Dict.org may lack it, but Dictionary.com has it. This is part of the fun of languages, they change and evolve, and sometimes you get disagreements on what is correct. And best of all, the people arguing for tradition aren't always right.
The entire story seems to be one part description of events, 9 parts "I'm better than them". Any respect he may win by clearing up the events that happened is surely squandered by childish self-aggrandizing and meaningless putdowns.
when its been proven by many people that Blizzard greatly scewed the number by counting past and trial subscriptions along with current subscriptions.
Well, Blizzard does explicitly say in their press releases that their figures include trial subs (which by this point must only make up a tiny fraction of the whole, anyway), but it does say it excludes expired subs - got a link to this proof? I'd be very intersted to see it (preferably an up-to-date one, obviously)
"Any scientist who cannot explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan"
--Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle
Have you ever seen any of the threads which pop up on some forums now and again attempting to convince people that 0.9 recurring is equal to 1? It's true, but it's unintuitive - and consequently, people tend to persistently reject the idea, even with varying degrees of proof (from the 1/3 = 0.3 recurring argument, to the demonstration that it follows directly as a result of constructing the set of reals).
Such is the case with most ideas in the sciences - things often contradict what we expect, and people tend to reject them, until they have studied the field enough to see why the arguments leading to them are valid. Heck, even Newton's laws don't line up directly with our everyday experiences until we understand enough to compensate for things like air resistance.
The professor I worked under for my MSci project last year was collaberating on a number of theoretical problems with people from many other univerisites, and rather than unwieldly mailing lists and such to keep in contact, they set up a bit of wiki-like software, so they could touch up errors in derviations, suggest new approaches and so forth, while still maintaining a cohesive form of the body of work. It's apparently very effective, and has made their collaberation much more efficient.
The important difference there was that this project was only open to those actually actively involved in working on this problem. A public wiki will likely be bogged down by people who don't truly understand the problem or the approaches used to solve them - instead of everyone being able to contribute a little (as is possible in Wikipedia, which effectively just requires a transcription of information) the vast majority of people won't have anything to offer at all. And of course, those that are actively involved in working on these projects and want to share their work are in all likihood already doing so - with other people in the same field.
This project will likely attract those who do not have the particlar interest, time or background to work in a focused fashion on the problem, and consequently I'd be surprised if anything really unique or surprising came out of the project.
The mass of a single electron is 9.1x10^-31. Putting these two values together gives a value of $1.23x10^-27 per electron. Not something you want to plan your retirement around.
Of course I feel I must point out that this neglects binding energy and such, but hey, it's late, I already feel like enough of a nerd for working this much out.
Just out of curiosity, could you name a few laws that we still have because they were British laws? Exclude any laws that we have made law, explicitly.
Off the top of my head? None. But this carries two provios: One, IANAL; Two, the concepts which typically fall into the body of "common law" are those which are not, in fact written down explicitly easily namable, but rather based off past court judgements - see the section of common law at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_United_Sta tes. It is quite probable there are many many cases in the early days of the US (as noted in the linked article) which reference British court judgements, and it did not stop because it became inappropriate, but rather it was no longer necessary due to an increase in the availabilty of home-grown legal judgements. Alas I lack extensive copies of late 18th century legal documents to cite for you.
The term 'law' can be applied equally to both statutory laws (i.e. those which are written down, voted into force, by governments and so forth) and common laws (those based primarily on precedent, previous judgements and the like) - although I will admit that the language in my original post may have been a bit sloppy and not made the distinction clear. (Part of the fun of not being a lawyer). The issue here is not really whether or not America is goverened by British law, but whether the courts whould choose to agree with this particular judge's interpretation of a document which forms the basis for several hundred years worth of legal precedent - in America, as well as Britain. If there was an American judgement on the subject, they probably would go to that instead. But given this is a realatively new area, there may well not be, and then a case like this would quite possibly come into consideration.
A clever lawyer could argue what? That has got to be one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. It's not like the US told Britain to f*** off and we are going to make our own laws.
And in many cases, you did. Well done and all that!
