No, he wouldn't. 10*10=100 is true regardless of base. It's pretty close to the rule you use for DEFINING 100 in fact. GP is wrong entirely in fact: I'll prefix numbers with 'o' for base 8, d for base 10:
Your use of 'and' here amuses me - it makes me think that a Russian painted Mig shooting across the border would be just fine so long as they had a nice chat with someone on the radio whilst they did it.
Oh, I'm in no way saying that the submitter _intended_ to mislead people - just that really my first reaction was "Wow, that was fast, I thought it would take another couple of years to catch up to IE" before looking at the article and realizing that it's still got a long way to go and most people still use some form of the blue e. I apologize if anyone thinks I'm saying that the misleading was deliberate.
The summary says "but over the last few months the slope of Firefox's worldwide curve has been steeper" which doesn't appear to be actually true for Firefox as a whole just 3.5, and again, looking at the graphs together this just seems to be a faster changeover of 3.0 -> 3.5 in Firefox, rather than the impression that at least was made upon me that Firefox was ahead an accelerating. Likewise "The submitter suggests using the time when Firefox rules the roost, globally speaking," which further reinforces this impression.
True, and you do have a point with the codebase defining browsers for people here, though I think if you asked most people "What browser do you use?" those who understand the words would say "IE" or "Firefox".
However, I think a more useful statistical insight comes from examining the trends in the "Browser" list on the article at the same time as the versions. Here you see what looks more or less like a linear decline in IE and a rise in FF - which seems to be oblivious to the versions changing; the steep dip in FF3.0 is almost exactly compensated by the sharp rise in FF3.5, and the slower decline of IE7 seems to be complemented by the rise in IE8.
My point is that the overall trend seems not to care about new versions of the browsers themselves, and in reference to your scenario, I think what you'd see is a fast rise of Opera in the "Browser Versions" chart, a decline in the IE7 and IE8 but little effect at all on IE in the "Browser" chart - the overall IE numbers (now including IE8 SP0) would probably be about 55%. There seem to be two mechanisms at work here - a slow but steady movement from IE->Firefox in the "Browser" market (I suspect that this has to do with name recognition) and upgrade paths within those two "Browsers" between "Versions".
If, however, you RTFA and see that there are statistics for "Browser" and "Browser Version", and one of these shows a clearly dominant "Browser" and the other that a certain version of a given browser is leading in that subcategory you'd see that the title is misleading. The point is that if you look at the "Browser" stats it becomes apparent that what's actually happening is that you're in the midst of a slow transition from IE6-IE7-IE8 and at this point in time they're split roughly 40-40-20. So of the 55% of people using some form of IE, many still use older versions, whereas the Firefox users are upgrading faster. After all, someone could come along and split Firefox 3.5 into 3.5, 3.5.1, 3.5.2 etc and then put each lower than IE 8 say.
A more accurate graph for the "Most Popular Browser Worldwide" would be given by: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-200827-200951 Here you see a more representative picture - IE's decline and Firefox's rise, but still IE's total share is 55% to Firefox's 32%
Just because we're in the midst of an IE upgrade from 7-8 doesn't make Firefox now the most popular browser. Sure, this version is currently a little ahead of each of IE7 and IE8, but to me what this really indicates is that Firefox users upgrade faster.
Unless there's a REALLY GOOD conspiracy theory out there that I don't know about, I think you mean "...the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor..."
Re:Enter the closed loop you cannot enter.
on
The Limits To Skepticism
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Nature not allowing arXiv thing is a myth:
"Our guidelines for authors and potential authors in such circumstances are clear-cut in principle: communicate with other researchers as much as you wish, whether on a recognised community preprint server, on Nature Precedings, by discussion at scientific meetings (publication of abstracts in conference proceedings is allowed), in an academic thesis, or by online collaborative sites such as wikis; but do not encourage premature publication by discussion with the press (beyond a formal presentation, if at a conference)."
There is certainly a cut-scene in which you get to hear Richard talk with a French accent, and like all the other cut-scenes it's unavoidable (annoying flaw in replaying the game actually, but you do hear the plot through them). The background and preparation missions for the assassination (go eavesdrop on someone with information, or pickpocket a guy, meet an informant etc) give you a bit of a feel for the cities at the time. There are somewhat realistic background events happening - open air preachers and war recruiters who are talking about real events (Richard is laying siege to Acre etc). There's a rather enthusiastic discussion of it with more detail than I noticed here:
AC is pretty, that's for sure. The historical accuracy, well, not so much. I mean, yes, Templars, Crusaders, Richard, Saladin - it's got the right names and places to a degree, but the plot etc is sheer fantasy (nothing wrong with that in a game, of course, but if it's historical accuracy you want, it is somewhat lacking). I'd say it's similar to the Civilization series in this manner - there's a lot of good starting points and places that can trigger you to go and learn some more, but the Aztecs didn't build the Great Wall.
