Isn't there a difference in energy between the spin states?
For free electrons there is only an energy difference in the presence of a magnetic field.
For atoms, an energy difference comes about from Zeeman splitting, which can be seen by standard textbook perturbation theory of the hydrogen atom in a magnetic field, where the otherwise degenerate levels split. This Zeeman splitting is how astronomers are able to detect the magnetic fields of astronomic objects.
Can you explain exactly what you are trying to accomplish, and why you think you need a fully polarized set of spins?
I'm confused what you're trying to do. Charging and aligning spins are two separate things. If you have a spintronic charging unit, which is what you're proposing, then you can do that, but such an object is the main point of all this research in the first place.
If you want to send a 100% polarized current of spin-up electrons into your batteries, your batteris will have a horrible coherence time and you'll eventually lose the coherence. Ie, after probably a few seconds any free electrons chosen at random from your battery will have 50% chance of being polarized up or down. Now put that battery in a magnetic field, you'll probably have more electrons of one polarity than another. but if you're not doing anything with spintronic materials or devices, this is entirely useless to you.
If you just want aligned spins, if you took a chunk of iron and cooled it sufficiently and put it in a sufficiently-high field, you can fully polarize that chunk so all the 'free' electrons point in the field direction. Of course most of the inner electrons in the iron atoms will be 'locked' into place, and unchangeable.
Spin is usually called "intrinsic angular momentum". Basically it's an angular momentum that's always present in all elementary particles, and is quantized in units of hbar/2.
Particles with integer spin, such as phonons (spin 0), photons (spin 1), gravitons (spin 2) are called Bosons and obey Bose-Einstein statistics. Any number of bosons can be found in any quantum state, and at low temperatures they can condense into the ground state via Bose-Einstein Condensation.
Particles with half-integer spin, such as electrons, protons, neutrons (all spin 1/2) are called Fermions, and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. This means interchanging two fermions in a system will cause the wavefunction of the system to acquire a factor of negative one. So if two fermions are in the same quantum state, that component of the wavefunction must be equal to it's negative - meaning zero. This is the Pauli Exclusion Principle, meaning no two fermions can ever exist in the same quantum state of a system. This effect has profound impact on physics, accounting for orbital nature of atoms, band structure of semiconductors, etc.
Anyway, back to your question about spin, another aspect of spin is that the allowable spin values must differ by integer units of hbar. So electrons, with total spin of hbar/2 are allowed two states that differ by hbar - +hbar/2 and -hbar/2. Usually the direction is chosen by an applied field, or whatever direction is chosen to measure the electron spin.
Spin is tricky because it isn't simply additive, but follows appropriate group theory. Electrons are part of SU(2) algebra, and spin interactions are weird. For example, you can simultaneously know the total spin (electrons are always hbar/2) and the spin component along one direction (for electrons this could be +hbar/2 and -hbar/2). But you cannot know the x, y, and z components simultaneously, basically because the Pauli matrices don't commute (Heisenberg uncertainty principle). So in actuality a spin-up electron really points somewhere along a cone that mostly points up, but you don't know more than that.
With two electrons, you can simultaneously know EITHER the total spin of the pair AND the total spin projected along one axis, OR you can know the projections of the two independent spins along one axis. If one electron is up and another is down, the system is in a state of 1/sqrt(2) (spin-Zero + spin-One). Also - this means that the two-electron system can exist in a Spin-1 state with the spin in one direction zero, or a Spin-0 also with the spin in one direction zero. Since the two electrons would have an integral number of spin, the system acts like a Boson. This is what allows superconductors, which are mentioned in TFA, to pair up and effectively condense.
Additionally, the spin-zero state of two electronss is very important in quantum communication, quantum teleportation, and quantum computation. This is the state with total spin zero, so no matter what direction you measure one spin, the other spin is aligned opposite.
That's been unsolved for years now, eg the read head in your hard disk uses GMR, which is a spintronic effect.
The wikipedia article is probably referring to the specific ability to make a selective filter to pass/block currents of only a specific spin type. Or to make a transistor to amplify/switch only on a specific spin type. etc.
What's the cheapest device that I, a layman, can buy to set the spin of large amounts of electrons (several coulombs per second) to a certain value?
Here's a semi-serious reply to your obviously tongue-in-cheek question. I'll assume by 'certain value' you mean direction, since the total spin of an electron is fixed to hbar/2.
