Just the boring part in the Shire. Reports just in that several top-level members of US intelligence have been found slumped dead at their desks after apparently being forced to endure the tedium of the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition.
I would also like thank Expo Dry Erase markets, without them we wouldn't get our first draft of the calculations.
The Vital Role is technology that without it, it wouldn't happen. Not something without it, you would have a perfectly usable substitute.
Ugh, no thanks. At my institution we use good ole blackboards. Not only do they look nicer, you never have to worry about searching through piles of pens to find one that actually works, or the indelible marks left by some idiot who didn't notice his pen was a permanent marker.
1 - Judges don't need to be educated to make these decisions. That's what the attorneys are for. Judges and juries shouldn't be swayed by anything but what the two sides present.
If judges are not sufficiently educated how are they going to be able to discriminate the facts from the bullshit the attorneys are spouting?
Exactly, social mobility, the ability to work your way to the top (The American Dream I guess), is the important thing. Wealth inequality is simply an indicator that social mobility is not high enough, for if it were the wealth gap would be smaller.
There are other aspects of academic jobs that many scientists (such as myself) value more than the salary. I could quite easily leave and work for a finance company as a quantitative analyst, earning 3 or 4 times my current salary, and many in my position do just that, but in doing so I would have to give up my freedom to pursue my ideas to go work for someone else. I enjoy my job too much for that.
Or the first thing you do when you plan to install linux - replace the hard disk with a fresh one. Then put the original one on a shelf until you either run out of warranty or return the computer.
If you RTFA you would notice that NewEgg's return policy states: 'The following conditions are not acceptable for return, and will result in the merchandise being returned to you: Any desktop PC, notebook or tablet PC that has been opened....'. So removing the drive breaks their returns policy.
If you had a clue on how games are designed I wouldnt have to explain to you how stupid you sound. Games arent jsut designed form the aether, DECISIONS are made that affect the balance of the game. Those DECISIONS included hampering single player mode so severely that the only truly viable option is to trade. Single player mode was PURPOSEFULLY deprecated to force trades. It was a decision wholly dictated by business reasons, not gameplay.
In the Reddit AMAA the designers explicitly state that they did not design the game around auction house use. During their internal testing they did not have a big enough group to even test a design that revolved around auction house usage. Of course they may be lying, but I doubt it.
This is my worry with global warming; that good science is not being done.
Good science is being done, my fear is that their results are being suppressed or taken out of context by people with an agenda. These are generally not scientists, but politicians and people representing corporate interests (often the same person) - most scientists despise politicking and consider data falsification as one of the worst crimes that can be committed. By perpetuating the "debate" about climate change, generally with utter falsehoods, they can continue to erode public trust in science hence giving themselves more power to push their agenda. The truth of their side of the debate does not matter, all that matters is that the debate continues.
Well done Nashville! The Scots tried to do exactly the same thing in Edinburgh ("the Athens of the North") but ran out of money after building just the first collonade - the monument is now often known as 'Scotland's Disgrace' or 'Edinburgh's Folly'.
He didn't participate in any organized religion, and his view of God was basically Spinozan.
Religious? No. Spiritual? Definitely.
I don't see the difference between Einstein's Spinozan belief system and a religion. I don't see the difference between spirituality and religion either. Perhaps we are working with separate definitions?
Calling Einstein religious is like calling Al Gore a climatologist.
But until the day he died, he refused to accept quantum mechanics (a field that he pioneered in the first place), even in the face of overwhelming evidence, due to his fundamental belief in the deterministic nature of the universe. Although this is not a 'religious belief' as such, it is still a good example of allowing belief to take over rational thinking.
If my brain isn't chunking religous thought into the same chunk as scientific thought, then it is baffling to me how someone can think that someone would think how one chunk would corrupt the other. If my brain is chunking them both together it is baffling how a religious man ties his shoes in the morning. As posted somewhere in the mass of comments above (I'm not sure if even this thread), a number of scientists with foundational principles have been able to successfully arrange their thoughts in such a way as to accomodate religion. The scary part occurs when people make policy or scientific decisions by chunking religion with science and you can't detect that. However, there are a number of other subjects when chunked with science makes for results just as terrible, e.g. politics, e.g. money, e.g. fame.
