If it's casual-gamer-only, they get lots of instant sales but it might not have as undiring a long-term appeal as the more advanced gamers won't contunue to buy/mod/play it too much beyond the next big release.
Which, as long as we're not talking about subscription games, isn't really a problem, because once you've bought the game, the developer/publisher doesn't really care whether you play the game for an hour or for a year; they already have your money. Of course, there are advantages to making games last longer (e.g. you are more likely to buy from that developer in the future, more likely to give a positive review and get others to buy it, etc.), so this is mitigated somewhat.
The one I have done involves sitting behind someone, eyes closed, and having your nose stroked (by a third party) while you stroke someone else's nose in front of you. After a few seconds, your brain "clicks" and you feel like you have an incredibly long nose. This is because of the feedback loop where your brain feels something on your nose and your finger simultaneously, and your mental body image just changes instantly.
While not a bad idea, the implementation could be much better...Picture this test:
1) McDonald's $2 Big Mac contains two all-beef patties that are cylinders of height 0.5cm and diameter 5cm. Burger King's $3 whopper contains two beef-like substances that are cylinders of height 0.3cm and diameter 4.5cm. How many more times valuable is the Big Mac versus the Whopper, assuming a sandwich's value is directly proportional to the amount of beef (or beef-like substance) in it?
2) A Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki 6" sub contains 250 kcal of lean, healthy energy. A Wendy's Baconator contains 975 kcal of thigh-hugging and gut-enlarging fat. If all the energy of these sandwiches were put into a 100kg person climbing a ladder, how much higher would the 100kg person have to climb in order to use up all the energy (assuming all energy spent is put into the potential energy from climbing)?
The possibilities are endless! We'd never have to worry about education funding again!
More likely the errors are due to natural issues such as sun-light reflecting off the surface of the roid in unknown ways giving it a slight push or imprecise knowledge about Jupiter's gravity profile at given distances.
This is exactly what I meant by "cut corners." Probably not the best way to describe it, but there are, at the roughest level, three different items that lead to error in predicting trajectories. The first is errors/inprecision in measurements, which this camera will help reduce. The second is us not knowing exactly how certain forces will affect a particular asteroid. The last is the inability to accurately simulate the forces that we do know, due to computational complexity. It is here where things are simplified (i.e. corners are cut) in order to be able to run a simulation at all. I suppose "cutting corners" has a connotation of laziness as opposed to necessity -- in this case, it is not because astronomers are lazy -- it is just that we do not have the technology or computational horsepower to be able to accurately simulate every known force on a particular asteroid (let alone the unknown forces that we don't know about).
The best we can do is attempt to determine the upper limits on the errors that all these unknowns/simplifications can cause on a particular trajectory. By doing this, if we have a potential impact, no matter how small, we may be able to adjust the trajectory enough to ensure that the projected trajectory, along with all potential error, still leaves the object safely out of harm's way.
Accurately predicting an asteroid's orbit is much more than simply knowing the current position and the current velocity. Even if you knew them, exactly, there are many more variables that affect the trajectory of an asteroid. Current prediction models still have trouble with simple things like gravity (most models only take into account the sun, planets, satellites of the planets, and a few of the larger astroids/minor planets, and all but the most advanced models treat them as point masses which they obviously aren't). There are a lot of more complex forces that can act on an asteroid that don't have nearly the impact that gravity has, but even the smallest of forces, over periods of years, can be the difference between a hit or a miss by many Earth radii.
The biggest problem is that the longer the time before the potential impact, the more that these small unknowns can affect the trajectory. If you're looking at an asteroid, and the potential time until impact is days or even probably months, then the standard models will probably be enough to determine if the asteroid will strike or not. In that case, however, it doesn't give us much time to react. When you look at much longer-term impacts (tens or hundreds of years away), we have much more time to react, but we also are much less accurate with our predictions.
The point I was trying to make is that there are a lot of forces acting on an asteroid while it is in orbit. As others have said, there are things like spin, close encounters with other unknown asteroids, the exact gravity profile of the planets, etc. Location and current velocity are just two of the many variables that affect the trajectory of an asteroid. Current projections can estimate the amount of error that each of these factors can cause, but they cannot, with today's technology, accurately account for them.
There was a recent study (which I think was highlighted on Slashdot, but I cannot find a link) that tried to quantify all these variables and determine how much each unknown could affect the overall trajectory of an asteroid. I'm sure someone else will be able to find it.
