But if you want to do N minutes, you have to divide by 60, or seconds even, you divide by 3600 which is a real PITA. It all depends on the length of time we're talking about and using convenient units. If it's rated at 10W and you want 40 seconds, well that's 400J. Fairly simple. And you're not being fair on the cost per KWH vs cost per Joule - if electricity were sold in Joules you'd have a simple number in 1/Joules to use instead of your 2.78. If it costs you 3.35345/KWH your calculation is harder than if it costs 2/Joule, for example, so just using silly numbers really doesn't make your point.
Yes. It is, but unfortunately electricity is sold by the kilowatt-hour in the USA. I'd prefer the joule, myself, and people should measure power in watts, but alas we're stuck with the "my car gets fourteen rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it" mentality. Even if you're hung up on the old miles/lbs/ergs/horsepower system units like kilowatt-hours per year should seem pretty stupid.
Right, my only point was that there is still a lot of good gameplay in new games. I had probably a thousand hours of CSS, Enemy Territory etc etc. I'd disagree about the map design - map design is key in team games - making it balanced yet varied, having different types of play in different areas. ET was a great example of this - the game was totally asymmetric (one side defends some objectives, the other attacks) but good map design made the game even between the two teams.
Unless you're just talking about the prettiness, in which case I largely agree with you. However, with technical innovation does come an increase in variety - we went from essentially 2D maps in Doom, for example, to fully 3D maps, lifts, overpasses, destroyable landscape etc which does make for interesting play.
I do NOT have to follow orders from a police officer at all times. I have to do so in certain situations, traffic is one of them. But if I'm walking along a street and a cop says "Stand there for ten minutes" without any reason, I do NOT have to obey him. The police ONLY get to order me around in VERY SPECIFIC situations. And they have NO right to arrest me when I've done nothing illegal.
No, we really don't. Maybe you do, but I'm not afraid - there's a far greater chance of being knocked down in the street. Do you live in fear of that every day?
"Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation." and that, in a nutshell, is why SCIENCE should be taught in schools. You DO need double-blind tests to try these things (except math which is in a different type of 'proof'). If you have a theory and want to see whether it's right or wrong, it's the best way to go if you can. In all the cases you mention it's a pretty good way of establishing the facts (again, except math).
Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The inbred social misfits that make up the royal family don't decide how our health care is funded. They don't control how taxes are spent, although they do receive a disgraceful amount of it (though anything >0 is disgraceful IMO).
The whole SCO thing has been a disaster. What most people don't seem to realize is that SCO weren't playing to win lawsuits. They were playing to spread FUD, taking money from M$ to make people think twice about using Linux. They've had five years of hoodwinking people. Just think how much damage they've done to IBM with their BS - millions of dollars in legal fees etc, and all the time trying to make people think that using Linux was putting their business at risk of being sued. They've done their job, and I reckon they'll be reborn in some new fashion to continue.
Well, I wouldn't call it obscure, but then again, I'm a mathematician at heart;-) For the most part though, the problems with understanding LQG arise from the fact that there aren't popular texts explaining the basics. I'm guessing the "obscure formulation" is the first order (Ashtekar) variables? You can just think of the tetrad as being a way to pull vectors in a curved space-time back to flat minkowski space so you can do math on them more easily. Kinda like Mercator's projection allows you to pull vectors on the surface of the earth back to a flat map and still find angles between them. The connection is just like in electrodynamics (ie derivatives have "an extra bit") or GR. It's not actually hard to get used to this formulation. In fact, GR in these variables isn't hard at all, and should be possible with just a sophomore GR class (I'm not from the US, but I assume that's when the physics majors start their GR for real).
In some sense LQG is the natural quantization of GR - you take basic variables and try to quantize them. It turns out that you can't quantize connection, so you do the next best thing - quantize the parallel transport of connection around a small loop. This is really how we're first taught what curvature is: You take an arrow, run around the surface of your object (eg the earth) keeping it as straight as possible and see whether it still points the same way when you get back where you started.
Of course, I'm giving the watered down version, but that's a large part of what's done, particularly in quantum cosmology (which is an easy way in for those who know cosmology). A nice version of this is at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702030 - don't worry too much about the formalities, just try to get the gist.
Anyway, as to your last comment, you are of course right. LQG actually tends to be fairly explicit about the fact that it's not a theory of everything. Indeed, I tend toward the opinion that physics will never be 100% correct, we'll just get better and better approximations to the truth.