It depends how many spins you want to align, what percentage of the total number of spins you want to align, and how accurately you want to control the direction the spins are aligned to. In a nutshell a magnet will align the spins, cooling will also align the spins (for ferromagnets and antiferromagnets). doing both will do it faster and give more control. But that adds to the cost.
At absolute zero the slightest applied magnetic field to a paramagnetic system will line the spins entirely along the direction of the applied field.
If you get a ferromagnet, you only need to cool below the curie point and then apply a field to get the spins aligned. You'll need to go to a stronger field than above to overcome the hysteresis, though.
As someone said above, a simple refrigerator magnetic will put out weak-enough fields that will allow you to align several spins, and it will have an effect on coulombs per second if you move it fast enough. Not to high degree of polarization, but enough to attract the magnet to the refrigerator, so that should answer your question.
Spintronics has been around for several years now, this project mentioned is really just one of many research projects, maybe the researcher Janko has friends with PhysOrg, or PhysOrg just picked him out of a hat.
Spintronics also represents one of the quickest transitions from lab to market, next to the transistor via GMR sensors. The hard disk read heads on the hard drives in your computer, if you bought a new disk in the past few years, already incorporates spintronic effects through GMR (Giant MagnetoResistance). Most major media storage and also electronics companies have been heavily investigating spintronics for years too, not to mention a good percentage of condensed-matter physicsists, electrical and materials-science engineers.
Spintronics is also being investigated for quantum computation because the two electron eigenstates in any direction (up / down) can make a good basis for the Zero and One states of a qubit.
But to repeat the hype, spintronics does have potential to revolutionize the electronics industry by offering a whole new degree of freedom to manipulate of the electrons. 'Classical' transistors move/detect/switch charge, adding spin to the picture allows much more flexibility, and probably higher device speeds or data densities. Eg, perhaps microprocessors can go from binary as presence/lack of charge to spintronic up/down charge. Or perhaps even base-4 using presence/absence of both spin up and spin down flavors of electrons.
Oh my! this is quite the story. I'm not quite sure that the lead story quite captures the essence of it though.
Did you RTFA? Apparently it's story enough for Business Week, and they also have a similar lead-in to the article. Here's the first paragraph from TFA:
Will Microsoft's Miss Be Repeated?
The software giant reported sales figures that were short of the mark, and some analysts view its fourth-quarter projections skeptically.
The rest of the article has a fairly critical tone as well.
Now regarding the 160% revenue increase you are excited about, you conveniently neglect to mention this is partly due to them paying significantly more in legal settlement costs last year than this year. Here's a snippet from TFA:
The software giant's earnings were largely in line with expectations. Operating income hit $3.3 billion, up 160%, though those numbers are skewed by legal settlement costs -- $768 million in the most recent quarter, compared to $2.5 billion in the year-ago period. Earnings per share were 23 cents, including 5 cents of legal charges, compared to 12 cents a year ago, including 17 cents in legal charges.
Hmm, $2.5 billion, that's quite a chunk of change there, especially compared to their overall $9.7 billion revenue.
The slashdot writeup uses the wrong terminology, but it's a similar concept. So whoever put the title as 'superfluid' was mistaken and should have written 'perfect fluid'.
A superfluid refers to a viscosity-less fluid. The most common being He4, which is easy to produce, just cool liquid helium down to about 2.2K. This has to do with the quantum interactions between the helium atoms, and is similar but different to a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The He4 atoms have an even number of fermions (two protons, two neutrons, 2 electrons) and act like Bosons. Ie, they aren't restricted to Pauli Exclusion principle, and can all be in the same state.
Another superfluid can come from He3, a rarer isotope of helium. The He3 atoms themselves, now having an odd number of fermions, act like fermions, and obey Pauli Exclusion. However, at cold enough temperatures (a few mK) they can pair together, thereby acting like a Boson, and can also form a superfluid. This is a process fairly similar to the Cooper pairing of two electrons in a superconductor (in the superconductor the normally repulsive electrons are paired through a phonon interchange mediated through the material's lattice).
Now regarding the quark-gluon soup, the physicists are talking about a perfect fluid. I just saw a physics colloquium by one of these researchers a few weeks ago, and unfortunately I don't remember the details. But basically if you take a ratio or some other mathematical function of the viscosity and another hydrodynamic parameter I can't remember, like surface tension or something, in a perfect fluid these approach some standard value such as unity or zero or some such. (this confuses me now because the ratio in question is either zero or infinity if a helium superfluid viscosity is exactly zero, so this is why i am hesitant to say anything definitively about which mathematical function or quantities are measured).