With plenty of time to work, small changes in velocity can cause large changes in position years in the future -- turning an impact into a near miss.
Or, given the fact that even the most advanced prediction algorithms still have to cut some corners (therefore leading to some uncertainty), it could turn a near miss into an impact.
The problem is that the cards are dealt. Yes, you can make it such that the next card dealt isn't known (so, for instance, even the server wouldn't know what the flop was going to be before it was dealt). What it *does* know, however, is what every player has been dealt as their two hole cards. If you knew exactly what everyone else had, you would be able to play the odds perfectly. Sure, you might get beat every once in a while on a 2% chance for the card the opponent needs hitting the river, but you would know the exact odds of you winning each hand and could bet accordingly. The best poker players in a legitimate game will estimate the odds of you winning, based on what they have and what they expect you to have, and a good day for them is winning about 2-3% of the big blind bet per hand on average.
Only if you consider angular velocity. In strict distance traveled per unit time, the further away you are, faster you are moving. This is only true if everything has the same period, which is not the case in orbital mechanics. When you are talking about stable orbits, the larger the orbit, the slower the object is moving (with respect to the object being orbited). If you don't believe me, check out the wikipedia pages for the planets -- you will see that the further out the planet is, the slower the speed at which the object orbits. It has nothing to do with angular velocity.
Let's take Venus and Earth, for example. Venus' orbital period is 224.7 days, and its orbital radius (assuming the orbit was circular) is about 108 million km. Using 2*pi*r/t, we get about 35km/s. For Earth, we get an orbital period of 365.25 days, and an orbital radius of 149.6 million km. This gives an average velocity of 29.8km/s.
This is why in orbital mechanics you add velocity to allow something to catch up to you, and reduce velocity if you want to catch up to something. It's totally counter-intuitive, but in the grand scheme, that's how it works.
I've never heard this before -- do you have some source that describes this in more detail?
Debris further away from the sun is moving faster than debris closer, Really? Kepler's laws of planetary motion (specifically the third law) state that the closer an object is to the sun, the faster the orbit.
If you assume a circular orbit, then velocity is calculated as sqrt(G*M/r). Therefore, the radius is inversely proportional to the square of the velocity -- for example, something with an orbital radius 4x that of a closer object will be moving half as slowly as the closer object.
(link to Alexa graph) One problem about Alexa is that it only gathers statistics from those who install the Alexa toolbar...I would tend to think that the Slashdot crowd would be a group that predominantly avoids installing that sort of thing. I actually think there was a discussion on this on Slashdot many months ago.
That said, I'm sure that the traffic to Wikipedia is probably several orders of magnitude higher than that of Slashdot.
Keep in mind that to create a golf-ball sized black hole you need to compress a LOT of matter. According to wikipedia, the article about black holes, a black hole with the mass of the moon would have a 0.1 mm diameter. It's actually a 0.1mm radius. There is a simple formula to determine the radius of the event horizon of a black hole given its mass, or vice versa. To determine the radius, it's just 2*G*M/c^2, where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the black hole, and c is of course the speed of light.
To calculate the mass, the calculation is just r*c^2/(2*G). Therefore, a black hole the size of a golf ball (21.33mm radius) would have to have a mass of 1.4E25 kg, or about 2.4 earths.
For those wondering, you calculate this by setting the escape velocity equal to the speed of light. Another interesting thing about black holes is that you don't technically need very dense matter to form a black hole. If you assumed all the mass of the black hole was evenly distributed, if you got a sphere of water (density 1kg/L) with a radius of 2.68AU, you would have a black hole. Of course, with all that mass (approximately 136 million solar masses), gravity would compress it.
This can easily be illustrated when looking at the sky, at night, when there are no cloud and no light pollution from a nearby big city : you see a lot of stars (when getting a global picture with all your visual field including peripheral vision) but if you try to look at some region in detail, some star seem to disappear (you're looking it with the high resolution / high color / but bad grey region of your retina), and then are visible again if you stop looking at them. I've noticed a similar thing with a recently turned off tube TV in a dark room. If I am looking away from the TV, I can notice a slight gray glow from the TV, but when I look directly at it, I can no longer make out any form of glow. I had always assumed it was because I had just been looking at the TV so the rods/cones/whatever senses that particular form of light were a little desensitized in the middle of my view, but I seemed to notice the same thing if I hadn't specifically been looking at the TV immediately prior to turning it off. This explains what I'm seeing perfectly!
