Good post, though I don't live in the US, but in the Finland where we've got a possibly worse government, but in different ways.
One major cause for all the corruption may be your constitution which places too much power in the hands of a single person, the president.
Whenever you've got a single person controlling too many things, you've got more possibilities for corruption..
Where I live the politicians are overall even sillier than in the US, but we've got possibly less corruption because the voters effectively get way more influence in who will ultimately be made ministers. With us, the members of the "house of representatives" effectively choose the ministers from among themselves. They will usually be people who have got a lot of votes themselves, though not always..
It may be that IQ only measures intelligence of the Intuitive / Thinking type (as in Myers-Briggs personality types), whereas Emotional Intelligence (F) is more useful for understanding how/why people act the way they do and Sensing (S) intelligence is more grounded in the "present", it's a faster type of intelligence in some way and speed is essential for seduction.
..Because Sony has so much more cash to throw into optimizing the CPU architecture and the production process. It is difficult to imagine a better "physics processing unit" than the Cell. It would be possible to implement specialized hardware for a set of common processing tasks, but then you'd lose the versatility that a fully programmable design has..It's a bit different from 3D graphics where almost the only thing that matters is drawing textured polygons. Physics simulation tasks are more varied.
It is the space of functions f(x) with df(x)/dx = 0. This means that f(x) = c. The dimension of the space of functions f(x) = c for some c is 1-dimensional.
This is an attempt to write a simplified introduction, which hopefully doesn't contain too many outright errors. The errors may be due to both oversimplification and the fact that I am only studying this subject myself, so corrections are welcome.
The Atiyah-Singer index theorem provides a link between algebraic topology, the study of 'large-scale', structural properties of manifolds, and advanced calculus on manifolds. So in order to precisely understand what the theorem states, some background in those two areas is essential. But I'll try to give some examples of the concepts that it deals with.
The index of a differential operator A is the difference dim (ker A) - dim (coker A), where dim means dimension, ker A means the kernel of A, and coker means the cokernel of A. The kernel and cokernel are somewhat analogous to their meanings in linear algebra, for an n x n square matrix A, just as differential operators and matrices have many analogous properties. In linear algebra the kernel is also sometimes known as nullspace, the space of vectors x with A x = 0. The cokernel is slightly more involved. For a matrix A, it is the orthogonal complement of its range, the space of y such that A x = y for some x. With some linear algebra you can prove that for an n x n matrix A, dim (ker A) - dim (coker A) = 0.
But with differential operators it is more complex. To take an example of the real line, R, and the differential operator d/dx, the kernel clearly has dimension one, whereas the cokernel has dimension zero, which is rather easy to see intuitively, but could require some work to prove carefully, I'm not sure. Anyway, the Atiyah-Singer index theorem deals instead with multidimensional differential operators, and pseudodifferential operators instead of differential operators. The pseudodifferential operators are a superset of differential operators, defined via Fourier analysis.
I don't know how the topological side could be illustrated that well...The topological invariants that appear on the other side of the theorem are in some ways similar to describing the deformation invariant structure of a manifold by counting holes on it, but the topology that the index theorem deals with is vastly more general and powerful and doesn't necessarily have much to do with holes anymore.
The index theorem has been used for example in particle physics where the topology of the spacetime manifold can be used to obtain information about the Dirac operator for fermions, which is an elliptic (pseudo)differential operator, the operator class that the index theorem deals with.
There is a good book by Booss and Blecker on the subject: "Topology and Analysis: the Atiyah-Singer Index Formula and Gauge-Theoretic Physics ", geared toward physical applications. Too Amazon doesn't seem to have it. "Spin geometry" by Lawson and Michelsohn is also pretty good. I am reading those two books at the moment..
It has been proved that general relativity permits spacetimes with "closed timelike curves", essentially time travel. This was done by Kurt Gödel when he was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study and met Einstein there.
