Though I do suspect that if you need food that badly, then hanging onto a laptop in the face of starvation isn't the best demonstration of priority management.
(And now for something completely different...)
>...wonder whether so many of us would still be strangers to the ladies
Slashdotters may be strangers to the ladies, but the ladies are stranger!
Though thank you for linking to the Wikipedia article. I'd not realized that, through collisions, the particles do assume a more thermal velocity distribution.
The Farnsworth fusor is a little different, AFAIK. It's not just about heating things up and letting thermal motion bang nuclei together. The Farnsworth uses an electric field geometry that accelerates all the particles towards the same point, at the center, so they collide: It's a much more directed approach than just heating-things-up.
I also tend to use an approach that's light in trigonometry to many of the problems that others solve with trig. You can do nearly everything you need to with dot products, cross products, ratios, and algebra.
That said, I do use trigonometric functions quite a bit in generating unit vectors.
I also do think that the relationship between polar and rectangular coordinates is one of the most beautiful things in simple math. It's stuff that everyone takes for granted, but sines and cosines are just beatuiful functions. They seem to say something fundamental about the way space is. And that the same function that relates these two coordinate systems arises from exceedingly-simple differential equations - that describe simple systems of springs and masses or subatomic particles - is just spooky to me. My favorite (albiet not-very-efficient) algorithm for drawing circles remains to use the simple parametric form, and to compute the sine and cosine for each point not by using Taylor expansions (as standard library functions do), but by Euler-integrating from the previous values...
Please: Get this thought out of your head, and do it quickly. The idea of continental or racial solidarity is hate-filled tribalism. What would you say if I spoke positively of "Caucasian solidarity?" You would think me a white supremacist and dismiss me as a hate-monger, and you would be right to do so. When Hitler set out to conquer Europe, he spoke of solidarity for the German-speaking peoples. You do the same. What you propose is mindless tribalism, nothing more.
You wrote: "Better an Asian country be ruled by fellow Asian people than by a bunch of tyrranical, arbitrary and murderous thugs that Europeans and Americans were and still are."
Better white Americans be ruled by a white president? Better men elect men? Understand the implications of your logic!! You mean to say that, as a white man, if I own a business and need to hire workers, I should put a sign on my door that says, "Non-whites need not apply?!" I cannot in good conscience do that! People are people.
And calling Europeans 'murderous thugs' is terribly out of touch with reality. Modern Europe is deeply pacifist, to the point of setting every roadblock it could for Bush's Iraq war. (What of Americans? I cannot apologize for the 50% of the population that ignorantly followed Bush, but I do know that 50% of the population also opposes him.)
You also suggest that Japan cared about Chinese people when it invaded. Japan cared when it sent its soldiers out to rape and murder innocent Chinese en masse? I once had a close Chinese friend who held a special place in her heart for the hate she kept for Japan. If you believe that Chinese people would have enjoyed Japanese rule, you are simply wrong. I can only hope that those scars will fade.
Also understand the implications if your ideology of seperateness actually succeeds. If you kill the noble thought that those of all races can live together in shared greatness, then you kill it for those of other races as well as members of your own. You may make close allies in your own race, but you will also create strong enemies in others. That is a sad picture of the future. I'd rather not see that happen.
The divisions between all people must be torn down. This is what intelligent and good-hearted people believe. This is what those not ruled by ignorance believe. You do not help their cause.
Here is my personal study based on observations on the map "The Hunters." Unit production statistics vary greatly depending on unpredictible factors however.
Zerg = Violent melee attackers and very cheap. They tend to use large armies of zerglings.
Terran = Smarter than Zerg, but lack their superior spawning rates. Terrans however are very adaptable, what with their floating buildings and moving bases. They tend to have moderate size armies.
Protoss = Highly intelligent and cunning compared to Terran and Zerg. They have the smallest armies and most expensive units, but make up for it in quality.
Whether or not there is scientific data to back up my personal observations, I don't see one "race" as having any advantage over the other. What I do notice however, is that people love to play around with different strategies on Battle.net. As such, we should expect to observe this in Starcraft just as much as in other games.
In seriousness: Try really getting close to somebody outside your race. Then tell me if you still believe all that.