No such perfect fluid is known to exist, and of all known fluids the closest one can come to it is a cryogenic superfluid, which has a value like 4 or 4pi or something like that. All other known fluids have this value substantially larger.
Regarding the quark-plasma soup, I believe the speaker said this wouldn' necessarily display the same properties of a quantum superfluid, maybe not perfect viscosity, I really don't remember exactly. I was trying to talk to him a bit afterwards, but I didn't know enough about the physics of superfluidity to really get into the details.
Because a simple robotic rendezvous with a spacecraft is an entirely different feat than having a robotic rendezvous with HST that includes opening the doors, swapping out old hardware and replacing it with new hardware. It was even harder to do than the astronauts originally intended, at one point they had 5 of the 7 astronauts EVA trying to get the Hubble onto the shuttle arm.
Demonstrate to me that my decade plus of playing wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and so on will compel me to go out and kill someone.
Your case is a sample size of 1, with really only one data point. If we had a clone of you that didn't play the games, then we might be able to do tests to measure how prone you are to anger, etc. Comparing you to before you played these games is pointless because you were younger then, and at a different stage of psychological development.
You apparently believe that a lack of a definitive correlation in only your case implies that any other such study is null and void.
Now would you like to keep talking about sound logic?
I hate to nitpick but your sentence seems to be implying that Lucas makes enjoyable SciFi fare.
You should be more specific. Lucas 1.0 did produce enjoyable SciFi fare, your comment seems to be aimed at Lucas 2.0 (which appears to still be in beta development).
Feel free to substitute as appropriate. For example, Lucas-Cola Classic vs. New Luke, Lucas 6.22 vs Lucas 95, Luke Mini vs. Lucas IIGS, etc etc.
Kids in the Hall (IIRC) had the best idea for an alarm clock, as a fake commercial.
The 'alarm' sound consisted of the most annoying recordings of your mom nagging you in her most obnoxious tone to get out of bed.
But not just that - there was no snooze or power off. The only way to turn it off was to get onto the connected exercise bike that came with a heart monitor. You then had to pedal until your heart rate hit some critical value to turn off the alarm, at which point you wouldn't go back to sleep.
I'm actually wondering if this could work in his favor. Ie, he tells his potential boss that he did something really stupid and has learned his lesson regarding intellectual property.
He was perhaps ignorant before this, maybe growing up sharing warez with friends as second nature and not aware of importance of keeping IP secret. He messed up and learned the hard way. But at least he knows this now. Another random
kid growing up the same way might not have learned the lesson yet.
Plus, this guy would know he'd be suspect #1 if anything happened, so that would make him damn sure not to screw up.
Do Windows users complain that they have the choice to use 2, 3, 4, or higher button mice with their system?
Similarly Mac users have the choice to use 1, 2, 3, 4, or higher button mice with their systems. So if anything Mac gives you more options (unless somebody has successfully used a one-button mouse with Windows???)
Of course your comment is a joke, but regarding the fundamental issue I never really understood why non-Mac users are so horrified by the one-button mouse. If you don't want to use it, then use whatever other mouse you want! It's like having the choice to use a one-button mouse, along with the other options available for Windows systems, is considered a Bad Thing.
If you're quibbling about running multiple monitors, then you shouldn't be looking at the low-cost Mac option anyway. I don't know if it's possible to run multiple monitors on the mini though.
I know somebody that still uss their TRS-80 Model 100 regularly. He uses it to test RS-232 products for advanced defense applications. He claimed this laptop was far more reliable than most other modern laptops that have serial ports.
The article was weak, only the first page dealt with hardware, and that focused primarily on fans and hard drive with brief mentions of case and power supply.
No talk about mobo's, busses, CPUs, etc.
The next 4 pages dealt with tweaking Windows XP, which was useless for me. And the slashdot summary implied half the article was about hardware, what a bunch of crap.
Perhaps the only interesting tidbit in the article was the mention of using ferrite bead chokes on the analog lines, which was interesting to me only as far as it's the first time I've seen any mention of ferrite chokes outside of EE circles.
Only after reading that horrid article did I see it was on a gamers website, so that makes sense why they focus so much time on tweaking XP, but even for the hard-core gamers I'm surprised they didn't talk about more hardware options.
