> It's morally on par with keeping the extra money when a clerk accidently hands you too much change.
No it isn't! When the clerk hands me too much change, the clerk gets screwed because their till comes out wrong and the store thinks they are skimming. This is morally equivilent to buying an item that you think may have been priced too low through a bureaucratic error. If you hesitate to do that, then think back to the last time that you heard of a company refunding money (voluntarily, not through a class-action suit) to customers because they accidently overcharged customers due to a bureaucratic error.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance
on
Verizon Can't Do Math
·
· Score: 1
> It is very unlikely that illiterate farmers will understand how exactly these ATMs work or for that matter, the banking system itself (which is so complex that most Americans don't understand all the fees and restrictions involved). This can inevitably lead to Citi, knowingly or unknowingly, taking advantage of these people who do not have the education, finances, and political power to protect themselves.
Illiteracy != stupidity. These farmers aren't from Mars; they can understand the concepts of fees and a balance just as well as the typical American. Will citibank try to exploit their illiteracy by complicating the fee structure to the point where it cannot possibly be remembered? Perhaps, but that isn't really any different than the mountains of legalese they throw at literate people. Besides that, word will spread quickly if people find that the banks are ripping them off, and no one will make deposits anymore, and then Citibank will just be left with an unused banking apparatus and a bad reputation.
> Although the farmers will hopefully be earning interest on these accounts, that interest really doesn't benefit the community. Think about it this way: you run to your local Citi branch and they lend out your money. The interest earned on those loans pays shareholders, the clerks at the desk, and the loan officers. All of these benefactors are members of your community. Do you really think these poor Indian farmers are going to work at the bank, either being a teller or repairing the ATM's? No, it will benefit the wealthier Indians and the international shareholders.
Yes, the interest will probably not stay in the community. But there is a considerable benefit in having one's money stored in the bank, rather than as a stack of bills at home, which has to be guarded. Given a choice between stashing your savings in a bank at zero interest or keeping a big wad of cash at home, you'd go with the bank, right?
> If high-energy-physicists had any questions they wanted answers to, there might be more reason to invest in expensive toys for > them. As it happens, they all seem tied up doing string theory, which (notoriously) offers no predictions to test.
The problem is that string theory is too flexible to offer specific predictions to test. But there are experiments that can shed light on which string theories might actually represent reality. Most important are accurate observations of the cosmic microwave background. None involve accelerators, as far as I know.
> In the meantime, condensed-matter physicists, fluid-dynamic physicists, and plasma physicists (not to mention meteorologists, > metabolic geneticists, and what-have-you) have never swung the kind of budgets you get, evidently, from having made an atom > bomb once, despite that each group have collectively produced far more positive and far fewer negative effects on our daily > lives.
Clearly the fusion people get this kind of money. ITER is a $12 billion project. Life science pulls far more money than physics; as I recall there were years in the 90's when just the increase in the NIH budget exceeded the entire NSF budget.
Fluid-dynamicists had as much to do with the atom bomb as particle physicists. Neither group of scientists holds any responsibility for the bomb, unless you are counting those over 85. Besides, if you are going to blame particle physicists for the bomb, shouldn't you credit them with nuclear medicine?
> Speaking personally (and at deep risk of spiteful moderation) I wouldn't mind a century-long hiatus in particle-accelerator > funding. There's plenty of science to be done by regular grad students at regular workbenches, and to much greater (perhaps > even beneficial!) effect.
I'd concede this, provided that benchtop experiments are also subject to the same "has this field run its useful course, and reached the land of diminishing returns?" funding criteria. Many of them certainly have. But let's go after the big and obvious wastes of money first... space station???
Well, indirectly, they already are manufacturing food. More than half of the world's fixed nitrogen is produced (converted from N2 to a biologically available form, like ammonia or nitrate) in a factory as part of fertilizer production, replacing what used to be done by microbes in the soil. Plants use this nitrogen to grow, and we eat them to grow, and thus a large fraction of the nitrogen in the protein in your body has passed through a factory. (Exception granted if you are Amish, and still farming the old way. If you are Amish, should you really be reading slashdot?)
