Not really. Many statistical quantities have little to do with the underlying behavior of the specific objects. For example, the Central Limit Theorem says that the average of a large number of trials of an experiment's distribution will approach a bell curve, regardless of the original experiment's distribution. (One example is rolling a dice, and recording the average. With one trial, the distribution is uniform, i.e., you have an equal probability of rolling anything between 1 and 6. With two rolls, you have a low probability of averaging a 1, a relatively high probability of averaging a 3.5, and a low probability of averaging a 6. The higher the number of rolls, the more and more bell-shaped your distribution is. The Java applet on this page demonstrates it.) So, just because a distribution is observed to occur that models the spread of disease/dollars, it doesn't mean that the underlying behavior is predictable.
There is an explainable reason that energy levels are said to be quantized: the Schrödinger equation. It is the wavefunction version of conservation of energy, and is a simple PDE (i.e., if you consider each particle to have a spatial wavefunction, which makes more sense than saying that every particle is just a hard sphere, you can derive it). Now, you may or may not know that one technique for solving PDEs is separation of variables, in which an infinite number of solutions are usually encountered. Often, they will be quantized (e.g., Fourier modes of vibration). It turns out that they are quantized in the case of an atom, and the eigenvalues of the equation are the energy levels. This idea has been tested incredibly precisely (up to about 99.9996%).
Now, spin comes into play when you consider relativistic effects. Dirac modified the Schrödinger equation to include these effects, coming up with the Dirac equation, which predicts the existence of spin. Since particles are actually spatial waves, your assertion that a particle cannot spin up and down at the same time means nothing, at spatial waves do not spin around in the intuitive sense. (Spin is essentially just a name.) As for why there are only two spin states, there are two answers to that question: the Dirac equation predicts it, and, more importantly, that is what is observed. Virtual particles arise from quantum electrodynamics, another successful theory which accurately predicts many things (among them, the existence of antiparticles, which have already been seen).
You see, physicists have two tools with which to work: theory and observation. If a particle is observed to take on only two spin states in thousands of experiments, then that must be the case, regardless of your flawed macroscopic view. You're right: reality isn't contradictory. However, just because you happen to view a macroscopic version of QM, it doesn't make it contradictory: it just means that you don't understand it. You ask why we don't have an explanation for the equations which imply quantization. Here's you answer: to do so would require an explanation for the postulates of our universe, such as conservation of energy. However, as I'm sure you know, explaining postulates is an impossible task, one left to the philosophers.
I'm reminded of an old friend from high school who hated the game franchises on the older consoles (like Mario Bros) because he was certain that their high pricing and continuous rehashing of the same story line not only stifled creativity but turned off gamers looking for something fresh. What do you think?
If you're playing Super Mario Bros. for the story, then you're playing it for the wrong reasons.
They weren't following orders, they were imitating adults. Young children have always imitated older people. If they didn't, how would they learn to walk? How to speak? How to interact with their fellow human beings? It's a necessary part of the development cycle.
The thing about science is that your opinion does not change the facts.
Fact 1: Cancer is caused by mutated cells run amok. Fact 2: Over-the-counter pills do not directly change your DNA. They are not overtly carciongenic, and even if they are carcinogenic in large quantities, the effects would take years to manifest. (Think about how long it takes most smokers to get lung cancer.) Fact 3: Cold viruses do change your DNA. Just because our bodies are used to fighting off various strains of the common cold, it doesn't make them any less mutagenic to individual cells.
With these facts in mind, which is most likely to cause cancer? The weak drugs, or the cell-mutating virus? You offer no evidence to support your claim except for your social commentary. That is not science any more than Intelligent Design is.
Having worked at Target, I know that it is their policy to press charges for any theft by a non-minor (at least according to the security team at my store, when they were trying to scare the employees into never stealing). Why should they make exceptions for this guy?
