Ever since deep inelastic scattering experiments revealed that the proton is not a pointlike charge at sufficiently small electron wavelengths, but rather scatters electrons as if it contained three pointlike (at that scale) charges (+2/3, +2/3, and -1/3), quarks have generally been considered real. Prior to these experiments, there most certainly was ontological debate about quarks. There was also similar debate about atoms for quite some time (see Ernst Mach).
Won't happen. We're hard at work on it right now (except when we're reading slashdot...), and we're making some amazing leaps forward in analysis techniques, but we simply won't have enough data to be sufficiently sensitive to the Higgs by the time the accelerator shuts down. We might find evidence or even strong evidence, but not strong enough to call it discovery. We do have enough data to exclude certain mass ranges, however. When you combine our data with D0's (the experiment that did the analysis in TFA), we have enough sensitivity to say that the Higgs, if it is the standard model Higgs (and the lightest SUSY Higgs is sufficiently similar that this holds for it, too), does not have a mass quite close to 170 GeV (which is pretty close to the mass of the top quark, incidentally). http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/prelim/HIGGS/H64/
And during the period of Dell's dominance, nothing was preventing anybody from starting up a system-builder shop. This didn't mean that Microsoft's exclusivity agreements with Dell* weren't anti-competitive. I think that the analogy here is sufficiently strong to draw the conclusion that Google's exclusivity agreements are anti-competitive.
* I may be overstating my case here. I don't know that Microsoft had actual exclusivity contracts with Dell. I do know, IIRC, that Microsoft threatened to eg jack up the price for Dell if they didn't cooperate, which boils down to the same thing.
No. Big bang nucleosynthesis tells us that baryonic matter (that is, made up of neutrons and protons, basically) only makes up a small percentage of the total matter mass of the universe. That is, there is an awful lot of matter out there which is not made of protons and neutrons; it is exotic.
It is worth pointing out that we have not located all of the baryonic matter out there yet, and much of that may well be rogue planets, brown dwarfs (black dwarfs haven't yet had time to form), etc. These are commonly called MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects).
A large amount of the carbon footprint of producing so-called zero emission transportation comes from not yet having zero emission transportation. That is, shipping lines still use diesel engines. Once we've got fuel cell or whatever transportation nailed down, shipping the parts all over the world to assemble more fuel cell cars won't incur such a huge carbon cost because the shipping lines will also be zero emission.
The other big carbon cost is of course the production of the hydrogen, which is generally AFAIK done using electrolysis, powered by whatever power plants happen to be around, most of them high emission plants. Changing this is not so directly tied to producing the fuel cell cars, but once this issue is fixed, fuel cell (or whatever) cars will approach much more closely to zero emissions.
In short, the carbon footprint of producing the cars and the fuel is in part a separate issue. Fixing the cars themselves will probably come first, and the rest will follow.
Anyway... Narita handled 16,464 flights in March; 0.001% would be an engine fire every six months, just for Narita.
No. You're assuming that every single ipod that catches fire does so on an airplane. How much time does the average ipod actually spend in the air, hm?
What you've actually calculated is that every six months, Narita will host a passenger who owns an ipod which will at some point in time catch fire. These are very different thing.
Also, don't forget that 0.001% of Nanos (since we're adopting that number for discussion) is the percentage of Nanos that will burst into flame at all. It would be instructive to examine the lifetime of these, and thereby deduce the rate at which Nanos burst into flame. This rate is probably on the order of 10 per year (given that 14 in Japan have burst into flame over the course of a few years). Then, you need to take into account the amount of time that an average Nano spends in the air (probably less than 0.1% of the time). So, of the several flaming Nanos per year, less than 0.1% of them will be on airplanes when they go off, giving us a flaming airplane Nano rate of perhaps 1 every 100 years.
Now, do you really think this is something to worry about?
Apples and oranges. GP said "the luggage compartment is unpressurized". You said "Aircraft cabins are usually pressurized". Unless I'm mistaken, those are two different things. If they are not, then you should have said so.