Maybe there are some interesting things in the 4 pages of Windows XP stuff, but for me that article was pretty useless.
For instance, the whole "God created the Earth in seven days." Seven days could mean seven million years, or seven billion years. It's worded in a way that man can understand. Why do people reject Evolution, when it could have been God that kickstarted the whole thing?
Exactly, I've been wondering about that for a long time now.
Look at how hard the church fought the Heliocentric theories, yet there's absolutely nothing in the Bible to claim the Sun is the center of the Solar System. Nowhere, Nothing. It was just that the Church accepted Geocentrism and didn't want to change the status quo.
Similarly there's no reason why creationists (using the silly new term, intelligent design) cannot believe in evolution. In fact, AFAIK, the order that various species were listed as being created in the Bible more or less corresponds to evolution anyway (Land and sea devoid of life came first, then plants, then animals, then man).
I don't understand why creationists think "Intelligent Design" must mean that God created the animals like an artist working with clay. Perhaps it was far more efficient to create single cellular organisms subject to initial boundary conditions, going from asexual to sexual reproduction, that specifically lead to the the ecosphere we have now.
Same with cosmology, some clergy members actively discourage study into the early universe. Why? Doesn't reading the first few sentences of Genesis constitute a study of the early universe (in their framework anyway)? If they adamantly believe in the Bible as truth, then they should encourage scientists to study the big bang to prove them right. It's a leap of faith, the same kind used to encourage others to believe the Bible as truth.
But these religious people tend to not want to take the leap of faith themselves when science is involved, only to encourage others to take the leap to join their religious community.
Luckily not all religious people are this conservative and closed-minded. There are actually quite a few liberal and scientific, yet also religious, people out there.
I would never want to see Firefox reach the level of dominance that Internet Explorer has reacher. Having a 90% market share leads inexorably to the stalling of innovation.
You mean like how Bell Telephone Laboratories, which had a monopoly on US telephony until 1984, didn't have innovative ideas like :
1933 - came up with radio astronomy
1947 - invented the transistor
Development of information theory by Shannon, Nyquist, Hartley, and others
These were all developed during their virtual phone monopoly, and I can hardly imagine any company being more fruitful and having more of an impact than them.
Now I'm definitely not supporting monopolies or claiming there were other problems with their customer service and lack of choice, etc.
But the main point is that not all monopolies have the lack of innovation that Microsoft does, and not all monoplies innovate merely because of the competition.
We will be talking about the victory of Free Software when people understands why Free Software is important, and why proprietary software shouldn't be used, and NOT when some specific piece of Free Software gains marketshare.
I think you are either delusional or over-zealous, and I disagree completely. IMHO it's a definite win for FOSS when users choose a FOSS solution for it's quality instead of choosing it merely because of philosophical/political/religious beliefs.
95% of computer users use their computer as a tool do get stuff done, not as a medium for expousing their philosophical beliefs. For these people, they don't care whether their CPU has 32 or 64 bit instructions, whether it uses the latest lithography process. All that matters is that the hardware works well for them and helps them get the job done as efficiently as possible.
It's the exact same thing with software, most people will never care whether they use FOSS or proprietary software. They'll choose the best solution that makes them the most productive, and that's really the main concept you are missing entirely.
So I completely disagree, because IMHO that is a definite win for open source. It provides the user with best choice for getting the job done. Also IMHO it's even more of a win for FOSS when people choose the package because it's superior in quality, not because it adheres to their political and philosophical beliefs.
Would you say that C++ is a failure because many end users aren't aware that their software was coded in the C++ programming language?
I actually think you're being disingenuous and going against the whole nature of free software / open source by demanding that people care about firefox being "Free Software". If you demand that, then that's just like charging money for using software, except that you're charging a change of political/philosophical beliefs upon the user, which in itself makes the software effectively non-Free, doesn't it?
And finally, I disagree completely that you say propriety software shouldn't be used. WHile years ago I may have agreed, I've since come to realize that some proprietary software packages work amazingly well. I don't mind paying money for decent software as long:
the software plays nicely with others (especially it's competitors)
From Marrion-Webster : SPAM - unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses
From Wikipedia : Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk.
Wikipedia also mentions Blog Spam, which is basically for increasing hits for a higher search engine raiting. That's not my purpose, I don't give a crap about google ratings. My sig is absolutely no different than anybody else's sig that points to a webpage, whether commercial or not. And more specifically my sig points to the conga, which is itself a non-commercial page (although it refers to a commercial page).