You also do kill more than 9 people in the game. You can get through it only killing about 18 in total (number guessed, as one of the bosses splits into various people etc etc), but just because you don't have to kill people doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. You can go the whole way through Deus Ex without firing a shot, but that isn't a typical experience of the game. Likewise in AC a typical experience involves quite a number of city guards, archers, Templars etc getting killed in some very violent ways. To 'level up' in your health etc you sometimes have to save people being harassed by guards which normally involves dispatching a few of them at the end of your sword.
If you're thinking about it for your kids, do give it a run through (or at least watch a walk-through of some of the missions or something). It's certainly got a good deal of educational value in getting you interested in the events that are going on. This is a lot more than your typical Doom/Halo game that has little connection to the real world, and it is entertaining. The violence is there and it is in your face in some of the killing, but that's pretty common in games.
Actually you CAN have depth perception with only one eye - it comes out of focal lengths. Try this: Cover up one eye and hold your index finger half way to your screen. Changing focus from one to the other will show you that they're not both as far away, as one will be blurry when the other is in focus. With a little practice you can get used to it and regain quite a bit of depth perception. Obviously we have two eyes for a reason, as triangulation is a better way to do it, but only having one eye doesn't lose you everything.
IIRC it was 0.99, the same price for Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Since they have the technology in place this seems like an awesome way to make a few thousand out of games that don't sell anymore. They had Bioshock for $5 a while back, and Assassin's Creed is $5 right now. I just bought it:)
When you find enough US students with master's degrees in math/physics willing to work for minimum wage you can cut out us foreign students. US students have access to a huge number of grants/fellowships that we don't get so much so that they often don't end up teaching. Foreign students end up doing the bulk of the teaching duties (in the form of TAs) since they are basically forced to do this as part of their program (you aren't allowed to take a non-university job as part of your immigration status, and even then only allowed to work 20 hours in specific areas). The US grad students get NSF fellowships etc that pay their way through, and we work our way through, TEACHING the domestic students, earning tuition money for the university. Any foreign student on a fellowship tends to be on one from his/her home country - again bringing money IN to the university.
Typically US students never get passed over in favor of foreign students: There are just different numbers of each required. The department takes as many US students as it can, all of whom get funded by fellowships/research positions that specify "US CITIZEN ONLY" and then fills up its teaching requirements with foreign students. I'm sorry if you didn't make it to grad school and you're bitter about this - I know it can be very competitive - but don't kid yourself that you were passed over for a foreign student. Without the foreigners there would be LESS room for US undergrads, or you'd have US grad students being asked to teach for minimum wage, which would mean the better candidates would probably pass on the job.
Oh, and did I mention that I pay taxes but don't get to vote? Wasn't there a war fought about that at some stage;-)
DDR or any rhythm/timing based game will be perfectly fine with a fair amount of lag so long as the lag is consistent. The game isn't based much on reaction times, more hitting the pads at the right intervals. Once you get accustomed to the lag (which should happen naturally as you dance) the actual amount won't matter so much - you just have to move 160ms before the arrow hits the circle or whatever, something you will have been doing already, moving to land on the beat, rather than waiting for the beat and then moving. This differs from, say, a shooter like counter-strike, where you have to react as fast as possible to what is a non-rhythmic, supposedly non-predictable event (unless the opposing team comes out in synchronized swimming formation).
Inconsistency in lag would be a killer here, as it is everywhere, as it would be essentially adding a random component to your timing that you have no control over. But any time you do rhythmic work you're doing predictable lag compensation already - eg clapping on the beat requires you to start the motion before the beat happens rather than react to it.
Energy is just another form of matter - that's what Einstein's E=mc^2 was all about. Gravitational waves carry energy, and they are radiated away from accelerating objects (sometimes we call it gravitational radiation as it is much like electromagnetic radiation, ie radio waves). Even the earth-sun system emits waves, albeit of an absolutely tiny energy (not enough that it would ever be noticeable).