And it has also been theorized by other physicists that a rapidly rotating object could distort spacetime enough to permit time travel. Light circling in a ring is essentially similar.
Of course this is a phenomenon, where general relativity might not work correctly at all, so this will really be an interesting test for general relativity if he can make it work..I think it's pretty unlikely that he will be able to generate a light beam that is intense enough to bend spacetime that much.
In some scifi novel there was an idea about terraforming Venus with a strain of bacteria / fungi, which might be capable of reversing the really massive greenhouse effect.
I don't remember which novel it was, and whether this could be at all possible in practice.
The mathematical theory of noncommutative geometry has been used to model the quantum Hall effect. Alain Connes has written a good book about this, called "Noncommutative geometry". It is pretty abstract mathematics, and you'll need some knowledge of functional analysis and abstract algebra before digging into it. I won't try to describe it here, because actually I haven't yet studied it very much myself!
By the way, another candidate for a theory of quantum gravity besides superstring theory is the so-called canonical formulation of general relativity, which can be used as a basis for quantization. Much information on this line of research can be found for example at John Baez' web page.
If they just measure the "context switch time",
that doesn't necessarily tell anything about the total productivity. It might be that a multitasking person is able to work relatively more efficiently on his tasks so that the penalty of the context switches doesn't really matter.
You can also think of the brain as a massively parallel computer. At least when I am studying math and physics it is much more efficient to study many things at the same time. And in programming too I find it much more efficient to
just move to a different section of the code whenever I get stuck.
Steganography is the art of embedding messages into other data so that it becomes difficult for the intercepting party to _detect_ whether there is an embedded message. For example, you might embed a message into the background noise of a digitized photograph. Of course it is a lot more trouble than just passing the message through PGP, but this kind of techniques could be one way of making the big brother's work a bit more difficult.
This is a regular book, not in the Internet, but I found it pretty easy to read and informative:
Understanding DNA and Gene Cloning - A Guide for the Curious, by Karl Drlica
It does not require much knowledge of biology, and it is probably quite accessible for the average Slashdot reader. It is still scientifically substantial, though, and I found it very helpful in learning to understand biology better.
You said that the mass of the WIMP:s is predicted to be from 52 to 134 GeV. Wouldn't that make them detectable by the LHC, which will be able to reach energies of 1 TeV?
Have you ever experienced 'synchronizity', or guidance of Holy Spirit, or a mysterious feeling that the universe is in a conspiracy on your behalf? If you only know physics on the non-quantum - level, you can easily dismiss such feelings. After all, what is the point of any physical laws if they are constantly being bent (even for your good)? But quantum mechanics shows that the physical machinery that runs our world is deeply mysterious. The physicist Richard Feynman once commented: 'I think I can safely say that no-one understands quantum mechanics'.
With a quantum mechanical picture of physics there is definitely room for more beliefs.
What if sometimes whether an atomic nucleus decays now or a nanosecond earlier is not random in a chaotic way, but rather happens because the Creator thinks it would be good? - Or what if sometimes the exact time a dendrite fires in your brain could sometimes be not truly random, if you choose to invite it?
I certainly find it somehow comforting that in the end faith in the Creator sometimes guiding you can not be objected against on physical grounds.
Well, I know about 5 people who have used acid without problems. Then there was one person who had manic-depressive tendencies after trying LSD. But that person probably had the mental problems in him even before trying LSD. I share the opinion of many other psychonauts that most mental problems associated with LSD are problems that are already there in some form before the LSD trip, but which 'surface' during the trip. Doing LSD is definitely not a very wise thing to do, but it can be a lot of fun as well:-)
Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that the path of light, and any electromagnetic radiation, is affected by gravitation just as everything else. Because gravity affects completely _everything_ completely uniformly, unlike any other force, it causes all sorts of interesting effects. Imagine that the entire earth was suddenly subjected to a strong uniform gravity field (Well, this is just an example!). Without looking at the sky, You would have no way of sensing the gravity field, because it would affect everything you see in the same way.
