Sorry, what was I not getting? What is so hard about drawing up a big chart that looks a bit like: o | 1 oo | 2 ooo | 3 oooo | 4 skip a few oooooooooo | 10 and so on in more detail than I care to type here? And when drawing so many dots gets really tedious, then so long as you've established the equivalency between symbols in particular parts of the chart you could further hammer it in with [ 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 ][ 1000 ]. Maybe throw in the addition sign if you want. I guarantee you any group of people from the ancient greeks, to egyptians, to the mayans could figure out our numbering system with such a chart, provided they gave a damn enough to try.
Sure, I don't know how to read ancient egyptian numbers, but I just looked it up, and guess what? It's a base ten numbering system. Numbers 1 through 9 are just so many dashes. 10 is a hump, 100 is a spiral, 1,000 is a lotus plant, 10,000 is a finger, 100,000 is a frog, and 1,000,000 is a god-dude. Add up 3 god-dudes, 5 frogs, 1 hump, and 4 dashes and you've got 3,500,014. I didn't need anyone to teach me, just look at the chart and an example number and I'm good to go in a few minutes. It might take someone from ancient egypt a bit more time to learn our numbering system as position is much more important for our system than theirs, but I'm sure they'd catch on eventually.
Explaining numbers from scratch just isn't as hard as explaining language from scratch. Pictogramming notions such as thought, intent, conditionality, verb tenses, parts of speech, etc. gets really frickin' tough. Pictogramming quantities... not so tough. 10 by a pictogram of a cow is equivalent to a pictogram containing ten cows. 10 by a pictogram of a tree is equivalent to a pictogram of ten trees. Ok then, 10 specifies the quantity of an item.
Now maybe future people just wouldn't give a damn about the clock, or be so primitive as to not have developed a notion of numbers beyond [1, 2, 3, 4, a bunch], but that doesn't seem to be your concern. People are damn well going to have a good conception of numbers before they'll be able to look at the position of the sun, moon, and stars and say, "Ah, such an alignment could have only occurred 9,752 years ago."
While I agree there should be some sort of universally decipherable symbols to explain the date it displays, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Numbers - super easy to explain as long as the person has a conception of numbers. A little more elaboration than â 1, ââ 2, âââ 3, and so on might be necessary to make the base-10 system absolutely clear, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Beyond that, it depends on the temporal resolution of the clock. If it includes hours, minutes, and seconds, then the fact that this object is some kind of rhythmic device ticking off regular periods of time would be self evident. If the smallest displayed increment was one year, then the curious observer might not immediately grasp that it is a clock, but if they are intrigued enough to figure out our numerology it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to include some pictograms explaining that each tick corresponds to one year.
I would argue that they shouldn't include months, as our month system is such an arbitrary, irregular subdivision of the year. If they wanted finer division than a year, it seems they should skip straight to the number of days in this year. Pictograms of a day should be pretty easy too.
My bet is on bio-engineered/unnaturally-selected bacteria. Scoop up a ton of landfill junk, dump it in a tank with some water and specialized bacteria. The bacteria get to gorge themselves on all our-uneaten twinkies while producing enzymes that dissolve and then complex all our precious metals into soluble compounds with convenient properties.
Drain off the water, do a little precipitation chemistry to get out your favorite insoluble oxidized metal products, and finally reduce the metals into their metallic form.
Is any of this actually feasible? I dunno, but bacteria can do some pretty nifty things, live in some pretty toxic environments, and are very strongly motivated by the prospect of munching on all our junk food.
This is god's answer for all those people who said hydrogen was just an energy storage mechanism, not a solution to the energy crisis. Look, there's untold millions of barrels of the stuff headed our way!
I won't argue with the fact that tasers are painful...
Not to deny that many people find tasering painful, but I felt like I'd share my personal experience here. When I (voluntarily) got tasered by my friend (for reference, one barb entered near to my nipple and the other just below my belt line), it actually wasn't what I would call a painful sensation. It was certainly uncomfortable, but mostly it was an overpowering wave of de-motivation. I had originally planned to see if I could walk towards my friend while being tasered. I managed to take like 1~1.5 steps while slowly sinking to the floor. It wasn't that I totally lost muscular control or was blinded by pain, but that I no longer felt any impetus to do anything. If the floor had spinning saw-blades everywhere, there might have been enough motive force to keep me standing (although balance might have been difficult with my abs all clenched up), but it's a tough call. Correspondingly, while I wanted it to stop, because it didn't register as strong pain, I might have been able to withold national secrets (as that involves not doing something).