When I was in high school two years ago, I worked as a cashier at an urban Target. As you can imagine, it had a fairly high shoplifiting rate, and people tried to pull scams like these all the time. Typically, it would manifest itself as someone taking a bar code from something like a potted plant (which had sticker barcodes) and sticking it over the real one. From the first time that I first noticed this a couple weeks after I started, to a year and a half later when I left for college, I probably saved the company about $3000 through catching this fraud alone. The trick was to glance at the display for all items that looked expensive to me. However, aside from the pat on the back and the free $10 DVD that I got after saving the store $300 in one transaction, I never saw a dime of that. (Actually, that $300 one was really clever: he managed to graft a couple of those souped-up Playstations with the label of a regular, old Playstation, so that come transaction time, the computer still said "Playstation.") Granted, assets protection (i.e., the security team) loved me, and it probably didn't hurt me come review/raise time. I never even had the satisfaction of seeing any of those people get arrested, because once they noticed that the jig was up, they found an excuse to leave as quickly as they could. (Also, Target had a policy of not arresting until they had definitive proof of shoplifting, i.e., camera footage. In this case, they'd have to trace back the person's motion through the cameras to when the label was fraudulently placed, a fairly time consuming process. Otherwise, they could get sued.)
For one thing, Randell Mills is a quack. He's been touting his device for the past 10 years, and has yet never gone public with it. He's also been discussed on Slashdot before. Secondly, calculus cannot possibly be wrong. It has been rigorously derived, and just because you don't know or understand the derivations doesn't make them any less true. Finally, quantum electrodynamics is the most successful theory in the history of physics. It has been verified to about 99.996% accuracy (only because our measuring devices cannot do any better than that), and has made extremely accurate, experimentally verified predictions, including (among other things) the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
Just so people don't get the wrong idea, it's not just quintic polynomials which can't be solved with one formula: it's all polynomials of degree five and higher.
Just so people don't get the wrong idea, it's not just quintic polynomials which can't be solved with one formula: it's all polynomials of degree five and higher. Also, "can't be solved" is something of a misnomer: there exist five solutions to a degree five polynomial, and they can be expressed either as infinite series or in terms of some non-standard functions. It's just that they can't be solved in terms of addition, multiplication, and exponentiation (i.e., using +, *, and radicals).
Amusingly, quite a bit of science in history was done by priests and other church members.
For a nice example of this, look up Georges Lemaitre, also known as Father Georges Lemaitre. His claim to fame is that he created the "hypothesis of the primeval atom," now known as the Big Bang theory.
I don't know much about the other two, but I do know that Buffy does have some sci-fi elements in it. For example, in one episode, a high school girl who wasn't noticed by anybody actually became invisible, and the explanation given had to do with quantum mechanics, not the supernatural. Also, at least three robots were made in the series which could actually pass as humans (including one made in the fifties). We can't even get a program to pass the Turing Test, let alone a robot.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to turn in into my own British Bat Cave. Kind of like where a combination of James Bond and Bruce Wayne would live.
It seems cities should offer a similar rebate to those who bike to work (less traffic impact, less wear and tear on the roads, less pollution), or those who drive cleaner cars (less pollution).
They already do. Most state road systems are paid for through the gasoline tax, which means that if you use less gas (either by driving a hybrid or riding a bicycle), you're automatically not getting taxed as much.
How accurate can that figure really be? China has over a billion people, so 800,000 people is.08% of the population. I don't know of any studies which are that accurate.
Actually, Tivo units retain some functionality even if you don't have a subscription, contrary to popular belief. You can still get a three-day program guide, record shows manually, and do all of the standard pause/rewind/fast-forward features. Does your VCR have a three-day program guide, with which you can select shows by name (and not by time/channel)? Does it allow you to pause or rewind live TV? Does it allow you to store 80+ hours of manual recordings?
Yeah, we use WebCT, too, and it's terrible. The most annoying things are that (a) they want you to not block pop-ups and (b) it opens up a Java Virtual Machine, though there is no good reason for them to do so. A site that should take a few seconds to visit ends up taking a full minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Many statistical quantities have little to do with the underlying behavior of the specific objects. For example, the Central Limit Theorem says that the average of a large number of trials of an experiment's distribution will approach a bell curve, regardless of the original experiment's distribution. (One example is rolling a dice, and recording the average. With one trial, the distribution is uniform, i.e., you have an equal probability of rolling anything between 1 and 6. With two rolls, you have a low probability of averaging a 1, a relatively high probability of averaging a 3.5, and a low probability of averaging a 6. The higher the number of rolls, the more and more bell-shaped your distribution is. The Java applet on this page demonstrates it.) So, just because a distribution is observed to occur that models the spread of disease/dollars, it doesn't mean that the underlying behavior is predictable.