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
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[M]y main toon is... the same gender as me. [M]y alt... is male I like how you subtly told us you were a girl, as if you were afraid that if we (men) found out we would do something untoward.
Hell for all we know the cockroaches descendants might outlive us due to the fact the might be able to survive meteor impacts and then go on to have a space faring species that travel on rocks colonizing planets over time. Hell, for all we know the cockroaches have already done this, which is how they ended up on earth!
Tilt the LCDs on their sides, and you have "better-than-page-at-a-time" view. While this will work with most LCD screens and video drivers, it's not going to work very well with a laptop unless you've learned to type sideways or your neck is permanently bent at a 90 degree angle, most likely from eating too much Taco Bell.
In other words, if you assume that the mass of the Oort cloud is distributed evenly across a sphere, it would have no gravitational impact on anything inside of the cloud. It won't "pull" something on the inside out toward it.
How can you be sure? Because there's no way stars can shine through the Sun. Direct from Wikipedia:
The solar interior is not directly observable, and the Sun itself is opaque to electromagnetic radiation. Still don't believe me? Take a look at this video. It clearly shows that there are no "stars" initially, but after the flare reaches the satellite, the "stars" suddenly appear. (SOHO is the satellite, the instrument is the EIT, or Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope)
How does that fit your theories of poor hungry record companies having to break even and barely being able to scrape by? I don't recall ever making this claim. I was only trying to debunk the parent's analogy of having a new and extremely cheap way to reproduce product (i.e. low marginal cost) reducing product price, mostly because the music industry (as well as software and movie industries) have always had an extremely cheap way to reproduce product.
If you look at the Wikipedia page, it talks about how, over time, the price of a particular product usually approaches its marginal cost as the fixed costs have been absorbed by initial sales of a particular product. This fits perfectly into how you (and I) think older CDs should be priced -- prices should go down over time, but this rarely happens with anything on the big labels.
Sometimes I wonder how another industry would react if a magical technology dropped in their lap that made duplicating their product instantaneous and nearly free (people already pay their ISPs) to nearly instantly deliver it to customers. What would an automaker think of something like that? They would probably rejoice and drop their pricing to pennies on the dollar. Yes, because you can now buy software for $10 or movies for $2.
The problem with your analogy is that there has never been a high cost of duplicating product in any of these industries. In economic terms, the marginal cost of producing an additional unit is low. However, the fixed costs (paying the artists, recording studio, etc.) here are proportionally much larger. It may cost $1 million to develop a piece of software, and then $5 per unit to put it all in a box and ship it out. Let's say the software costs $50. Now, you create a better way of distribution and the marginal cost is now $0. This doesn't mean suddenly the company is going to be giving them away for free...in this simple scenario, in order to get the equivalent amount of profit per unit (ignoring changes in supply or demand), they would be able to sell the product for $45.
Now let's take a look at the auto industry. Here, marginal costs make up a much higher percentage of the total cost. To make things simple, let's say each car costs the company $10,000 to produce (in materials and labor costs), and they sell the car for $12,500. If you suddenly can lower the costs (due to your magical technology) for each car to $100, then to get the same profit per unit (again ignoring changes in supply or demand) they would only charge $2,600. In one case we only reduced the price by 10%, in the other we reduced it by almost 80%.
The problem is that people in general expect to pay near the marginal cost for an item, but in general do not take into account the fixed costs with producing a particular product. For this reason, it's easier for a person to justify spending $100 on an object they know costs about $95 in materials to produce, while they hesitate to spend $15 on a CD they know costs only pennies to create.
For more information on marginal cost and how it applies, I highly recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia article on Marginal Cost.
island flora and fauna undergo size changes to either gigantic sizes not seen on the continent (for example, the komodo dragon), or to diminuitive sizes (the pygmy rhino, for example). it's called the island rule I read the article you linked to, and it was very informative. It also makes intuitive sense that a relatively small isolated population of any species could tend to change size over time. In large populations, such as those on continents, the large number of individuals will keep the average sizes relatively constant barring any significant evolutionary pressure to change sizes. In the small populations on isolated islands, random "mutations" to be larger or smaller are much more likely to significantly affect the average in the population. Compounded with even slight evolutionary pressure, changes can happen much more rapidly.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's casual-gamer-only, they get lots of instant sales but it might not have as undiring a long-term appeal as the more advanced gamers won't contunue to buy/mod/play it too much beyond the next big release.