As an LQG researcher (yes, really!) I can answer your question to some degree: LQG wasn't particularly "sexy" for the most part. By that I mean that we don't try to have a "theory of everything" in the way that strings do. LQG for the most part is exactly that - a theory of quantum gravity. There are several people working on some pretty fascinating things now - for example Sundance Bilson-Thomson and his preon models with spin-foams. In fact, the whole spin-network thing is pretty exciting.
Also, until recently we didn't have the "wow" factor with any of our predictions. Strings go for extra dimensions in a big way which is a huge prediction. The recent advances in LQC (loop quantum cosmology) by Ashtekar and Bojowald, predict a big "bounce" instead of a big "bang", at least for homogeneous and isotropic space-times, and some of us are working hard on others (Singh, Pawlowski, Chiou, Vandersloot etc). A big thing that we have is singularity resolution, at least to some degree. In laymans terms, most of all the scary infinities of the theory of relativity are being stripped away. Not all of them, but most. To me this is a great reason to keep looking at LQG as a whole and something we need to publicize more. Mind you, it's all very recent so maybe people are just catching on to the idea.
To an extent, as well, string theory has reached what I like to call critical mass. There are enough people working on it that they can all keep one-another in jobs. LQG is a small community and it's pretty hard to get funding for your research when a lot of other prominent scientists say that they have a much better way of doing things. The snob factor seems to come in too - strings go on at places like MIT, Ivy league schools, Cambridge University etc. LQG happens at places like Penn State, Louisiana State, Perimeter (canada). And whilst loops has this bad, it's much worse for people in double special relativity, causal set theory etc etc.
I'm sure that stringy people can pull up a lot of physical problems with LQG - they do exist. But for most part I think strings had better PR.
It was in the drop down list just before you were conceived - right between sexual orientation and skin color. Sheesh, all these people complain - I bet they just clicked through without checking out the options (hint: Next time don't do "Default" configuration, go through "Advanced").
If you think spilling coffee by accident is like putting your finger in a light socket, fine. I guess there's no point discussing this further, I only wanted to try and put an end to people using this tired and false example of a bad lawsuit. My post was not insulting, just informative, if you think telling you that you're wrong is an insult, then I suggest therapy.
Actually, alpha and beta do tend to be easy to absorb - from high school physics you normally learn that alpha can be stopped by paper, and beta by a thin layer of aluminium. Gamma, I'll grant you:)
Once again, read the linked text. The point is that they knew there was a problem and did nothing to fix it. And a jury found that they were negligent, so yes 185 degrees is negligent. No-one else serves coffee that hot. You buy coffee at Starbucks to take to work and it won't be 185.
I quote "A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible." The actual payout was $480,000 and considering the cost of getting skin grafts, rehabilitation treatment and the pain and suffering this person encountered, yes, it's reasonable. McDonalds knew there was a problem, did nothing about it and someone was severely hurt as a result. I'd say that they were in the wrong. Yes, hot coffee hurts. But third degree burns from food bought at a fast-food (read ready to eat) restaurant?
Cute, you just tried to insult me over the internet. Are you telling me that you've never spilled a drink? If you read the link you'd know there was far more to this case than the two line fox-news version you give. The coffee was spilled and gave third degree burns. You've joined the ditto-heads who repeat the nonsense version perpetuating crap.
True, you can't hold a CEO responsible for the actions of all employees, but they are responsible for having procedures in place so that this doesn't happen. Of course, sometimes things are going to slip through, but the CEO is responsible for hiring and firing the people that do it (or some level of abstraction of the people that hire and fire). The employee should have a supervisor who should notice some of the 1300 forms going missing. Hell, even putting one fake test form in with all the others would be a good way to catch this (kinda like putting your own name on a mailing list you pay an external company to handle). So IMHO the CEO holds some responsabilty.
Can we freaking kill the spilling coffee thing? Read: http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm and get a clue. The woman had third degree burns and needed a skin graft. McDonalds knew there was a problem - 700 prior incidents of scalding. So GET A CLUE before spouting a meme.
I believe these are taxes owed to the state. $500 million will pay for quite a few teachers/police/road repairs etc etc. all of which the state pays for from these taxes. So yeah, the companies are cheating society as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you want to do N minutes, you have to divide by 60, or seconds even, you divide by 3600 which is a real PITA. It all depends on the length of time we're talking about and using convenient units. If it's rated at 10W and you want 40 seconds, well that's 400J. Fairly simple. And you're not being fair on the cost per KWH vs cost per Joule - if electricity were sold in Joules you'd have a simple number in 1/Joules to use instead of your 2.78. If it costs you 3.35345 /KWH your calculation is harder than if it costs 2/Joule, for example, so just using silly numbers really doesn't make your point.
