Yeah. If we enforced that law, it would get repealed pretty fast, which is kinda the point. If there are unenforced and frequently broken laws on the books, then anyone who wants to hurt you can bring you up on frivolous but damaging charges. That is, rather obviously, a bad thing.
Also, if we start having some laws that are not enforced, it becomes much easier to enforce any laws selectively, which opens one huge door to corruption and oppression and other -essions.
Well, that was the original intent. RMS envisioned a world in which all software was Free (Libre), and then he thought about how this could be brought about. What he came up with was two-pronged. 1) copyleft 2) write lots of really excellent software, so excellent that people will want to use it even though they know they will get sucked into the copyleft. It appears to be working.
No, no. We're at war with Terror, Drugs, and Poverty. I don't really know which of those he aided, although a coworker of mine claims that Julian Assange is "a terrorist by anyone's definition", so maybe it is Terror.
Here's one possibility: All of our favorite science fiction stuff (things that would allow us to effectively have a galactic or even universal civilization) appears to be disallowed by special and general relativity. However, these things necessarily break down in some regard at the smallest (ie highest energy) scales. Understanding quantum gravity (if we can ever do so) will tell us just exactly how relativity breaks down at super high energies. It is possible that the particulars will show us a way to travel and communicate faster than light (think things like the Alcubierre bubble).
The LHC will probably not unlock the secrets of quantum gravity. However, understanding the lower energy phenomena like the mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking, or supersymmetry (or technicolor, or a variety of other speculative theories) is a necessary step towards understanding quantum gravity. As such, I think that experiments like the LHC are vitally important to the extremely long term survival of the human species (we have to get off Earth and out of the solar system sometime within the next few billion years, at the very least).
As other posters have pointed out, this, along with all other speculative applications of what we learn from the LHC, are probably not going to be seen during our lifetimes.
Which is why we need to reform our electoral system, making it easier for candidates not backed by a major party with deep pockets to win meaningful offices. The reason that this would help with burnout is that then regular people with other careers could hold an office for a term, then go back to their regular careers. By not being career politicians, they are much less susceptible to burnout.
I downloaded a paper I needed to read from the arXiv the other day. After I had downloaded it *from* the arXiv, it better have gone *to* my HDD, or I won't be able to read it. Would you say that as I downloaded it from the arXiv, I simultaneously uploaded it to my hard disk? I hope not, because that usage is completely ridiculous.
Both download and upload have both an input and an output, so from and to are both appropriate to use with either action.
That quibble aside, I agree that the direction is quite often, and rather annoyingly, mixed up. Furthermore, one end of each action is usually obvious from context and omitted.
Finally, how do we talk about a transfer of data from A to B which is initiated by a third party C?
Good grief. I talk about higher order loop corrections to diagrams, my homepage is CDF (where I work), and somehow everyone seems to think I've never even heard of baryonic dark matter. Shrug.
I am aware of and understand all this. I was trying to alleviate what I thought was a minor but fundamental and common misunderstanding regarding what "dark" in "dark matter" signifies. If I had known that you were just looking for an excuse to be pedantic about the existence of baryonic dark matter, I would not have posted anything. Yes, baryonic dark matter exists. Yes, baryonic dark matter couples to the photon. Happy?
These are good ideas. They are so good, in fact, that lots of people who work on this stuff have already had them. The consequences of these hypotheses are not too difficult to work out, and people have done that, too. However, having worked out those consequences, and learned where and how to look to see if these hypotheses are correct, we find that their predictions do not agree with observation. A slashdot comment is certainly not the place to recount all of this, so if you are still curious or don't want to take my word for it, I'd suggest a look at the relevant and current literature. For instance, try looking up information on MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects), which are none other than your hypothesized "small objects with mass that are spread throughout our universe".
There are lots of testable explanations of what it might be. Many of them are being tested by experiments in progress today, or will be tested by experiments in the planning or building stages. For example, the lightest supersymmetric partner (LSP) is a good candidate for dark matter. Weakly interacting massive particles (yes, WIMPs) are another good candidate, and the LSP might in fact be a WIMP, depending on the values of the parameters describing supersymmetry (if it exists).
Some proposed explanations have already been ruled out by observations. For instance, "hot" dark matter (low mass, and therefore high average momentum) is easily ruled out by observations of galactic rotation curves. "hot" dark matter would not clump together nearly tightly enough to produce the observed rotation curves. So we're left with higher mass, lower momentum cold dark matter models.