Though not all solids are frozen liquids, all frozen liquids are solids. Hence, the grandparent was correct.
Also, research has shown that people with post-graduate degrees are much more likely to vote Democratic.
It's all about the Hamiltons, baby.
Yeah, and bugs placed in your house are easy to remove, provided that you know they exist.
There is an explainable reason that energy levels are said to be quantized: the Schrödinger equation. It is the wavefunction version of conservation of energy, and is a simple PDE (i.e., if you consider each particle to have a spatial wavefunction, which makes more sense than saying that every particle is just a hard sphere, you can derive it). Now, you may or may not know that one technique for solving PDEs is separation of variables, in which an infinite number of solutions are usually encountered. Often, they will be quantized (e.g., Fourier modes of vibration). It turns out that they are quantized in the case of an atom, and the eigenvalues of the equation are the energy levels. This idea has been tested incredibly precisely (up to about 99.9996%).
Now, spin comes into play when you consider relativistic effects. Dirac modified the Schrödinger equation to include these effects, coming up with the Dirac equation, which predicts the existence of spin. Since particles are actually spatial waves, your assertion that a particle cannot spin up and down at the same time means nothing, at spatial waves do not spin around in the intuitive sense. (Spin is essentially just a name.) As for why there are only two spin states, there are two answers to that question: the Dirac equation predicts it, and, more importantly, that is what is observed. Virtual particles arise from quantum electrodynamics, another successful theory which accurately predicts many things (among them, the existence of antiparticles, which have already been seen).
You see, physicists have two tools with which to work: theory and observation. If a particle is observed to take on only two spin states in thousands of experiments, then that must be the case, regardless of your flawed macroscopic view. You're right: reality isn't contradictory. However, just because you happen to view a macroscopic version of QM, it doesn't make it contradictory: it just means that you don't understand it. You ask why we don't have an explanation for the equations which imply quantization. Here's you answer: to do so would require an explanation for the postulates of our universe, such as conservation of energy. However, as I'm sure you know, explaining postulates is an impossible task, one left to the philosophers.
I'm reminded of an old friend from high school who hated the game franchises on the older consoles (like Mario Bros) because he was certain that their high pricing and continuous rehashing of the same story line not only stifled creativity but turned off gamers looking for something fresh. What do you think?
If you're playing Super Mario Bros. for the story, then you're playing it for the wrong reasons.
They weren't following orders, they were imitating adults. Young children have always imitated older people. If they didn't, how would they learn to walk? How to speak? How to interact with their fellow human beings? It's a necessary part of the development cycle.
The thing about science is that your opinion does not change the facts.
Fact 1: Cancer is caused by mutated cells run amok.
Fact 2: Over-the-counter pills do not directly change your DNA. They are not overtly carciongenic, and even if they are carcinogenic in large quantities, the effects would take years to manifest. (Think about how long it takes most smokers to get lung cancer.)
Fact 3: Cold viruses do change your DNA. Just because our bodies are used to fighting off various strains of the common cold, it doesn't make them any less mutagenic to individual cells.
With these facts in mind, which is most likely to cause cancer? The weak drugs, or the cell-mutating virus? You offer no evidence to support your claim except for your social commentary. That is not science any more than Intelligent Design is.
Having worked at Target, I know that it is their policy to press charges for any theft by a non-minor (at least according to the security team at my store, when they were trying to scare the employees into never stealing). Why should they make exceptions for this guy?