If the wavelengths compressed (assuming frequency remained the same) we'd see that their speed was different than the speed of light, which violates the theory of relativity. If the frequency changed, this would also be measurable (and indeed, we do see the frequency of photons change due to gravitation in some places, for example cosmological redshifts which are doppler-shifted photons, although their frequency change is a feature of the energy change in escaping a gravitational field.)
You're almost there - what we're looking for is a contraction along one axis, and an expansion along the other (for the simplest case). Therefore to your observers (remember speed of light is a constant in all reference frames) you would see the light ray along the shorter distance get back before the one along the longer distance. The observer watching from within the system won't see the light go perfectly straight. The curvature of space itself is very much observable to someone living within that space.
An example that might help illustrate this is the first real experimental test of GR - photographs of the sky during a solar eclipse. Here it was seen that stars appeared out of place from where they 'should' be if the light had traveled through a straight (flat/Euclidean) geometry. This effect was the effect of the sun's gravitation bending the light rays.
More recently we've been able to see light from distant stars that goes on either side of a large mass that bends them both towards us, the light from one side traveling further than the other. The lensing effect is now quite famous and is very useful in examining distant events that would otherwise be hard to see (somehow having something 'in the way' of our sight actually improves our ability to see it!).
I hope that helps, though I realize that it might not be as clear as you'd like.
The laser itself will be subject to it, as will everything occupying the space through which the wave passes. However, this will not make a difference in the interferometer itself, as what we're looking for is the difference between the two beams, both created by the same laser (one beam that goes through a 'beam splitter' - a mirror at 45% to the beam that deflects 50% of the beam). On a practical level, the amount of distortion we are looking for is absolutely tiny, which is why we have to do it using interferometers which notice a tiny phase shift in beams that travel around 4km. Other ideas for testing this have included torsion balances and Casimir forces between plates, but nothing so far has been able to match the precision of this setup.
For a comparison, the LISA project aims to have three satellites separated by around 5 million kilometers, and will aim to measure deviations in the order of fractions of millimeters.
Disclaimer: I don't work on LIGO, but I work with people who do.
LIGO didn't expect to see a signal above the noise here. What it has done, is largely rule out a lot of 'exotic' sources - sources with equations of state that don't fit the normal matter we see, but some of the more ambitious parts of string theory thought might be possible. What they have achieved is a phenomenal reduction in their 'noise curve' - the background above which a signal must register to be considered real. So far it's only been a one-way test - just ruling out exotic sources, but nothing that we think should necessarily be there.
LIGO primer and vast oversimplification:
LIGO is an interferometer. The way it works is that a laser is split into two parts, each of which goes down an equal length tunnel, at right angles to one another. If the light went the same distance, when it is reflected back, it should still be in phase, and should interfere constructively (think back to intro physics and the way waves on a string add). If a gravitational wave which had the right polarization passed through the region in the time of detection, one tunnel will have been 'shorter' due to the contracting geometry caused by the wave, and hence the beams will no longer be in phase when they return, so will not interfere constructively in the same way.
So why is it so hard to see waves? Well, all kinds of things (drilling, trucks going by, someone sneezing!) can cause a minute wobbling of any part of the equipment and thus will cause the waves to interfere in the wrong way. What LIGO looks for is a specific 'signature' measured at three sites concurrently, the signature being the waves predicted to occur from certain galactic events (two black holes spiraling into one another, for example). They do some pretty impressive data processing to look for this, but so far have only found that they can't see anything above the noise. We've ruled out some of the less likely things that could be going on - types of matter that some string theories allow, but certainly aren't predicted to exist by established theories (like GR).
However, over time with a few additions to 'advanced' LIGO, or the amazing LISA project we should have a two-way test: Either we'll see the wave that GR predicts to exist from standard black hole collisions, or theoretical physicists have a lot of explaining to do.
"Overall sales were up by 10%". That's a win in my book. I don't care who I'm selling to, or what format they're buying in so long as my profits went up.
Check out steam then. They have some pretty awesome sales (Bioshock $5, original HL games 99c etc), and normally the valve games are pretty good value. I got the orange box at $50 and was blown away by the price - now it's around $30. If you wait for the holidays some stuff comes down so far that its really worth it - I wouldn't have gone for Bioshock normally, but for 5 bucks it was pretty much worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he wouldn't. 10*10=100 is true regardless of base. It's pretty close to the rule you use for DEFINING 100 in fact. GP is wrong entirely in fact: I'll prefix numbers with 'o' for base 8, d for base 10:
o10 = d8
o10*o10 =d8*d8 = d64 = o100
You were right the first time.