Yes, you are right, it needs a high momentum target. My bad. _________________ It's not as obvious as "10^20 > 10^12, therefore cosmic rays would have created them by now".
The amount of energy available to create new particles is governed by the total energy of the incoming particle and its target, as measured in their center of momentum frame. The LHC is a collider, so all of that 7 TeV is available to create particles. But an incoming cosmic ray of energy 10^20 eV striking an atmospheric atom has an energy in the cosmic ray-atom center of momentum frame which is proportional to the square root of its energy in the Earth's rest frame (see here); i.e., on the order of only sqrt(10^20) or 3 x 10^10 eV.
Physicists are hoping that they will see signs of tiny black holes forming and instantly evaporating. If they can be produced by the energies of the LHC, then they are already being produced in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays, which have far more energy per particle (up to 10^20 eV) than what the LHC can do. (7*10^12 eV).
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cos mic_ray
How much power...well lots. Area of human (one side) about 1sq. m. mass, (order of magnitude) 100Kg, say 1KN force required = 1Megapascal. That's 10bar pressure, implying an acoustic pressure of 10dB above atmospheric..or 203dB into 4pi space.
1KN of force into one square meter is one kilopascal.
gives us 154 dB SPL, and that won't be any fun at all. At least the wavelength is big, so maybe the shear forces on our organs won't cause the kinds of damage that dynamite does when it goes off near a fish.
> I want to know whether the meteor appeared from Earth to come from the direction of the Pleiades constellation that the Mayans > would later prioritize in their studies with the world's most sophisticated pre-industrial astromomy.
Yes, but lots of civilizations have placed importance on the Pleiades. Perhaps because they look so cool.
> It's already an interesting coincidence that the people whose empire was built on the site of the most influential astronomical > event in "recent" Earth history would have such sophisticated astronomy.
Yes, but several ancient civilizations developed advanced astronomy. I suspect ancient civilizations are more likely to develop astronomy if:
They have a way to record numbers and do arithmetic. They have a written language that allows them to record observations. They have substantial city-states sustained by intensive farming, and That farming relies (possibly via irrigation) on rainfall that comes at specific times each year.
> also wonder if our current complex space sciences can reconstruct the path of the meteor from its origin, by studying the > trajectories of the remaining solar system objects, and projecting back 65My to a slightly larger population.
Not going to happen. We would need accurate measures of the trajectory of the earth before and after the collision to determine the momentum, and thus direction, of the meteor. In principle, if we knew everything that happened in the solar system since that time to a very high accuracy, we could run Newton's equations backward and find the trajectory of the earth after the event.
The taxpayers of Germany and the US paid for this research. When Nature decides to let them read the article they paid for, I'll start respecting Nature's copyright.
Cutting edge quantum physics in the late 80's. In your hard drives since the late 90's.
> If 10% of the hype revolving around storage in the last 5 years materialized, I'd be storing a terrabyte on a sheet of paper spit > out by a magical unicorn's ass by now.
Depends on the pigments in the ink. Organic pigments get fried by UV, or even just trace ozone in the air, very quickly. But metal ion based pigments (lead, cadmium, iron...) can last almost forever. Too bad the used media would then be toxic waste.
I think the most interesting thing about this conflict between two competitor's infrastructures is that it isn't happening out in some field somewhere. It's happening on the side of your house!
and put it up undedited on youtube, right at the end of each school day. Put a mechanical clock in the corner of the view to make any cuts obvious. This would protect both students from abuse and teachers from baseless allegations. Too bad it would scare the crap out of some students, and they would be afraid to raise their hands and ask "the dumb questions." Other students would play to the camera. Still others would be motivated by the camera to work harder. I think it would be an interesting experiment.
Thoughts?
This will be useful in low temperature physics
on
Silicon Superconductors
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Yes, 0.35 K is really cold. Refridgeration methods that reach this temperature cost ~ $100,000 and use the helium-3 isotope as the working fluid, which costs several hundred dollars per gaseous liter at STP. But this may still be useful because there is lots of established technology for making very small things out of silicon, and lots of fundemental physics that can only be done at very small length scales and in very cold environments.