Many great thinkers seem to have managed to separate their religious beliefs from their rational mind, for a while at least anyway. However their beliefs were often ultimately responsible for their fall from grace. Just look at Newton, he contributed much to science but was also strongly religious; he jumped the shark later and spent the latter part of his life writing discourses disputing the holy trinity and experimenting with alchemy (giving himself mercury poisoning in the process). Einstein was also religious, but that did not stop him from doing great things for science, but he eventually let his beliefs about a deterministic universe prevent him from accepting quantum mechanics.
Evangelistic aethistic scientists have a fundamental disagreement with the attitude that humans can segregate parts of their lives into different thought processes. They think that someone cannot perform rational thought in one area of their life with demonstratable proof that they have logical flaws in other areas. The problem IMO with this line of thought is that they are pretending the human approximation to logic is closer to how we should think than the evolutionary-designed heuristic processes that allow us to think. We think within a context of data chunks, between roughly 5 and 9 chunks of data at any one time. As we gain expertise, then our chunks grow to encompass wider concepts, but we are still limited to a processing blob that deals with reality in a very segmented context. That isn't to say there aren't places that a religious scientist needs to be careful, but it is quite as intellectually honest as any other method.
This sounds a lot like doublethink to me. From 1984:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
I think your 'fundamentalist atheistic scientists' are right to look down upon such behaviour.
I checked a number of physics blogs including Tommaso's who generally catches most of the good stuff in HEP. I'll try to read the actual paper tonight. And please, don't get me started on string theory! Have you presented at any conferences yet?
Several members of the RBC&UKQCD collaboration, including Matthew Lightman, Elaine Goode, Chris Sachrajda and Norman Christ have talked about this calculation over the last few years at the annual lattice conferences, and I will be giving a talk about the calculation of the A_0 amplitude at this year's lattice conference in Australia. I believe Chris Sachrajda has talked about the calculation at some of the Kaon conferences. I could try to find some links to their slides/proceedings if you are interested?
I vote for sed 's/Sorcerer/Philosopher/g' Harry\ Potter*
It still irritates me to this day that the US version of HP and the Philosopher's Stone is marketed as HP and the *Sorcerer's Stone*. WHY??? The Philosopher's Stone is a well know fictional device (i.e. used in fiction for 1700 YEARS!) for attaining eternal life - it has meaning and history! The US publishers apparently decided that kids would not want to read a book with the word 'philosopher' in the title, and changed it to the vacuous 'HP and the Sorcerer's Stone'. Die marketing droids, die.
Whoever pays the bills gets to make the rules! If you let government take over your health care, you are giving the government control over your health
Clearly its much better to leave it to the insurance companies, they clearly have our best interests at heart/sarcasm
While the authors (as they always do) consider this landmark, I was unable to find any comment on their letter or the preprint (apparently this) in the usual places. This could be in part because it is a) not 'real' and b) doesn't have the words 'Higgs' or 'superluminal neutrino' in the title.
We had an article in New Scientist, which is pretty high profile. Also this truly was a landmark calculation: it was the first realistic decay computed entirely from first principles, combining 40 years of theoretical and computational development and will have a significant impact upon the search for new physics. You are, however, right in that some of the more sensationalist science publishers were likely not interested in this calculation, deeming it not 'sexy' enough compared to the latest untestable-but-cool-sounding theories emerging from the string theory community.
Actually a lot of lattice QCD calculations are run on graphics cards, usually NVidia cards like the Fermi and Tesla. These cards have error correction, larger RAM and better support for double precision, but some of us do run on clusters of standard gaming cards like the GTX480.
The calculation in the study required 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors.
And yet the entire article does not contain a single equation, much less a link to the paper. I am disappoint.
Here is a link to our paper. I'm sure you will be satisfied with the number of equations:)
Your comment about the weak interaction occurring over large distances is not correct - the weak interaction scale is ~90 GeV, which is much much higher than the hadronic energy scale ~1 GeV. In lattice calculations, where the interaction scales are on the order of femtometres, the weak interactions can be simulated to very high accuracy (sub-1%) using simply a point-like vertex. Due to the separation of scales, the actual weak component of the calculation can be completely separated out and calculated using standard perturbative techniques - the hard part has always been the calculation of the strong interaction component. While perturbative calculations just take a few guys a couple of months to sort out the factors of 2, the lattice calculation takes many months to run on state-of-the-art supercomputers and combines techniques developed over 40 years of work.