On the other hand my friend dropped like a rock and started screaming "Stop! Stop!" as soon as he got tased, and said it was very painful. In his case the barbs were taped on his bare skin. With me one barb implanted into the skin, but the other, being below my waistline had a harder time penetrating my clothing and just grazed my skin. One thing that does worry me, though, is that my friend wasn't very far away and the spread was roughly 2 feet. If I had been moving around a little, or he had been a bit farther away, a barb very easily could have hit my neck, face, or nuts, all of which sound like very bad options.
I wonder if any of the deaths involved being hit in such non-conventional areas.
I too came to that conclusion in high school. Since time slows to a stop at a singularity (as viewed from an external observer), it seems nothing should ever completely fall into a blackhole, and similarly, the components of a collapsing star should never quite shrink to zero size. Of course, this isn't a rigorous argument, I suppose to be precise you'd really need to look at the rates of change. It's possible this thinking is making a mistake similar to what one finds in Zeno's paradoxes.
If, however, this reasoning is correct, it seems like the most elegant solution to the problem of singularities and event horizons. In no finite amount of time can you generate a singularity, and similarly no information can pass behind an event horizon in a finite amount of time, so why worry about it?
Poopoo on professional physicists if this is true and they'd just never thought of it before.
Is this really that hard of a question? Guys like girls who have some common interests as well as being physically attractive. Ever notice how average Joe's start slobbering when they hear a hot chick likes to drink beer and watch NFL? Same thing with geeks, they dream of hot geeky girls. Now of course it's true most readers will never meet these women, most guys are never going to meet any Victoria's Secret models, but that hardly stops them from talking about how hot they consider them. Furthermore, while model-type women may represent a small percentage of the population, it's no great surprise to see one while out walking. Hot geeky girls, on the other hand, are much more elusive. A geek in a small town could easily go his whole life without meeting a HGG. As a student at a large public university, I've met 0 hot, seriously-geeky girls and a few hot, sorta-geeky girls.
Just knowing such women are out there can be of major importance to a guy. If this kind of response really was the reason so few women are in the industry, it sure would seem to be a vicious-cycle. Scarcity of women -> slobbering response -> greater scarcity, and so on. However, genetic disposition and residual cultural restraints probably have a lot more to do with it.
You might consider investigating your own assumptions before denigrating other people's. The problem really depends on the length of time that you are to keep the object moving. While it's possible you expend more energy starting and stopping than you do fighting air resistance while driving around the city, consider a long drive on the interestate. Does the needle in your fuel gauge drop more while accelerating on the on-ramp or during your two hour cruise?
Giving an object kinetic energy is a one time deal. Fighting air resistance is a continuous process, the amount of energy used is proportional to time spent at that speed. Even the most aerodynamic object will lose more energy to air resistance than to acceleration if it continues at the steady speed long enough.
Furthermore, this isn't just a technicality. Which contribution is more significant actually does change depending on your driving style and circumstances.
Dear god, clearly this man's brain tumor has taken over his brain and is trying to trick the rest of us so that we all get brain tumors too! I urge you all, be careful, especially around anyone who has a lot of cell phone exposure but claims they're perfectly safe. Better yet, refuse to talk to anyone who won't submit to an MRI screening first.
I'm sorry, but this is kind of silly. Sure, figuring out the exact equations to predict how wide/thin the paper must be is a handy piece of work, but being the first person to fold a piece of paper more than n times is just a matter of being the first person to try it on the largest/thinnest piece of paper they can find.
I know when I first heard that challenge, I tried it on a regular piece of paper and couldn't do it, so I moved to a piece of newspaper, and voila, I had already beaten the impossible challenge. I think anybody with a sound grasp of basic physical phenomenon could tell you this challenge is only impossible for limited sizes/thickness of paper.