Here's the fun part though: You didn't replace every single law. Many of the British ones were perfectly servicable, and were simply taken as granted in the new system (which was obviously based heavily on the British one), and remained in force. If there is no new American law explicitly superceding this one, then by tradition it does indeed still apply in the US - and tradition (or precedent, if you will) is a big thing in legal circles.
Check out one of the many, many links to relevant wikipedia articles in this topic before engaging in a round of "rofl, but we pwned those british good!" back-slapping.
They go on tracks, so installing a few wires isn't too expensive or difficult, making the electricity transportation far more efficient trought wires than fitting fuel cells on every locomotive, and then carrying all that hydrogen and.. sheesh!
This is probably true, and is why much of the railways in Japan are already operated in this fashion, where it is viable to do so. However, unfortunately in many areas (particularly mountainous or rural areas where this technology is being introduced) the cost of setting up and maintaining a system to support electrified trains isn't as easy as you would suggest, and hence these lines have been serviced by deisel trains.
It is these lines which will be serviced by these new trains, and presumably (since Japan is not opposed to these train types) this is in fact the more practical approach - unless the company really wants to spend more money on what is, as you point out, a less environmentally sound solution. Which just doesn't make much sense whatever way you look at it.
That Blizzard work more on "the game" and less of "OMGWTFBBQSAUCE"
Yes, because the Community Managers and website design staff are also the exact same people responsible for server stability and game design/coding. Such a terrible waste of valuable resources!
And of course, you need to work out the exact moment the observation starts at. An offset of even a single bit will give you nonsense, that's the idea behind the pad. The keyspace offered by a million quasars, 5000 possible frequencies, and an almost arbitrarily fine time sampling is pretty vast.
This is the link, however it's giving me a "service unavailable" message. I'm not sure if that's because I'm not authorized, or because I'm in the US and trying to get to the European forums, or what. If anyone can access it and quote their answer, I'd be very interested.
Wednesday is maintenance day for WoW in Europe. This typically means something significant is broken for a large part of the day after maintenance finishes. Today it's the forums, so we're going to have to wait a while.
It looks to me that they're saying that people who appear to be performing repetative, scripted actions in non-standard game environments appear to be cheaters. Rather a different statement.
And there's a business graduate who wants to take advantage of them. From TFA:
The company is a start-up company with roots from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and was formed by a team of Executive MBA students to improve the performance of online video games.
Personally, I would've expected a tech start-up to include at least someone with a degree in, you know, technology of some sort...
Any response to the fact that said fix was in fact "stuck in" 6 months ago? The same day the parent poster noticed the problem, and did nothing about it, others noticed it and did do something about it.
My response would have to be to apologise for taking the parent poster at face value, I must have forgotten where I was reading for a moment.
Please identify this comprehensive, authoritative source of encyclopedic information I should be using instead of Wikipedia, as I would like to know!
Two responses: 1) An actual encyclopedia. You never specified it had to be free/open/what have you. 2) Wikipedia's status as "authoritative" is questionalbe at best, given its current editorial policies. Being authoritative should not carry a footnote saying it's only true if you catch a good edit.
Well, since you already stymied the "Why don't you edit it yourself?" response from the Wiki-fanatics, it'll probably be 5 minutes until someone sticks in a quick edit to fix the specific issue you pointed out, and then flaunts this as the great strength of Wikipedia. On the one hand, they're right - when criticism arises, Wikipedia can respond pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, on articles which aren't contentious enough to get people angry and editing vigorously, these criticisms are often not forthcoming, and errors persist for a very long time. Wikipedia should not be reacting to criticism, but rather pre-empting it. Unfortunately, with the present editing policies that's not often the case.
WoW did this originally - the rested bonus went from 200% experience (after you've been logged off for the standard period) to a 50% penalty, depending on how much you levelled without logging.