However this was not really confirmation of the Standard Model because the actual calculation of CP violation occurring in the SM is really hard to calculate: it involves quark/W boson loops which must have contributions from all three generations of quarks (specifically including the top quark!). These so-called penguin diagrams (blame the name on John Ellis' dart playing skills!) are really hard to calculate - at least to the accuracy needed for CP violation in kaons. Kaons must decay through a weak interaction because only the weak interaction can change the strange quark into an up quark which is needed for pion decay. However there is also a strong component to the decay.
Strong (QCD) processes are really hard to calculate because perturbation theory does not work for them (the interaction is far too strong). One approach to solve this is lattice QCD which literally simulates all the colour (QCD) fields on a 4D grid of space-time points. However this is really CPU-intensive so only small grids can be simulated. This is not too bad if you have a strong process because, being 'strong' it happens quickly in a small region. However the weak part of the decay occurs more slowly over a larger area. What the authors seem to have done is overcome this simulation problem of both weak and strong forces in the same decay which raises the prospect of accurate calculations of the CP violation in kaon decays which has never been possible before. For the technically minded this paper calculates the Isospin=2 decay amplitude (A_2) whose phase shift, relative to the isospin 0 amplitude (A_0) is what makes direct CP violation visible - it's a really interesting paper - at least if you have ever been involved in kaon physics!
Slashdot Mirror
I hope Notch gives it to them good.
Then he can upgrade his nym to 'Shaft'.
Unless he settles, after which 'Quiver' would be more appropriate.
They've stolen Frodo? Oh god no the humanity!
Just the boring part in the Shire. Reports just in that several top-level members of US intelligence have been found slumped dead at their desks after apparently being forced to endure the tedium of the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition.
Oh no! Several GIGABYTES of information?
That means they've stolen anywhere from half of a South Park season to several millions of pages of plain text!
What a useful measure!
Or half of The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition.
Wait, where does Ubuntu come in? CMS and ATLAS are standardized on SL5/6 and I'm guessing LHCb and ALICE are also using SL. Who's using Ubuntu?
Also the LHC computing grid is built on Scientific Linux.
They probably would had still found it.
I would also like thank Expo Dry Erase markets, without them we wouldn't get our first draft of the calculations.
The Vital Role is technology that without it, it wouldn't happen. Not something without it, you would have a perfectly usable substitute.
Ugh, no thanks. At my institution we use good ole blackboards. Not only do they look nicer, you never have to worry about searching through piles of pens to find one that actually works, or the indelible marks left by some idiot who didn't notice his pen was a permanent marker.
1 - Judges don't need to be educated to make these decisions. That's what the attorneys are for. Judges and juries shouldn't be swayed by anything but what the two sides present.
If judges are not sufficiently educated how are they going to be able to discriminate the facts from the bullshit the attorneys are spouting?
Or would you prefer we bring back slavery? will that fix your problem:?
Well alot of these people's families fought to the death to keep their slaves, I guess it runs in the blood.
Exactly, social mobility, the ability to work your way to the top (The American Dream I guess), is the important thing. Wealth inequality is simply an indicator that social mobility is not high enough, for if it were the wealth gap would be smaller.
There are other aspects of academic jobs that many scientists (such as myself) value more than the salary. I could quite easily leave and work for a finance company as a quantitative analyst, earning 3 or 4 times my current salary, and many in my position do just that, but in doing so I would have to give up my freedom to pursue my ideas to go work for someone else. I enjoy my job too much for that.
Or the first thing you do when you plan to install linux - replace the hard disk with a fresh one. Then put the original one on a shelf until you either run out of warranty or return the computer.
If you RTFA you would notice that NewEgg's return policy states: 'The following conditions are not acceptable for return, and will result in the merchandise being returned to you: Any desktop PC, notebook or tablet PC that has been opened....'. So removing the drive breaks their returns policy.