There are a lot of different models for dark matter candidates. All of them have in common that the coupling of dark matter to photons is zero. Also the strong coupling constant (coupling to gluons) is zero. Some models have dark matter that interacts via the weak interaction (W and Z bosons), eg WIMPs. Other models have zero weak interaction. Some models propose brand new interactions among dark matter particles that normal baryonic matter does not couple to, but TTBOMK none of these have a coupling significantly above the weak scale. All models have a normal coupling to gravity and massive particles.
So, depending on the proposed model, the dark matter particles may interact weakly with each other, which would lead to a clumpy distribution (but clumps much larger and less dense than stars or planets), or they may interact only gravitationally (that is, _very_ weakly), leading to a distribution much like you would expect of an ideal gas (pretty uniform throughout the galaxy, maybe higher density nearer the center, maybe not).
This is exactly what is meant by the word "dark" in "dark matter". It precisely means that its coupling to photons is zero (except, of course, for higher order loop effects in the Feynman diagrams, but those would be incredibly, perhaps immeasurably, small).
Your mail must get forwarded an awful lot! I usually try to cut things off at about 75 columns, so that when those pesky ">" characters get prepended to every line, it won't get all wonky...
I don't know if I would describe ROOT's abominable TFiles as "flat files". I'm not even sure I would describe them as "files"... Certainly TTrees are extremely like an object database, except poorly designed, described, and implemented.
I always detested assignments like that, as a general rule. There's always at least somebody in the class for whom this is a complete waste of time for the simple reason that they are already comfortable with vim. For anyone who reads this comment and even thinks that there is a small chance that they will wind up teaching someday: please remember to always provide an alternative, such as a signed statement to the effect of "I already know how to use the tool, and if at any point I find that there is some aspect of the tool I don't know how to use, I will go back and do this assignment.".
I remember a quote from somebody or other that it was easy in the 30s-50s for a second rate physicist to do first rate work, but that now it's difficult for a first rate physicist to do second rate work. Yes, the 30s-50s were glory days in a way. Mostly, this is because the things that we discovered and worked to understand in those days have worked their way into actual engineered and mass-produced products today.
Suppose that I took a hollow shape and drilled a small hole in it, then heated it up and measured the spectrum of light that came out of the hole. Do you think it would be interesting or useful to understand just why that spectrum is shaped exactly the way it is? Probably not. Yet that led us to quantum mechanics, and I've it said that 75% of the world's economy today is due to quantum mechanics.
I do not propose that the research being done today at the Tevatron, the LHC, RHIC, JLab, SLAC, Belle, etc. will have that sort of impact during our lifetimes. But there are a lot of things that we would like to be true (Faster-than-light travel to other planets, instant teleportation from place to place, and lots and lots of other classic SF material), and there is really only one place left for them to be possible: higher and higher energies. There are a lot of ways that things like special relativity could break down in regimes we don't understand that would make those ideas possible. From knowing they were possible to building them, there would be one heck of an engineering challenge, but we certainly can't do it if we don't understand the underlying physics.
Finally, we have to keep the momentum that we have built. If we lose all the accumulated working knowledge in this generation of physicists, then we may not be able to build another collider whenever we determine that we are far enough along that it is worthwhile. I think it's better to go ahead and acquire the knowledge now, and go ahead and get started on any centuries-long engineering problems that the results suggest than to wait 100 years and then say "collider? what's that? how do you build one?".
Finally, finally, there may be an endpoint in sight. It might well be that the LHC does not discover anything new at all. Maybe there is simply nothing out there that is remotely within our reach. At that point, collider physics would be over, and almost nobody would argue that it should be different. OTOH, as long as we keep finding new stuff and finding hints that there may be more new stuff around the corner, it seems totally reasonable to keep pursuing it.
I think that you will find that that is a very silly line of reasoning. It allows anyone to make up any horrible bogeyman they like, accuse their opponents (political, business, scientific, personal) of being or aiding that bogeyman, and, according to you, it is up to the accused to demonstrate that they are not.
But do you really want 6 billion people coming to be your next door neighbor? And, no, I'm not really jealous, because I think that the vast majority of the things I referenced are seriously overblown, and if you've gone to the trouble of moving to a place that doesn't have any of them from a place that does, you've uprooted your life and transplanted it elsewhere for essentially no reason.
I'm pretty sure that no network has any single tower that covers multiple counties. As other posters have pointed out, these alerts would likely be handled at the tower level. Thus, it is unlikely that your phone would receive 30 alerts for one small storm.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. If we enforced that law, it would get repealed pretty fast, which is kinda the point. If there are unenforced and frequently broken laws on the books, then anyone who wants to hurt you can bring you up on frivolous but damaging charges. That is, rather obviously, a bad thing.
Also, if we start having some laws that are not enforced, it becomes much easier to enforce any laws selectively, which opens one huge door to corruption and oppression and other -essions.