We know that red meat is unhealthy and is probably just as costly to society in the way of illness and death but when do you expect to pay a tax on Big Macs? The difference? 1 in 6 people in the US smokes, 29 in 30 people in the US eats red meat. (those are rough figures, you get the point).
Somewhat off topic, but really, red meat is not so terrible for you. If you look at the nutrition info per unit weight for lean beef it's one of the best sources of protein around. It also has more iron than chicken. If you choose lean beaf, don't smother it in grease during cooking, and can find good natural (not pumped full of steroids, hormones, and antiobiotics) beef, then you're good to go. The problem with big macs is they're generally low quality meat smothered in grease, and people eat it to excess. Still, a big mac is probably better for you than the box of fries that comes with it (see Supersize Me, the guy who ate two big macs every day but no fries).
In any event, it's not fair to compare red meat to cigarettes. Red meat has significant nutritional value, but some people overdo it and get high cholesterol. Cigarettes offer no nutritional value at any level of consumption.
*Disclaimer: I avidly play ultimate frisbee and lift weights, and will sometimes eat a pound of beef or chicken for dinner.
Interesting, I've come to the exact same conclusion. Why the universe? Why not. "Before it" nothing stopped it from happening. This applies to any internally consistent system. Therefore one can come to the idea that all information exists, which is akin to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Here things get even more interesting. Just as there are uncountably more irrational numbers than there are rational numbers, there should be uncountably more universes/realities with arbitrarily complex laws than with simple, finite laws, and probably says we should therefore be in one of those realities. Look at how physics has progressed, first we had Newton's laws. We were pretty happy with those. Further investigation showed there were small problems with this, so along came Einstein. Then there was quantum mechanics. But now quantum mechanics and relativity don't quite mesh very well, so we're off to explore new theoretical realms. While quantum mechanics and general relativity explain a whole lot, there are still many mysteries. Dark matter, dark energy, the unknown force on the pioneer probes, the unexplainably high energy cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere are all areas from which new physics could seep in. Perhaps our mapping of the rules of the universes is like trying to pin down the value of an irrational number; we keep getting better and better approximations but we still don't have the actual value.
And that's just in physics. While chemistry and biology may be emergent properties of physics, we are still constantly making new findings in these areas too. In any event science and mathematics shouldn't be running out of material any time soon.
Just be cause you can't understand it, it does not mean it is wrong.
I really doubt any/.'ers "can't understand it." Evolution is remarkably simple concept. That's the amazing thing about it, the concept of evolution is smack me in the face obvious. Sure, some of the mechanisms are a bit complex. Mutation and then expression of DNA is not obvious, but why it works is simple. Some expressions of DNA are better suited to their environment, so they stick around more. Throw in the fact that there's always some variation to select from, and voila, you have evolution.
The real problem is people refuse to believe/understand evolution for whatever reason. They come up with supposed proofs for flaws in evolution that really don't prove anything. It's almost like trying to disprove 1 + 1 = 2. Evolution is so basic, so fundamental that you could never really disprove the concept of evolution. The best you can do is show we didn't fully understand the history of evolution (that is, what evolved from what and when it happened, etc.). The history of evolution will never be complete, but the concept of evolution is rock solid.
Easy algorithm for this: Encryption: Computer generates script based on movie, includes all actor's name, stores it in a text file, and zips that. Decryption: Computer interpretes script and generates the movie based on stored voice and body models of the actors.
Think about it, no longer would it be important how well the actor acted, but how good the computer was at interpreting the script. If it was open source, then the Academy Awards could open up a new category for the programmer who made the computer produce the most original interpretations. It's the future man!
Since they are taught nothing but abstinence, those who do have sex don't use protection.
While I agree in sentiment with much of your post, people don't use protection for many, many reasons. The way our culture treats sex is so warped and so confusing it's gonna take a lot more than just telling kids what protection is before people will start being rational about their sexual habits.
Unfortunately when they said "plasmonic" they're talking about plasmons, which are longitudinal waves in the surface electrons of certain metals, not plasma which is another state of matter where all the elements of a gas become ionized.
Yeah, that's all basically correct. I did research on annealing these metal films to try to change their optical properties (we ran into some problems with grain structures in the metal growing during the annealing process).