If you had a clue on how games are designed I wouldnt have to explain to you how stupid you sound. Games arent jsut designed form the aether, DECISIONS are made that affect the balance of the game. Those DECISIONS included hampering single player mode so severely that the only truly viable option is to trade. Single player mode was PURPOSEFULLY deprecated to force trades. It was a decision wholly dictated by business reasons, not gameplay.
In the Reddit AMAA the designers explicitly state that they did not design the game around auction house use. During their internal testing they did not have a big enough group to even test a design that revolved around auction house usage. Of course they may be lying, but I doubt it.
This is my worry with global warming; that good science is not being done.
Good science is being done, my fear is that their results are being suppressed or taken out of context by people with an agenda. These are generally not scientists, but politicians and people representing corporate interests (often the same person) - most scientists despise politicking and consider data falsification as one of the worst crimes that can be committed. By perpetuating the "debate" about climate change, generally with utter falsehoods, they can continue to erode public trust in science hence giving themselves more power to push their agenda. The truth of their side of the debate does not matter, all that matters is that the debate continues.
Also, a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.
Well done Nashville! The Scots tried to do exactly the same thing in Edinburgh ("the Athens of the North") but ran out of money after building just the first collonade - the monument is now often known as 'Scotland's Disgrace' or 'Edinburgh's Folly'.
Einstein was also religious
He didn't participate in any organized religion, and his view of God was basically Spinozan.
Religious? No. Spiritual? Definitely.
I don't see the difference between Einstein's Spinozan belief system and a religion. I don't see the difference between spirituality and religion either. Perhaps we are working with separate definitions?
Calling Einstein religious is like calling Al Gore a climatologist.
But until the day he died, he refused to accept quantum mechanics (a field that he pioneered in the first place), even in the face of overwhelming evidence, due to his fundamental belief in the deterministic nature of the universe. Although this is not a 'religious belief' as such, it is still a good example of allowing belief to take over rational thinking.
If my brain isn't chunking religous thought into the same chunk as scientific thought, then it is baffling to me how someone can think that someone would think how one chunk would corrupt the other. If my brain is chunking them both together it is baffling how a religious man ties his shoes in the morning. As posted somewhere in the mass of comments above (I'm not sure if even this thread), a number of scientists with foundational principles have been able to successfully arrange their thoughts in such a way as to accomodate religion. The scary part occurs when people make policy or scientific decisions by chunking religion with science and you can't detect that. However, there are a number of other subjects when chunked with science makes for results just as terrible, e.g. politics, e.g. money, e.g. fame.
Many great thinkers seem to have managed to separate their religious beliefs from their rational mind, for a while at least anyway. However their beliefs were often ultimately responsible for their fall from grace. Just look at Newton, he contributed much to science but was also strongly religious; he jumped the shark later and spent the latter part of his life writing discourses disputing the holy trinity and experimenting with alchemy (giving himself mercury poisoning in the process). Einstein was also religious, but that did not stop him from doing great things for science, but he eventually let his beliefs about a deterministic universe prevent him from accepting quantum mechanics.
Evangelistic aethistic scientists have a fundamental disagreement with the attitude that humans can segregate parts of their lives into different thought processes. They think that someone cannot perform rational thought in one area of their life with demonstratable proof that they have logical flaws in other areas. The problem IMO with this line of thought is that they are pretending the human approximation to logic is closer to how we should think than the evolutionary-designed heuristic processes that allow us to think. We think within a context of data chunks, between roughly 5 and 9 chunks of data at any one time. As we gain expertise, then our chunks grow to encompass wider concepts, but we are still limited to a processing blob that deals with reality in a very segmented context. That isn't to say there aren't places that a religious scientist needs to be careful, but it is quite as intellectually honest as any other method.
This sounds a lot like doublethink to me. From 1984:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
I think your 'fundamentalist atheistic scientists' are right to look down upon such behaviour.
I checked a number of physics blogs including Tommaso's who generally catches most of the good stuff in HEP. I'll try to read the actual paper tonight. And please, don't get me started on string theory! Have you presented at any conferences yet?