I might be more enthusiastic about that if the ad were asking for any physicists to show up... As a physicist, I don't really trust "graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area" to get the physics right. If there's one thing we don't need, it's more kids coming in who think they know physics, but have it all wrong.
I really hope you're being sarcastic. If not, you really need to lighten up. I have never had difficulty with slashdot due to twitter, trolling or not. However, the pages and pages of people screaming "ZOMGWTFBBQROFLCOPTER ITS TEH TWETTTX0RS!" really do ruin a good article.
So get over yourself. You're not some brave chivalrous hero. You're just as much of a troll. You do more damage to slashdot than any of the other trolls do. For goodness sake, just shut up!
Perhaps my knowledge of notable irrational numbers is deficient (although I suspect not). What exactly is the connection you see between the Euler number and the golden ratio?
Also, you must disassemble, by hand, the compiler. Heck you'd better not even trust the HDD controller or driver to accurately report the bits representing the compiler binary that you're disassembling. You'll have to open the disk and read the bits by hand with a compass needle. Reflections on Trusting Trust?
Solar and wind can't provide sufficient power density. We will never get to Type I using terrestrial solar, simply by virtue of the fact that we still need some land area on which to live. If I had to guess, I'd say that, short of Type I (or very close to), we don't have enough power to send up enough solar satellites to provide Type I level power. I'm not even sure Type I would be enough power to start progressing past Type I. But we should be able to punch through Type I with only terrestrial sources by running an energy deficit with fission and fusion. Our stores of fission and fusion fuels should last plenty long enough to get us well on our way to Type II, and I'm afraid my imagination doesn't run any farther.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever since deep inelastic scattering experiments revealed that the proton is not a pointlike charge at sufficiently small electron wavelengths, but rather scatters electrons as if it contained three pointlike (at that scale) charges (+2/3, +2/3, and -1/3), quarks have generally been considered real. Prior to these experiments, there most certainly was ontological debate about quarks. There was also similar debate about atoms for quite some time (see Ernst Mach).
IAAPP, and you got it in one.
It is predicted by the Standard Model, which Garrett Lisi's theory of everything had better also predict, so yes. But not exclusively so.
Won't happen. We're hard at work on it right now (except when we're reading slashdot...), and we're making some amazing leaps forward in analysis techniques, but we simply won't have enough data to be sufficiently sensitive to the Higgs by the time the accelerator shuts down. We might find evidence or even strong evidence, but not strong enough to call it discovery. We do have enough data to exclude certain mass ranges, however. When you combine our data with D0's (the experiment that did the analysis in TFA), we have enough sensitivity to say that the Higgs, if it is the standard model Higgs (and the lightest SUSY Higgs is sufficiently similar that this holds for it, too), does not have a mass quite close to 170 GeV (which is pretty close to the mass of the top quark, incidentally). http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/prelim/HIGGS/H64/
And during the period of Dell's dominance, nothing was preventing anybody from starting up a system-builder shop. This didn't mean that Microsoft's exclusivity agreements with Dell* weren't anti-competitive. I think that the analogy here is sufficiently strong to draw the conclusion that Google's exclusivity agreements are anti-competitive.
* I may be overstating my case here. I don't know that Microsoft had actual exclusivity contracts with Dell. I do know, IIRC, that Microsoft threatened to eg jack up the price for Dell if they didn't cooperate, which boils down to the same thing.
Exclusivity agreements like this one are definitely quite nastily anti-competitive, which I would say is evil.
No. Big bang nucleosynthesis tells us that baryonic matter (that is, made up of neutrons and protons, basically) only makes up a small percentage of the total matter mass of the universe. That is, there is an awful lot of matter out there which is not made of protons and neutrons; it is exotic.
It is worth pointing out that we have not located all of the baryonic matter out there yet, and much of that may well be rogue planets, brown dwarfs (black dwarfs haven't yet had time to form), etc. These are commonly called MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects).
He really just needs to throw the photos in a black hole, because, as Hawking proved, black holes don't destroy information.
This minimum compressed length is easy (yet very slow) to find out.
