The solution so far has been to put people into a queue, something that would get a site like Amazon laughed out of the marketplace. "I'm sorry, we're a little busy right now, try shopping later?!!"
This was a strange comparison. Amazon often loads very slow for me, and pages fail to load completely on a regular basis.
irs.gov used to be a good example of a fast site. It is not as fast as it used to be, but still about 3x faster than Amazon, probably due to a static design with few images.
I am seeing lots of negative and off topic comments, many of which show people only watched part of the video. I thought it was totally amazing. When I was a teenager I had to change the course of my career away from computational science towards experimental science because of RSI-like problems. If I had his tools when I was 14 and had known I needed to use them, my career would be totally different and possibly much better since my programming talents would actually have been used.
Today, I can't really afford to spend several months learning to replicate his work, but hopefully soon it will be easier to learn. This will never be for everyone - some people can't use modal programs - and maybe it will never work in every context (Can it talk to my 20 year old Tektronix oscilloscope over GPIB?) but the video showed it can work. I hope good documentation, native linux support, and support for latex will be forthcoming so it can help me do science.
Yeah, in science, it's usually rare to have serious development done on Windows, except for the occasional data acquisition station or for some control computer attached to a commercial lab apparatus.
Unfortunately windows based data acquisition stations with proprietary software for commercial lab apparatus are far from rare.
Every lab apparatus I have used that had computer control was windows (or MS-DOS, on a really bad day) only, except the most expensive one. The $10 million JEOL electron beam lithography system ran a very old Solaris.
I just replaced my MS-DOS based instrument. It had a proprietary RISC co-processor that could not talk to any modern computer.
That works in many parts of American universities too (though usually not potentially hazardous locations such as machine shops).
In fact, I was recently needed a new faculty ID (not saying where). It turns out you can just walk in and get one of those too. They only asked for my name.
Republishing your old work or resubmitting old proposals is scientific misconduct because it wastes resources by forcing other scientists to perform duplicate reviews.
Ideally, you should have 1, 3, and 4 picked out before you apply to graduate school. People who state 1, 3, and 4, with backup plans, will look better prepared to an admissions committee. Of course you can change your mind later.
Funding supplies is the advisor's job, at least in theory.
Does anybody here understand what these scientists have supposedly achieved?
This is in my area of research, and I read and understood the abstract. It does not seem like something that should be posted on Slashdot.
In this case, quantum fluid means a fluid that is cold enough, dense enough, and made of low enough mass particles that it has some quantum mechanical properties (interference is an example in the abstract).
Making a bigger quantum fluid is not really a challenge - you just need a bigger refrigerator and a bigger tank of helium. In this case, they made a bigger quantum fluid of a very specialized type.
But isn't the whole point to quantum science that observation collapses a state into one thing or the other?
No. That is just one small part of quantum mechanics.
This experiment is outside my field of expertise, but I know several people who worked on this experiment and have met Juan Collar several times. It seems like an excellent experiment, but there is a funny side to their results:- Juan Collar has been talking for a long time about how he has been very close to showing the DAMA claim of dark matter detection is incorrect, and now he has confirmed it. I often got the feeling that the COGENT team didn't really believe dark matter existed.
Physicists think computer science means numerical calculus, since most of theoretical physics is difficult calculus problems. Perhaps this is why there are so many physicists who write unreadable code.
You do not know how science funding works in America. My salary is partly paid by a wealthy private donor and partly paid by the government. My boss is paid by the university (he does not actually participate in the experiment). Since politicians want to provide skilled workers for their corporate sponsors, and politicians subscribe to the theory that having smarter workers will compensate for the fact that our workers expect to be paid more than those in China, they provide lots of money for people to have salaries to work in labs on the thinking that it prepares them to work in industry or to teach people to work in industry. However, nobody will give us money to buy equipment or liquid helium, so I am forced to spend vast sums of salary money to save only somewhat less vast sums on the cost of helium. My boss can't just lay of some of his staff and use the money to buy more helium; the government won't let him divert the money.
I hear in Europe it is the other way around; the government will buy equipment for labs but they have no staff to use it. This probably has something to do with why high energy physicists are always flying off to CERN.
I didn't even mention that sometimes we cannot get liquid helium at all when we want it.
As you said, energy used for liquefaction has little to do with the cost of helium. Liquefiers are expensive to buy. We are fortunate to have enough helium users that the capital expense of a liquefier has been overcome. I think we also indirectly pay the person who runs the liquefier's salary, since that is not the sort of thing the government will pay for. Some of what we return to the liquefier is lost before it can be resold.