Unsurprisingly, the 'hardcore' people (which was the majority, as this was back in the US beta IIRC) tore Blizzard a new one on the forums. Blizzard then redid it as the nice, simple, two-tier system we have today. Most of the truly hardcore aren't going to be 'encouraged' to explore the world, they want to do it on their terms, which is something penalites don't really help. And Blizzard really didn't want to lose them, so we switch from a perceived penalty to giving the impression that non-rested was 'baseline' and rested xp was a 'bonus', so nobody feels like they're losing out.
I believe Blizzard's reasoning is, they were not warning people based on their sexual orientation (the guild was allowed to continue existing, and directed towards appropriate means of advertising itself) but instead against actions - i.e. advertising where it was deemed appropriate. Which is an entirely different kettle of fish, and something they wouldn't get into big legal trouble for enforcing - if they do it even-handedly. Compare it to the age-old example of shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater and claiming people who attempted to remove/silence you were violating your right to free speech
However, this particular policy decision was very harsh, and to actually enforce it would require a massive effort on Blizzard's part, and generate a lot of bad will. While they originally tried to stick by their staff, I think we'll see them slowly moving away from that position, albiet in a way which gives them lots of angles to avoid looking like they backed down.
0.999999999999999999999.... is always going to be the smallest possible difference from 1 in reality.
What is this 'reality' you speak of?
Mathematics isn't constrained by our perceptions of what it 'should' be or what feels right. It's constrained by the axioms and principles we build it from. And in this case, 0.9 recurring is exactly equal to one. As you demonstrated, there are countless proofs of it (the one you selected being one of the less rigorous ones), and since the proofs are not incorrect, it means that their conclusion is wholly true, from a mathematical point of view.
Ah, I apologise for the fuzzy wording in my post, but that wasn't precisely the idea I was trying to communicate. Although it's now even later, I'll try again before I get some sleep.
I did not mean to assert that time experienced by objects was identical in all frames, nor that some frame had a particularly special interpretation. When I referred to a single time axis, I meant the single time term in the 4-vector (x,y,z,t). This is obviously valid for the two particle system used in the typical derivation of the Lortenz transformations since regardless of the motion of the object/observer, we could reduce it to a single space-like dimension and a single time-like dimension (x,t) (and, obviously, as you mentioned, identically valid co-ordinates (x',t') for other frames which can be viewed as a transformation in the direction the axes point).
However, his suggestion of a temporal geometry seemed to imply, on my first reading, that he was suggesting additional temporal dimensions - (x,y,z,t1,t2,t3) for example - which would add complications to situations where we could not transform the system we were considering to a two-dimensional one.
But having re-read what he says, I fear you may actually be correct in your observation, and that he is merely presenting Special relativity as his own, new, remarkable idea. A shame such things can manage to get book deals (although that really should've been a clue, I suppose). Maybe when I'm more awake I'll watch his presentations to see if they actually have any substance.
(And sorry about the 'professor' confusion, I had misread which section of 'visiting staff' he fell under on the stanford website...)
Hmm. And now I notice that he's listed under visiting Scholars, not visiting professors. My mistake there, apologies. I wonder in what capacity he's actually there as.
Physicists know that time has geometry---it is, after all, a part of spacetime, which has geometry
Wasn't this the point he was trying to make? People are very familair with the concept of multiple spatial axes which can lead to spatial geometry (and hence spacetime geometry) but that time is taken as a single, fixed axis, which he thinks isn't the case, which would lead to differences in how many aspects of relativity would have to be interpreted?
Once again, as I mentioned in a post I made above: It's late, and I haven't read his presentations, so I may have completely missed his point. If it is as mundane as you suggest, then this post can be ignored and written off as a sleepy error, and I apologise for the inconvenience.
In the derivation of the Lorentz transformation (and consequently, in how most people envision 'spacetime'), we have one time 'direction', which is the same at all times, in all places - all that changes in a relativistic picture is the projection of the spacetime motion onto the time axis.
Conversely, what I think this professor is suggesting that it's not quite so simple as dealing with a single axis, but rather a collection of them, which would mean it's not possible to consider our motion through time with regard to one solitary axis, which would have an effect on many aspects of relativity (although not in the Lorentz derivation shown at the link in your post, I don't think, since in that case our spatial and time axis are simply defined as being the directions of relative motion anyhow, so there this point is moot).