Anyway, you cannot in any way claim I'm a spammer. Of all my posts can you find a single one that is unrelated to the thread or article topic? I could understand people being pissed if I butted into unrelated threads just to push the link, but I never once did that. And in fact the only time I ever talked about the offer other than in my sig and journal was in this specific/. article, which is directly related to the offer to begin with.
But more importantly - I'm not sending emails, I'm not invading any sort of space considered "yours" in any way (unlike spammers and telemarketers). Slashdot is a public forum, users have sigs that point to various webpages, mine points to a free mac page. You have come here to slashdot of your own will to join a discussion of which my posts are relevent. And even for non-mac related posts my 120 character sig is no different than any other sig with a link.
Slashdot Mirror
For free electrons there is only an energy difference in the presence of a magnetic field.
For atoms, an energy difference comes about from Zeeman splitting, which can be seen by standard textbook perturbation theory of the hydrogen atom in a magnetic field, where the otherwise degenerate levels split. This Zeeman splitting is how astronomers are able to detect the magnetic fields of astronomic objects.
Can you explain exactly what you are trying to accomplish, and why you think you need a fully polarized set of spins?
If you want to send a 100% polarized current of spin-up electrons into your batteries, your batteris will have a horrible coherence time and you'll eventually lose the coherence. Ie, after probably a few seconds any free electrons chosen at random from your battery will have 50% chance of being polarized up or down. Now put that battery in a magnetic field, you'll probably have more electrons of one polarity than another. but if you're not doing anything with spintronic materials or devices, this is entirely useless to you.
If you just want aligned spins, if you took a chunk of iron and cooled it sufficiently and put it in a sufficiently-high field, you can fully polarize that chunk so all the 'free' electrons point in the field direction. Of course most of the inner electrons in the iron atoms will be 'locked' into place, and unchangeable.
Particles with integer spin, such as phonons (spin 0), photons (spin 1), gravitons (spin 2) are called Bosons and obey Bose-Einstein statistics. Any number of bosons can be found in any quantum state, and at low temperatures they can condense into the ground state via Bose-Einstein Condensation.
Particles with half-integer spin, such as electrons, protons, neutrons (all spin 1/2) are called Fermions, and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. This means interchanging two fermions in a system will cause the wavefunction of the system to acquire a factor of negative one. So if two fermions are in the same quantum state, that component of the wavefunction must be equal to it's negative - meaning zero. This is the Pauli Exclusion Principle, meaning no two fermions can ever exist in the same quantum state of a system. This effect has profound impact on physics, accounting for orbital nature of atoms, band structure of semiconductors, etc.
Anyway, back to your question about spin, another aspect of spin is that the allowable spin values must differ by integer units of hbar. So electrons, with total spin of hbar/2 are allowed two states that differ by hbar - +hbar/2 and -hbar/2. Usually the direction is chosen by an applied field, or whatever direction is chosen to measure the electron spin.
Spin is tricky because it isn't simply additive, but follows appropriate group theory. Electrons are part of SU(2) algebra, and spin interactions are weird. For example, you can simultaneously know the total spin (electrons are always hbar/2) and the spin component along one direction (for electrons this could be +hbar/2 and -hbar/2). But you cannot know the x, y, and z components simultaneously, basically because the Pauli matrices don't commute (Heisenberg uncertainty principle). So in actuality a spin-up electron really points somewhere along a cone that mostly points up, but you don't know more than that.
With two electrons, you can simultaneously know EITHER the total spin of the pair AND the total spin projected along one axis, OR you can know the projections of the two independent spins along one axis. If one electron is up and another is down, the system is in a state of 1/sqrt(2) (spin-Zero + spin-One). Also - this means that the two-electron system can exist in a Spin-1 state with the spin in one direction zero, or a Spin-0 also with the spin in one direction zero. Since the two electrons would have an integral number of spin, the system acts like a Boson. This is what allows superconductors, which are mentioned in TFA, to pair up and effectively condense.
Additionally, the spin-zero state of two electronss is very important in quantum communication, quantum teleportation, and quantum computation. This is the state with total spin zero, so no matter what direction you measure one spin, the other spin is aligned opposite.
The wikipedia article is probably referring to the specific ability to make a selective filter to pass/block currents of only a specific spin type. Or to make a transistor to amplify/switch only on a specific spin type. etc.
