Well, maybe the last two books were not too good, but I thought the series got better and better and culminated in God Emperor. If you just read Dune I don't think you can get what Frank Herbert was trying to say. Dune is only setting the scene.
Recalling the origins of Dune, Herbert says:
"It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheros were disastrous for humans."
At first I thought you said m looked like m. Then I thought why would he be stating a tautology, so I looked closer and there's a single pixel difference. Sorry I missed it but it was rather hard to spot when running 1920*1080.
A single Einstein is worth an infinite number of mediocre physicists who never end up producing any work in their careers.
The problem is that for every celebrity physicist like Einstein there are hundred of "mediocre" physicists who happened to test or champion the wrong idea, but that does not mean that their work was useless. It was very necessary to help form the ideas that ended up working.
But that is easy to solve. Pay them a reasonable amount for the hours they work, and then give them a bonus depending on how well the company is doing a fixed number of years down the line. So if the CEO did well his first year, he would get the bonus 5 years later if the company was still doing well.
And under the system we've got, they have a better chance of yanking themselves up than under any other system.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree. It might be a good system(I'm assuming you meant the british system based on your.uk address) but hardly the best in the world in this respect. The amount of people living below the poverty line in the U.K. is 14%, whereas the amount in the scandinavian countries are much lower (~4%).
I have studied Maiguy's article on construction of effective rat traps and found it lacking. After an intriguing abstract outlining the quality of his rat trap along with an implied link between upper level science education and said quality, the article becomes decidedly more vague. There article does not contain a thorough enough description of the rat trap experiment that would allow others to reproduce the results. In fact the article does not even contain ample imperical justification for its claims.
I'll just say that I thought the story was a bit thin in places, but it's a really good movie. The casting and acting is simply amazing. And, there are plenty of scenes that take advantage of what Tarantino does best, which is creating an atmosphere so vivid you can practically taste it.
The problem is that it would require a much better hygene. Very few diseases can jump the species gap, and even those that can have a hard time doing so. Any disease in a human however can easily transfer to another human.
Dog and cat would probably be safer to eat than pig.
heck, even if you are danish, or belgian: how the hell are you suppose to preserve danish and belgian culture in the face of the english onslaught? protectionism seems appealing. even if, of course, it really makes no difference. its just nostalgia. resistance is futile
First of all danish culture is quite similar to english and so is the language. Denmark is a small nation that has been dependent on trade since just about forever. The language and culture has been adapting to whatever was in vogue. First low germanic, then french, then high germanic and now english. So much so that even the grammar is different.
In western dialects of danish the article is used as in english (a house, the house / et hus, æ hus) but in eastern dialects the enlitic article is used like normal scandinavian (et hus, huset).
Actually I think that local cultures and languages have a much greater chance of keeping their culture intact than english. Because english is becoming the lingua franca of the world, english culture is becoming an indistinguishable mish mash, a lowest common denominator. If you say danish the first thing that comes to my mind is H.C.Andersen/Kierkegård, the Skagen painters, Carl Nielsen. Belgian: Cartoons(tintin), flemish golden age/surreallism, the saxophone. French: Voltaire, Impressionists, Debussy/Ravel. English: slashdot, sitcoms, pop music.
If you can only use what you can carry as an energy source, the best you can do with the mass you can carry is what I said - carry antimatter, annihilate it down to massless particle such as photons and use those annihilation products as propellant. We're a long way from being able to do that though.
If you insist on bringing your fuel with you. But that might not be necessary. You could use solar power if you were only going places near a star.
The problem with antimatter(well besides making the antimatter and a bunch of other practical probems:-)) is that you cannot control the annihilation and be sure to get photons, sure its the first order reaction in low energy scenarios, but not the only one. So you will also get muon pairs etc. You could also just carry the anti matter, and then scoop up the matter you needed from space as you were flying along, effectively doubling the specific impulse of the antimatter rocket
I'm with mcrbids on this one, but it's some years since I studied relativity.
Of course the mass has to be measured in your frame of reference. As we near the limit of the speed of light(for the exhaust) your reaction mass would start to increase and therefore its impulse would increase. However the reaction mass is stationary in our frame of reference before entering the engine and will therefore have rest mass. The effect being that there is no limit to specific impulse.