Your use of 'and' here amuses me - it makes me think that a Russian painted Mig shooting across the border would be just fine so long as they had a nice chat with someone on the radio whilst they did it.
Oh, I'm in no way saying that the submitter _intended_ to mislead people - just that really my first reaction was "Wow, that was fast, I thought it would take another couple of years to catch up to IE" before looking at the article and realizing that it's still got a long way to go and most people still use some form of the blue e. I apologize if anyone thinks I'm saying that the misleading was deliberate.
The summary says "but over the last few months the slope of Firefox's worldwide curve has been steeper" which doesn't appear to be actually true for Firefox as a whole just 3.5, and again, looking at the graphs together this just seems to be a faster changeover of 3.0 -> 3.5 in Firefox, rather than the impression that at least was made upon me that Firefox was ahead an accelerating. Likewise "The submitter suggests using the time when Firefox rules the roost, globally speaking," which further reinforces this impression.
True, and you do have a point with the codebase defining browsers for people here, though I think if you asked most people "What browser do you use?" those who understand the words would say "IE" or "Firefox".
However, I think a more useful statistical insight comes from examining the trends in the "Browser" list on the article at the same time as the versions. Here you see what looks more or less like a linear decline in IE and a rise in FF - which seems to be oblivious to the versions changing; the steep dip in FF3.0 is almost exactly compensated by the sharp rise in FF3.5, and the slower decline of IE7 seems to be complemented by the rise in IE8.
My point is that the overall trend seems not to care about new versions of the browsers themselves, and in reference to your scenario, I think what you'd see is a fast rise of Opera in the "Browser Versions" chart, a decline in the IE7 and IE8 but little effect at all on IE in the "Browser" chart - the overall IE numbers (now including IE8 SP0) would probably be about 55%. There seem to be two mechanisms at work here - a slow but steady movement from IE->Firefox in the "Browser" market (I suspect that this has to do with name recognition) and upgrade paths within those two "Browsers" between "Versions".
If, however, you RTFA and see that there are statistics for "Browser" and "Browser Version", and one of these shows a clearly dominant "Browser" and the other that a certain version of a given browser is leading in that subcategory you'd see that the title is misleading. The point is that if you look at the "Browser" stats it becomes apparent that what's actually happening is that you're in the midst of a slow transition from IE6-IE7-IE8 and at this point in time they're split roughly 40-40-20. So of the 55% of people using some form of IE, many still use older versions, whereas the Firefox users are upgrading faster. After all, someone could come along and split Firefox 3.5 into 3.5, 3.5.1, 3.5.2 etc and then put each lower than IE 8 say.
A more accurate graph for the "Most Popular Browser Worldwide" would be given by:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-200827-200951
Here you see a more representative picture - IE's decline and Firefox's rise, but still IE's total share is 55% to Firefox's 32%
Just because we're in the midst of an IE upgrade from 7-8 doesn't make Firefox now the most popular browser. Sure, this version is currently a little ahead of each of IE7 and IE8, but to me what this really indicates is that Firefox users upgrade faster.
Unless there's a REALLY GOOD conspiracy theory out there that I don't know about, I think you mean "...the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor..."
Nature not allowing arXiv thing is a myth:
"Our guidelines for authors and potential authors in such circumstances are clear-cut in principle: communicate with other researchers as much as you wish, whether on a recognised community preprint server, on Nature Precedings, by discussion at scientific meetings (publication of abstracts in conference proceedings is allowed), in an academic thesis, or by online collaborative sites such as wikis; but do not encourage premature publication by discussion with the press (beyond a formal presentation, if at a conference)."
From :
http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/embargo.html
There is certainly a cut-scene in which you get to hear Richard talk with a French accent, and like all the other cut-scenes it's unavoidable (annoying flaw in replaying the game actually, but you do hear the plot through them). The background and preparation missions for the assassination (go eavesdrop on someone with information, or pickpocket a guy, meet an informant etc) give you a bit of a feel for the cities at the time. There are somewhat realistic background events happening - open air preachers and war recruiters who are talking about real events (Richard is laying siege to Acre etc). There's a rather enthusiastic discussion of it with more detail than I noticed here:
http://chrisstubbs.com/2007/11/the-history-behind-assassins-c.html
AC is pretty, that's for sure. The historical accuracy, well, not so much. I mean, yes, Templars, Crusaders, Richard, Saladin - it's got the right names and places to a degree, but the plot etc is sheer fantasy (nothing wrong with that in a game, of course, but if it's historical accuracy you want, it is somewhat lacking). I'd say it's similar to the Civilization series in this manner - there's a lot of good starting points and places that can trigger you to go and learn some more, but the Aztecs didn't build the Great Wall.
