First off, let me state that I'm a pacifist, and have absolutely no love for the violence and war-porn that infests our society. I've never served in the armed forces, and never intend to. I've met vets whom I've made great friendships with, and I've met vets whom I wish I'd never had the displeasure of meeting - they're human beings, good and bad, just like the rest of us. But I cannot let you attack the soldiers like this so unfairly without offering a different perspective.
They are there because they signed up to serve their country and protect it. They are there because they were ordered to be there to do this. If you have an issue with what the troops are doing then you have an issue with their commander in chief (actually, probably now the ex-CiC) and the politicians who sent them there. The soldiers themselves do not get to choose the battles or the issues they fight for, the politicians do, and in democracies populations choose politicians. (Yeah, broadly speaking, no need to nit-pick/supreme court me here, I know all that crap).
Yes, I think it's a tragedy that so many people have died (hundreds of thousands of civilians, thousands of soldiers) as a result of this exercise in futility. I think the war in Iraq is a mistake, and protested before its beginning, and that the war in Afghanistan has been so badly mis-handled that no good has come of it. But I will never hold that against someone who signed up to serve his country and protect his family. The "selfrighteous pricks" are the ones who sold us the lies behind all this, who squandered our most valuable resources all to further their own personal agendas. The soldiers put their trust in their leaders, offered their sweat, tears, and sadly also blood to serve.
Now I know that this might bring up the usual 'just following orders isn't an excuse' argument. But really, do you think that a soldier has time to sit down and review the evidence in of yellow-cake, to weigh the pros and cons of fighting an insurgency? Yes, you should disobey obviously bad orders (eg 'Shoot that innocent civilian in the head') but for the larger issues like this there is no practical way for that to be possible. And thus I lay the blame at the feet of the leaders, not the soldiers, and I think that's really where you would want to place it too.
OK, the AC is a little harsh here. We don't need a quantum theory of gravity here as we're well below the planck regime - we're in a region well described by the standard model. The interaction of two particles that you describe is going to be a local, and well described by QFT, something I suggested you learn, not out of spewing big words or anything else, but because it would help you understand the process. Saying a lack of a quantum theory of gravity means that this is invalid is about as accurate as saying that lacking a quantum theory of gravity means we can't trust NASA to get us to the moon. Of course we're using a flawed theory (Hell, you can get there with little more than Newtonian physics) but it's good enough.
Utter rubbish. Even if you can begin to make some kind of reference frame argument (learn about Lorentz invariance before you comment on that again) if you integrate over the history of the universe, the probability of two cosmic rays with close to zero net rest momentum in the current earth reference frame having collided (again, each with energies far in excess of those created in the LHC) is close to unity. So yes, even if we accept the silly rules you want to impose, events of far greater magnitude have happened in the past, and yet we observe no black hole in our local area (say the solar system).
And as to what the type of matter that collides is, why the hell would that matter? Learn some quantum field theory please - particle creation is a function of momentum, spin and energy conservation.
Every single day the earth is bombarded with particles of far higher energy than those the LHC could ever come close to producing. We've observed cosmic rays with energies that are several orders of magnitude higher than the LHC can ever come close to producing. The Pierre-Auger project will probably reveal that we're hit by far more of them, and might even tell us where they're coming from. So if the LHC were capable of producing a world ending event, we already wouldn't be here. Sure, "scientists meddle with forces they don't understand" sells papers, (and let's face it, if we DID understand them, we wouldn't need to meddle) but we all do that. How many of you know exactly how the computer sitting on your desk works, down to the excitation states of silicon? Yet you still use them and don't worry about them causing the world to end, because you know that it just isn't possible. The same analysis works for the LHC.
Or rather, the criminals that they've noticed are dumb enough to be noticed. Plenty of smart criminals have gotten away with things for years and years, and I don't doubt that many go completely undetected.
Nope, the discs scratch when playing flat with no movement of the console whatsoever. It gets blamed on rotating the system, but I've seen a clean disk go into a 360 and come out scratched. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STwlMKiSP2c&feature=related
The rest I agree - it's pointless whining about which is better, but the disk scratching issue with the 360 is real.
I will paraphrase an old expression, never under estimate the data bandwidth of a semi-truck sized data center driving two days across country. Think about the number of raw terabytes that can be shipped vs transfered over the backbone.
In some fields (such as mine) the convention is alphabetical. Which sucks when your surname is from the arse-end of the alphabet. Even in large groups like the LIGO collaboration all papers list all 400 or so contributors to the group alphabetically, which gets shortened to "B Abbott et al." so that one guy looks like the first author on hundreds of papers whereas whoever wrote the damned thing is lost in the undergrowth somewhere. God knows why this is the case (though I suspect it might have something to do with my adviser's name beginning with A).