... the usable energy in the fuel would be frame-of-reference dependent, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Remember that we are simply talking propellant not fuel(It's the same in a chemical rocket, but not in engines like VASIMR). It's simply what we are throwing backwards to gain momentum. If we didn't take relativistic effects into account we would have a violation of the conservation of energy. Because we can pump however much energy we like into an exhaust particle, that must be translated into a similar increase in kinetic energy for our rocket and therefore a relativistic increase in momentum.
A perfect mirror in a solar sail would attain infinite specific impulse, since it's carrying no propellant.
In the end specific impulse isn't the only interesting measure. The problem is that it only covers the propellant. As mcrbids says: "as far as you have the ability to add more energy". We still have to find a way to bring this energy along, in a nuclear reactor or solar panels etc. And, we will have to scale up our energy generator as we scale up the energy spent on accelerating creating a limit on the rocket's efficiency.
VASIMR is not radically more efficient than a chemical rocket
Yes it is. The efficiency of a rocket is tied to the velocity of the propellant. VASIMR has a much higher velocity(~ speed of light/- 10%) than chemical(liquid propelant ~4,400 m/s) rockets. On the other hand VASIMR has very litte thrust. That means it is only useful in situation where there are no forces working against you i.e. already in orbit and no atmosphere.
I don't care if they get a few facts wrong it's make believe anyway. What I can't stand is when the story is internaly inconsistent. I watched a Krull the other day, and they have to get these magical super fast horses to get to somewhere. So they lay a trap and surround the wild horses to capture them. Fair enough. But, why are the horses fast? Because they can fly. How the F.. do they catch them by surrounding them??
By their own theory, every event in history delaying the creation and operation of the LHC would have to be included. Not least of which would be the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, which probably set back the experiment by a thousand years.
Very silly. Who funds these guys?
I believe the Danish state funds Holger Bech Nielsen. He's a high energy theorist and one of the fathers of string theory. Basically his job is to come up with crazy ideas and mathematically model them. Then the Phenomonologists will step in and use the theory to create predictions and explain how those prediction can be used to distinguish this theory from others. Then those predicitons can be tested by the experimental physicists in experiments like the LHC.
Yes most of his work is crazy, but it is not silly neither is it stupid. Let's not pretend that quantum mechanics and particle physics isn't crazy, and incredibly counter intuitive. However they are currently the most accurate model to describe the physical world.
You quoted "The more I see LHC fail and fail", what are you (and the Dr Nielsen)
talking about, the LHC failed, just once, this time last year. The Tevatron which might well
produce Higgs particles, but not enough for a statistically good observation,
has run very well. The SSC was ridiclously expensive and ahead of its time,
politics happens, that isn't unlikely. In short we're no where near the sort of
back luck, that might start people looking for paranoid explanations.
And for such a complex machine to not have any failures is highly unlikely.
Furthermore, the LHC isn't magical it's only doing what cosmic rays are already doing in the upper atmosphere. So if LHC can create Higgs bosons then they already exists in the upper atmosphere.
You could say that the universe is forever splitting into infinitely many versions every instant, or that the wave function of the universe is getting infinitely more complex every instant...
Maybe this accounts for entropy, and why it cannot be reversed?
Entropy can be reversed it just costs energy.
Entropy is quite simple. It is a measure of the disorder of a system. The reason entropy increases is simply that it is the most likely state.
For example, imagine you have a box containing two identical particles. These particles can have two states hot and cold. Macroscopically there will be three states:
Hot (both particles hot), Cold (both particles cold), Medium(one hot, one cold). So it seems there are three equaly likely states macroscopically, but we know that the
most disorderly state with the highest entropy(Medium) will be most likely, because there are 2 configurations possible for Medium, but only 1 for either Hot or Cold.
As we increase the degrees of freedom, reality looks more and more like a continuum. The reason that entropy increases is that we are lumping more and more configurations together in high entropic states, therefore making those states more likely. It's like saying that it's more likely for the rest of the world to win the lottery than for me to do so. There is nothing strange in that. It's just that from my point of view I can't distinguish one stranger winning the lottery from another, so I lump them all together.
Incidentally, my teacher in statistical mechanics (microscopic thermodynamics) at the Niels Bohr Institute was Holger Bech Nielsen from the article.