Yes, but only with Nikola Tesla's help.
on
Top Ten Geek Girls
·
· Score: 0
My brother is brilliant but couldn't concentrate on a book long enough to read 15 pages of it. Writing was similarly impossible. He figured he was a lazy and disorganized, and just couldn't concentrate due to insufficient moral fiber. So, despite being brilliant, he counted himself out of any kind of intelectually rewarding career. Then he learned about ADHD and tried some medication. It was like throwing a switch- now he can concentrate and work hard, and he does. ADHD meds made it possible for him to thrive at law school, where so much counselling, introspection, self-blame, and "lifestyle changes" did nothing.
Overdiagnosed as ADHD is, there are lots of cases out there like my brother's, and you cannot dismiss the reality of ADHD without considering them.
But it wasn't in an airport. We have well founded fears of people who would disobey airport security. This was in a library... not a nuclear power plant, not the white house lawn. The sensitivity of those places justifies a stronger reaction to someone who is uncooperative with security. No threat here, no weapons, just an annoying guy that the cops need to lift by the arms and haul off.
As for it being planned: How does that justify this treatment? "He asked for it, he choose this treatment because he planned the confrontation", you say. Whatever his reasons for choosing to confront the cops, that he made that choice in advance of the confrontation, and not in the heat of the moment, does NOT give the cops a carte blanche to electrocute the guy. Recall that in the past some people have very thoughtfully planned confrontations with the police for very good reasons. If the cops can use tazers on this harmless bigmouth, expect tazers to be used in place of Bull Connor's fire hoses to supress serious and thoughtful acts of civil disobedience in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's morally on par with keeping the extra money when a clerk accidently hands you too much change.
No it isn't! When the clerk hands me too much change, the clerk gets screwed because their till comes out wrong and the store thinks they are skimming. This is morally equivilent to buying an item that you think may have been priced too low through a bureaucratic error. If you hesitate to do that, then think back to the last time that you heard of a company refunding money (voluntarily, not through a class-action suit) to customers because they accidently overcharged customers due to a bureaucratic error.
Appearantly Verizon is trying ignorance.
Sad...
You might start with the notable names database, http://www.nndb.com/
If you haven't seen his management advice movie clips, do check them out. Hillarious! http://www.despair.com/spin.html
Here's the link http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-59/iss-8/p30.sh tml
> It is very unlikely that illiterate farmers will understand how exactly these ATMs work or for that matter, the banking system itself (which is so complex that most Americans don't understand all the fees and restrictions involved). This can inevitably lead to Citi, knowingly or unknowingly, taking advantage of these people who do not have the education, finances, and political power to protect themselves.
Illiteracy != stupidity. These farmers aren't from Mars; they can understand the concepts of fees and a balance just as well as the typical American. Will citibank try to exploit their illiteracy by complicating the fee structure to the point where it cannot possibly be remembered? Perhaps, but that isn't really any different than the mountains of legalese they throw at literate people. Besides that, word will spread quickly if people find that the banks are ripping them off, and no one will make deposits anymore, and then Citibank will just be left with an unused banking apparatus and a bad reputation.
> Although the farmers will hopefully be earning interest on these accounts, that interest really doesn't benefit the community. Think about it this way: you run to your local Citi branch and they lend out your money. The interest earned on those loans pays shareholders, the clerks at the desk, and the loan officers. All of these benefactors are members of your community. Do you really think these poor Indian farmers are going to work at the bank, either being a teller or repairing the ATM's? No, it will benefit the wealthier Indians and the international shareholders.
Yes, the interest will probably not stay in the community. But there is a considerable benefit in having one's money stored in the bank, rather than as a stack of bills at home, which has to be guarded. Given a choice between stashing your savings in a bank at zero interest or keeping a big wad of cash at home, you'd go with the bank, right?
Thoughts:
> If high-energy-physicists had any questions they wanted answers to, there might be more reason to invest in expensive toys for
> them. As it happens, they all seem tied up doing string theory, which (notoriously) offers no predictions to test.