Me, I'm just not going to play those games. Shooters relieve tension better anyway.
She invited me over so I made that little trip
And then she pulled out my mushroom tip
Goin' over it just went drip, drip, drip
I didn't know she had the GI Joe Kung Fu Grip
Thanks for your reply. Yet an effective path that cosists of just capacitive and inductive coupling doesn't require that current be conducted through the air. Lightning bolts imply that current is being conducted through the air. And I'd suspect that the ionized gas would be the lowest-impedance path, so that's how most of the current flows, right?
Current through a capacitor happens because of electrostatics; there's no current through the insulator. So if we're just looking at the capacitant coupling of people to the device, then there's no reason that lightning should be shooting towards them to induce currents; currents will be electrostatically induced in them.
Likewise, for inductive coupling: In a transformer, current isn't driven through the insulator of the primary windings into the secondaries -- it's induced by the changing current. So if the point is inductive coupling, then why the lightning bolts and straight-up current-flow through the air?
Now you get the source of my confusion? If lightning is our goal, and it happens whenever the breakdown voltage of the air is exceeded, then what's the advantage of HF AC? Because the capacitive and inductive current paths don't explain the three-foot streamers! (or do they?)
I believe I understand what their real purpose is: Take low-frequency AC, and transform it to high-frequency AC. There's an LC circuit that you can think of as being like a swing, and the low-frequency signal "gives that swing a puch" every so many cycles. That's it, right? And you still need a high-voltage supply to begin with to feed the thing.
So what's the point? Why do we need high frequency AXC? We're not trying to hit people with radio waves; we're just trying to exceed air's breakdown voltage - right? Is there any advantage to high frequency AC over, say, taking a pointy metal rod (pointy because charge builds up on areas with small radii of curvature), and just raising it to a really large potential with a beefy DC power supply?
The world's a smaller place than it used to be. Have you noticed the amount of immigration to Europe?! Fact is, if the third world has a killer STD, chances are it won't be long until the first world meets her and gets it too. As long as this shit is ANYWHERE, you're not safe.
...who met a woman, and dated her, as much in the World of Warcraft as in the real one.
She ended up leaving her husband and moving to an apartment near him just to be with him -- a college kid. Talk about insane!
Poor guy didn't know what'd hit him.
She was po'-white-trash with no job and no education beyond high school. Finally he got enough sense knocked into him to get away from her.
The kid is still addicted to WoW, much to the detriment of his grades and his social life. For all I knock the crap that passes for a "social life," sitting by yourself in a dark room playing MMORPGs sure isn't healthy!
I've been in some bad situations, but man: What happened to him sure makes me feel normal.
I think that "lbf" here is just for "pound force."
There are two similar versions of the U.S. customary system. The more consistent of the two uses the pound as the unit of force and the slug as the unit of mass. All the equations you know and love work well in this system. In these units, for example, F=mg where g = 32 lbs/slug = 9.81 N/kg
There's also a second system in which the unit of mass is not the slug but the pound -- in which case there needs to be a distinction made between "pounds mass" and "pounds force." So you get two units, "lb" for mass, and "lbf" for force. This is what you're seeing here.
Unfortunately the second system has a way of screwing up equations; you need to throw in extra 1/32 conversion factors to lots of equations that relate forces to masses, and it's generally a pain to work with.
I hate existing flourescent bulbs. They give me a headache. This phosphor which glows continuously should help to reduce flicker.
Even a much shorter-lived phosphor would be good: If one could develop a phosphor which decays at about the rate that a lightbulb filament cools down, then we get both flicker-free lighting AND essentially instantaneous turn-off.
>Heat. Only it's heat where it isn't that useful to you... like as latent heat in the humidity you're generating and higher wavelengths (visible/near visible light).
Really good point about the humidity! I hadn't even thought about that.
By definition, you do break even. Energy is never created nor destroyed; it merely changes forms. "Inefficiency" is the unwanted conversion of exergy (low-entropy energy) to thermal energy (high-entropy energy). When your goal is to create thermal energy, you can do no wrong: nearly ANYTHING is a 100% efficient heater. ("Nearly," because some things do radiate some energy as radio waves, etc -- but this is normally negligible.)