An often-used analogy about general relativity is that of an ant moving on the surface of an apple. Even if the ant moves 'straight' on the surface of the apple in the 2-dimensional sense, its path still curves when looked in 3 dimensions.
So in general relativity you can think of objects as traveling 'straight' if no force but gravity acts on them. Then you can work out the trajectories of particles much as you would work out the path of the imaginary ant as it explores the apple.
In general relativity you can think of a ball that you throw on the surface of earth as traveling 'straight' just as light travels 'straight', only in a different 'direction', because they move at different velocities.
General relativity predicts interesting (and experimentally verified) things, for example that time will pass very slightly (10^-10 or something like that) slower on the surface of earth than outside earth's gravity field. You can work this out by considering a light ray that is emitted from the surface of earth far into the space. As the light ray climbs its way up the gravity field, its frequency will get slightly lower, because it has to do work to move against the gravity. But you can also think of the light ray as moving 'straight'. Therefore, when the person far in space measures that a light ray, which has moved straight, has a lower frequency than when it was emitted, he must conclude that time moved slower where it was sent.:-)
Now, back to cosmology. Because the universe contains lots of matter, you would expect that 2 light rays, which are emitted in parallel some distance from each other, would eventually cross each other, because there will probably be some matter _between them_ on their path, which will pull them closer together.
But this seems to not be the case, which is unexpected and kind of beautiful! There is a 'cosmological constant' or something, which pushes the light rays apart from each other so that they indeed move 'straight'
Well, hope that helped, professional physicists, feel free to correct me...
Well, the third (or whichever) law of thermodynamics doesn't really say anything about gravitation. It just says that entropy tends to increase. Entropy is a measure of the number of ways in which a system can be so that it looks the same. For example, if you have a ball on a table, the ball will have some (gravitational) potential energy with respect to the floor. When the ball falls from the table it will eventually come to rest on the floor. The potential energy has changed into heat, which is highly unordered kinetic energy of molecules. So the energy has changed into a form in which it can be in more states. It is extremely unlikely, in _practice_ impossible, that the molecules would suddenly start bumping back into each other so that the ball would start jumping higher and higher off the floor and back on the table.
Hmm, in cosmic inflation (I think), a cosmological constant, which would push things apart from each other would not decrease entropy, because there are more ways in which things can be separate from each other than close to each other. Imagine you are eating a bag of candy on a space station in zero gravity. If you accidentally tear the bag apart, the candy will randomly wander into all possible directions and it is unlikely that it will go back into the bag again.
So entropy is only a measure of the probability of different things happening, and in a way thermodynamics just says that the most probable things are likely to happen.
Yeah, I don't know anything about drivers, but you'd think that Linux and FreeBSD were 'similar' enough operating systems so that if the Linux driver code is open source, it wouldn't be that much work to port to FreeBSD..?
Slashdot Mirror
Good post, though I don't live in the US, but in the Finland where we've got a possibly worse government, but in different ways.
One major cause for all the corruption may be your constitution which places too much power in the hands of a single person, the president.
Whenever you've got a single person controlling too many things, you've got more possibilities for corruption..
Where I live the politicians are overall even sillier than in the US, but we've got possibly less corruption because the voters effectively get way more influence in who will ultimately be made ministers. With us, the members of the "house of representatives" effectively choose the ministers from among themselves. They will usually be people who have got a lot of votes themselves, though not always..
It may be that IQ only measures intelligence of the Intuitive / Thinking type (as in Myers-Briggs personality types), whereas Emotional Intelligence (F) is more useful for understanding how/why people act the way they do and Sensing (S) intelligence is more grounded in the "present", it's a faster type of intelligence in some way and speed is essential for seduction.
Mandriva 10.0 installer crashes on my laptop, Mandriva 10.1 does the same thing.