Text message will ensure that all the details get there, not some garbled, half-heard phone call. You also get all the information already available if you need to look back at it quickly and it's in neat understandable writing (anyone who's ever read a doctor's scrawl will know what I mean). For this purpose (transmitting a technical procedure step by step) it's the better of the two media.
Man you're evil. It's not like the staff have a choice really - in fact 99% of them are driven half insane by what is forced upon them. Management, sure, from their long distance offices think it's a good idea and drives sales, but the staff themselves are normally the biggest victims of the 'holiday season'.
E=mc^2 is a prediction of SPECIAL relativity, which has (modulo a LOT of math) been shown to work well with quantum mechanics. Early examples: Klein-Gordon Eqn, Dirac Eqn. Later: Quantum Electrodynamics, and recently QCD. QCD is inherently Lorentz invariant and so should respect all the rules of SR. What is being shown here is that lattice based QCD actually gives the right numbers for the inclusion of vacuum fluctuations in the masses of fundamental particles (disclaimer - my field is gravity not QCD).
Quantum Mechanics and GENRAL relativity don't mesh well. In fact they lead to all kinds of infinities. The Bad kind. The ones we can't sweep under the rug.... ^W^W^W^W 'renormalize'. There are various efforts to make a consistent formulation (String, Loops, Dynamic triangulations, graphs, insert-your-favourite-that-I-forgot-here) but this is where the problem lies. GR and QM are not good together. But SR and QM is a match made in heaven.
You got paid for that copy already. Get over yourself. I'll keep buying used DVDs and games, just like I buy used cars. Maybe if you charged less than $50 for 4-5 hours of gameplay I'd consider buying new.
First you write a paper - this is the hard part. Then you can submit it to Arxiv - usually done at the same time as submission to a journal, though some choose to wait for any initial backlash/corrections before doing this. Arxiv normally publishes it the next working day with no peer review (8pm EST the night before) for all to see online. Meenwhile your journal is still looking for peer reviewers. No journal in physics can now ask to be the sole source for any article - all authors have to sign a contract often stating that no other commercial source will exist, but that the author can have a copy on his/her homepage (or other place) for free distribution, and on the preprint archive.
Double-blind journal review becomes single-blind when you publish on Arxiv - you can't see your reviewer's name but he can easily find yours. This way it's still possible for someone who gets your paper to screw you over if they don't like you, but then again you can appeal to the editors if you think this is happening. Since you don't know your reviewer, you can't exert any pressure on them (in theory) to accept your paper, so the review part keeps most of its integrity. Reviewers are also required to give detailed reasons for rejecting/accepting papers so you really have to justify your reasons not just "I like/dislike this guy".
In many fields, the blind part of peer review isn't all that blind. Often from the suggestions for citations for example you can get an idea of who your reviewer is. In small fields it's pretty hard not to know everyone in it anyway - especially since you're normally familiar with everyone else' work in your area, and because reviewers are chosen as experts in that area.
Well, this is the problem of perception a lot of people have - that scientists are the anti-social ones. Scientists cannot work in a vacuum - we need communications with one another, interactions and a knowledge of other work to get on with our own work. You build off other people's work, use the things recently discovered to move your own work forward, so you need to have constant fast communications of the latest discoveries. Good physicists are always talking to one another, asking about work done, clarifying points and collaborating - just check out how many of those papers have multiple authors, often at separate institutions.
Compare this to a social science/humanity subject where sitting in your ivory tower is basically encouraged, with publications of great single-authored treatises seemingly the only output. They don't need to talk to one another and many are outright hostile to any discussion of their work.
Disclosure: I'm a physicist with an SO in the humanities. The differences in our experiences are incredible - people in my department like each other and work together.
Most accidents involving teens aren't 80mph freeway crashes - they're taking slower roads too fast. I was in a wreck (car written off, I walked away with bruises) with a friend driving - he tried to take a roundabout at 50 instead of 30 on a wet night. The problem isn't a function of power, speed or traction - it's recklessness. Trust me - I was in a freaking Metro when it happened. Limiting the speed to 80 just means that kids will get their kicks driving 60 in a 30 zone or something similar.
You could even go with the libertarian argument (only time I can ever remember agreeing with them!) and let the market sort it out. If we have excess power at night, price electricity differently at different times of the day. Hell, places already do this. Are you going to recharge you car at $1 per KJ or $0.1 per KJ? Time based price differences will give people the incentive to keep the load steady and keep plants running at peak efficiency.