Here's a semi-serious reply to your obviously tongue-in-cheek question. I'll assume by 'certain value' you mean direction, since the total spin of an electron is fixed to hbar/2.
It depends how many spins you want to align, what percentage of the total number of spins you want to align, and how accurately you want to control the direction the spins are aligned to. In a nutshell a magnet will align the spins, cooling will also align the spins (for ferromagnets and antiferromagnets). doing both will do it faster and give more control. But that adds to the cost.
At absolute zero the slightest applied magnetic field to a paramagnetic system will line the spins entirely along the direction of the applied field.
If you get a ferromagnet, you only need to cool below the curie point and then apply a field to get the spins aligned. You'll need to go to a stronger field than above to overcome the hysteresis, though.
As someone said above, a simple refrigerator magnetic will put out weak-enough fields that will allow you to align several spins, and it will have an effect on coulombs per second if you move it fast enough. Not to high degree of polarization, but enough to attract the magnet to the refrigerator, so that should answer your question.
Spintronics also represents one of the quickest transitions from lab to market, next to the transistor via GMR sensors. The hard disk read heads on the hard drives in your computer, if you bought a new disk in the past few years, already incorporates spintronic effects through GMR (Giant MagnetoResistance). Most major media storage and also electronics companies have been heavily investigating spintronics for years too, not to mention a good percentage of condensed-matter physicsists, electrical and materials-science engineers.
Spintronics is also being investigated for quantum computation because the two electron eigenstates in any direction (up / down) can make a good basis for the Zero and One states of a qubit.
But to repeat the hype, spintronics does have potential to revolutionize the electronics industry by offering a whole new degree of freedom to manipulate of the electrons. 'Classical' transistors move/detect/switch charge, adding spin to the picture allows much more flexibility, and probably higher device speeds or data densities. Eg, perhaps microprocessors can go from binary as presence/lack of charge to spintronic up/down charge. Or perhaps even base-4 using presence/absence of both spin up and spin down flavors of electrons.
Except you mean 0.9%.
Oh my! this is quite the story. I'm not quite sure that the lead story quite captures the essence of it though.
Did you RTFA? Apparently it's story enough for Business Week, and they also have a similar lead-in to the article. Here's the first paragraph from TFA:
Will Microsoft's Miss Be Repeated? The software giant reported sales figures that were short of the mark, and some analysts view its fourth-quarter projections skeptically.
The rest of the article has a fairly critical tone as well.
Now regarding the 160% revenue increase you are excited about, you conveniently neglect to mention this is partly due to them paying significantly more in legal settlement costs last year than this year. Here's a snippet from TFA:
The software giant's earnings were largely in line with expectations. Operating income hit $3.3 billion, up 160%, though those numbers are skewed by legal settlement costs -- $768 million in the most recent quarter, compared to $2.5 billion in the year-ago period. Earnings per share were 23 cents, including 5 cents of legal charges, compared to 12 cents a year ago, including 17 cents in legal charges.
Hmm, $2.5 billion, that's quite a chunk of change there, especially compared to their overall $9.7 billion revenue.
But it was a nice try at trolling.
A superfluid refers to a viscosity-less fluid. The most common being He4, which is easy to produce, just cool liquid helium down to about 2.2K. This has to do with the quantum interactions between the helium atoms, and is similar but different to a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The He4 atoms have an even number of fermions (two protons, two neutrons, 2 electrons) and act like Bosons. Ie, they aren't restricted to Pauli Exclusion principle, and can all be in the same state.
Another superfluid can come from He3, a rarer isotope of helium. The He3 atoms themselves, now having an odd number of fermions, act like fermions, and obey Pauli Exclusion. However, at cold enough temperatures (a few mK) they can pair together, thereby acting like a Boson, and can also form a superfluid. This is a process fairly similar to the Cooper pairing of two electrons in a superconductor (in the superconductor the normally repulsive electrons are paired through a phonon interchange mediated through the material's lattice).
Now regarding the quark-gluon soup, the physicists are talking about a perfect fluid. I just saw a physics colloquium by one of these researchers a few weeks ago, and unfortunately I don't remember the details. But basically if you take a ratio or some other mathematical function of the viscosity and another hydrodynamic parameter I can't remember, like surface tension or something, in a perfect fluid these approach some standard value such as unity or zero or some such. (this confuses me now because the ratio in question is either zero or infinity if a helium superfluid viscosity is exactly zero, so this is why i am hesitant to say anything definitively about which mathematical function or quantities are measured).