Most scientifically literate people probably haven't heard of plasmons because they only form when the surface of a metal is milled with a regular array of nanostructures. In this case you have an array of holes on the scale of tens to hundreds of nanometers in diameter. When there's some such repeating nanoscale structure it changes the electron energetics so that the energy to frequency ratio is similar to that of the electromagnetic spectrum, at which point light can couple with the surface electrons and form these longitudinal surface waves (I'm not a physicist yet, so some of this may be a bit shakey).
As the parent said it's these waves that can then travel through the holes milled in the surface out onto the other side, where for some reason or another, they'll reemit the energy stored in them as light. It's pretty cool because they've done tests and the light doesn't just come out of the holes. It's as if the light passes straight through the metal film. Furthermore, they know the light's not simply passing through the film, because they've also measured it and found a very slight delay due to the formation, propagation, and reemission of the plasmons.
The story I heard about the discovery of this phenomenon is kind of amusing. Apparently an English speaking chemist wanted an array of micro wells for some polymer reaction, asked a Chinese chemist if he could do make one. The Chinese chemist thought he was crazy and said it would take six months. Due to the language barrier, the "you're crazy" bit didn't make it through, and six months later the English speaker picked it up looked through it, and said, hey, there's nothing here.
One use they're currently looking into is very specific optical filters which can be built for any wavelength. The grad student I worked with mentioned way down the line the possibility for essentially infinite resolution displays, although how that'd work isn't quite clear.
People had been mentioning executive order's aren't law, etc., but I hadn't seen anybody explain under what context a president could issue them, seeing as they aren't exactly law.
but why does the President have the power to do this? What exactly does it mean for the president to pass an executive order?
I don't remember any "executive orders" in either my highschool American Government or American History classes. Is it just that the article is slightly short on details, and what actually happened is that Bush pressed for a bill to be created, got it through congress, then signed off on it? Or did he something less legally clear? It sure would be nice if this was something the Supreme Court could easily overturn.
Any law/government buffs out there wanna help explain?
but it's not like you can just walk around within N feet of some 'emitter' and the phone will charge.
Sure it is, just in this case N is very very small.:)
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Sorry, what was I not getting? What is so hard about drawing up a big chart that looks a bit like:
o | 1
oo | 2
ooo | 3
oooo | 4
skip a few
oooooooooo | 10
and so on in more detail than I care to type here? And when drawing so many dots gets really tedious, then so long as you've established the equivalency between symbols in particular parts of the chart you could further hammer it in with [ 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 ][ 1000 ]. Maybe throw in the addition sign if you want. I guarantee you any group of people from the ancient greeks, to egyptians, to the mayans could figure out our numbering system with such a chart, provided they gave a damn enough to try.
Sure, I don't know how to read ancient egyptian numbers, but I just looked it up, and guess what? It's a base ten numbering system. Numbers 1 through 9 are just so many dashes. 10 is a hump, 100 is a spiral, 1,000 is a lotus plant, 10,000 is a finger, 100,000 is a frog, and 1,000,000 is a god-dude. Add up 3 god-dudes, 5 frogs, 1 hump, and 4 dashes and you've got 3,500,014. I didn't need anyone to teach me, just look at the chart and an example number and I'm good to go in a few minutes. It might take someone from ancient egypt a bit more time to learn our numbering system as position is much more important for our system than theirs, but I'm sure they'd catch on eventually.
Explaining numbers from scratch just isn't as hard as explaining language from scratch. Pictogramming notions such as thought, intent, conditionality, verb tenses, parts of speech, etc. gets really frickin' tough. Pictogramming quantities... not so tough. 10 by a pictogram of a cow is equivalent to a pictogram containing ten cows. 10 by a pictogram of a tree is equivalent to a pictogram of ten trees. Ok then, 10 specifies the quantity of an item.
Now maybe future people just wouldn't give a damn about the clock, or be so primitive as to not have developed a notion of numbers beyond [1, 2, 3, 4, a bunch], but that doesn't seem to be your concern. People are damn well going to have a good conception of numbers before they'll be able to look at the position of the sun, moon, and stars and say, "Ah, such an alignment could have only occurred 9,752 years ago."
