The celebrated Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum theory is based on statistical statements about the coupled standard deviations of position and momentum measurements (for example), not the mean deviation. The mean deviations are assumed to be zero since the means of the position and momentum distributions are exactly known for theoretical work. What matters are the fluctuations about the mean. In fairness, Taleb does allow physicists to keep using STD. But, quantum mechanics aside, it seems characterizing fluctuations about the mean, rather than fluctuations of the mean, is often an important measure depending on the nature of the investigation. Retiring the standard deviation seems a bit hasty.
The submitter, J.L. Tympanum, is clearly some old timer's sockpuppet (low UID, only 3 unmodded non sequitur comments in 5 years, 2 quirky submissions including this one).
NASA has a long history of naming missions and modules after rather arbitrary, but dignified sounding, things. For example, the arts (Apollo Theater, Orson Welles' Mercury theater company, etc.) as well as pseudo-scientific things like signs of the zodiac and crypto-geographic places and cryptozoological creatures. Not to mention South American countries featured in drug-oriented movies, science fiction space ships, and even abstract contestants on a game show. "Colbert" seems pretty consistent with this non sequitur trend.
"In a whimsical abuse of pedigree leading to much undeserved press, two guys who apparently understand neither philosophy nor quantum mechanics mathematically connect two of those fields' major questions in a non-peer reviewed arXiv article and simultaneously solve humanity's deepest ontological questions using a translucent haze of logic."
Here are a doublet of papers for an undergraduate laboratory demonstrating Bell's Inequality and and entangled photons. The whole apparatus (detailed in the second paper) is estimated to cost USD 15k circa 2002, so the optical elements have probably come down in price since then.
1. Entangled photons, nonlocality, and Bell inequalities in the undergraduate
laboratory. [American Journal of Physics 70, 903 (2002)], Dietrich Dehlinger, MW Mitchell. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205171/
2. Entangled photon apparatus for the undergraduate laboratory. [American Journal of
Physics 70, 898 (2002)], Dietrich Dehlinger, MW Mitchell. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205172/
I'm not sure why so much is being made of this '25 Random Things About Me' note on facebook. It is just a variation on an old parlor game that never really "came and went". Some people want to play, others don't. Yes, there are meme-y elements to virtually everything in a culture, but would an invitation to a kegger, superbowl party, LAN party, or a poker game be given such careful meme-y analysis? I'm not saying someone shouldn't analyze those things in this framework, but it seems this '25 Random Things About Me' note is being treated as a wild fad (some kind of canonical meme flash and burn) although it is really no different than some people at a large BBQ deciding to play poker while others play frisbee.
Be advised you are following the same meme cliche cycle by complaining about it. For every annoying decaying, witless in-joke past its glory days, there's someone who has a tired argument to remind us how annoying, witless, and cliche the in-joke really is. And similarly, there's someone like me who will boorishly complain about the complaining about it. And so on. Culture's one big recursive clicheplex. I don't think we can help it.
The paper rotation idea is interesting, but before assuming the moon itself rotated with respect to the earth, wouldn't it just be easier to assume he sketched it at a different time of night at, at a different latitude, and/or different season then used "towards the ground as I'm looking at it" as down in the sketch? The moon's apparent orientation wrt one's line of sight on earth depends on all those things. Perhaps knowing where he sketched it and at what time of year, one could then figure out what time of night he did his work.
The probability of creating a voracious black hole at the LHC is about the same as creating a voracious 1972 Cadillac at the LHC. Indeed, it is about as probable as creating a voracious black hole next to your head right now out of the vacuum. Such doomsday ideas were utterly fabricated nonsense forged in the minds of highly fringe and misguided people. The core ideas of your paper are interesting, but your work is better applied to things that really matter, not the pseudoscience of doomsday at supercolliders. Using the doomsday mania to sex up your work is fear mongering and borders on the unethical. Getting HIV from a handshake, however insanely unlikely, is a billion times more probable than destroying the earth from collisions at the LHC, but you don't seem to have used this example. Why not? Perhaps because it would be unethical to spread such nonsense?
Archive.org is a good idea, but may be causing complacency. The problem is simple: a) they don't keep everything, and b) a lot of people seem to believe they do. That's an archival train wreck waiting to happen. They dynamically change the archive time window even for single sites, and even completely eliminate sites without notice. Besides, long after a site has been archived, a new system admin can block all archive requests (essentially forcing the removal of all archived versions of a site as if it didn't ever exist).