Er... You'd better get that paper published and claim your prize for solving the halting problem! Oh wait...
The Kolmogorov complexity of a string s is uncomputable.
So what happens when you ...?
Then you get really really high latency.
A large amount of the carbon footprint of producing so-called zero emission transportation comes from not yet having zero emission transportation. That is, shipping lines still use diesel engines. Once we've got fuel cell or whatever transportation nailed down, shipping the parts all over the world to assemble more fuel cell cars won't incur such a huge carbon cost because the shipping lines will also be zero emission.
The other big carbon cost is of course the production of the hydrogen, which is generally AFAIK done using electrolysis, powered by whatever power plants happen to be around, most of them high emission plants. Changing this is not so directly tied to producing the fuel cell cars, but once this issue is fixed, fuel cell (or whatever) cars will approach much more closely to zero emissions.
In short, the carbon footprint of producing the cars and the fuel is in part a separate issue. Fixing the cars themselves will probably come first, and the rest will follow.
Anyway... Narita handled 16,464 flights in March; 0.001% would be an engine fire every six months, just for Narita.
No. You're assuming that every single ipod that catches fire does so on an airplane. How much time does the average ipod actually spend in the air, hm?
What you've actually calculated is that every six months, Narita will host a passenger who owns an ipod which will at some point in time catch fire. These are very different thing.
Gah! Innumeracy everywhere!
Also, don't forget that 0.001% of Nanos (since we're adopting that number for discussion) is the percentage of Nanos that will burst into flame at all. It would be instructive to examine the lifetime of these, and thereby deduce the rate at which Nanos burst into flame. This rate is probably on the order of 10 per year (given that 14 in Japan have burst into flame over the course of a few years). Then, you need to take into account the amount of time that an average Nano spends in the air (probably less than 0.1% of the time). So, of the several flaming Nanos per year, less than 0.1% of them will be on airplanes when they go off, giving us a flaming airplane Nano rate of perhaps 1 every 100 years.
Now, do you really think this is something to worry about?
Not anymore!
Apples and oranges. GP said "the luggage compartment is unpressurized". You said "Aircraft cabins are usually pressurized". Unless I'm mistaken, those are two different things. If they are not, then you should have said so.
I might be more enthusiastic about that if the ad were asking for any physicists to show up... As a physicist, I don't really trust "graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area" to get the physics right. If there's one thing we don't need, it's more kids coming in who think they know physics, but have it all wrong.
You forgot the sarcasm tags. Again.
I really hope you're being sarcastic. If not, you really need to lighten up. I have never had difficulty with slashdot due to twitter, trolling or not. However, the pages and pages of people screaming "ZOMGWTFBBQROFLCOPTER ITS TEH TWETTTX0RS!" really do ruin a good article.
So get over yourself. You're not some brave chivalrous hero. You're just as much of a troll. You do more damage to slashdot than any of the other trolls do. For goodness sake, just shut up!
Perhaps my knowledge of notable irrational numbers is deficient (although I suspect not). What exactly is the connection you see between the Euler number and the golden ratio?
Correction: see the stack overflow when you use a language that doesn't recurse properly.
Also, you must disassemble, by hand, the compiler. Heck you'd better not even trust the HDD controller or driver to accurately report the bits representing the compiler binary that you're disassembling. You'll have to open the disk and read the bits by hand with a compass needle. Reflections on Trusting Trust?
Solar and wind can't provide sufficient power density. We will never get to Type I using terrestrial solar, simply by virtue of the fact that we still need some land area on which to live. If I had to guess, I'd say that, short of Type I (or very close to), we don't have enough power to send up enough solar satellites to provide Type I level power. I'm not even sure Type I would be enough power to start progressing past Type I. But we should be able to punch through Type I with only terrestrial sources by running an energy deficit with fission and fusion. Our stores of fission and fusion fuels should last plenty long enough to get us well on our way to Type II, and I'm afraid my imagination doesn't run any farther.
It will sell for an MSRP of $399.99 and should be available in the U.S. next month.
my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary...
So does my $10 digital picture frame...
Three, sir! Three!