No such perfect fluid is known to exist, and of all known fluids the closest one can come to it is a cryogenic superfluid, which has a value like 4 or 4pi or something like that. All other known fluids have this value substantially larger.
Regarding the quark-plasma soup, I believe the speaker said this wouldn' necessarily display the same properties of a quantum superfluid, maybe not perfect viscosity, I really don't remember exactly. I was trying to talk to him a bit afterwards, but I didn't know enough about the physics of superfluidity to really get into the details.
Because a simple robotic rendezvous with a spacecraft is an entirely different feat than having a robotic rendezvous with HST that includes opening the doors, swapping out old hardware and replacing it with new hardware. It was even harder to do than the astronauts originally intended, at one point they had 5 of the 7 astronauts EVA trying to get the Hubble onto the shuttle arm.
Your case is a sample size of 1, with really only one data point. If we had a clone of you that didn't play the games, then we might be able to do tests to measure how prone you are to anger, etc. Comparing you to before you played these games is pointless because you were younger then, and at a different stage of psychological development.
You apparently believe that a lack of a definitive correlation in only your case implies that any other such study is null and void.
Now would you like to keep talking about sound logic?
You should be more specific. Lucas 1.0 did produce enjoyable SciFi fare, your comment seems to be aimed at Lucas 2.0 (which appears to still be in beta development).
Feel free to substitute as appropriate. For example, Lucas-Cola Classic vs. New Luke, Lucas 6.22 vs Lucas 95, Luke Mini vs. Lucas IIGS, etc etc.
The 'alarm' sound consisted of the most annoying recordings of your mom nagging you in her most obnoxious tone to get out of bed.
But not just that - there was no snooze or power off. The only way to turn it off was to get onto the connected exercise bike that came with a heart monitor. You then had to pedal until your heart rate hit some critical value to turn off the alarm, at which point you wouldn't go back to sleep.
A funny skit, but totally brilliant as well.
He was perhaps ignorant before this, maybe growing up sharing warez with friends as second nature and not aware of importance of keeping IP secret. He messed up and learned the hard way. But at least he knows this now. Another random kid growing up the same way might not have learned the lesson yet.
Plus, this guy would know he'd be suspect #1 if anything happened, so that would make him damn sure not to screw up.
Similarly Mac users have the choice to use 1, 2, 3, 4, or higher button mice with their systems. So if anything Mac gives you more options (unless somebody has successfully used a one-button mouse with Windows???)
Of course your comment is a joke, but regarding the fundamental issue I never really understood why non-Mac users are so horrified by the one-button mouse. If you don't want to use it, then use whatever other mouse you want! It's like having the choice to use a one-button mouse, along with the other options available for Windows systems, is considered a Bad Thing.
If you're quibbling about running multiple monitors, then you shouldn't be looking at the low-cost Mac option anyway. I don't know if it's possible to run multiple monitors on the mini though.
I know somebody that still uss their TRS-80 Model 100 regularly. He uses it to test RS-232 products for advanced defense applications. He claimed this laptop was far more reliable than most other modern laptops that have serial ports.
Perhaps the only interesting tidbit in the article was the mention of using ferrite bead chokes on the analog lines, which was interesting to me only as far as it's the first time I've seen any mention of ferrite chokes outside of EE circles.
Only after reading that horrid article did I see it was on a gamers website, so that makes sense why they focus so much time on tweaking XP, but even for the hard-core gamers I'm surprised they didn't talk about more hardware options.
Maybe there are some interesting things in the 4 pages of Windows XP stuff, but for me that article was pretty useless.
Exactly, I've been wondering about that for a long time now.
Look at how hard the church fought the Heliocentric theories, yet there's absolutely nothing in the Bible to claim the Sun is the center of the Solar System. Nowhere, Nothing. It was just that the Church accepted Geocentrism and didn't want to change the status quo.
Similarly there's no reason why creationists (using the silly new term, intelligent design) cannot believe in evolution. In fact, AFAIK, the order that various species were listed as being created in the Bible more or less corresponds to evolution anyway (Land and sea devoid of life came first, then plants, then animals, then man).
I don't understand why creationists think "Intelligent Design" must mean that God created the animals like an artist working with clay. Perhaps it was far more efficient to create single cellular organisms subject to initial boundary conditions, going from asexual to sexual reproduction, that specifically lead to the the ecosphere we have now.