At a public university, the "customer" the university is servicing is not the student, but the state. A student is more an employee to the state than a customer of the university. Even for the ordinary student attending school without any special scholarships and who is not doing any explicit research under any state or federal grants, anywhere between 50-80% of the tuition to keep you in school is payed by taxpayers. That means your education is not for your benefit, but rather the state's. That's why most of the output you produce while in school legally belongs to "the system." The university's intellectual property policy usually reflects this. I think students tend to think of their public education as being mostly their own thing, so forget that they are ultimately accountable to the public. However unfair this may seem, it is pretty much the same anywhere in life. The professors, staff, and administrators are also under the same rules. In addition, in most non-academic private industries the rules are even more strict about whose ideas belong to whom and under under what conditions. All that said, there is a proper legal means for the university to partly own your ideas while still giving you formal credit. People can't just up and plagiarize or steal your ideas and claim them as their own novel work. If you suspect this is happening, you should raise bloody hell. There is a chain of ethical accountability that is maintained in an academic settings. Universities are better than most places in giving credit where credit is due because individualism is generally respected (this does frequently break down, though). This is in contrast to the private industry which doesn't honor that individualism so much.
Everyone mourns in different ways. Laugh, cry, tell jokes, be quiet, scream out, whatever you are compelled to do. However, I don't suggest judging the mourning styles of others.
Science in general isn't about "publishing what is right" but rather creating a network of accountability in the form of methods, ideas, data, procedures, etc. so others can try and reproduce and critique the results. Even if the published results are shown to be incorrect by other studies, this does not mean the system is broken. The scientific process is an iterative, self correcting, one. However, if after many years and many studies, a particular field fails to converge on an accepted baseline conclusions, there is a good chance something is wrong (you may even be doing pseudoscience).
Very creative. But were they going for the Alfred E. Neuman look? Probably should have put the stage below the chin. Still love it. Perhaps more with the missing tooth.
Setting the flyback frequency of your monitor by hand in the video setup of slackware circa 95: add an extra zero and, ah, the peanut-buttery stench of frying capacitors. I guess the smell-based error message movement fell out of fashion a while ago.
Keep in mind that the universities in question are not hurting for students. It is a seller's market. Universities can get upwards of a factor of 10 or more apparently qualified applicants than positions available. With rampant high school grade inflation, easier SAT exams, workshop-crafted personal statements, and letters of recommendations from HS advisors all suggesting nuanced shades of genius for all applicants, universities are not so much seeking qualified people rather than looking for active excuses to throw out applications. Going to the public record, provided online by the students themselves, is a natural place to go. I'm not saying it's right, it is just the nature of that market. Universities should probably be more up-front about their behavior (it might actually have the effect of cleaning-up MySpace). Sure, universities may throw out a few diamonds in the rough this way (the 17 year-old guy with the "College" t-shirt and underwear on his head holding a beer may be a future nobel prize winner in the right environment), but the there is little incentive for the university to worry or care about such things. For every moronic latent genius with bad personal habits, there's another one who appears well-tempered. For an industry where reputation and pedigree is everything, the choice is obvious.
Well put. The theremin, in many ways, is more mysterious than this (by some mysterious definition of "mystery") because it essentially uses the user's body itself as a capacitive element in an RF circuit whereas the iPhone accelerometer is a straightforward (albeit cleverly made) direct mechanical effect. If you don't want a toy, you can get real Moog theremin kits for under $400 or the real thing for under $2k. Nevertheless, I do think this is a clever use of the accelerometer in the iPhone. The real test will be if a composer creates an iPhone Concerto in Em with this new instrument.
Well, at least someone in the store will now actually know something about the merchandise. I mean that, of course, with all due respect to BB and CC (and Apple Store) -- exactly the due respect. The need for special titles for certain employees like "Windows Gurus" and "Apple Geniuses" is just indicating who they should have hired for the sales jobs in the first place. Since when does a hands, on, working knowledge of a topic certify you as a guru or genius? This should be the entry level criteria!
A charmonium ring would be pretty geeky and certainly impress the heck out of her. As the ground state of a charm and anticharm quark bound state, it is also amongst the most expensive materials on the planet, costing perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of person-years to produce mere zeptomoles of the stuff. It not only has a nice moniker with the word "charm" in it, it is also a humble reminder we were once all part of a seething mass of quark-gluon plasma. Never mind the copious radiation that will be emitted as a ring-sized clump of the stuff rapidly decays on her finger. Ok, I'll shut up now. Iridium is definitely a good call.
adding another historic element to a presidential race that has been filled with firsts
Historical, perhaps. But not a first. Geraldine Ferraro anyone? This is "historical" in the sense that she is the second female vice presidential candidate of a major US party (third if you count Nader's VP Jan Pierce in 2004). Also remember, the rest of the world has been doing the "female vice president" thing for a long while.