Of course, I could be completely wrong, as it's nearly 2am, I haven't looked at his slides, and my report is turning my brain to mush. I'll have to have a look in the morning when it works again.
I dunno, my undergrad particle physics was taught by stepping through all the developments of the 'facts' in that area, showing what evidence demonstrated they went wrong, what the new model was, and so forth. And finished up with modern questions and details of experiments which are working on them. Similarly, one of my QM lecturers loved to set assignments researching the background of open questions or significant limitations in QM as taught. An excellent example of how to teach material from a developing field.
The problem arises when you are teaching material which forms the basis of an established field, which while removed from the cutting edge a bit, but is still effectively a "special case" of some much more general law, which may have a rather different form. Newton's laws are a subset of Relativity, but when you're teaching this material for the first time, introducing this would take a lot of teaching time, which is at a premium in a lot of places now. It is simply more practical to state something as 'fact' when it is not, and clarify it when it's studied at higher levels ("Lies to children" was a nice description of it I heard once).
Of course, I would really like it if some material on the basis of the Scientific Method was taught fairly rigorously to all students at some point - then they would know to ask these questions themselves. Alas, it's another thing which runs up against the requirements of teaching these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Better luck next rant!
The entire story seems to be one part description of events, 9 parts "I'm better than them". Any respect he may win by clearing up the events that happened is surely squandered by childish self-aggrandizing and meaningless putdowns.
Well, Blizzard does explicitly say in their press releases that their figures include trial subs (which by this point must only make up a tiny fraction of the whole, anyway), but it does say it excludes expired subs - got a link to this proof? I'd be very intersted to see it (preferably an up-to-date one, obviously)
Have you ever seen any of the threads which pop up on some forums now and again attempting to convince people that 0.9 recurring is equal to 1? It's true, but it's unintuitive - and consequently, people tend to persistently reject the idea, even with varying degrees of proof (from the 1/3 = 0.3 recurring argument, to the demonstration that it follows directly as a result of constructing the set of reals).
Such is the case with most ideas in the sciences - things often contradict what we expect, and people tend to reject them, until they have studied the field enough to see why the arguments leading to them are valid. Heck, even Newton's laws don't line up directly with our everyday experiences until we understand enough to compensate for things like air resistance.
The important difference there was that this project was only open to those actually actively involved in working on this problem. A public wiki will likely be bogged down by people who don't truly understand the problem or the approaches used to solve them - instead of everyone being able to contribute a little (as is possible in Wikipedia, which effectively just requires a transcription of information) the vast majority of people won't have anything to offer at all. And of course, those that are actively involved in working on these projects and want to share their work are in all likihood already doing so - with other people in the same field.
This project will likely attract those who do not have the particlar interest, time or background to work in a focused fashion on the problem, and consequently I'd be surprised if anything really unique or surprising came out of the project.
Borrowing some figures from another post, I get a value of $1357.15 per kilo.
The mass of a single electron is 9.1x10^-31. Putting these two values together gives a value of $1.23x10^-27 per electron. Not something you want to plan your retirement around.
Of course I feel I must point out that this neglects binding energy and such, but hey, it's late, I already feel like enough of a nerd for working this much out.
Off the top of my head? None. But this carries two provios: One, IANAL; Two, the concepts which typically fall into the body of "common law" are those which are not, in fact written down explicitly easily namable, but rather based off past court judgements - see the section of common law at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_United_Sta tes. It is quite probable there are many many cases in the early days of the US (as noted in the linked article) which reference British court judgements, and it did not stop because it became inappropriate, but rather it was no longer necessary due to an increase in the availabilty of home-grown legal judgements. Alas I lack extensive copies of late 18th century legal documents to cite for you.