Several members of the RBC&UKQCD collaboration, including Matthew Lightman, Elaine Goode, Chris Sachrajda and Norman Christ have talked about this calculation over the last few years at the annual lattice conferences, and I will be giving a talk about the calculation of the A_0 amplitude at this year's lattice conference in Australia. I believe Chris Sachrajda has talked about the calculation at some of the Kaon conferences. I could try to find some links to their slides/proceedings if you are interested?
sed -i s/wand/wang/g Harry\ Potter*
I vote for sed 's/Sorcerer/Philosopher/g' Harry\ Potter*
It still irritates me to this day that the US version of HP and the Philosopher's Stone is marketed as HP and the *Sorcerer's Stone*. WHY??? The Philosopher's Stone is a well know fictional device (i.e. used in fiction for 1700 YEARS!) for attaining eternal life - it has meaning and history! The US publishers apparently decided that kids would not want to read a book with the word 'philosopher' in the title, and changed it to the vacuous 'HP and the Sorcerer's Stone'. Die marketing droids, die.
Whoever pays the bills gets to make the rules! If you let government take over your health care, you are giving the government control over your health
Clearly its much better to leave it to the insurance companies, they clearly have our best interests at heart /sarcasm
While the authors (as they always do) consider this landmark, I was unable to find any comment on their letter or the preprint (apparently this) in the usual places. This could be in part because it is a) not 'real' and b) doesn't have the words 'Higgs' or 'superluminal neutrino' in the title.
We had an article in New Scientist, which is pretty high profile. Also this truly was a landmark calculation: it was the first realistic decay computed entirely from first principles, combining 40 years of theoretical and computational development and will have a significant impact upon the search for new physics. You are, however, right in that some of the more sensationalist science publishers were likely not interested in this calculation, deeming it not 'sexy' enough compared to the latest untestable-but-cool-sounding theories emerging from the string theory community.
Why are they running it on the GPU?
Actually a lot of lattice QCD calculations are run on graphics cards, usually NVidia cards like the Fermi and Tesla. These cards have error correction, larger RAM and better support for double precision, but some of us do run on clusters of standard gaming cards like the GTX480.
And yet the entire article does not contain a single equation, much less a link to the paper. I am disappoint.
Here is a link to our paper. I'm sure you will be satisfied with the number of equations :)
Oops- apologies for the empty post!
Disclaimer - I am an author on the paper.
Your comment about the weak interaction occurring over large distances is not correct - the weak interaction scale is ~90 GeV, which is much much higher than the hadronic energy scale ~1 GeV. In lattice calculations, where the interaction scales are on the order of femtometres, the weak interactions can be simulated to very high accuracy (sub-1%) using simply a point-like vertex. Due to the separation of scales, the actual weak component of the calculation can be completely separated out and calculated using standard perturbative techniques - the hard part has always been the calculation of the strong interaction component. While perturbative calculations just take a few guys a couple of months to sort out the factors of 2, the lattice calculation takes many months to run on state-of-the-art supercomputers and combines techniques developed over 40 years of work.
However this was not really confirmation of the Standard Model because the actual calculation of CP violation occurring in the SM is really hard to calculate: it involves quark/W boson loops which must have contributions from all three generations of quarks (specifically including the top quark!). These so-called penguin diagrams (blame the name on John Ellis' dart playing skills!) are really hard to calculate - at least to the accuracy needed for CP violation in kaons. Kaons must decay through a weak interaction because only the weak interaction can change the strange quark into an up quark which is needed for pion decay. However there is also a strong component to the decay.
Strong (QCD) processes are really hard to calculate because perturbation theory does not work for them (the interaction is far too strong). One approach to solve this is lattice QCD which literally simulates all the colour (QCD) fields on a 4D grid of space-time points. However this is really CPU-intensive so only small grids can be simulated. This is not too bad if you have a strong process because, being 'strong' it happens quickly in a small region. However the weak part of the decay occurs more slowly over a larger area. What the authors seem to have done is overcome this simulation problem of both weak and strong forces in the same decay which raises the prospect of accurate calculations of the CP violation in kaon decays which has never been possible before. For the technically minded this paper calculates the Isospin=2 decay amplitude (A_2) whose phase shift, relative to the isospin 0 amplitude (A_0) is what makes direct CP violation visible - it's a really interesting paper - at least if you have ever been involved in kaon physics!