This topic is complex and much discussed among low temperature and high energy scientists, who need liquid helium to cool their experiments. Unfortunately a large portion of helium usage is waste, such as deliberate dumping by natural gas companies who do not think the helium market (tiny compared to the natural gas market) is worth their time, or welders who still use helium when argon is cheaper.
In my lab, the liquid helium is the primary cost of doing experiments. We spend around $100 for each four-hour experimental session. It is by far our biggest expense. We try to recover as much as possible, but we only get a small refund for returned gas. So, please don't use helium where it is not needed; you are limiting our science, and you may be limiting your own access to medical technologies such as MRI in the future.
Currently only the wealthiest students are paying the sticker price at good private colleges. So if you are not wealthy, it is best to apply first and decide where to go after getting your financial aid offer. Simon's Rock is unusual because it offers merit scholarships, so even wealthy students may get a discount. Many prestigious universities do not give out merit scholarships.
The Tevatron has to be partially removed to allow the construction of Project X, which is an accelerator that complements the LHC but does not compete with it. Fermilab is in no danger of being closed due to obsolescence. Many of the people who work there are working on the LHC, and there are many other experiments located at Fermilab.
After congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, Europe focused on exploring the "Energy Frontier" and American scientists have focused on the "Intensity Frontier." There are also lots of collaboration and experiments that do not fit into either category. Of course, the rate at which the "Intensity Frontier" is explored does depend on the federal budget, but it will get done eventually.
A good quantum analog of the classical speed grandparent was talking about is the root mean square velocity (computed from the momentum operator), which need not be zero for a bound state. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation shows that a particle in any state may be observed to have a nonzero velocity.
Perhaps you are thinking that the wavefunction, as it is written in most textbooks, does not depend on time. Usually in books the time dependent factor is dropped because it is not very interesting. Also, it is incorrect to think that the motion of a wavefunction is the quantum analog of the classical motion of a particle. Always think in expectation values.
Exxon is not trying to prevent climate change legislation. Several years ago I heard an Exxon executive arguing in favor of cap and trade.
Exxon is not stupid. They have made sure that if cap and trade becomes law, their profits will be protected. They have developed carbon sequestration technology which will allow them to continue to sell oil without polluting. Sure, carbon sequestration is expensive (but cheaper than wars or health care). However, with cap and trade everyone will be forced to do carbon sequestration, and Exxon knows how to do it better than most other groups. Also, keep in mind that Exxon has businesses besides oil and that they have the cash to simply purchase any "green" competition.
So why do people accuse Exxon of funding global warming skeptics? Most likely Exxon is backing both sides. Large corporations will back all sides in any political competition, to make sure that whoever wins rewards them afterwards.
Anyway, do not blame corporate profiteering for global warming. Corporations would be just as willing to make their profits off of "green" energy. They will follow the government's guidance. It is congress that is sitting there and doing nothing.
Some rigorous, 4-year colleges will take 16 year olds as freshmen. The best one is Simon's Rock College which exists solely for that purpose. One can get a good overview of other institutions that have related programs.
I went to Simon's Rock for two years and afterwards attended a top-10 ranked university for two years. I think most students who care strongly about academics could benefit from starting college early, and if they went to Simon's Rock they would get better teaching and better peers than at said highly ranked university. (The university is much better in the area of research.)
My current university uses Gmail, but operates a separate legacy system. If I remember correctly, human subjects researchers use the legacy system to make appointments with subjects. This information is not secret, since anyone can stand outside the lab and see who goes in, but it is still forbidden for the researcher to share the information with Google.
If the photon doesn't have enough energy to put the molecule into a new state, it simply doesn't get absorbed.
For cell phone radiation and carbon bonds, that is an excellent approximation, but it is not generally true. There is such a thing as two photon excitation, where for example two 1 eV photons cause a 2 eV transition. In my lab we often observe two and three photon excitation using high power lasers and a sensitive spectrometer, though it is much less likely than single photon excitation. One would need to wait a very long time to observe million photon excitation.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never found it challenging to file my taxes using just the information from IRS.gov. IRS documents usually explain things very well.
This was a strange comparison. Amazon often loads very slow for me, and pages fail to load completely on a regular basis.
irs.gov used to be a good example of a fast site. It is not as fast as it used to be, but still about 3x faster than Amazon, probably due to a static design with few images.