Studies here in Denmark have shown that birds adjust their route ~200 m from the mill. It has also shown that the high voltage cables connecting the windmill to the grid kill many more birds than windmills, even windows kill more birds than windmills. There are examples of Falcons nesting and breeding on windmills here.
The only known wind mill farm with a lot of bird killings is in the altamont pass where a huge number of small windmills have been placed in the middle of a raptor hunting ground. Ensuring that the birds are preoccupied with their prey and don't have time to look for moving obstacles.
A most compelling argument. Well researched no doubt. I prostrate myself before your superior intelligence. My lifegoal shall be to match your perfection of acerbic wit, though such excellence will forever be out of reach for a simpleton such as I.
Or, if you prefer, listen to the horror stories female developers tell about sexist remarks or being asked out for dates.
Making sexist remarks, ok, I can understand how that might be seen as being sexist. But how is asking a woman out considered sexist behaviour?
You obviously haven't read the feminist manifesto. It's sexist because it's wrong to be a man.
Now, feminists, let me turn this around. I've never been the target of sexists remarks or been asked on a date. Nor have a woman paid for dinner or a drink, held a door for me or taken my coat. I never heard you clamour for women to be included in the mandatory national service and sent to Iraq. Neither have I heard you fight for the abolishment of the law that requires a man to pay for the upkeep and luxury items(such as makeup) for his wife, when there is no law that requires the opposite even though there is almost no gender inequality in the jobmarket.
In conclusion: you're all a bunch female chauvinists. Luv ya, qc_dk.
There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
Actually, not really. Neither future linear colliders are expected to have collisions with more than a factor of 2 to 3 more energy than the Tevatron.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe the last two books were not too good, but I thought the series got better and better and culminated in God Emperor. If you just read Dune I don't think you can get what Frank Herbert was trying to say. Dune is only setting the scene.
Recalling the origins of Dune, Herbert says: "It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheros were disastrous for humans."
For an interesting read, see Tim O'Reilly's book on Herbert: http://tim.oreilly.com/herbert/
That's because your friend is mistakingly thinking that the people are the main characters.
At first I thought you said m looked like m. Then I thought why would he be stating a tautology, so I looked closer and there's a single pixel difference. Sorry I missed it but it was rather hard to spot when running 1920*1080.
A single Einstein is worth an infinite number of mediocre physicists who never end up producing any work in their careers.
The problem is that for every celebrity physicist like Einstein there are hundred of "mediocre" physicists who happened to test or champion the wrong idea, but that does not mean that their work was useless. It was very necessary to help form the ideas that ended up working.
But that is easy to solve. Pay them a reasonable amount for the hours they work, and then give them a bonus depending on how well the company is doing a fixed number of years down the line. So if the CEO did well his first year, he would get the bonus 5 years later if the company was still doing well.
And under the system we've got, they have a better chance of yanking themselves up than under any other system.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree. It might be a good system(I'm assuming you meant the british system based on your .uk address) but hardly the best in the world in this respect. The amount of people living below the poverty line in the U.K. is 14%, whereas the amount in the scandinavian countries are much lower (~4%).
Peer review of Maiguy's article.(See parent)
I have studied Maiguy's article on construction of effective rat traps and found it lacking. After an intriguing abstract outlining the quality of his rat trap along with an implied link between upper level science education and said quality, the article becomes decidedly more vague. There article does not contain a thorough enough description of the rat trap experiment that would allow others to reproduce the results. In fact the article does not even contain ample imperical justification for its claims.
Recommendation: [ ] Accept [ ] Accept after modifications outlined below [x] Reject
I'll just say that I thought the story was a bit thin in places, but it's a really good movie. The casting and acting is simply amazing. And, there are plenty of scenes that take advantage of what Tarantino does best, which is creating an atmosphere so vivid you can practically taste it.
It's false advertising. I have been present many times things have gone "tits up" but have never seen the proverbial subject.
p.s. if you try too hard, in the name of science of course, you are left with an acute sense of embarassment and a stinging sensation in your cheek.
Only they didn't show the hockey graph was bogus, and lately a completely different method and analysis has confirmed the hockey graph: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~tingley/mean_variance.pdf
why do people still worry about CO2?