Same with cosmology, some clergy members actively discourage study into the early universe. Why? Doesn't reading the first few sentences of Genesis constitute a study of the early universe (in their framework anyway)? If they adamantly believe in the Bible as truth, then they should encourage scientists to study the big bang to prove them right. It's a leap of faith, the same kind used to encourage others to believe the Bible as truth.
But these religious people tend to not want to take the leap of faith themselves when science is involved, only to encourage others to take the leap to join their religious community.
Luckily not all religious people are this conservative and closed-minded. There are actually quite a few liberal and scientific, yet also religious, people out there.
Just respond to PETA by saying "Every time a loaf of bread is baked, one million yeast cry out in pain!"
What's the point of Free Software if you claim that one's fundamental reason for using MUST be because of it's license, instead of it's superiority?
No, those people still actively invade a space somewhat considered "yours". You came to slashdot, I didn't go to your space.
My sig is more like someone advertising something on a community bulletin board or kiosk.
You mean like how Bell Telephone Laboratories, which had a monopoly on US telephony until 1984, didn't have innovative ideas like :
- 1933 - came up with radio astronomy
- 1947 - invented the transistor
- Development of information theory by Shannon, Nyquist, Hartley, and others
- Developed UNIX, C, and C++
You can read more here .These were all developed during their virtual phone monopoly, and I can hardly imagine any company being more fruitful and having more of an impact than them.
Now I'm definitely not supporting monopolies or claiming there were other problems with their customer service and lack of choice, etc. But the main point is that not all monopolies have the lack of innovation that Microsoft does, and not all monoplies innovate merely because of the competition.
But this begs the question - would Microsoft still have given IE away for free if they didn't feel the need to drive Netscape out of business?
I think you are either delusional or over-zealous, and I disagree completely. IMHO it's a definite win for FOSS when users choose a FOSS solution for it's quality instead of choosing it merely because of philosophical/political/religious beliefs.
95% of computer users use their computer as a tool do get stuff done, not as a medium for expousing their philosophical beliefs. For these people, they don't care whether their CPU has 32 or 64 bit instructions, whether it uses the latest lithography process. All that matters is that the hardware works well for them and helps them get the job done as efficiently as possible.
It's the exact same thing with software, most people will never care whether they use FOSS or proprietary software. They'll choose the best solution that makes them the most productive, and that's really the main concept you are missing entirely.
So I completely disagree, because IMHO that is a definite win for open source. It provides the user with best choice for getting the job done. Also IMHO it's even more of a win for FOSS when people choose the package because it's superior in quality, not because it adheres to their political and philosophical beliefs.
Would you say that C++ is a failure because many end users aren't aware that their software was coded in the C++ programming language?
I actually think you're being disingenuous and going against the whole nature of free software / open source by demanding that people care about firefox being "Free Software". If you demand that, then that's just like charging money for using software, except that you're charging a change of political/philosophical beliefs upon the user, which in itself makes the software effectively non-Free, doesn't it?
And finally, I disagree completely that you say propriety software shouldn't be used. WHile years ago I may have agreed, I've since come to realize that some proprietary software packages work amazingly well. I don't mind paying money for decent software as long :
Wrong. My sig is an ad, not spam.
From Marrion-Webster : SPAM - unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses
From Wikipedia : Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk.
Wikipedia also mentions Blog Spam, which is basically for increasing hits for a higher search engine raiting. That's not my purpose, I don't give a crap about google ratings. My sig is absolutely no different than anybody else's sig that points to a webpage, whether commercial or not. And more specifically my sig points to the conga, which is itself a non-commercial page (although it refers to a commercial page).
Anyway, you cannot in any way claim I'm a spammer. Of all my posts can you find a single one that is unrelated to the thread or article topic? I could understand people being pissed if I butted into unrelated threads just to push the link, but I never once did that. And in fact the only time I ever talked about the offer other than in my sig and journal was in this specific /. article, which is directly related to the offer to begin with.
But more importantly - I'm not sending emails, I'm not invading any sort of space considered "yours" in any way (unlike spammers and telemarketers). Slashdot is a public forum, users have sigs that point to various webpages, mine points to a free mac page. You have come here to slashdot of your own will to join a discussion of which my posts are relevent. And even for non-mac related posts my 120 character sig is no different than any other sig with a link.