The term 'law' can be applied equally to both statutory laws (i.e. those which are written down, voted into force, by governments and so forth) and common laws (those based primarily on precedent, previous judgements and the like) - although I will admit that the language in my original post may have been a bit sloppy and not made the distinction clear. (Part of the fun of not being a lawyer). The issue here is not really whether or not America is goverened by British law, but whether the courts whould choose to agree with this particular judge's interpretation of a document which forms the basis for several hundred years worth of legal precedent - in America, as well as Britain. If there was an American judgement on the subject, they probably would go to that instead. But given this is a realatively new area, there may well not be, and then a case like this would quite possibly come into consideration.
And in many cases, you did. Well done and all that!
Here's the fun part though: You didn't replace every single law. Many of the British ones were perfectly servicable, and were simply taken as granted in the new system (which was obviously based heavily on the British one), and remained in force. If there is no new American law explicitly superceding this one, then by tradition it does indeed still apply in the US - and tradition (or precedent, if you will) is a big thing in legal circles.
Check out one of the many, many links to relevant wikipedia articles in this topic before engaging in a round of "rofl, but we pwned those british good!" back-slapping.
This is probably true, and is why much of the railways in Japan are already operated in this fashion, where it is viable to do so. However, unfortunately in many areas (particularly mountainous or rural areas where this technology is being introduced) the cost of setting up and maintaining a system to support electrified trains isn't as easy as you would suggest, and hence these lines have been serviced by deisel trains.
It is these lines which will be serviced by these new trains, and presumably (since Japan is not opposed to these train types) this is in fact the more practical approach - unless the company really wants to spend more money on what is, as you point out, a less environmentally sound solution. Which just doesn't make much sense whatever way you look at it.
Yes, because the Community Managers and website design staff are also the exact same people responsible for server stability and game design/coding. Such a terrible waste of valuable resources!
And of course, you need to work out the exact moment the observation starts at. An offset of even a single bit will give you nonsense, that's the idea behind the pad. The keyspace offered by a million quasars, 5000 possible frequencies, and an almost arbitrarily fine time sampling is pretty vast.
Wednesday is maintenance day for WoW in Europe. This typically means something significant is broken for a large part of the day after maintenance finishes. Today it's the forums, so we're going to have to wait a while.
It looks to me that they're saying that people who appear to be performing repetative, scripted actions in non-standard game environments appear to be cheaters. Rather a different statement.
And there's a business graduate who wants to take advantage of them. From TFA:
The company is a start-up company with roots from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and was formed by a team of Executive MBA students to improve the performance of online video games.
Personally, I would've expected a tech start-up to include at least someone with a degree in, you know, technology of some sort...
My response would have to be to apologise for taking the parent poster at face value, I must have forgotten where I was reading for a moment.
Please identify this comprehensive, authoritative source of encyclopedic information I should be using instead of Wikipedia, as I would like to know!
Two responses: 1) An actual encyclopedia. You never specified it had to be free/open/what have you. 2) Wikipedia's status as "authoritative" is questionalbe at best, given its current editorial policies. Being authoritative should not carry a footnote saying it's only true if you catch a good edit.
Well, since you already stymied the "Why don't you edit it yourself?" response from the Wiki-fanatics, it'll probably be 5 minutes until someone sticks in a quick edit to fix the specific issue you pointed out, and then flaunts this as the great strength of Wikipedia. On the one hand, they're right - when criticism arises, Wikipedia can respond pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, on articles which aren't contentious enough to get people angry and editing vigorously, these criticisms are often not forthcoming, and errors persist for a very long time. Wikipedia should not be reacting to criticism, but rather pre-empting it. Unfortunately, with the present editing policies that's not often the case.
Unsurprisingly, the 'hardcore' people (which was the majority, as this was back in the US beta IIRC) tore Blizzard a new one on the forums. Blizzard then redid it as the nice, simple, two-tier system we have today. Most of the truly hardcore aren't going to be 'encouraged' to explore the world, they want to do it on their terms, which is something penalites don't really help. And Blizzard really didn't want to lose them, so we switch from a perceived penalty to giving the impression that non-rested was 'baseline' and rested xp was a 'bonus', so nobody feels like they're losing out.