While I agree there should be some sort of universally decipherable symbols to explain the date it displays, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Numbers - super easy to explain as long as the person has a conception of numbers. A little more elaboration than â 1, ââ 2, âââ 3, and so on might be necessary to make the base-10 system absolutely clear, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Beyond that, it depends on the temporal resolution of the clock. If it includes hours, minutes, and seconds, then the fact that this object is some kind of rhythmic device ticking off regular periods of time would be self evident. If the smallest displayed increment was one year, then the curious observer might not immediately grasp that it is a clock, but if they are intrigued enough to figure out our numerology it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to include some pictograms explaining that each tick corresponds to one year.
I would argue that they shouldn't include months, as our month system is such an arbitrary, irregular subdivision of the year. If they wanted finer division than a year, it seems they should skip straight to the number of days in this year. Pictograms of a day should be pretty easy too.
My bet is on bio-engineered/unnaturally-selected bacteria. Scoop up a ton of landfill junk, dump it in a tank with some water and specialized bacteria. The bacteria get to gorge themselves on all our-uneaten twinkies while producing enzymes that dissolve and then complex all our precious metals into soluble compounds with convenient properties.
Drain off the water, do a little precipitation chemistry to get out your favorite insoluble oxidized metal products, and finally reduce the metals into their metallic form.
Is any of this actually feasible? I dunno, but bacteria can do some pretty nifty things, live in some pretty toxic environments, and are very strongly motivated by the prospect of munching on all our junk food.
This is god's answer for all those people who said hydrogen was just an energy storage mechanism, not a solution to the energy crisis. Look, there's untold millions of barrels of the stuff headed our way!
Not to deny that many people find tasering painful, but I felt like I'd share my personal experience here. When I (voluntarily) got tasered by my friend (for reference, one barb entered near to my nipple and the other just below my belt line), it actually wasn't what I would call a painful sensation. It was certainly uncomfortable, but mostly it was an overpowering wave of de-motivation. I had originally planned to see if I could walk towards my friend while being tasered. I managed to take like 1~1.5 steps while slowly sinking to the floor. It wasn't that I totally lost muscular control or was blinded by pain, but that I no longer felt any impetus to do anything. If the floor had spinning saw-blades everywhere, there might have been enough motive force to keep me standing (although balance might have been difficult with my abs all clenched up), but it's a tough call. Correspondingly, while I wanted it to stop, because it didn't register as strong pain, I might have been able to withold national secrets (as that involves not doing something).
On the other hand my friend dropped like a rock and started screaming "Stop! Stop!" as soon as he got tased, and said it was very painful. In his case the barbs were taped on his bare skin. With me one barb implanted into the skin, but the other, being below my waistline had a harder time penetrating my clothing and just grazed my skin. One thing that does worry me, though, is that my friend wasn't very far away and the spread was roughly 2 feet. If I had been moving around a little, or he had been a bit farther away, a barb very easily could have hit my neck, face, or nuts, all of which sound like very bad options.
I wonder if any of the deaths involved being hit in such non-conventional areas.
I too came to that conclusion in high school. Since time slows to a stop at a singularity (as viewed from an external observer), it seems nothing should ever completely fall into a blackhole, and similarly, the components of a collapsing star should never quite shrink to zero size. Of course, this isn't a rigorous argument, I suppose to be precise you'd really need to look at the rates of change. It's possible this thinking is making a mistake similar to what one finds in Zeno's paradoxes.
If, however, this reasoning is correct, it seems like the most elegant solution to the problem of singularities and event horizons. In no finite amount of time can you generate a singularity, and similarly no information can pass behind an event horizon in a finite amount of time, so why worry about it?
Poopoo on professional physicists if this is true and they'd just never thought of it before.
No, but now it goes to eleven. It's one harder.
Is this really that hard of a question? Guys like girls who have some common interests as well as being physically attractive. Ever notice how average Joe's start slobbering when they hear a hot chick likes to drink beer and watch NFL? Same thing with geeks, they dream of hot geeky girls. Now of course it's true most readers will never meet these women, most guys are never going to meet any Victoria's Secret models, but that hardly stops them from talking about how hot they consider them. Furthermore, while model-type women may represent a small percentage of the population, it's no great surprise to see one while out walking. Hot geeky girls, on the other hand, are much more elusive. A geek in a small town could easily go his whole life without meeting a HGG. As a student at a large public university, I've met 0 hot, seriously-geeky girls and a few hot, sorta-geeky girls.