Which, as long as we're not talking about subscription games, isn't really a problem, because once you've bought the game, the developer/publisher doesn't really care whether you play the game for an hour or for a year; they already have your money. Of course, there are advantages to making games last longer (e.g. you are more likely to buy from that developer in the future, more likely to give a positive review and get others to buy it, etc.), so this is mitigated somewhat.
The one I have done involves sitting behind someone, eyes closed, and having your nose stroked (by a third party) while you stroke someone else's nose in front of you. After a few seconds, your brain "clicks" and you feel like you have an incredibly long nose. This is because of the feedback loop where your brain feels something on your nose and your finger simultaneously, and your mental body image just changes instantly.
Are you sure it was a nose you were stroking?
I put my copyright notice next to every answer.
Doesn't work so well on the scantron forms though.
Simple...just fill in the "C" bubble every time. Besides, everyone knows that the answer is usually C.
While not a bad idea, the implementation could be much better...Picture this test:
1) McDonald's $2 Big Mac contains two all-beef patties that are cylinders of height 0.5cm and diameter 5cm. Burger King's $3 whopper contains two beef-like substances that are cylinders of height 0.3cm and diameter 4.5cm. How many more times valuable is the Big Mac versus the Whopper, assuming a sandwich's value is directly proportional to the amount of beef (or beef-like substance) in it?
2) A Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki 6" sub contains 250 kcal of lean, healthy energy. A Wendy's Baconator contains 975 kcal of thigh-hugging and gut-enlarging fat. If all the energy of these sandwiches were put into a 100kg person climbing a ladder, how much higher would the 100kg person have to climb in order to use up all the energy (assuming all energy spent is put into the potential energy from climbing)?
The possibilities are endless! We'd never have to worry about education funding again!
More likely the errors are due to natural issues such as sun-light reflecting off the surface of the roid in unknown ways giving it a slight push or imprecise knowledge about Jupiter's gravity profile at given distances.
This is exactly what I meant by "cut corners." Probably not the best way to describe it, but there are, at the roughest level, three different items that lead to error in predicting trajectories. The first is errors/inprecision in measurements, which this camera will help reduce. The second is us not knowing exactly how certain forces will affect a particular asteroid. The last is the inability to accurately simulate the forces that we do know, due to computational complexity. It is here where things are simplified (i.e. corners are cut) in order to be able to run a simulation at all. I suppose "cutting corners" has a connotation of laziness as opposed to necessity -- in this case, it is not because astronomers are lazy -- it is just that we do not have the technology or computational horsepower to be able to accurately simulate every known force on a particular asteroid (let alone the unknown forces that we don't know about).
The best we can do is attempt to determine the upper limits on the errors that all these unknowns/simplifications can cause on a particular trajectory. By doing this, if we have a potential impact, no matter how small, we may be able to adjust the trajectory enough to ensure that the projected trajectory, along with all potential error, still leaves the object safely out of harm's way.
Accurately predicting an asteroid's orbit is much more than simply knowing the current position and the current velocity. Even if you knew them, exactly, there are many more variables that affect the trajectory of an asteroid. Current prediction models still have trouble with simple things like gravity (most models only take into account the sun, planets, satellites of the planets, and a few of the larger astroids/minor planets, and all but the most advanced models treat them as point masses which they obviously aren't). There are a lot of more complex forces that can act on an asteroid that don't have nearly the impact that gravity has, but even the smallest of forces, over periods of years, can be the difference between a hit or a miss by many Earth radii.
The biggest problem is that the longer the time before the potential impact, the more that these small unknowns can affect the trajectory. If you're looking at an asteroid, and the potential time until impact is days or even probably months, then the standard models will probably be enough to determine if the asteroid will strike or not. In that case, however, it doesn't give us much time to react. When you look at much longer-term impacts (tens or hundreds of years away), we have much more time to react, but we also are much less accurate with our predictions.
The point I was trying to make is that there are a lot of forces acting on an asteroid while it is in orbit. As others have said, there are things like spin, close encounters with other unknown asteroids, the exact gravity profile of the planets, etc. Location and current velocity are just two of the many variables that affect the trajectory of an asteroid. Current projections can estimate the amount of error that each of these factors can cause, but they cannot, with today's technology, accurately account for them.
There was a recent study (which I think was highlighted on Slashdot, but I cannot find a link) that tried to quantify all these variables and determine how much each unknown could affect the overall trajectory of an asteroid. I'm sure someone else will be able to find it.
With plenty of time to work, small changes in velocity can cause large changes in position years in the future -- turning an impact into a near miss.