Well, that was the original intent. RMS envisioned a world in which all software was Free (Libre), and then he thought about how this could be brought about. What he came up with was two-pronged. 1) copyleft 2) write lots of really excellent software, so excellent that people will want to use it even though they know they will get sucked into the copyleft. It appears to be working.
Not me, but, ohhh the possibilities. World domination... The humiliation of my enemies...
Well, you've certainly given me a lot to think about!
The immediate neighbourhood of a black hole is likely to be extremely hostile to biology. Otherwise, this is really quite a reasonable idea.
No, no. We're at war with Terror, Drugs, and Poverty. I don't really know which of those he aided, although a coworker of mine claims that Julian Assange is "a terrorist by anyone's definition", so maybe it is Terror.
Here's one possibility: All of our favorite science fiction stuff (things that would allow us to effectively have a galactic or even universal civilization) appears to be disallowed by special and general relativity. However, these things necessarily break down in some regard at the smallest (ie highest energy) scales. Understanding quantum gravity (if we can ever do so) will tell us just exactly how relativity breaks down at super high energies. It is possible that the particulars will show us a way to travel and communicate faster than light (think things like the Alcubierre bubble).
The LHC will probably not unlock the secrets of quantum gravity. However, understanding the lower energy phenomena like the mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking, or supersymmetry (or technicolor, or a variety of other speculative theories) is a necessary step towards understanding quantum gravity. As such, I think that experiments like the LHC are vitally important to the extremely long term survival of the human species (we have to get off Earth and out of the solar system sometime within the next few billion years, at the very least).
As other posters have pointed out, this, along with all other speculative applications of what we learn from the LHC, are probably not going to be seen during our lifetimes.
Which is why we need to reform our electoral system, making it easier for candidates not backed by a major party with deep pockets to win meaningful offices. The reason that this would help with burnout is that then regular people with other careers could hold an office for a term, then go back to their regular careers. By not being career politicians, they are much less susceptible to burnout.
I downloaded a paper I needed to read from the arXiv the other day. After I had downloaded it *from* the arXiv, it better have gone *to* my HDD, or I won't be able to read it. Would you say that as I downloaded it from the arXiv, I simultaneously uploaded it to my hard disk? I hope not, because that usage is completely ridiculous.
Both download and upload have both an input and an output, so from and to are both appropriate to use with either action.
That quibble aside, I agree that the direction is quite often, and rather annoyingly, mixed up. Furthermore, one end of each action is usually obvious from context and omitted.
Finally, how do we talk about a transfer of data from A to B which is initiated by a third party C?
The purpose of insurance is whatever the insurers and insured agree it is.
mandate
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Good grief. I talk about higher order loop corrections to diagrams, my homepage is CDF (where I work), and somehow everyone seems to think I've never even heard of baryonic dark matter. Shrug.
I am aware of and understand all this. I was trying to alleviate what I thought was a minor but fundamental and common misunderstanding regarding what "dark" in "dark matter" signifies. If I had known that you were just looking for an excuse to be pedantic about the existence of baryonic dark matter, I would not have posted anything. Yes, baryonic dark matter exists. Yes, baryonic dark matter couples to the photon. Happy?
These are good ideas. They are so good, in fact, that lots of people who work on this stuff have already had them. The consequences of these hypotheses are not too difficult to work out, and people have done that, too. However, having worked out those consequences, and learned where and how to look to see if these hypotheses are correct, we find that their predictions do not agree with observation. A slashdot comment is certainly not the place to recount all of this, so if you are still curious or don't want to take my word for it, I'd suggest a look at the relevant and current literature. For instance, try looking up information on MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects), which are none other than your hypothesized "small objects with mass that are spread throughout our universe".
There are lots of testable explanations of what it might be. Many of them are being tested by experiments in progress today, or will be tested by experiments in the planning or building stages. For example, the lightest supersymmetric partner (LSP) is a good candidate for dark matter. Weakly interacting massive particles (yes, WIMPs) are another good candidate, and the LSP might in fact be a WIMP, depending on the values of the parameters describing supersymmetry (if it exists).
Some proposed explanations have already been ruled out by observations. For instance, "hot" dark matter (low mass, and therefore high average momentum) is easily ruled out by observations of galactic rotation curves. "hot" dark matter would not clump together nearly tightly enough to produce the observed rotation curves. So we're left with higher mass, lower momentum cold dark matter models.
There are a lot of different models for dark matter candidates. All of them have in common that the coupling of dark matter to photons is zero. Also the strong coupling constant (coupling to gluons) is zero. Some models have dark matter that interacts via the weak interaction (W and Z bosons), eg WIMPs. Other models have zero weak interaction. Some models propose brand new interactions among dark matter particles that normal baryonic matter does not couple to, but TTBOMK none of these have a coupling significantly above the weak scale. All models have a normal coupling to gravity and massive particles.