Speaking as a TA for an intro physics course, the number of plain scientifically stupid people in "Pre-med" scares the hell out of me. Any doctor I go to I ask what their score on their intro physics course was - I'd rather see their transcripts than some medical degree on the wall! As for ORGANIC CHEMISTRY = how can that NOT be a requirement for wanting to be a doctor? You should at the very least have an understanding of the basics of the theory behind your job when you do something like this!
Until someone does it right, and you do: Imagine you walk towards a room with a light on inside, then the light goes off and you can see the reflected image of someone standing behind you in the now dark glass. At the moment, of course, this can be directly programmed, but with ray tracing you will see a lot more emergent gameplay - a metal door can become a mirror to see around a corner, a flashlight can be bounced off a surface to temporarily blind someone/lose their night-vision. Again, this can all be done right now, but it's clunky and forced but soon it will be dynamic. The changes that accurate physics made (in say, Half-life 2) were huge to emergent gameplay - I could throw a grenade behind a box to get the goodies in it to come to me, instead of fighting my way over to it etc. It's up to the developer of course to work out how to make environments that take advantage of it, but with a bit of imagination they should be able to do some cool stuff.
Looking at the data, they just picked the lowest and highest points to get the factor. This is not indicative of an overall trend - I could pick March to March and say it had gone from 0.3% to 0.6% a factor of 2, not 28 - indeed from March to June of 07, things went DOWN by a factor of three...
Anyone not trying to fool themselves should really do some kind of best fit line and see that it's going at about 0.1% per month (number guessed). Yes, we're linux is making progress, and it's good, but let's be honest at least with ourselves about how much progress is actually being made.
... I'd suggest that he look here for inspiration:
"After being charged £20 for a £10 overdraft, 30 year old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to Yorkshire Bank PLC Are Fascist Bastards. The bank has now asked him to close his account, and Mr. Bastards has asked them to repay the 69p balance, by cheque, made out in his new name."
No one is found innocent. They are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The only findings are guilty and not guilty. Sure, it may sound like semantics but it's pretty important as a distinction - you don't have to prove your innocence.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, let me state that I'm a pacifist, and have absolutely no love for the violence and war-porn that infests our society. I've never served in the armed forces, and never intend to. I've met vets whom I've made great friendships with, and I've met vets whom I wish I'd never had the displeasure of meeting - they're human beings, good and bad, just like the rest of us. But I cannot let you attack the soldiers like this so unfairly without offering a different perspective.
They are there because they signed up to serve their country and protect it. They are there because they were ordered to be there to do this. If you have an issue with what the troops are doing then you have an issue with their commander in chief (actually, probably now the ex-CiC) and the politicians who sent them there. The soldiers themselves do not get to choose the battles or the issues they fight for, the politicians do, and in democracies populations choose politicians. (Yeah, broadly speaking, no need to nit-pick/supreme court me here, I know all that crap).
Yes, I think it's a tragedy that so many people have died (hundreds of thousands of civilians, thousands of soldiers) as a result of this exercise in futility. I think the war in Iraq is a mistake, and protested before its beginning, and that the war in Afghanistan has been so badly mis-handled that no good has come of it. But I will never hold that against someone who signed up to serve his country and protect his family. The "selfrighteous pricks" are the ones who sold us the lies behind all this, who squandered our most valuable resources all to further their own personal agendas. The soldiers put their trust in their leaders, offered their sweat, tears, and sadly also blood to serve.
Now I know that this might bring up the usual 'just following orders isn't an excuse' argument. But really, do you think that a soldier has time to sit down and review the evidence in of yellow-cake, to weigh the pros and cons of fighting an insurgency? Yes, you should disobey obviously bad orders (eg 'Shoot that innocent civilian in the head') but for the larger issues like this there is no practical way for that to be possible. And thus I lay the blame at the feet of the leaders, not the soldiers, and I think that's really where you would want to place it too.
OK, the AC is a little harsh here. We don't need a quantum theory of gravity here as we're well below the planck regime - we're in a region well described by the standard model. The interaction of two particles that you describe is going to be a local, and well described by QFT, something I suggested you learn, not out of spewing big words or anything else, but because it would help you understand the process. Saying a lack of a quantum theory of gravity means that this is invalid is about as accurate as saying that lacking a quantum theory of gravity means we can't trust NASA to get us to the moon. Of course we're using a flawed theory (Hell, you can get there with little more than Newtonian physics) but it's good enough.