I am seeing lots of negative and off topic comments, many of which show people only watched part of the video. I thought it was totally amazing. When I was a teenager I had to change the course of my career away from computational science towards experimental science because of RSI-like problems. If I had his tools when I was 14 and had known I needed to use them, my career would be totally different and possibly much better since my programming talents would actually have been used.
Today, I can't really afford to spend several months learning to replicate his work, but hopefully soon it will be easier to learn. This will never be for everyone - some people can't use modal programs - and maybe it will never work in every context (Can it talk to my 20 year old Tektronix oscilloscope over GPIB?) but the video showed it can work. I hope good documentation, native linux support, and support for latex will be forthcoming so it can help me do science.
Mathematica is great on linux, except for the DRM.
Gnu Octave replaces matlab.
Yeah, in science, it's usually rare to have serious development done on Windows, except for the occasional data acquisition station or for some control computer attached to a commercial lab apparatus.
Unfortunately windows based data acquisition stations with proprietary software for commercial lab apparatus are far from rare.
Every lab apparatus I have used that had computer control was windows (or MS-DOS, on a really bad day) only, except the most expensive one. The $10 million JEOL electron beam lithography system ran a very old Solaris.
I just replaced my MS-DOS based instrument. It had a proprietary RISC co-processor that could not talk to any modern computer.
That works in many parts of American universities too (though usually not potentially hazardous locations such as machine shops).
In fact, I was recently needed a new faculty ID (not saying where). It turns out you can just walk in and get one of those too. They only asked for my name.
Republishing your old work or resubmitting old proposals is scientific misconduct because it wastes resources by forcing other scientists to perform duplicate reviews.
Ideally, you should have 1, 3, and 4 picked out before you apply to graduate school. People who state 1, 3, and 4, with backup plans, will look better prepared to an admissions committee. Of course you can change your mind later.
Funding supplies is the advisor's job, at least in theory.
The sooner you start, the sooner you will finish and get a job that pays better or is more prestigious.
Streaming video needs a switch to turn off the vapid commentary.
Does anybody here understand what these scientists have supposedly achieved?
This is in my area of research, and I read and understood the abstract. It does not seem like something that should be posted on Slashdot.
In this case, quantum fluid means a fluid that is cold enough, dense enough, and made of low enough mass particles that it has some quantum mechanical properties (interference is an example in the abstract).
Making a bigger quantum fluid is not really a challenge - you just need a bigger refrigerator and a bigger tank of helium. In this case, they made a bigger quantum fluid of a very specialized type.
But isn't the whole point to quantum science that observation collapses a state into one thing or the other?
No. That is just one small part of quantum mechanics.
This experiment is outside my field of expertise, but I know several people who worked on this experiment and have met Juan Collar several times. It seems like an excellent experiment, but there is a funny side to their results:- Juan Collar has been talking for a long time about how he has been very close to showing the DAMA claim of dark matter detection is incorrect, and now he has confirmed it. I often got the feeling that the COGENT team didn't really believe dark matter existed.
Physicists think computer science means numerical calculus, since most of theoretical physics is difficult calculus problems. Perhaps this is why there are so many physicists who write unreadable code.
You do not know how science funding works in America. My salary is partly paid by a wealthy private donor and partly paid by the government. My boss is paid by the university (he does not actually participate in the experiment). Since politicians want to provide skilled workers for their corporate sponsors, and politicians subscribe to the theory that having smarter workers will compensate for the fact that our workers expect to be paid more than those in China, they provide lots of money for people to have salaries to work in labs on the thinking that it prepares them to work in industry or to teach people to work in industry. However, nobody will give us money to buy equipment or liquid helium, so I am forced to spend vast sums of salary money to save only somewhat less vast sums on the cost of helium. My boss can't just lay of some of his staff and use the money to buy more helium; the government won't let him divert the money.
I hear in Europe it is the other way around; the government will buy equipment for labs but they have no staff to use it. This probably has something to do with why high energy physicists are always flying off to CERN.
I didn't even mention that sometimes we cannot get liquid helium at all when we want it.
As you said, energy used for liquefaction has little to do with the cost of helium. Liquefiers are expensive to buy. We are fortunate to have enough helium users that the capital expense of a liquefier has been overcome. I think we also indirectly pay the person who runs the liquefier's salary, since that is not the sort of thing the government will pay for. Some of what we return to the liquefier is lost before it can be resold.