Just knowing such women are out there can be of major importance to a guy. If this kind of response really was the reason so few women are in the industry, it sure would seem to be a vicious-cycle. Scarcity of women -> slobbering response -> greater scarcity, and so on. However, genetic disposition and residual cultural restraints probably have a lot more to do with it.
You might consider investigating your own assumptions before denigrating other people's. The problem really depends on the length of time that you are to keep the object moving. While it's possible you expend more energy starting and stopping than you do fighting air resistance while driving around the city, consider a long drive on the interestate. Does the needle in your fuel gauge drop more while accelerating on the on-ramp or during your two hour cruise?
Giving an object kinetic energy is a one time deal. Fighting air resistance is a continuous process, the amount of energy used is proportional to time spent at that speed. Even the most aerodynamic object will lose more energy to air resistance than to acceleration if it continues at the steady speed long enough.
Furthermore, this isn't just a technicality. Which contribution is more significant actually does change depending on your driving style and circumstances.
Dear god, clearly this man's brain tumor has taken over his brain and is trying to trick the rest of us so that we all get brain tumors too! I urge you all, be careful, especially around anyone who has a lot of cell phone exposure but claims they're perfectly safe. Better yet, refuse to talk to anyone who won't submit to an MRI screening first.
I'm sorry, but this is kind of silly. Sure, figuring out the exact equations to predict how wide/thin the paper must be is a handy piece of work, but being the first person to fold a piece of paper more than n times is just a matter of being the first person to try it on the largest/thinnest piece of paper they can find.
I know when I first heard that challenge, I tried it on a regular piece of paper and couldn't do it, so I moved to a piece of newspaper, and voila, I had already beaten the impossible challenge. I think anybody with a sound grasp of basic physical phenomenon could tell you this challenge is only impossible for limited sizes/thickness of paper.
We know that red meat is unhealthy and is probably just as costly to society in the way of illness and death but when do you expect to pay a tax on Big Macs? The difference? 1 in 6 people in the US smokes, 29 in 30 people in the US eats red meat. (those are rough figures, you get the point).
Somewhat off topic, but really, red meat is not so terrible for you. If you look at the nutrition info per unit weight for lean beef it's one of the best sources of protein around. It also has more iron than chicken. If you choose lean beaf, don't smother it in grease during cooking, and can find good natural (not pumped full of steroids, hormones, and antiobiotics) beef, then you're good to go. The problem with big macs is they're generally low quality meat smothered in grease, and people eat it to excess. Still, a big mac is probably better for you than the box of fries that comes with it (see Supersize Me, the guy who ate two big macs every day but no fries).
In any event, it's not fair to compare red meat to cigarettes. Red meat has significant nutritional value, but some people overdo it and get high cholesterol. Cigarettes offer no nutritional value at any level of consumption.
*Disclaimer: I avidly play ultimate frisbee and lift weights, and will sometimes eat a pound of beef or chicken for dinner.
Interesting, I've come to the exact same conclusion. Why the universe? Why not. "Before it" nothing stopped it from happening. This applies to any internally consistent system. Therefore one can come to the idea that all information exists, which is akin to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Here things get even more interesting. Just as there are uncountably more irrational numbers than there are rational numbers, there should be uncountably more universes/realities with arbitrarily complex laws than with simple, finite laws, and probably says we should therefore be in one of those realities. Look at how physics has progressed, first we had Newton's laws. We were pretty happy with those. Further investigation showed there were small problems with this, so along came Einstein. Then there was quantum mechanics. But now quantum mechanics and relativity don't quite mesh very well, so we're off to explore new theoretical realms. While quantum mechanics and general relativity explain a whole lot, there are still many mysteries. Dark matter, dark energy, the unknown force on the pioneer probes, the unexplainably high energy cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere are all areas from which new physics could seep in. Perhaps our mapping of the rules of the universes is like trying to pin down the value of an irrational number; we keep getting better and better approximations but we still don't have the actual value.
And that's just in physics. While chemistry and biology may be emergent properties of physics, we are still constantly making new findings in these areas too. In any event science and mathematics shouldn't be running out of material any time soon.