Yes. It is, but unfortunately electricity is sold by the kilowatt-hour in the USA. I'd prefer the joule, myself, and people should measure power in watts, but alas we're stuck with the "my car gets fourteen rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it" mentality. Even if you're hung up on the old miles/lbs/ergs/horsepower system units like kilowatt-hours per year should seem pretty stupid.
Right, my only point was that there is still a lot of good gameplay in new games. I had probably a thousand hours of CSS, Enemy Territory etc etc. I'd disagree about the map design - map design is key in team games - making it balanced yet varied, having different types of play in different areas. ET was a great example of this - the game was totally asymmetric (one side defends some objectives, the other attacks) but good map design made the game even between the two teams.
Unless you're just talking about the prettiness, in which case I largely agree with you. However, with technical innovation does come an increase in variety - we went from essentially 2D maps in Doom, for example, to fully 3D maps, lifts, overpasses, destroyable landscape etc which does make for interesting play.
I dunno, some people have been playing Counter-Strike for about ten years now...
I do NOT have to follow orders from a police officer at all times. I have to do so in certain situations, traffic is one of them. But if I'm walking along a street and a cop says "Stand there for ten minutes" without any reason, I do NOT have to obey him. The police ONLY get to order me around in VERY SPECIFIC situations. And they have NO right to arrest me when I've done nothing illegal.
They only ever had three accountants, but they all counted each other twice*
*I know it doesn't add up. That's accountancy.
No, we really don't. Maybe you do, but I'm not afraid - there's a far greater chance of being knocked down in the street. Do you live in fear of that every day?
"Some things are just provably wrong and don't need experimentation." and that, in a nutshell, is why SCIENCE should be taught in schools. You DO need double-blind tests to try these things (except math which is in a different type of 'proof'). If you have a theory and want to see whether it's right or wrong, it's the best way to go if you can. In all the cases you mention it's a pretty good way of establishing the facts (again, except math).
The inbred social misfits that make up the royal family don't decide how our health care is funded. They don't control how taxes are spent, although they do receive a disgraceful amount of it (though anything >0 is disgraceful IMO).
100 pound laptop? And I thought mine was heavy - do you work for Dell?
The whole SCO thing has been a disaster. What most people don't seem to realize is that SCO weren't playing to win lawsuits. They were playing to spread FUD, taking money from M$ to make people think twice about using Linux. They've had five years of hoodwinking people. Just think how much damage they've done to IBM with their BS - millions of dollars in legal fees etc, and all the time trying to make people think that using Linux was putting their business at risk of being sued. They've done their job, and I reckon they'll be reborn in some new fashion to continue.
Well, I wouldn't call it obscure, but then again, I'm a mathematician at heart ;-) For the most part though, the problems with understanding LQG arise from the fact that there aren't popular texts explaining the basics. I'm guessing the "obscure formulation" is the first order (Ashtekar) variables? You can just think of the tetrad as being a way to pull vectors in a curved space-time back to flat minkowski space so you can do math on them more easily. Kinda like Mercator's projection allows you to pull vectors on the surface of the earth back to a flat map and still find angles between them. The connection is just like in electrodynamics (ie derivatives have "an extra bit") or GR. It's not actually hard to get used to this formulation. In fact, GR in these variables isn't hard at all, and should be possible with just a sophomore GR class (I'm not from the US, but I assume that's when the physics majors start their GR for real).
In some sense LQG is the natural quantization of GR - you take basic variables and try to quantize them. It turns out that you can't quantize connection, so you do the next best thing - quantize the parallel transport of connection around a small loop. This is really how we're first taught what curvature is: You take an arrow, run around the surface of your object (eg the earth) keeping it as straight as possible and see whether it still points the same way when you get back where you started.
Of course, I'm giving the watered down version, but that's a large part of what's done, particularly in quantum cosmology (which is an easy way in for those who know cosmology). A nice version of this is at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702030 - don't worry too much about the formalities, just try to get the gist.
Anyway, as to your last comment, you are of course right. LQG actually tends to be fairly explicit about the fact that it's not a theory of everything. Indeed, I tend toward the opinion that physics will never be 100% correct, we'll just get better and better approximations to the truth.