You can do better than this for heating by using a heat pump, but a heat-pump actually uses energy input not to create thermal energy, but to move it to the higher temperature indoors from the low-temperature outdoors. Think of it as "pushing heat uphill."
So in summary: Energy-wise, this fireplace is no worse than a simple electric heater.
Some reasonable complaints would be:
This takes more energy to make at a factory than does an electric heater.
This wastes water by essentially boiling it and thereby moving it from freshwater sources to the atmosphere for no good reason.
So long as this doesn't have a chimney, it will heat no less efficiently than an electric radiator. Both convert 100% of the electrical energy input to heat.
Granted, this fireplace makes some noise, so it radiates acoustic energy - but this is just absorbed by and therefore heats the surroundings. It also produces some visible and infrared light, but the same is true of these: they're absorbed by the room. The only POSSIBLE way in which energy is lost is, say, if the thing is visible through your window, so some light is escaping without being absorbed by the room! That would be absolutely negligible.
Nearly everything is a 100% efficient heater. Your computer is no less efficient at heating the room using the electrical energy that it consumes than the electric radiator next to it is. The computer just happens to DO SOMETHING with the energy during its trip to high entropy.
When I want to heat a room, sometimes I just turn on incandescent light bulbs. This may shock you as an example of incredible inefficiency, but it isn't. You wouldn't feel guilty about using an electric heater to achieve the same thing, would you? Well guess what: light bulbs are just as efficient.
It's true that heat-pumps heat more efficiently, but they're completely, completely different. Depending on context, sometimes heat-pump efficiencies are reported as >100% to reflect this [which is true even if the heat pump's actual performance is low. Even the worst heat pump is better than any heater. At 0% performance, a heat pump becomes just an electric radiator.])
Slashdot Mirror
If she looks anything like Trinity, it won't take much of a pickup line at all.
D'oh! Thanks for the correction. That's what I'd meant.
>a laptop is "mated" to a child
Ever read Snow Crash?
>selling the laptop on the black market for food,
Though I do suspect that if you need food that badly, then hanging onto a laptop in the face of starvation isn't the best demonstration of priority management.
(And now for something completely different...)
>...wonder whether so many of us would still be strangers to the ladies
Slashdotters may be strangers to the ladies, but the ladies are stranger!
Menstruation was also considered unclean in Old Testament times.
Though thank you for linking to the Wikipedia article. I'd not realized that, through collisions, the particles do assume a more thermal velocity distribution.
The Farnsworth fusor is a little different, AFAIK. It's not just about heating things up and letting thermal motion bang nuclei together. The Farnsworth uses an electric field geometry that accelerates all the particles towards the same point, at the center, so they collide: It's a much more directed approach than just heating-things-up.
Do you, have you, or do you ever plan to sleep with another person? You too will inhale CO2 fumes... all night long! *gasp*
...should be required of all Slashdot editors.
(And for members of the general population, for that matter.)
I also tend to use an approach that's light in trigonometry to many of the problems that others solve with trig. You can do nearly everything you need to with dot products, cross products, ratios, and algebra.
That said, I do use trigonometric functions quite a bit in generating unit vectors.
I also do think that the relationship between polar and rectangular coordinates is one of the most beautiful things in simple math. It's stuff that everyone takes for granted, but sines and cosines are just beatuiful functions. They seem to say something fundamental about the way space is. And that the same function that relates these two coordinate systems arises from exceedingly-simple differential equations - that describe simple systems of springs and masses or subatomic particles - is just spooky to me. My favorite (albiet not-very-efficient) algorithm for drawing circles remains to use the simple parametric form, and to compute the sine and cosine for each point not by using Taylor expansions (as standard library functions do), but by Euler-integrating from the previous values...
Hey, XOR is great for one-time-pads...
You wrote:
"achieving Asian solidarity"
Please: Get this thought out of your head, and do it quickly. The idea of continental or racial solidarity is hate-filled tribalism. What would you say if I spoke positively of "Caucasian solidarity?" You would think me a white supremacist and dismiss me as a hate-monger, and you would be right to do so. When Hitler set out to conquer Europe, he spoke of solidarity for the German-speaking peoples. You do the same. What you propose is mindless tribalism, nothing more.