You also do kill more than 9 people in the game. You can get through it only killing about 18 in total (number guessed, as one of the bosses splits into various people etc etc), but just because you don't have to kill people doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. You can go the whole way through Deus Ex without firing a shot, but that isn't a typical experience of the game. Likewise in AC a typical experience involves quite a number of city guards, archers, Templars etc getting killed in some very violent ways. To 'level up' in your health etc you sometimes have to save people being harassed by guards which normally involves dispatching a few of them at the end of your sword.
If you're thinking about it for your kids, do give it a run through (or at least watch a walk-through of some of the missions or something). It's certainly got a good deal of educational value in getting you interested in the events that are going on. This is a lot more than your typical Doom/Halo game that has little connection to the real world, and it is entertaining. The violence is there and it is in your face in some of the killing, but that's pretty common in games.
Actually you CAN have depth perception with only one eye - it comes out of focal lengths. Try this: Cover up one eye and hold your index finger half way to your screen. Changing focus from one to the other will show you that they're not both as far away, as one will be blurry when the other is in focus. With a little practice you can get used to it and regain quite a bit of depth perception. Obviously we have two eyes for a reason, as triangulation is a better way to do it, but only having one eye doesn't lose you everything.
This man is bound to be correct - he's even got 6502 in his UID!
(I couldn't convince my Dad to buy acorn shares when they were 6p...)
IIRC it was 0.99, the same price for Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Since they have the technology in place this seems like an awesome way to make a few thousand out of games that don't sell anymore. They had Bioshock for $5 a while back, and Assassin's Creed is $5 right now. I just bought it :)
When you find enough US students with master's degrees in math/physics willing to work for minimum wage you can cut out us foreign students. US students have access to a huge number of grants/fellowships that we don't get so much so that they often don't end up teaching. Foreign students end up doing the bulk of the teaching duties (in the form of TAs) since they are basically forced to do this as part of their program (you aren't allowed to take a non-university job as part of your immigration status, and even then only allowed to work 20 hours in specific areas). The US grad students get NSF fellowships etc that pay their way through, and we work our way through, TEACHING the domestic students, earning tuition money for the university. Any foreign student on a fellowship tends to be on one from his/her home country - again bringing money IN to the university.
Typically US students never get passed over in favor of foreign students: There are just different numbers of each required. The department takes as many US students as it can, all of whom get funded by fellowships/research positions that specify "US CITIZEN ONLY" and then fills up its teaching requirements with foreign students. I'm sorry if you didn't make it to grad school and you're bitter about this - I know it can be very competitive - but don't kid yourself that you were passed over for a foreign student. Without the foreigners there would be LESS room for US undergrads, or you'd have US grad students being asked to teach for minimum wage, which would mean the better candidates would probably pass on the job.
Oh, and did I mention that I pay taxes but don't get to vote? Wasn't there a war fought about that at some stage ;-)
DDR or any rhythm/timing based game will be perfectly fine with a fair amount of lag so long as the lag is consistent. The game isn't based much on reaction times, more hitting the pads at the right intervals. Once you get accustomed to the lag (which should happen naturally as you dance) the actual amount won't matter so much - you just have to move 160ms before the arrow hits the circle or whatever, something you will have been doing already, moving to land on the beat, rather than waiting for the beat and then moving. This differs from, say, a shooter like counter-strike, where you have to react as fast as possible to what is a non-rhythmic, supposedly non-predictable event (unless the opposing team comes out in synchronized swimming formation).
Inconsistency in lag would be a killer here, as it is everywhere, as it would be essentially adding a random component to your timing that you have no control over. But any time you do rhythmic work you're doing predictable lag compensation already - eg clapping on the beat requires you to start the motion before the beat happens rather than react to it.
Energy is just another form of matter - that's what Einstein's E=mc^2 was all about. Gravitational waves carry energy, and they are radiated away from accelerating objects (sometimes we call it gravitational radiation as it is much like electromagnetic radiation, ie radio waves). Even the earth-sun system emits waves, albeit of an absolutely tiny energy (not enough that it would ever be noticeable).
The most likely sources to be observed are those of inspiralling systems, eg two black holes merging. This site: http://www.einsteinathome.org/gwaves/sources/index.html probably explains things better than I can.