As an LQG researcher (yes, really!) I can answer your question to some degree: LQG wasn't particularly "sexy" for the most part. By that I mean that we don't try to have a "theory of everything" in the way that strings do. LQG for the most part is exactly that - a theory of quantum gravity. There are several people working on some pretty fascinating things now - for example Sundance Bilson-Thomson and his preon models with spin-foams. In fact, the whole spin-network thing is pretty exciting.
Also, until recently we didn't have the "wow" factor with any of our predictions. Strings go for extra dimensions in a big way which is a huge prediction. The recent advances in LQC (loop quantum cosmology) by Ashtekar and Bojowald, predict a big "bounce" instead of a big "bang", at least for homogeneous and isotropic space-times, and some of us are working hard on others (Singh, Pawlowski, Chiou, Vandersloot etc). A big thing that we have is singularity resolution, at least to some degree. In laymans terms, most of all the scary infinities of the theory of relativity are being stripped away. Not all of them, but most. To me this is a great reason to keep looking at LQG as a whole and something we need to publicize more. Mind you, it's all very recent so maybe people are just catching on to the idea.
To an extent, as well, string theory has reached what I like to call critical mass. There are enough people working on it that they can all keep one-another in jobs. LQG is a small community and it's pretty hard to get funding for your research when a lot of other prominent scientists say that they have a much better way of doing things. The snob factor seems to come in too - strings go on at places like MIT, Ivy league schools, Cambridge University etc. LQG happens at places like Penn State, Louisiana State, Perimeter (canada). And whilst loops has this bad, it's much worse for people in double special relativity, causal set theory etc etc.
I'm sure that stringy people can pull up a lot of physical problems with LQG - they do exist. But for most part I think strings had better PR.
It was in the drop down list just before you were conceived - right between sexual orientation and skin color. Sheesh, all these people complain - I bet they just clicked through without checking out the options (hint: Next time don't do "Default" configuration, go through "Advanced").
Serves you right - my 32Mb MP3 player only costs $16 to fill. I always knew it was better value than the iPod!
If you think spilling coffee by accident is like putting your finger in a light socket, fine. I guess there's no point discussing this further, I only wanted to try and put an end to people using this tired and false example of a bad lawsuit. My post was not insulting, just informative, if you think telling you that you're wrong is an insult, then I suggest therapy.
Actually, alpha and beta do tend to be easy to absorb - from high school physics you normally learn that alpha can be stopped by paper, and beta by a thin layer of aluminium. Gamma, I'll grant you :)
Once again, read the linked text. The point is that they knew there was a problem and did nothing to fix it. And a jury found that they were negligent, so yes 185 degrees is negligent. No-one else serves coffee that hot. You buy coffee at Starbucks to take to work and it won't be 185.
I quote "A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible." The actual payout was $480,000 and considering the cost of getting skin grafts, rehabilitation treatment and the pain and suffering this person encountered, yes, it's reasonable. McDonalds knew there was a problem, did nothing about it and someone was severely hurt as a result. I'd say that they were in the wrong. Yes, hot coffee hurts. But third degree burns from food bought at a fast-food (read ready to eat) restaurant?
Cute, you just tried to insult me over the internet. Are you telling me that you've never spilled a drink? If you read the link you'd know there was far more to this case than the two line fox-news version you give. The coffee was spilled and gave third degree burns. You've joined the ditto-heads who repeat the nonsense version perpetuating crap.
True, you can't hold a CEO responsible for the actions of all employees, but they are responsible for having procedures in place so that this doesn't happen. Of course, sometimes things are going to slip through, but the CEO is responsible for hiring and firing the people that do it (or some level of abstraction of the people that hire and fire). The employee should have a supervisor who should notice some of the 1300 forms going missing. Hell, even putting one fake test form in with all the others would be a good way to catch this (kinda like putting your own name on a mailing list you pay an external company to handle). So IMHO the CEO holds some responsabilty.
Can we freaking kill the spilling coffee thing? Read: http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm and get a clue. The woman had third degree burns and needed a skin graft. McDonalds knew there was a problem - 700 prior incidents of scalding. So GET A CLUE before spouting a meme.
I believe these are taxes owed to the state. $500 million will pay for quite a few teachers/police/road repairs etc etc. all of which the state pays for from these taxes. So yeah, the companies are cheating society as a whole.
OK, it's a bit heated, so here's a joke:
How many libertarians does it take to stop a tank?
None. The free market will taker care of it.
(Also works with change a lightbulb etc etc)
Do not forget rule one.
What is this, wikipedia? Google it!