This topic is complex and much discussed among low temperature and high energy scientists, who need liquid helium to cool their experiments. Unfortunately a large portion of helium usage is waste, such as deliberate dumping by natural gas companies who do not think the helium market (tiny compared to the natural gas market) is worth their time, or welders who still use helium when argon is cheaper.
In my lab, the liquid helium is the primary cost of doing experiments. We spend around $100 for each four-hour experimental session. It is by far our biggest expense. We try to recover as much as possible, but we only get a small refund for returned gas. So, please don't use helium where it is not needed; you are limiting our science, and you may be limiting your own access to medical technologies such as MRI in the future.
Currently only the wealthiest students are paying the sticker price at good private colleges. So if you are not wealthy, it is best to apply first and decide where to go after getting your financial aid offer. Simon's Rock is unusual because it offers merit scholarships, so even wealthy students may get a discount. Many prestigious universities do not give out merit scholarships.
I liked it quite a bit. I graduated three years ago, still like to advertise it in my sig.
At first I was confused by this article, since I was reading it in Opera 10.11. The new version is called 10.60, not 10.6.
The Tevatron has to be partially removed to allow the construction of Project X, which is an accelerator that complements the LHC but does not compete with it. Fermilab is in no danger of being closed due to obsolescence. Many of the people who work there are working on the LHC, and there are many other experiments located at Fermilab.
After congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, Europe focused on exploring the "Energy Frontier" and American scientists have focused on the "Intensity Frontier." There are also lots of collaboration and experiments that do not fit into either category. Of course, the rate at which the "Intensity Frontier" is explored does depend on the federal budget, but it will get done eventually.
A good quantum analog of the classical speed grandparent was talking about is the root mean square velocity (computed from the momentum operator), which need not be zero for a bound state. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation shows that a particle in any state may be observed to have a nonzero velocity.
Perhaps you are thinking that the wavefunction, as it is written in most textbooks, does not depend on time. Usually in books the time dependent factor is dropped because it is not very interesting. Also, it is incorrect to think that the motion of a wavefunction is the quantum analog of the classical motion of a particle. Always think in expectation values.
Exxon is not trying to prevent climate change legislation. Several years ago I heard an Exxon executive arguing in favor of cap and trade.
Exxon is not stupid. They have made sure that if cap and trade becomes law, their profits will be protected. They have developed carbon sequestration technology which will allow them to continue to sell oil without polluting. Sure, carbon sequestration is expensive (but cheaper than wars or health care). However, with cap and trade everyone will be forced to do carbon sequestration, and Exxon knows how to do it better than most other groups. Also, keep in mind that Exxon has businesses besides oil and that they have the cash to simply purchase any "green" competition.
So why do people accuse Exxon of funding global warming skeptics? Most likely Exxon is backing both sides. Large corporations will back all sides in any political competition, to make sure that whoever wins rewards them afterwards.
Anyway, do not blame corporate profiteering for global warming. Corporations would be just as willing to make their profits off of "green" energy. They will follow the government's guidance. It is congress that is sitting there and doing nothing.
Some rigorous, 4-year colleges will take 16 year olds as freshmen. The best one is Simon's Rock College which exists solely for that purpose. One can get a good overview of other institutions that have related programs.
I went to Simon's Rock for two years and afterwards attended a top-10 ranked university for two years. I think most students who care strongly about academics could benefit from starting college early, and if they went to Simon's Rock they would get better teaching and better peers than at said highly ranked university. (The university is much better in the area of research.)
My current university uses Gmail, but operates a separate legacy system. If I remember correctly, human subjects researchers use the legacy system to make appointments with subjects. This information is not secret, since anyone can stand outside the lab and see who goes in, but it is still forbidden for the researcher to share the information with Google.
Disclaimer: Not a human subjects researcher.
For cell phone radiation and carbon bonds, that is an excellent approximation, but it is not generally true. There is such a thing as two photon excitation, where for example two 1 eV photons cause a 2 eV transition. In my lab we often observe two and three photon excitation using high power lasers and a sensitive spectrometer, though it is much less likely than single photon excitation. One would need to wait a very long time to observe million photon excitation.
The LHC is designed to have a higher brightness, so a hypothetical recycler would be emptied much faster than it could be refilled.
Also, proton-proton collisions have different backgrounds, so they make some signals easier to detect.