If the wavelengths compressed (assuming frequency remained the same) we'd see that their speed was different than the speed of light, which violates the theory of relativity. If the frequency changed, this would also be measurable (and indeed, we do see the frequency of photons change due to gravitation in some places, for example cosmological redshifts which are doppler-shifted photons, although their frequency change is a feature of the energy change in escaping a gravitational field.)
You're almost there - what we're looking for is a contraction along one axis, and an expansion along the other (for the simplest case). Therefore to your observers (remember speed of light is a constant in all reference frames) you would see the light ray along the shorter distance get back before the one along the longer distance. The observer watching from within the system won't see the light go perfectly straight. The curvature of space itself is very much observable to someone living within that space.
An example that might help illustrate this is the first real experimental test of GR - photographs of the sky during a solar eclipse. Here it was seen that stars appeared out of place from where they 'should' be if the light had traveled through a straight (flat/Euclidean) geometry. This effect was the effect of the sun's gravitation bending the light rays.
More recently we've been able to see light from distant stars that goes on either side of a large mass that bends them both towards us, the light from one side traveling further than the other. The lensing effect is now quite famous and is very useful in examining distant events that would otherwise be hard to see (somehow having something 'in the way' of our sight actually improves our ability to see it!).
I hope that helps, though I realize that it might not be as clear as you'd like.
The laser itself will be subject to it, as will everything occupying the space through which the wave passes. However, this will not make a difference in the interferometer itself, as what we're looking for is the difference between the two beams, both created by the same laser (one beam that goes through a 'beam splitter' - a mirror at 45% to the beam that deflects 50% of the beam). On a practical level, the amount of distortion we are looking for is absolutely tiny, which is why we have to do it using interferometers which notice a tiny phase shift in beams that travel around 4km. Other ideas for testing this have included torsion balances and Casimir forces between plates, but nothing so far has been able to match the precision of this setup.
For a comparison, the LISA project aims to have three satellites separated by around 5 million kilometers, and will aim to measure deviations in the order of fractions of millimeters.
Disclaimer: I don't work on LIGO, but I work with people who do.
LIGO didn't expect to see a signal above the noise here. What it has done, is largely rule out a lot of 'exotic' sources - sources with equations of state that don't fit the normal matter we see, but some of the more ambitious parts of string theory thought might be possible. What they have achieved is a phenomenal reduction in their 'noise curve' - the background above which a signal must register to be considered real. So far it's only been a one-way test - just ruling out exotic sources, but nothing that we think should necessarily be there.
LIGO primer and vast oversimplification:
LIGO is an interferometer. The way it works is that a laser is split into two parts, each of which goes down an equal length tunnel, at right angles to one another. If the light went the same distance, when it is reflected back, it should still be in phase, and should interfere constructively (think back to intro physics and the way waves on a string add). If a gravitational wave which had the right polarization passed through the region in the time of detection, one tunnel will have been 'shorter' due to the contracting geometry caused by the wave, and hence the beams will no longer be in phase when they return, so will not interfere constructively in the same way.
So why is it so hard to see waves? Well, all kinds of things (drilling, trucks going by, someone sneezing!) can cause a minute wobbling of any part of the equipment and thus will cause the waves to interfere in the wrong way. What LIGO looks for is a specific 'signature' measured at three sites concurrently, the signature being the waves predicted to occur from certain galactic events (two black holes spiraling into one another, for example). They do some pretty impressive data processing to look for this, but so far have only found that they can't see anything above the noise. We've ruled out some of the less likely things that could be going on - types of matter that some string theories allow, but certainly aren't predicted to exist by established theories (like GR).
However, over time with a few additions to 'advanced' LIGO, or the amazing LISA project we should have a two-way test: Either we'll see the wave that GR predicts to exist from standard black hole collisions, or theoretical physicists have a lot of explaining to do.
That would make sense - it's much less of an impulse to deflect something through an angle than flat-out reflect it.
He made the world a little bit better for a whole lot of people, quietly and effectively. There's almost no higher purpose in life.
"Overall sales were up by 10%". That's a win in my book. I don't care who I'm selling to, or what format they're buying in so long as my profits went up.
Check out steam then. They have some pretty awesome sales (Bioshock $5, original HL games 99c etc), and normally the valve games are pretty good value. I got the orange box at $50 and was blown away by the price - now it's around $30. If you wait for the holidays some stuff comes down so far that its really worth it - I wouldn't have gone for Bioshock normally, but for 5 bucks it was pretty much worth it.
That's funny - do you know Al Gore by any chance? He used that same quote in his movie, only he attributed it to a classmate.