However, this particular policy decision was very harsh, and to actually enforce it would require a massive effort on Blizzard's part, and generate a lot of bad will. While they originally tried to stick by their staff, I think we'll see them slowly moving away from that position, albiet in a way which gives them lots of angles to avoid looking like they backed down.
What is this 'reality' you speak of?
Mathematics isn't constrained by our perceptions of what it 'should' be or what feels right. It's constrained by the axioms and principles we build it from. And in this case, 0.9 recurring is exactly equal to one. As you demonstrated, there are countless proofs of it (the one you selected being one of the less rigorous ones), and since the proofs are not incorrect, it means that their conclusion is wholly true, from a mathematical point of view.
I did not mean to assert that time experienced by objects was identical in all frames, nor that some frame had a particularly special interpretation. When I referred to a single time axis, I meant the single time term in the 4-vector (x,y,z,t). This is obviously valid for the two particle system used in the typical derivation of the Lortenz transformations since regardless of the motion of the object/observer, we could reduce it to a single space-like dimension and a single time-like dimension (x,t) (and, obviously, as you mentioned, identically valid co-ordinates (x',t') for other frames which can be viewed as a transformation in the direction the axes point).
However, his suggestion of a temporal geometry seemed to imply, on my first reading, that he was suggesting additional temporal dimensions - (x,y,z,t1,t2,t3) for example - which would add complications to situations where we could not transform the system we were considering to a two-dimensional one.
But having re-read what he says, I fear you may actually be correct in your observation, and that he is merely presenting Special relativity as his own, new, remarkable idea. A shame such things can manage to get book deals (although that really should've been a clue, I suppose). Maybe when I'm more awake I'll watch his presentations to see if they actually have any substance.
(And sorry about the 'professor' confusion, I had misread which section of 'visiting staff' he fell under on the stanford website...)
Hmm. And now I notice that he's listed under visiting Scholars, not visiting professors. My mistake there, apologies. I wonder in what capacity he's actually there as.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/people/visiti ng.html
He's not a Stanford professor, but he is working there at the moment, which is probably why he described himself as an "affiliate".
Wasn't this the point he was trying to make? People are very familair with the concept of multiple spatial axes which can lead to spatial geometry (and hence spacetime geometry) but that time is taken as a single, fixed axis, which he thinks isn't the case, which would lead to differences in how many aspects of relativity would have to be interpreted?
Once again, as I mentioned in a post I made above: It's late, and I haven't read his presentations, so I may have completely missed his point. If it is as mundane as you suggest, then this post can be ignored and written off as a sleepy error, and I apologise for the inconvenience.
Conversely, what I think this professor is suggesting that it's not quite so simple as dealing with a single axis, but rather a collection of them, which would mean it's not possible to consider our motion through time with regard to one solitary axis, which would have an effect on many aspects of relativity (although not in the Lorentz derivation shown at the link in your post, I don't think, since in that case our spatial and time axis are simply defined as being the directions of relative motion anyhow, so there this point is moot).
Of course, I could be completely wrong, as it's nearly 2am, I haven't looked at his slides, and my report is turning my brain to mush. I'll have to have a look in the morning when it works again.
I dunno, my undergrad particle physics was taught by stepping through all the developments of the 'facts' in that area, showing what evidence demonstrated they went wrong, what the new model was, and so forth. And finished up with modern questions and details of experiments which are working on them. Similarly, one of my QM lecturers loved to set assignments researching the background of open questions or significant limitations in QM as taught. An excellent example of how to teach material from a developing field.
The problem arises when you are teaching material which forms the basis of an established field, which while removed from the cutting edge a bit, but is still effectively a "special case" of some much more general law, which may have a rather different form. Newton's laws are a subset of Relativity, but when you're teaching this material for the first time, introducing this would take a lot of teaching time, which is at a premium in a lot of places now. It is simply more practical to state something as 'fact' when it is not, and clarify it when it's studied at higher levels ("Lies to children" was a nice description of it I heard once).
Of course, I would really like it if some material on the basis of the Scientific Method was taught fairly rigorously to all students at some point - then they would know to ask these questions themselves. Alas, it's another thing which runs up against the requirements of teaching these days.