You wrote:
"Better an Asian country be ruled by fellow Asian people than by a bunch of tyrranical, arbitrary and murderous thugs that Europeans and Americans were and still are."
Better white Americans be ruled by a white president? Better men elect men? Understand the implications of your logic!! You mean to say that, as a white man, if I own a business and need to hire workers, I should put a sign on my door that says, "Non-whites need not apply?!" I cannot in good conscience do that! People are people.
And calling Europeans 'murderous thugs' is terribly out of touch with reality. Modern Europe is deeply pacifist, to the point of setting every roadblock it could for Bush's Iraq war. (What of Americans? I cannot apologize for the 50% of the population that ignorantly followed Bush, but I do know that 50% of the population also opposes him.)
You also suggest that Japan cared about Chinese people when it invaded. Japan cared when it sent its soldiers out to rape and murder innocent Chinese en masse? I once had a close Chinese friend who held a special place in her heart for the hate she kept for Japan. If you believe that Chinese people would have enjoyed Japanese rule, you are simply wrong. I can only hope that those scars will fade.
Also understand the implications if your ideology of seperateness actually succeeds. If you kill the noble thought that those of all races can live together in shared greatness, then you kill it for those of other races as well as members of your own. You may make close allies in your own race, but you will also create strong enemies in others. That is a sad picture of the future. I'd rather not see that happen.
The divisions between all people must be torn down. This is what intelligent and good-hearted people believe. This is what those not ruled by ignorance believe. You do not help their cause.
>I felt like I could have had more fun with a dirty hooker for less money.
Common miscalculation. You're leaving out the cost of twenty years of antivirals.
So if I wear this thing, women will stop being interested in me? I could use some peace and quiet! I'll take ten!
Here is my personal study based on observations on the map "The Hunters." Unit production statistics vary greatly depending on unpredictible factors however.
Zerg = Violent melee attackers and very cheap. They tend to use large armies of zerglings.
Terran = Smarter than Zerg, but lack their superior spawning rates. Terrans however are very adaptable, what with their floating buildings and moving bases. They tend to have moderate size armies.
Protoss = Highly intelligent and cunning compared to Terran and Zerg. They have the smallest armies and most expensive units, but make up for it in quality.
Whether or not there is scientific data to back up my personal observations, I don't see one "race" as having any advantage over the other. What I do notice however, is that people love to play around with different strategies on Battle.net. As such, we should expect to observe this in Starcraft just as much as in other games.
In seriousness: Try really getting close to somebody outside your race. Then tell me if you still believe all that.
Me, I'm just not going to play those games. Shooters relieve tension better anyway.
She invited me over so I made that little trip
And then she pulled out my mushroom tip
Goin' over it just went drip, drip, drip
I didn't know she had the GI Joe Kung Fu Grip
- Sublime, "Caress me down."
Thanks for your reply. Yet an effective path that cosists of just capacitive and inductive coupling doesn't require that current be conducted through the air. Lightning bolts imply that current is being conducted through the air. And I'd suspect that the ionized gas would be the lowest-impedance path, so that's how most of the current flows, right?
Current through a capacitor happens because of electrostatics; there's no current through the insulator. So if we're just looking at the capacitant coupling of people to the device, then there's no reason that lightning should be shooting towards them to induce currents; currents will be electrostatically induced in them.
Likewise, for inductive coupling: In a transformer, current isn't driven through the insulator of the primary windings into the secondaries -- it's induced by the changing current. So if the point is inductive coupling, then why the lightning bolts and straight-up current-flow through the air?
Now you get the source of my confusion? If lightning is our goal, and it happens whenever the breakdown voltage of the air is exceeded, then what's the advantage of HF AC? Because the capacitive and inductive current paths don't explain the three-foot streamers! (or do they?)
...what's so special about Tesla coils?
I believe I understand what their real purpose is: Take low-frequency AC, and transform it to high-frequency AC. There's an LC circuit that you can think of as being like a swing, and the low-frequency signal "gives that swing a puch" every so many cycles. That's it, right? And you still need a high-voltage supply to begin with to feed the thing.
So what's the point? Why do we need high frequency AXC? We're not trying to hit people with radio waves; we're just trying to exceed air's breakdown voltage - right? Is there any advantage to high frequency AC over, say, taking a pointy metal rod (pointy because charge builds up on areas with small radii of curvature), and just raising it to a really large potential with a beefy DC power supply?