So, depending on the proposed model, the dark matter particles may interact weakly with each other, which would lead to a clumpy distribution (but clumps much larger and less dense than stars or planets), or they may interact only gravitationally (that is, _very_ weakly), leading to a distribution much like you would expect of an ideal gas (pretty uniform throughout the galaxy, maybe higher density nearer the center, maybe not).
This is exactly what is meant by the word "dark" in "dark matter". It precisely means that its coupling to photons is zero (except, of course, for higher order loop effects in the Feynman diagrams, but those would be incredibly, perhaps immeasurably, small).
Your mail must get forwarded an awful lot! I usually try to cut things off at about 75 columns, so that when those pesky ">" characters get prepended to every line, it won't get all wonky...
I don't know if I would describe ROOT's abominable TFiles as "flat files". I'm not even sure I would describe them as "files"... Certainly TTrees are extremely like an object database, except poorly designed, described, and implemented.
I always detested assignments like that, as a general rule. There's always at least somebody in the class for whom this is a complete waste of time for the simple reason that they are already comfortable with vim. For anyone who reads this comment and even thinks that there is a small chance that they will wind up teaching someday: please remember to always provide an alternative, such as a signed statement to the effect of "I already know how to use the tool, and if at any point I find that there is some aspect of the tool I don't know how to use, I will go back and do this assignment.".
I remember a quote from somebody or other that it was easy in the 30s-50s for a second rate physicist to do first rate work, but that now it's difficult for a first rate physicist to do second rate work. Yes, the 30s-50s were glory days in a way. Mostly, this is because the things that we discovered and worked to understand in those days have worked their way into actual engineered and mass-produced products today.
Suppose that I took a hollow shape and drilled a small hole in it, then heated it up and measured the spectrum of light that came out of the hole. Do you think it would be interesting or useful to understand just why that spectrum is shaped exactly the way it is? Probably not. Yet that led us to quantum mechanics, and I've it said that 75% of the world's economy today is due to quantum mechanics.
I do not propose that the research being done today at the Tevatron, the LHC, RHIC, JLab, SLAC, Belle, etc. will have that sort of impact during our lifetimes. But there are a lot of things that we would like to be true (Faster-than-light travel to other planets, instant teleportation from place to place, and lots and lots of other classic SF material), and there is really only one place left for them to be possible: higher and higher energies. There are a lot of ways that things like special relativity could break down in regimes we don't understand that would make those ideas possible. From knowing they were possible to building them, there would be one heck of an engineering challenge, but we certainly can't do it if we don't understand the underlying physics.
Finally, we have to keep the momentum that we have built. If we lose all the accumulated working knowledge in this generation of physicists, then we may not be able to build another collider whenever we determine that we are far enough along that it is worthwhile. I think it's better to go ahead and acquire the knowledge now, and go ahead and get started on any centuries-long engineering problems that the results suggest than to wait 100 years and then say "collider? what's that? how do you build one?".
Finally, finally, there may be an endpoint in sight. It might well be that the LHC does not discover anything new at all. Maybe there is simply nothing out there that is remotely within our reach. At that point, collider physics would be over, and almost nobody would argue that it should be different. OTOH, as long as we keep finding new stuff and finding hints that there may be more new stuff around the corner, it seems totally reasonable to keep pursuing it.
I think that you will find that that is a very silly line of reasoning. It allows anyone to make up any horrible bogeyman they like, accuse their opponents (political, business, scientific, personal) of being or aiding that bogeyman, and, according to you, it is up to the accused to demonstrate that they are not.
What would actually convince you that climate change represents a danger to the lives of millions, possibly billions of people?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that TFA probably won't.
But do you really want 6 billion people coming to be your next door neighbor? And, no, I'm not really jealous, because I think that the vast majority of the things I referenced are seriously overblown, and if you've gone to the trouble of moving to a place that doesn't have any of them from a place that does, you've uprooted your life and transplanted it elsewhere for essentially no reason.
wait, you live in an area prone to dangerous hurricanes, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to major earthquakes, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to periodic flooding, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to disease outbreaks, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to violent crime, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to volcanic eruptions, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to rioting, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to wildfires, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to dangerously cold winters, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to dangerously hot summers, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to lions and tigers and bear oh my, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
wait, you live in an area prone to idiocy, and you haven't left and moved somewhere safer?
I'm pretty sure that no network has any single tower that covers multiple counties. As other posters have pointed out, these alerts would likely be handled at the tower level. Thus, it is unlikely that your phone would receive 30 alerts for one small storm.