Or, given the fact that even the most advanced prediction algorithms still have to cut some corners (therefore leading to some uncertainty), it could turn a near miss into an impact.
The problem is that the cards are dealt. Yes, you can make it such that the next card dealt isn't known (so, for instance, even the server wouldn't know what the flop was going to be before it was dealt). What it *does* know, however, is what every player has been dealt as their two hole cards. If you knew exactly what everyone else had, you would be able to play the odds perfectly. Sure, you might get beat every once in a while on a 2% chance for the card the opponent needs hitting the river, but you would know the exact odds of you winning each hand and could bet accordingly. The best poker players in a legitimate game will estimate the odds of you winning, based on what they have and what they expect you to have, and a good day for them is winning about 2-3% of the big blind bet per hand on average.
Let's take Venus and Earth, for example. Venus' orbital period is 224.7 days, and its orbital radius (assuming the orbit was circular) is about 108 million km. Using 2*pi*r/t, we get about 35km/s. For Earth, we get an orbital period of 365.25 days, and an orbital radius of 149.6 million km. This gives an average velocity of 29.8km/s.
This is why in orbital mechanics you add velocity to allow something to catch up to you, and reduce velocity if you want to catch up to something. It's totally counter-intuitive, but in the grand scheme, that's how it works.
I've never heard this before -- do you have some source that describes this in more detail?If you assume a circular orbit, then velocity is calculated as sqrt(G*M/r). Therefore, the radius is inversely proportional to the square of the velocity -- for example, something with an orbital radius 4x that of a closer object will be moving half as slowly as the closer object.
That said, I'm sure that the traffic to Wikipedia is probably several orders of magnitude higher than that of Slashdot.
To calculate the mass, the calculation is just r*c^2/(2*G). Therefore, a black hole the size of a golf ball (21.33mm radius) would have to have a mass of 1.4E25 kg, or about 2.4 earths.
For those wondering, you calculate this by setting the escape velocity equal to the speed of light. Another interesting thing about black holes is that you don't technically need very dense matter to form a black hole. If you assumed all the mass of the black hole was evenly distributed, if you got a sphere of water (density 1kg/L) with a radius of 2.68AU, you would have a black hole. Of course, with all that mass (approximately 136 million solar masses), gravity would compress it.
ZOMG! A GIRL ON SLASHDOT!
In other words, if you assume that the mass of the Oort cloud is distributed evenly across a sphere, it would have no gravitational impact on anything inside of the cloud. It won't "pull" something on the inside out toward it.
I tried to follow along but I was lost somewhere around holonomies and flux operators, which I assume is related to the flux capacitor.
If you look at the Wikipedia page, it talks about how, over time, the price of a particular product usually approaches its marginal cost as the fixed costs have been absorbed by initial sales of a particular product. This fits perfectly into how you (and I) think older CDs should be priced -- prices should go down over time, but this rarely happens with anything on the big labels.
The problem with your analogy is that there has never been a high cost of duplicating product in any of these industries. In economic terms, the marginal cost of producing an additional unit is low. However, the fixed costs (paying the artists, recording studio, etc.) here are proportionally much larger. It may cost $1 million to develop a piece of software, and then $5 per unit to put it all in a box and ship it out. Let's say the software costs $50. Now, you create a better way of distribution and the marginal cost is now $0. This doesn't mean suddenly the company is going to be giving them away for free...in this simple scenario, in order to get the equivalent amount of profit per unit (ignoring changes in supply or demand), they would be able to sell the product for $45.
Now let's take a look at the auto industry. Here, marginal costs make up a much higher percentage of the total cost. To make things simple, let's say each car costs the company $10,000 to produce (in materials and labor costs), and they sell the car for $12,500. If you suddenly can lower the costs (due to your magical technology) for each car to $100, then to get the same profit per unit (again ignoring changes in supply or demand) they would only charge $2,600. In one case we only reduced the price by 10%, in the other we reduced it by almost 80%.
The problem is that people in general expect to pay near the marginal cost for an item, but in general do not take into account the fixed costs with producing a particular product. For this reason, it's easier for a person to justify spending $100 on an object they know costs about $95 in materials to produce, while they hesitate to spend $15 on a CD they know costs only pennies to create.
For more information on marginal cost and how it applies, I highly recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia article on Marginal Cost.
Those "stars" you see are not stars -- they are one of two things:
1) Image artifacts
2) particles of solar wind/high-energy waves hitting the recording instrument.