The problem is that string theory is too flexible to offer specific predictions to test. But there are experiments that can shed light on which string theories might actually represent reality. Most important are accurate observations of the cosmic microwave background. None involve accelerators, as far as I know.
> In the meantime, condensed-matter physicists, fluid-dynamic physicists, and plasma physicists (not to mention meteorologists,
> metabolic geneticists, and what-have-you) have never swung the kind of budgets you get, evidently, from having made an atom
> bomb once, despite that each group have collectively produced far more positive and far fewer negative effects on our daily
> lives.
Clearly the fusion people get this kind of money. ITER is a $12 billion project. Life science pulls far more money than physics; as I recall there were years in the 90's when just the increase in the NIH budget exceeded the entire NSF budget.
Fluid-dynamicists had as much to do with the atom bomb as particle physicists. Neither group of scientists holds any responsibility for the bomb, unless you are counting those over 85. Besides, if you are going to blame particle physicists for the bomb, shouldn't you credit them with nuclear medicine?
> Speaking personally (and at deep risk of spiteful moderation) I wouldn't mind a century-long hiatus in particle-accelerator
> funding. There's plenty of science to be done by regular grad students at regular workbenches, and to much greater (perhaps
> even beneficial!) effect.
I'd concede this, provided that benchtop experiments are also subject to the same "has this field run its useful course, and reached the land of diminishing returns?" funding criteria. Many of them certainly have. But let's go after the big and obvious wastes of money first... space station???
Well, indirectly, they already are manufacturing food. More than half of the world's fixed nitrogen is produced (converted from N2 to a biologically available form, like ammonia or nitrate) in a factory as part of fertilizer production, replacing what used to be done by microbes in the soil. Plants use this nitrogen to grow, and we eat them to grow, and thus a large fraction of the nitrogen in the protein in your body has passed through a factory.
(Exception granted if you are Amish, and still farming the old way. If you are Amish, should you really be reading slashdot?)
Yes, you are right, it needs a high momentum target. My bad.
_________________
It's not as obvious as "10^20 > 10^12, therefore cosmic rays would have created them by now".
The amount of energy available to create new particles is governed by the total energy of the incoming particle and its target, as measured in their center of momentum frame. The LHC is a collider, so all of that 7 TeV is available to create particles. But an incoming cosmic ray of energy 10^20 eV striking an atmospheric atom has an energy in the cosmic ray-atom center of momentum frame which is proportional to the square root of its energy in the Earth's rest frame (see here); i.e., on the order of only sqrt(10^20) or 3 x 10^10 eV.
Physicists are hoping that they will see signs of tiny black holes forming and instantly evaporating. If they can be produced by the energies of the LHC, then they are already being produced in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays, which have far more energy per particle (up to 10^20 eV) than what the LHC can do. (7*10^12 eV). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cos mic_ray
Also, issue a three dollar bill, which smells a bit queer.
How much power...well lots. Area of human (one side) about 1sq. m. mass, (order of magnitude) 100Kg, say 1KN force required = 1Megapascal. That's 10bar pressure, implying an acoustic pressure of 10dB above atmospheric..or 203dB into 4pi space.
t _work.asp?css=1
1KN of force into one square meter is one kilopascal.
Which by this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure
gives us 154 dB SPL, and that won't be any fun at all. At least the wavelength is big, so maybe the shear forces on our organs won't cause the kinds of damage that dynamite does when it goes off near a fish.
Hey, here's an idea: Let's set the frequency equal to zero and do this. Oh wait, they already have:
http://www.airkix.com/airkix_explained/how_does_i
A skeptical reply:
> I want to know whether the meteor appeared from Earth to come from the direction of the Pleiades constellation that the Mayans
> would later prioritize in their studies with the world's most sophisticated pre-industrial astromomy.
Yes, but lots of civilizations have placed importance on the Pleiades. Perhaps because they look so cool.
> It's already an interesting coincidence that the people whose empire was built on the site of the most influential astronomical
> event in "recent" Earth history would have such sophisticated astronomy.