..Because Sony has so much more cash to throw into optimizing the CPU architecture and the production process. It is difficult to imagine a better "physics processing unit" than the Cell. It would be possible to implement specialized hardware for a set of common processing tasks, but then you'd lose the versatility that a fully programmable design has..It's a bit different from 3D graphics where almost the only thing that matters is drawing textured polygons. Physics simulation tasks are more varied.
Yeah, I guess that's true, it was probably not a very good example...
Heh ok, what is the kernel of d/dx?
It is the space of functions f(x) with df(x)/dx = 0. This means that f(x) = c. The dimension of the space of functions f(x) = c for some c is 1-dimensional.
This is an attempt to write a simplified introduction, which hopefully doesn't contain too many outright errors. The errors may be due to both oversimplification and the fact that I am only studying this subject myself, so corrections are welcome.
The Atiyah-Singer index theorem provides a link between algebraic topology, the study of 'large-scale', structural properties of manifolds, and advanced calculus on manifolds. So in order to precisely understand what the theorem states, some background in those two areas is essential. But I'll try to give some examples of the concepts that it deals with.
The index of a differential operator A is the difference dim (ker A) - dim (coker A), where dim means dimension, ker A means the kernel of A, and coker means the cokernel of A. The kernel and cokernel are somewhat analogous to their meanings in linear algebra, for an n x n square matrix A, just as differential operators and matrices have many analogous properties. In linear algebra the kernel is also sometimes known as nullspace, the space of vectors x with A x = 0. The cokernel is slightly more involved. For a matrix A, it is the orthogonal complement of its range, the space of y such that A x = y for some x. With some linear algebra you can prove that for an n x n matrix A, dim (ker A) - dim (coker A) = 0.
But with differential operators it is more complex. To take an example of the real line, R, and the differential operator d/dx, the kernel clearly has dimension one, whereas the cokernel has dimension zero, which is rather easy to see intuitively, but could require some work to prove carefully, I'm not sure. Anyway, the Atiyah-Singer index theorem deals instead with multidimensional differential operators, and pseudodifferential operators instead of differential operators. The pseudodifferential operators are a superset of differential operators, defined via Fourier analysis.
I don't know how the topological side could be illustrated that well...The topological invariants that appear on the other side of the theorem are in some ways similar to describing the deformation invariant structure of a manifold by counting holes on it, but the topology that the index theorem deals with is vastly more general and powerful and doesn't necessarily have much to do with holes anymore.
The index theorem has been used for example in particle physics where the topology of the spacetime manifold can be used to obtain information about the Dirac operator for fermions, which is an elliptic (pseudo)differential operator, the operator class that the index theorem deals with.
There is a good book by Booss and Blecker on the subject: "Topology and Analysis: the Atiyah-Singer Index Formula and Gauge-Theoretic Physics
", geared toward physical applications. Too Amazon doesn't seem to have it. "Spin geometry" by Lawson and Michelsohn is also pretty good. I am reading those two books at the moment..
spacetimes with "closed timelike curves", essentially time travel. This was done by Kurt Gödel when he was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study and met Einstein there.
And it has also been theorized by other physicists that a rapidly rotating object could distort spacetime enough to permit time travel. Light circling in a ring is essentially similar.
Of course this is a phenomenon, where general relativity might not work correctly at all,
so this will really be an interesting test for general relativity if he can make it work..I think it's pretty unlikely that he will be able to generate a light beam that is intense enough to bend spacetime that much.
I don't remember which novel it was, and whether this could be at all possible in practice.
By the way, they are also looking for people to do some mathematical parallel programming on a
..when you think about all the problems that a possibility for some people to become immortal would cause.
By the way, another candidate for a theory of quantum gravity besides superstring theory is the so-called canonical formulation of general relativity, which can be used as a basis for quantization. Much information on this line of research can be found for example at John Baez' web page.
Ha, fun to speak of humans in this manner :)
I guess this too varies from person to person..
--
Abelson and Sussman : Structure and interpretation of computer programs.
Based on the LISP language. Insanely elegant. Used as an introductory programming textbook in MIT and many other places.