Any answers would be much appreciated.
The world's a smaller place than it used to be. Have you noticed the amount of immigration to Europe?! Fact is, if the third world has a killer STD, chances are it won't be long until the first world meets her and gets it too. As long as this shit is ANYWHERE, you're not safe.
...who met a woman, and dated her, as much in the World of Warcraft as in the real one.
She ended up leaving her husband and moving to an apartment near him just to be with him -- a college kid. Talk about insane!
Poor guy didn't know what'd hit him.
She was po'-white-trash with no job and no education beyond high school. Finally he got enough sense knocked into him to get away from her.
The kid is still addicted to WoW, much to the detriment of his grades and his social life. For all I knock the crap that passes for a "social life," sitting by yourself in a dark room playing MMORPGs sure isn't healthy!
I've been in some bad situations, but man: What happened to him sure makes me feel normal.
I think that "lbf" here is just for "pound force."
There are two similar versions of the U.S. customary system. The more consistent of the two uses the pound as the unit of force and the slug as the unit of mass. All the equations you know and love work well in this system. In these units, for example, F=mg where g = 32 lbs/slug = 9.81 N/kg
There's also a second system in which the unit of mass is not the slug but the pound -- in which case there needs to be a distinction made between "pounds mass" and "pounds force." So you get two units, "lb" for mass, and "lbf" for force. This is what you're seeing here.
Unfortunately the second system has a way of screwing up equations; you need to throw in extra 1/32 conversion factors to lots of equations that relate forces to masses, and it's generally a pain to work with.
Your post is hugely off-topic, but sounds genuine, so I'm curious: What motivated it?
I hate existing flourescent bulbs. They give me a headache. This phosphor which glows continuously should help to reduce flicker.
Even a much shorter-lived phosphor would be good: If one could develop a phosphor which decays at about the rate that a lightbulb filament cools down, then we get both flicker-free lighting AND essentially instantaneous turn-off.
>Heat. Only it's heat where it isn't that useful to you... like as latent heat in the humidity you're generating and higher wavelengths (visible/near visible light).
Really good point about the humidity! I hadn't even thought about that.
By definition, you do break even. Energy is never created nor destroyed; it merely changes forms. "Inefficiency" is the unwanted conversion of exergy (low-entropy energy) to thermal energy (high-entropy energy). When your goal is to create thermal energy, you can do no wrong: nearly ANYTHING is a 100% efficient heater. ("Nearly," because some things do radiate some energy as radio waves, etc -- but this is normally negligible.)
You can do better than this for heating by using a heat pump, but a heat-pump actually uses energy input not to create thermal energy, but to move it to the higher temperature indoors from the low-temperature outdoors. Think of it as "pushing heat uphill."
So in summary: Energy-wise, this fireplace is no worse than a simple electric heater.
Some reasonable complaints would be:
So long as this doesn't have a chimney, it will heat no less efficiently than an electric radiator. Both convert 100% of the electrical energy input to heat.
Granted, this fireplace makes some noise, so it radiates acoustic energy - but this is just absorbed by and therefore heats the surroundings. It also produces some visible and infrared light, but the same is true of these: they're absorbed by the room. The only POSSIBLE way in which energy is lost is, say, if the thing is visible through your window, so some light is escaping without being absorbed by the room! That would be absolutely negligible.
Nearly everything is a 100% efficient heater. Your computer is no less efficient at heating the room using the electrical energy that it consumes than the electric radiator next to it is. The computer just happens to DO SOMETHING with the energy during its trip to high entropy.
When I want to heat a room, sometimes I just turn on incandescent light bulbs. This may shock you as an example of incredible inefficiency, but it isn't. You wouldn't feel guilty about using an electric heater to achieve the same thing, would you? Well guess what: light bulbs are just as efficient.
It's true that heat-pumps heat more efficiently, but they're completely, completely different. Depending on context, sometimes heat-pump efficiencies are reported as >100% to reflect this [which is true even if the heat pump's actual performance is low. Even the worst heat pump is better than any heater. At 0% performance, a heat pump becomes just an electric radiator.])