Yes, but several ancient civilizations developed advanced astronomy. I suspect ancient civilizations are more likely to develop astronomy if:
They have a way to record numbers and do arithmetic.
They have a written language that allows them to record observations.
They have substantial city-states sustained by intensive farming, and
That farming relies (possibly via irrigation) on rainfall that comes at specific times each year.
> also wonder if our current complex space sciences can reconstruct the path of the meteor from its origin, by studying the
> trajectories of the remaining solar system objects, and projecting back 65My to a slightly larger population.
Not going to happen. We would need accurate measures of the trajectory of the earth before and after the collision to determine the momentum, and thus direction, of the meteor. In principle, if we knew everything that happened in the solar system since that time to a very high accuracy, we could run Newton's equations backward and find the trajectory of the earth after the event.
Yup, I'm a doubting Thomas.
The taxpayers of Germany and the US paid for this research. When Nature decides to let them read the article they paid for, I'll start respecting Nature's copyright.
Cutting edge quantum physics in the late 80's. In your hard drives since the late 90's.
> If 10% of the hype revolving around storage in the last 5 years materialized, I'd be storing a terrabyte on a sheet of paper spit > out by a magical unicorn's ass by now.
How'd you get ahold of my grant proposal?
I don't know about selenium, but mercury is in the lamp that lights your lcd, unless it is a xenon lamp.
This works: http://www.realdoll.com/dolls.asp That's what I get for not testing.
combine this technology with that at http://www.realdoll.com/dolls.asp/
Depends on the pigments in the ink. Organic pigments get fried by UV, or even just trace ozone in the air, very quickly. But metal ion based pigments (lead, cadmium, iron...) can last almost forever. Too bad the used media would then be toxic waste.
I think the most interesting thing about this conflict between two competitor's infrastructures is that it isn't happening out in some field somewhere. It's happening on the side of your house!
and put it up undedited on youtube, right at the end of each school day. Put a mechanical clock in the corner of the view to make any cuts obvious. This would protect both students from abuse and teachers from baseless allegations. Too bad it would scare the crap out of some students, and they would be afraid to raise their hands and ask "the dumb questions." Other students would play to the camera. Still others would be motivated by the camera to work harder. I think it would be an interesting experiment.
Thoughts?
Yes, 0.35 K is really cold. Refridgeration methods that reach this temperature cost ~ $100,000 and use the helium-3 isotope as the working fluid, which costs several hundred dollars per gaseous liter at STP. But this may still be useful because there is lots of established technology for making very small things out of silicon, and lots of fundemental physics that can only be done at very small length scales and in very cold environments.
Joke is in subject.
My brother is brilliant but couldn't concentrate on a book long enough to read 15 pages of it. Writing was similarly impossible. He figured he was a lazy and disorganized, and just couldn't concentrate due to insufficient moral fiber. So, despite being brilliant, he counted himself out of any kind of intelectually rewarding career. Then he learned about ADHD and tried some medication. It was like throwing a switch- now he can concentrate and work hard, and he does. ADHD meds made it possible for him to thrive at law school, where so much counselling, introspection, self-blame, and "lifestyle changes" did nothing.
Overdiagnosed as ADHD is, there are lots of cases out there like my brother's, and you cannot dismiss the reality of ADHD without considering them.
But it wasn't in an airport. We have well founded fears of people who would disobey airport security. This was in a library... not a nuclear power plant, not the white house lawn. The sensitivity of those places justifies a stronger reaction to someone who is uncooperative with security. No threat here, no weapons, just an annoying guy that the cops need to lift by the arms and haul off.
As for it being planned: How does that justify this treatment? "He asked for it, he choose this treatment because he planned the confrontation", you say. Whatever his reasons for choosing to confront the cops, that he made that choice in advance of the confrontation, and not in the heat of the moment, does NOT give the cops a carte blanche to electrocute the guy. Recall that in the past some people have very thoughtfully planned confrontations with the police for very good reasons. If the cops can use tazers on this harmless bigmouth, expect tazers to be used in place of Bull Connor's fire hoses to supress serious and thoughtful acts of civil disobedience in the future.