The difference is that person's frame is non-inertial because it is accelerating (i.e. their velocity vector and speed are changing). Motion is usually best analyzed in an inertial frame (e.g. the fixed frame of the infrastructure).
In the game, GlaDOS says "momentum is conserved through the portal." Assuming our physical system is the character, momentum definitely is not conserved. Neither is energy. The description "the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction" is exactly correct: a textbook example of momentum non-conservation. However, what drives the exciting "flinging" effect, which makes Portal's teleportation so unique, isn't just momentum redirection. It's that you instantly obtain the potential energy of your exit location. This new potential energy can be converted back into kinetic energy, increasing your speed...mix in a little momentum redirection at the portals then wash, rinse, repeat. Although GlaDOS describes the game physics incorrectly, there is a game walkthrough where the programmers do describe it correctly. If you take any physics courses from me, you can expect to see some Portal questions on future quizzes:) Nice article overall.
Definitely enjoyable stuff. Of course, you could just play Portal. Oh, sorry, that's just an ordinary 3D space which happens to be multiply disconnected and topologically unsettling. For more (Euclidian!) 4D visualization tools, here are a couple nice (but old) clips of rotating cubes and tesseracts through higher dimensions. For example, it gives you the (x,y,z) view of a cube then a simultaneous projection of that object in the (w,x) plane where w is a 4th orthogonal direction. It then proceeds to rotate the (w,x) projection in a circle to see what the 3D "shadow" in (x,y,z) space is doing. Rather than getting bigger and smaller (simulating perspective) as it moves back and forth in the 4th direction, the faces are color coded (I personally think this makes it easier to visualize). Run the simulation back and forth slowly a couple times and your brain locks in pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
The celebrated Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum theory is based on statistical statements about the coupled standard deviations of position and momentum measurements (for example), not the mean deviation. The mean deviations are assumed to be zero since the means of the position and momentum distributions are exactly known for theoretical work. What matters are the fluctuations about the mean. In fairness, Taleb does allow physicists to keep using STD. But, quantum mechanics aside, it seems characterizing fluctuations about the mean, rather than fluctuations of the mean, is often an important measure depending on the nature of the investigation. Retiring the standard deviation seems a bit hasty.
The submitter, J.L. Tympanum, is clearly some old timer's sockpuppet (low UID, only 3 unmodded non sequitur comments in 5 years, 2 quirky submissions including this one).
NASA has a long history of naming missions and modules after rather arbitrary, but dignified sounding, things. For example, the arts (Apollo Theater, Orson Welles' Mercury theater company, etc.) as well as pseudo-scientific things like signs of the zodiac and crypto-geographic places and cryptozoological creatures. Not to mention South American countries featured in drug-oriented movies, science fiction space ships, and even abstract contestants on a game show. "Colbert" seems pretty consistent with this non sequitur trend.
"In a whimsical abuse of pedigree leading to much undeserved press, two guys who apparently understand neither philosophy nor quantum mechanics mathematically connect two of those fields' major questions in a non-peer reviewed arXiv article and simultaneously solve humanity's deepest ontological questions using a translucent haze of logic."
Here are a doublet of papers for an undergraduate laboratory demonstrating Bell's Inequality and and entangled photons. The whole apparatus (detailed in the second paper) is estimated to cost USD 15k circa 2002, so the optical elements have probably come down in price since then.
1. Entangled photons, nonlocality, and Bell inequalities in the undergraduate laboratory. [American Journal of Physics 70, 903 (2002)], Dietrich Dehlinger, MW Mitchell. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205171/
2. Entangled photon apparatus for the undergraduate laboratory. [American Journal of Physics 70, 898 (2002)], Dietrich Dehlinger, MW Mitchell. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205172/
I'm not sure why so much is being made of this '25 Random Things About Me' note on facebook. It is just a variation on an old parlor game that never really "came and went". Some people want to play, others don't. Yes, there are meme-y elements to virtually everything in a culture, but would an invitation to a kegger, superbowl party, LAN party, or a poker game be given such careful meme-y analysis? I'm not saying someone shouldn't analyze those things in this framework, but it seems this '25 Random Things About Me' note is being treated as a wild fad (some kind of canonical meme flash and burn) although it is really no different than some people at a large BBQ deciding to play poker while others play frisbee.