Maybe you should ask yourself why you fail to worry about CO2 and you will know the answer to your question?
The problem is that it would require a much better hygene. Very few diseases can jump the species gap, and even those that can have a hard time doing so. Any disease in a human however can easily transfer to another human. Dog and cat would probably be safer to eat than pig.
The jealous people with small penises.
No way. I know my history. I'm doing it the 4th.
heck, even if you are danish, or belgian: how the hell are you suppose to preserve danish and belgian culture in the face of the english onslaught? protectionism seems appealing. even if, of course, it really makes no difference. its just nostalgia. resistance is futile
First of all danish culture is quite similar to english and so is the language. Denmark is a small nation that has been dependent on trade since just about forever. The language and culture has been adapting to whatever was in vogue. First low germanic, then french, then high germanic and now english. So much so that even the grammar is different. In western dialects of danish the article is used as in english (a house, the house / et hus, æ hus) but in eastern dialects the enlitic article is used like normal scandinavian (et hus, huset).
Actually I think that local cultures and languages have a much greater chance of keeping their culture intact than english. Because english is becoming the lingua franca of the world, english culture is becoming an indistinguishable mish mash, a lowest common denominator. If you say danish the first thing that comes to my mind is H.C.Andersen/Kierkegård, the Skagen painters, Carl Nielsen. Belgian: Cartoons(tintin), flemish golden age/surreallism, the saxophone. French: Voltaire, Impressionists, Debussy/Ravel. English: slashdot, sitcoms, pop music.
If you can only use what you can carry as an energy source, the best you can do with the mass you can carry is what I said - carry antimatter, annihilate it down to massless particle such as photons and use those annihilation products as propellant. We're a long way from being able to do that though.
If you insist on bringing your fuel with you. But that might not be necessary. You could use solar power if you were only going places near a star.
The problem with antimatter(well besides making the antimatter and a bunch of other practical probems :-)) is that you cannot control the annihilation and be sure to get photons, sure its the first order reaction in low energy scenarios, but not the only one. So you will also get muon pairs etc. You could also just carry the anti matter, and then scoop up the matter you needed from space as you were flying along, effectively doubling the specific impulse of the antimatter rocket
I'm with mcrbids on this one, but it's some years since I studied relativity.
Of course the mass has to be measured in your frame of reference. As we near the limit of the speed of light(for the exhaust) your reaction mass would start to increase and therefore its impulse would increase. However the reaction mass is stationary in our frame of reference before entering the engine and will therefore have rest mass. The effect being that there is no limit to specific impulse.
... the usable energy in the fuel would be frame-of-reference dependent, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Remember that we are simply talking propellant not fuel(It's the same in a chemical rocket, but not in engines like VASIMR). It's simply what we are throwing backwards to gain momentum. If we didn't take relativistic effects into account we would have a violation of the conservation of energy. Because we can pump however much energy we like into an exhaust particle, that must be translated into a similar increase in kinetic energy for our rocket and therefore a relativistic increase in momentum.
A perfect mirror in a solar sail would attain infinite specific impulse, since it's carrying no propellant.
In the end specific impulse isn't the only interesting measure. The problem is that it only covers the propellant. As mcrbids says: "as far as you have the ability to add more energy". We still have to find a way to bring this energy along, in a nuclear reactor or solar panels etc. And, we will have to scale up our energy generator as we scale up the energy spent on accelerating creating a limit on the rocket's efficiency.
VASIMR is not radically more efficient than a chemical rocket
Yes it is. The efficiency of a rocket is tied to the velocity of the propellant. VASIMR has a much higher velocity(~ speed of light /- 10%) than chemical(liquid propelant ~4,400 m/s) rockets. On the other hand VASIMR has very litte thrust. That means it is only useful in situation where there are no forces working against you i.e. already in orbit and no atmosphere.
I don't care if they get a few facts wrong it's make believe anyway. What I can't stand is when the story is internaly inconsistent. I watched a Krull the other day, and they have to get these magical super fast horses to get to somewhere. So they lay a trap and surround the wild horses to capture them. Fair enough. But, why are the horses fast? Because they can fly. How the F.. do they catch them by surrounding them??