When I was in high school two years ago, I worked as a cashier at an urban Target. As you can imagine, it had a fairly high shoplifiting rate, and people tried to pull scams like these all the time. Typically, it would manifest itself as someone taking a bar code from something like a potted plant (which had sticker barcodes) and sticking it over the real one. From the first time that I first noticed this a couple weeks after I started, to a year and a half later when I left for college, I probably saved the company about $3000 through catching this fraud alone. The trick was to glance at the display for all items that looked expensive to me. However, aside from the pat on the back and the free $10 DVD that I got after saving the store $300 in one transaction, I never saw a dime of that. (Actually, that $300 one was really clever: he managed to graft a couple of those souped-up Playstations with the label of a regular, old Playstation, so that come transaction time, the computer still said "Playstation.") Granted, assets protection (i.e., the security team) loved me, and it probably didn't hurt me come review/raise time. I never even had the satisfaction of seeing any of those people get arrested, because once they noticed that the jig was up, they found an excuse to leave as quickly as they could. (Also, Target had a policy of not arresting until they had definitive proof of shoplifting, i.e., camera footage. In this case, they'd have to trace back the person's motion through the cameras to when the label was fraudulently placed, a fairly time consuming process. Otherwise, they could get sued.)
For one thing, Randell Mills is a quack. He's been touting his device for the past 10 years, and has yet never gone public with it. He's also been discussed on Slashdot before. Secondly, calculus cannot possibly be wrong. It has been rigorously derived, and just because you don't know or understand the derivations doesn't make them any less true. Finally, quantum electrodynamics is the most successful theory in the history of physics. It has been verified to about 99.996% accuracy (only because our measuring devices cannot do any better than that), and has made extremely accurate, experimentally verified predictions, including (among other things) the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
Tivos have no buttons on them. You have to use the remote to operate it.
Just so people don't get the wrong idea, it's not just quintic polynomials which can't be solved with one formula: it's all polynomials of degree five and higher.
I stand by my statement.
Just so people don't get the wrong idea, it's not just quintic polynomials which can't be solved with one formula: it's all polynomials of degree five and higher. Also, "can't be solved" is something of a misnomer: there exist five solutions to a degree five polynomial, and they can be expressed either as infinite series or in terms of some non-standard functions. It's just that they can't be solved in terms of addition, multiplication, and exponentiation (i.e., using +, *, and radicals).
Amusingly, quite a bit of science in history was done by priests and other church members.
For a nice example of this, look up Georges Lemaitre, also known as Father Georges Lemaitre. His claim to fame is that he created the "hypothesis of the primeval atom," now known as the Big Bang theory.
Tivo's also been able to do it for years. Now, instead of using Tivo.com to do it, you can use Yahoo's listings.
I don't know much about the other two, but I do know that Buffy does have some sci-fi elements in it. For example, in one episode, a high school girl who wasn't noticed by anybody actually became invisible, and the explanation given had to do with quantum mechanics, not the supernatural. Also, at least three robots were made in the series which could actually pass as humans (including one made in the fifties). We can't even get a program to pass the Turing Test, let alone a robot.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to turn in into my own British Bat Cave. Kind of like where a combination of James Bond and Bruce Wayne would live.
Some of those old Looney Tunes episodes are extremely racist. The censoring's not just to protect kids: it's to remove offensive material.
It seems cities should offer a similar rebate to those who bike to work (less traffic impact, less wear and tear on the roads, less pollution), or those who drive cleaner cars (less pollution).
They already do. Most state road systems are paid for through the gasoline tax, which means that if you use less gas (either by driving a hybrid or riding a bicycle), you're automatically not getting taxed as much.
How accurate can that figure really be? China has over a billion people, so 800,000 people is .08% of the population. I don't know of any studies which are that accurate.
So, is the website run by Q? If so, I must say that I'm a little disappointed that my computer doesn't explode when I click on the page three times.
Actually, Tivo units retain some functionality even if you don't have a subscription, contrary to popular belief. You can still get a three-day program guide, record shows manually, and do all of the standard pause/rewind/fast-forward features. Does your VCR have a three-day program guide, with which you can select shows by name (and not by time/channel)? Does it allow you to pause or rewind live TV? Does it allow you to store 80+ hours of manual recordings?
Yeah, we use WebCT, too, and it's terrible. The most annoying things are that (a) they want you to not block pop-ups and (b) it opens up a Java Virtual Machine, though there is no good reason for them to do so. A site that should take a few seconds to visit ends up taking a full minute.