Be advised you are following the same meme cliche cycle by complaining about it. For every annoying decaying, witless in-joke past its glory days, there's someone who has a tired argument to remind us how annoying, witless, and cliche the in-joke really is. And similarly, there's someone like me who will boorishly complain about the complaining about it. And so on. Culture's one big recursive clicheplex. I don't think we can help it.
How did microsoft get around the embargo?
They aren't a company, man. They're their own frickn' weather system. They just need the coriolis force the tell them which way to spin.
The paper rotation idea is interesting, but before assuming the moon itself rotated with respect to the earth, wouldn't it just be easier to assume he sketched it at a different time of night at, at a different latitude, and/or different season then used "towards the ground as I'm looking at it" as down in the sketch? The moon's apparent orientation wrt one's line of sight on earth depends on all those things. Perhaps knowing where he sketched it and at what time of year, one could then figure out what time of night he did his work.
The probability of creating a voracious black hole at the LHC is about the same as creating a voracious 1972 Cadillac at the LHC. Indeed, it is about as probable as creating a voracious black hole next to your head right now out of the vacuum. Such doomsday ideas were utterly fabricated nonsense forged in the minds of highly fringe and misguided people. The core ideas of your paper are interesting, but your work is better applied to things that really matter, not the pseudoscience of doomsday at supercolliders. Using the doomsday mania to sex up your work is fear mongering and borders on the unethical. Getting HIV from a handshake, however insanely unlikely, is a billion times more probable than destroying the earth from collisions at the LHC, but you don't seem to have used this example. Why not? Perhaps because it would be unethical to spread such nonsense?
Archive.org is a good idea, but may be causing complacency. The problem is simple: a) they don't keep everything, and b) a lot of people seem to believe they do. That's an archival train wreck waiting to happen. They dynamically change the archive time window even for single sites, and even completely eliminate sites without notice. Besides, long after a site has been archived, a new system admin can block all archive requests (essentially forcing the removal of all archived versions of a site as if it didn't ever exist).
At a public university, the "customer" the university is servicing is not the student, but the state. A student is more an employee to the state than a customer of the university. Even for the ordinary student attending school without any special scholarships and who is not doing any explicit research under any state or federal grants, anywhere between 50-80% of the tuition to keep you in school is payed by taxpayers. That means your education is not for your benefit, but rather the state's. That's why most of the output you produce while in school legally belongs to "the system." The university's intellectual property policy usually reflects this. I think students tend to think of their public education as being mostly their own thing, so forget that they are ultimately accountable to the public. However unfair this may seem, it is pretty much the same anywhere in life. The professors, staff, and administrators are also under the same rules. In addition, in most non-academic private industries the rules are even more strict about whose ideas belong to whom and under under what conditions. All that said, there is a proper legal means for the university to partly own your ideas while still giving you formal credit. People can't just up and plagiarize or steal your ideas and claim them as their own novel work. If you suspect this is happening, you should raise bloody hell. There is a chain of ethical accountability that is maintained in an academic settings. Universities are better than most places in giving credit where credit is due because individualism is generally respected (this does frequently break down, though). This is in contrast to the private industry which doesn't honor that individualism so much.
and try to reduce your cesium footprint. I know I'll do my part. Happy New Year.
Everyone mourns in different ways. Laugh, cry, tell jokes, be quiet, scream out, whatever you are compelled to do. However, I don't suggest judging the mourning styles of others.
Science in general isn't about "publishing what is right" but rather creating a network of accountability in the form of methods, ideas, data, procedures, etc. so others can try and reproduce and critique the results. Even if the published results are shown to be incorrect by other studies, this does not mean the system is broken. The scientific process is an iterative, self correcting, one. However, if after many years and many studies, a particular field fails to converge on an accepted baseline conclusions, there is a good chance something is wrong (you may even be doing pseudoscience).
Very creative. But were they going for the Alfred E. Neuman look? Probably should have put the stage below the chin. Still love it. Perhaps more with the missing tooth.
Setting the flyback frequency of your monitor by hand in the video setup of slackware circa 95: add an extra zero and, ah, the peanut-buttery stench of frying capacitors. I guess the smell-based error message movement fell out of fashion a while ago.