Utter rubbish. Even if you can begin to make some kind of reference frame argument (learn about Lorentz invariance before you comment on that again) if you integrate over the history of the universe, the probability of two cosmic rays with close to zero net rest momentum in the current earth reference frame having collided (again, each with energies far in excess of those created in the LHC) is close to unity. So yes, even if we accept the silly rules you want to impose, events of far greater magnitude have happened in the past, and yet we observe no black hole in our local area (say the solar system).
And as to what the type of matter that collides is, why the hell would that matter? Learn some quantum field theory please - particle creation is a function of momentum, spin and energy conservation.
Fundamental mis-understanding of quantum mechanics, I'm afraid. Particles existed a long time before man did, my friend.
Every single day the earth is bombarded with particles of far higher energy than those the LHC could ever come close to producing. We've observed cosmic rays with energies that are several orders of magnitude higher than the LHC can ever come close to producing. The Pierre-Auger project will probably reveal that we're hit by far more of them, and might even tell us where they're coming from. So if the LHC were capable of producing a world ending event, we already wouldn't be here. Sure, "scientists meddle with forces they don't understand" sells papers, (and let's face it, if we DID understand them, we wouldn't need to meddle) but we all do that. How many of you know exactly how the computer sitting on your desk works, down to the excitation states of silicon? Yet you still use them and don't worry about them causing the world to end, because you know that it just isn't possible. The same analysis works for the LHC.
Or rather, the criminals that they've noticed are dumb enough to be noticed. Plenty of smart criminals have gotten away with things for years and years, and I don't doubt that many go completely undetected.
Nope, the discs scratch when playing flat with no movement of the console whatsoever. It gets blamed on rotating the system, but I've seen a clean disk go into a 360 and come out scratched. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STwlMKiSP2c&feature=related
The rest I agree - it's pointless whining about which is better, but the disk scratching issue with the 360 is real.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFoUL_bIotw
In some fields (such as mine) the convention is alphabetical. Which sucks when your surname is from the arse-end of the alphabet. Even in large groups like the LIGO collaboration all papers list all 400 or so contributors to the group alphabetically, which gets shortened to "B Abbott et al." so that one guy looks like the first author on hundreds of papers whereas whoever wrote the damned thing is lost in the undergrowth somewhere. God knows why this is the case (though I suspect it might have something to do with my adviser's name beginning with A).
Text message will ensure that all the details get there, not some garbled, half-heard phone call. You also get all the information already available if you need to look back at it quickly and it's in neat understandable writing (anyone who's ever read a doctor's scrawl will know what I mean). For this purpose (transmitting a technical procedure step by step) it's the better of the two media.
A three-piece suite? Armchairs and all?
Man you're evil. It's not like the staff have a choice really - in fact 99% of them are driven half insane by what is forced upon them. Management, sure, from their long distance offices think it's a good idea and drives sales, but the staff themselves are normally the biggest victims of the 'holiday season'.
E=mc^2 is a prediction of SPECIAL relativity, which has (modulo a LOT of math) been shown to work well with quantum mechanics. Early examples: Klein-Gordon Eqn, Dirac Eqn. Later: Quantum Electrodynamics, and recently QCD. QCD is inherently Lorentz invariant and so should respect all the rules of SR. What is being shown here is that lattice based QCD actually gives the right numbers for the inclusion of vacuum fluctuations in the masses of fundamental particles (disclaimer - my field is gravity not QCD).
Quantum Mechanics and GENRAL relativity don't mesh well. In fact they lead to all kinds of infinities. The Bad kind. The ones we can't sweep under the rug.... ^W^W^W^W 'renormalize'. There are various efforts to make a consistent formulation (String, Loops, Dynamic triangulations, graphs, insert-your-favourite-that-I-forgot-here) but this is where the problem lies. GR and QM are not good together. But SR and QM is a match made in heaven.
You got paid for that copy already. Get over yourself. I'll keep buying used DVDs and games, just like I buy used cars. Maybe if you charged less than $50 for 4-5 hours of gameplay I'd consider buying new.
I've never understood why the law allows a president to do this - could someone explain what good it does?
Here's how it works (for me at least):
First you write a paper - this is the hard part. Then you can submit it to Arxiv - usually done at the same time as submission to a journal, though some choose to wait for any initial backlash/corrections before doing this. Arxiv normally publishes it the next working day with no peer review (8pm EST the night before) for all to see online. Meenwhile your journal is still looking for peer reviewers. No journal in physics can now ask to be the sole source for any article - all authors have to sign a contract often stating that no other commercial source will exist, but that the author can have a copy on his/her homepage (or other place) for free distribution, and on the preprint archive.