--
Press, Teukolsky, Vetterling, Flannery: Numerical recipes in C
An excellent book on numerical computing.
Steganography is the art of embedding messages into other data so that it becomes difficult for the intercepting party to _detect_ whether there is an embedded message. For example, you might embed a message into the background noise of a digitized photograph. Of course it is a lot more trouble than just passing the message through PGP, but this kind of techniques could be one way of making the big brother's work a bit more difficult.
Understanding DNA and Gene Cloning - A Guide for the Curious, by Karl Drlica
It does not require much knowledge of biology, and it is probably quite accessible for the average Slashdot reader. It is still scientifically substantial, though, and I found it very helpful in learning to understand biology better.
You said that the mass of the WIMP:s is predicted to be from 52 to 134 GeV. Wouldn't that make them detectable by the LHC, which will be able to reach energies of 1 TeV?
With a quantum mechanical picture of physics there is definitely room for more beliefs.
What if sometimes whether an atomic nucleus decays now or a nanosecond earlier is not random in a chaotic way, but rather happens because the Creator thinks it would be good? - Or what if sometimes the exact time a dendrite fires in your brain could sometimes be not truly random, if you choose to invite it?
I certainly find it somehow comforting that in the end faith in the Creator sometimes guiding you can not be objected against on physical grounds.
Well, I know about 5 people who have used acid without problems. Then there was one person who had manic-depressive tendencies after trying LSD. But that person probably had the mental problems in him even before trying LSD. I share the opinion of many other psychonauts that most mental problems associated with LSD are problems that are already there in some form before the LSD trip, but which 'surface' during the trip. Doing LSD is definitely not a very wise thing to do, but it can be a lot of fun as well:-)
An often-used analogy about general relativity is that of an ant moving on the surface of an apple. Even if the ant moves 'straight' on the surface of the apple in the 2-dimensional sense, its path still curves when looked in 3 dimensions.
So in general relativity you can think of objects as traveling 'straight' if no force but gravity acts on them. Then you can work out the trajectories of particles much as you would work out the path of the imaginary ant as it explores the apple.
In general relativity you can think of a ball that you throw on the surface of earth as traveling 'straight' just as light travels 'straight', only in a different 'direction', because they move at different velocities.
General relativity predicts interesting (and experimentally verified) things, for example that time will pass very slightly (10^-10 or something like that) slower on the surface of earth than outside earth's gravity field. You can work this out by considering a light ray that is emitted from the surface of earth far into the space. As the light ray climbs its way up the gravity field, its frequency will get slightly lower, because it has to do work to move against the gravity. But you can also think of the light ray as moving 'straight'. Therefore, when the person far in space measures that a light ray, which has moved straight, has a lower frequency than when it was emitted, he must conclude that time moved slower where it was sent. :-)
Now, back to cosmology. Because the universe contains lots of matter, you would expect that 2 light rays, which are emitted in parallel some distance from each other, would eventually cross each other, because there will probably be some matter _between them_ on their path, which will pull them closer together.
But this seems to not be the case, which is unexpected and kind of beautiful! There is a 'cosmological constant' or something, which pushes the light rays apart from each other so that they indeed move 'straight'
Well, hope that helped, professional physicists, feel free to correct me...
Hmm, in cosmic inflation (I think), a cosmological constant, which would push things apart from each other would not decrease entropy, because there are more ways in which things can be separate from each other than close to each other. Imagine you are eating a bag of candy on a space station in zero gravity. If you accidentally tear the bag apart, the candy will randomly wander into all possible directions and it is unlikely that it will go back into the bag again.
So entropy is only a measure of the probability of different things happening, and in a way thermodynamics just says that the most probable things are likely to happen.
Yeah, I don't know anything about drivers, but you'd think that Linux and FreeBSD were 'similar' enough operating systems so that if the Linux driver code is open source, it wouldn't be that much work to port to FreeBSD..?