Keep in mind that the universities in question are not hurting for students. It is a seller's market. Universities can get upwards of a factor of 10 or more apparently qualified applicants than positions available. With rampant high school grade inflation, easier SAT exams, workshop-crafted personal statements, and letters of recommendations from HS advisors all suggesting nuanced shades of genius for all applicants, universities are not so much seeking qualified people rather than looking for active excuses to throw out applications. Going to the public record, provided online by the students themselves, is a natural place to go. I'm not saying it's right, it is just the nature of that market. Universities should probably be more up-front about their behavior (it might actually have the effect of cleaning-up MySpace). Sure, universities may throw out a few diamonds in the rough this way (the 17 year-old guy with the "College" t-shirt and underwear on his head holding a beer may be a future nobel prize winner in the right environment), but the there is little incentive for the university to worry or care about such things. For every moronic latent genius with bad personal habits, there's another one who appears well-tempered. For an industry where reputation and pedigree is everything, the choice is obvious.
Well put. The theremin, in many ways, is more mysterious than this (by some mysterious definition of "mystery") because it essentially uses the user's body itself as a capacitive element in an RF circuit whereas the iPhone accelerometer is a straightforward (albeit cleverly made) direct mechanical effect. If you don't want a toy, you can get real Moog theremin kits for under $400 or the real thing for under $2k. Nevertheless, I do think this is a clever use of the accelerometer in the iPhone. The real test will be if a composer creates an iPhone Concerto in Em with this new instrument.
Well, at least someone in the store will now actually know something about the merchandise. I mean that, of course, with all due respect to BB and CC (and Apple Store) -- exactly the due respect. The need for special titles for certain employees like "Windows Gurus" and "Apple Geniuses" is just indicating who they should have hired for the sales jobs in the first place. Since when does a hands, on, working knowledge of a topic certify you as a guru or genius? This should be the entry level criteria!
A charmonium ring would be pretty geeky and certainly impress the heck out of her. As the ground state of a charm and anticharm quark bound state, it is also amongst the most expensive materials on the planet, costing perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of person-years to produce mere zeptomoles of the stuff. It not only has a nice moniker with the word "charm" in it, it is also a humble reminder we were once all part of a seething mass of quark-gluon plasma. Never mind the copious radiation that will be emitted as a ring-sized clump of the stuff rapidly decays on her finger. Ok, I'll shut up now. Iridium is definitely a good call.
adding another historic element to a presidential race that has been filled with firsts
Historical, perhaps. But not a first. Geraldine Ferraro anyone? This is "historical" in the sense that she is the second female vice presidential candidate of a major US party (third if you count Nader's VP Jan Pierce in 2004). Also remember, the rest of the world has been doing the "female vice president" thing for a long while.
The difference is that person's frame is non-inertial because it is accelerating (i.e. their velocity vector and speed are changing). Motion is usually best analyzed in an inertial frame (e.g. the fixed frame of the infrastructure).
In the game, GlaDOS says "momentum is conserved through the portal." Assuming our physical system is the character, momentum definitely is not conserved. Neither is energy. The description "the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction" is exactly correct: a textbook example of momentum non-conservation. However, what drives the exciting "flinging" effect, which makes Portal's teleportation so unique, isn't just momentum redirection. It's that you instantly obtain the potential energy of your exit location. This new potential energy can be converted back into kinetic energy, increasing your speed...mix in a little momentum redirection at the portals then wash, rinse, repeat. Although GlaDOS describes the game physics incorrectly, there is a game walkthrough where the programmers do describe it correctly. If you take any physics courses from me, you can expect to see some Portal questions on future quizzes :) Nice article overall.
Definitely enjoyable stuff. Of course, you could just play Portal. Oh, sorry, that's just an ordinary 3D space which happens to be multiply disconnected and topologically unsettling. For more (Euclidian!) 4D visualization tools, here are a couple nice (but old) clips of rotating cubes and tesseracts through higher dimensions. For example, it gives you the (x,y,z) view of a cube then a simultaneous projection of that object in the (w,x) plane where w is a 4th orthogonal direction. It then proceeds to rotate the (w,x) projection in a circle to see what the 3D "shadow" in (x,y,z) space is doing. Rather than getting bigger and smaller (simulating perspective) as it moves back and forth in the 4th direction, the faces are color coded (I personally think this makes it easier to visualize). Run the simulation back and forth slowly a couple times and your brain locks in pretty well.