Double-blind journal review becomes single-blind when you publish on Arxiv - you can't see your reviewer's name but he can easily find yours. This way it's still possible for someone who gets your paper to screw you over if they don't like you, but then again you can appeal to the editors if you think this is happening. Since you don't know your reviewer, you can't exert any pressure on them (in theory) to accept your paper, so the review part keeps most of its integrity. Reviewers are also required to give detailed reasons for rejecting/accepting papers so you really have to justify your reasons not just "I like/dislike this guy".
In many fields, the blind part of peer review isn't all that blind. Often from the suggestions for citations for example you can get an idea of who your reviewer is. In small fields it's pretty hard not to know everyone in it anyway - especially since you're normally familiar with everyone else' work in your area, and because reviewers are chosen as experts in that area.
Well, this is the problem of perception a lot of people have - that scientists are the anti-social ones. Scientists cannot work in a vacuum - we need communications with one another, interactions and a knowledge of other work to get on with our own work. You build off other people's work, use the things recently discovered to move your own work forward, so you need to have constant fast communications of the latest discoveries. Good physicists are always talking to one another, asking about work done, clarifying points and collaborating - just check out how many of those papers have multiple authors, often at separate institutions.
Compare this to a social science/humanity subject where sitting in your ivory tower is basically encouraged, with publications of great single-authored treatises seemingly the only output. They don't need to talk to one another and many are outright hostile to any discussion of their work.
Disclosure: I'm a physicist with an SO in the humanities. The differences in our experiences are incredible - people in my department like each other and work together.
Most accidents involving teens aren't 80mph freeway crashes - they're taking slower roads too fast. I was in a wreck (car written off, I walked away with bruises) with a friend driving - he tried to take a roundabout at 50 instead of 30 on a wet night. The problem isn't a function of power, speed or traction - it's recklessness. Trust me - I was in a freaking Metro when it happened. Limiting the speed to 80 just means that kids will get their kicks driving 60 in a 30 zone or something similar.
You could even go with the libertarian argument (only time I can ever remember agreeing with them!) and let the market sort it out. If we have excess power at night, price electricity differently at different times of the day. Hell, places already do this. Are you going to recharge you car at $1 per KJ or $0.1 per KJ? Time based price differences will give people the incentive to keep the load steady and keep plants running at peak efficiency.
Speaking as a TA for an intro physics course, the number of plain scientifically stupid people in "Pre-med" scares the hell out of me. Any doctor I go to I ask what their score on their intro physics course was - I'd rather see their transcripts than some medical degree on the wall! As for ORGANIC CHEMISTRY = how can that NOT be a requirement for wanting to be a doctor? You should at the very least have an understanding of the basics of the theory behind your job when you do something like this!
Until someone does it right, and you do: Imagine you walk towards a room with a light on inside, then the light goes off and you can see the reflected image of someone standing behind you in the now dark glass. At the moment, of course, this can be directly programmed, but with ray tracing you will see a lot more emergent gameplay - a metal door can become a mirror to see around a corner, a flashlight can be bounced off a surface to temporarily blind someone/lose their night-vision. Again, this can all be done right now, but it's clunky and forced but soon it will be dynamic. The changes that accurate physics made (in say, Half-life 2) were huge to emergent gameplay - I could throw a grenade behind a box to get the goodies in it to come to me, instead of fighting my way over to it etc. It's up to the developer of course to work out how to make environments that take advantage of it, but with a bit of imagination they should be able to do some cool stuff.
Looking at the data, they just picked the lowest and highest points to get the factor. This is not indicative of an overall trend - I could pick March to March and say it had gone from 0.3% to 0.6% a factor of 2, not 28 - indeed from March to June of 07, things went DOWN by a factor of three...
Anyone not trying to fool themselves should really do some kind of best fit line and see that it's going at about 0.1% per month (number guessed). Yes, we're linux is making progress, and it's good, but let's be honest at least with ourselves about how much progress is actually being made.
... I'd suggest that he look here for inspiration:
"After being charged £20 for a £10 overdraft, 30 year old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to Yorkshire Bank PLC Are Fascist Bastards. The bank has now asked him to close his account, and Mr. Bastards has asked them to repay the 69p balance, by cheque, made out in his new name."
From The Guardian.
No one is found innocent. They are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The only findings are guilty and not guilty. Sure, it may sound like semantics but it's pretty important as a distinction - you don't have to prove your innocence.