By their own theory, every event in history delaying the creation and operation of the LHC would have to be included. Not least of which would be the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, which probably set back the experiment by a thousand years. Very silly. Who funds these guys?
I believe the Danish state funds Holger Bech Nielsen. He's a high energy theorist and one of the fathers of string theory. Basically his job is to come up with crazy ideas and mathematically model them. Then the Phenomonologists will step in and use the theory to create predictions and explain how those prediction can be used to distinguish this theory from others. Then those predicitons can be tested by the experimental physicists in experiments like the LHC.
Yes most of his work is crazy, but it is not silly neither is it stupid. Let's not pretend that quantum mechanics and particle physics isn't crazy, and incredibly counter intuitive. However they are currently the most accurate model to describe the physical world.
You quoted "The more I see LHC fail and fail", what are you (and the Dr Nielsen) talking about, the LHC failed, just once, this time last year. The Tevatron which might well produce Higgs particles, but not enough for a statistically good observation, has run very well. The SSC was ridiclously expensive and ahead of its time, politics happens, that isn't unlikely. In short we're no where near the sort of back luck, that might start people looking for paranoid explanations.
And for such a complex machine to not have any failures is highly unlikely.
Furthermore, the LHC isn't magical it's only doing what cosmic rays are already doing in the upper atmosphere. So if LHC can create Higgs bosons then they already exists in the upper atmosphere.
You could say that the universe is forever splitting into infinitely many versions every instant, or that the wave function of the universe is getting infinitely more complex every instant...
Maybe this accounts for entropy, and why it cannot be reversed?
Entropy can be reversed it just costs energy. Entropy is quite simple. It is a measure of the disorder of a system. The reason entropy increases is simply that it is the most likely state.
For example, imagine you have a box containing two identical particles. These particles can have two states hot and cold. Macroscopically there will be three states: Hot (both particles hot), Cold (both particles cold), Medium(one hot, one cold). So it seems there are three equaly likely states macroscopically, but we know that the most disorderly state with the highest entropy(Medium) will be most likely, because there are 2 configurations possible for Medium, but only 1 for either Hot or Cold.
As we increase the degrees of freedom, reality looks more and more like a continuum. The reason that entropy increases is that we are lumping more and more configurations together in high entropic states, therefore making those states more likely. It's like saying that it's more likely for the rest of the world to win the lottery than for me to do so. There is nothing strange in that. It's just that from my point of view I can't distinguish one stranger winning the lottery from another, so I lump them all together.
Incidentally, my teacher in statistical mechanics (microscopic thermodynamics) at the Niels Bohr Institute was Holger Bech Nielsen from the article.
Studies here in Denmark have shown that birds adjust their route ~200 m from the mill. It has also shown that the high voltage cables connecting the windmill to the grid kill many more birds than windmills, even windows kill more birds than windmills. There are examples of Falcons nesting and breeding on windmills here.
The only known wind mill farm with a lot of bird killings is in the altamont pass where a huge number of small windmills have been placed in the middle of a raptor hunting ground. Ensuring that the birds are preoccupied with their prey and don't have time to look for moving obstacles.
You're a moron, ...
A most compelling argument. Well researched no doubt. I prostrate myself before your superior intelligence. My lifegoal shall be to match your perfection of acerbic wit, though such excellence will forever be out of reach for a simpleton such as I.
Or, if you prefer, listen to the horror stories female developers tell about sexist remarks or being asked out for dates.
Making sexist remarks, ok, I can understand how that might be seen as being sexist. But how is asking a woman out considered sexist behaviour?
You obviously haven't read the feminist manifesto. It's sexist because it's wrong to be a man.
Now, feminists, let me turn this around. I've never been the target of sexists remarks or been asked on a date. Nor have a woman paid for dinner or a drink, held a door for me or taken my coat. I never heard you clamour for women to be included in the mandatory national service and sent to Iraq. Neither have I heard you fight for the abolishment of the law that requires a man to pay for the upkeep and luxury items(such as makeup) for his wife, when there is no law that requires the opposite even though there is almost no gender inequality in the jobmarket.
In conclusion: you're all a bunch female chauvinists. Luv ya, qc_dk.
There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
Actually, not really. Neither future linear colliders are expected to have collisions with more than a factor of 2 to 3 more energy than the Tevatron.
How is this not more powerful?