I wonder if we've met/discussed before.
Just be cause you can't understand it, it does not mean it is wrong.
/.'ers "can't understand it." Evolution is remarkably simple concept. That's the amazing thing about it, the concept of evolution is smack me in the face obvious. Sure, some of the mechanisms are a bit complex. Mutation and then expression of DNA is not obvious, but why it works is simple. Some expressions of DNA are better suited to their environment, so they stick around more. Throw in the fact that there's always some variation to select from, and voila, you have evolution.
I really doubt any
The real problem is people refuse to believe/understand evolution for whatever reason. They come up with supposed proofs for flaws in evolution that really don't prove anything. It's almost like trying to disprove 1 + 1 = 2. Evolution is so basic, so fundamental that you could never really disprove the concept of evolution. The best you can do is show we didn't fully understand the history of evolution (that is, what evolved from what and when it happened, etc.). The history of evolution will never be complete, but the concept of evolution is rock solid.
Easy algorithm for this:
Encryption: Computer generates script based on movie, includes all actor's name, stores it in a text file, and zips that.
Decryption: Computer interpretes script and generates the movie based on stored voice and body models of the actors.
Think about it, no longer would it be important how well the actor acted, but how good the computer was at interpreting the script. If it was open source, then the Academy Awards could open up a new category for the programmer who made the computer produce the most original interpretations. It's the future man!
Since they are taught nothing but abstinence, those who do have sex don't use protection.
While I agree in sentiment with much of your post, people don't use protection for many, many reasons. The way our culture treats sex is so warped and so confusing it's gonna take a lot more than just telling kids what protection is before people will start being rational about their sexual habits.
Unfortunately when they said "plasmonic" they're talking about plasmons, which are longitudinal waves in the surface electrons of certain metals, not plasma which is another state of matter where all the elements of a gas become ionized.
Yeah, that's all basically correct. I did research on annealing these metal films to try to change their optical properties (we ran into some problems with grain structures in the metal growing during the annealing process).
Most scientifically literate people probably haven't heard of plasmons because they only form when the surface of a metal is milled with a regular array of nanostructures. In this case you have an array of holes on the scale of tens to hundreds of nanometers in diameter. When there's some such repeating nanoscale structure it changes the electron energetics so that the energy to frequency ratio is similar to that of the electromagnetic spectrum, at which point light can couple with the surface electrons and form these longitudinal surface waves (I'm not a physicist yet, so some of this may be a bit shakey).
As the parent said it's these waves that can then travel through the holes milled in the surface out onto the other side, where for some reason or another, they'll reemit the energy stored in them as light. It's pretty cool because they've done tests and the light doesn't just come out of the holes. It's as if the light passes straight through the metal film. Furthermore, they know the light's not simply passing through the film, because they've also measured it and found a very slight delay due to the formation, propagation, and reemission of the plasmons.
The story I heard about the discovery of this phenomenon is kind of amusing. Apparently an English speaking chemist wanted an array of micro wells for some polymer reaction, asked a Chinese chemist if he could do make one. The Chinese chemist thought he was crazy and said it would take six months. Due to the language barrier, the "you're crazy" bit didn't make it through, and six months later the English speaker picked it up looked through it, and said, hey, there's nothing here.
One use they're currently looking into is very specific optical filters which can be built for any wavelength. The grad student I worked with mentioned way down the line the possibility for essentially infinite resolution displays, although how that'd work isn't quite clear.
In some cases porn certainly seems like a sport...
Ok, thanks, that makes sense.
People had been mentioning executive order's aren't law, etc., but I hadn't seen anybody explain under what context a president could issue them, seeing as they aren't exactly law.
but why does the President have the power to do this? What exactly does it mean for the president to pass an executive order?
I don't remember any "executive orders" in either my highschool American Government or American History classes. Is it just that the article is slightly short on details, and what actually happened is that Bush pressed for a bill to be created, got it through congress, then signed off on it? Or did he something less legally clear? It sure would be nice if this was something the Supreme Court could easily overturn.
Any law/government buffs out there wanna help explain?
but it's not like you can just walk around within N feet of some 'emitter' and the phone will charge. Sure it is, just in this case N is very very small. :)