If our government gets wind of this idea of yours, they'll be hiring hundreds of thousands of new federal employees tasked with keeping your private stuff private. And in the end, the governement will gain hundreds of thousands of new votes for themselves.
Well, that's why I put "Department of Privacy" in quotes. It was the suggestion of a gereral idea, not a call to create another Department of Homeland Security. But a standard tool of larger organizations is to appoint an omnibudsman with substantial power of investigation to look for systemic problems in that organization, independent of any particular department. Privacy rights are enforced by the right of judges to throw out evidence obtained illegally, such evidence typically obtained by violating privacy rights in the process. It's NOT impossible - but it is complex, and has to be thought out as to how to set up a system that encourages people, companies, organizations and the government to respect privacy rights as a default, at their peril if they don't.
...but if you think you have no chance to stop losing your privacy, you resign yourself to it and give up. Everyone has a limited, increasingly limited, amount of spare time in their lives to worry about things other than work. The problem with "protecting your privacy" is that it is an increasingly complex, time-consuming, byzantine, and inconvienent task. You as an individual have to keep track of all the myriad ways that your privacy is being ignored or taking advantage of and spend your spare time tracking down, learning about and trying to change this. There is no "Department of Privacy", no mechanism in the government, other than individuals who have discovered that their privacy was violated bringing up individual cases in court, to stop its erosion in fact. And the most recent suggested constitutional amendments have had nothing to do with enhancing and/or extending or simply MODERNIZING the privacy rights individuals have....
The only reason North Korea exists is because of China, giving them food, oil, diplomatic sheilding, and just about everything else. China, and the country they don't get on with very well, Japan, issued a joint communication saying a N. Korean nuclear test would be "unacceptable". I wonder if China is going to be a bit more... interested in how to deal with little dictator states when they start disobeying, collecting nukes and have missles with the range to hit most of China's main cities.
Whoops! Thanks for the correction - it gave me an excuse to pull it off the shelf and thumb through it. It's STILL as good as I remembered - [cue nostalgic music while I wish I was 21 again...]
...I can't imagine memorizing 100,000 ANYTHING. Most people know about 25,000 words, 1,000 or so people, etc. - there is a certain amazement at what the human mind is capable of. Can you imagine if he memorized 100,000 faces and names? 100,000 cities and populations? It is astonishing how much information we can learn...
All the people who have said that there is no difference in ability, and any arbitrary person can advance to any arbitrary level of mathematical ability are pretty unrealistic. I base this statement on my own abiding comfort and love of the subject, as well as five years tutoring and teaching it at levels varying from elementary school level to graduate school. That said, here are my own personal observations as to which people succeed in their math goals and which people fail.
First, what people said about practice is partway true. But HOW you practice is as important as how much. Many people think that if they do the same problem over and over and over, perhaps with minor variations, this will somehow improve their mathematics ability. Except for at a very base rote level, this is untrue. A far better challenge would be to INVENT problems like the ones you have been solving, and see if you can solve those. Frequently, the 'canned' problems you are given for most mathematics instruction below second year university level are designed to have 'neat' answers. This very quickly becomes a crutch for students, because they are so used to looking for the 'neat' answer that they are unable, or don't trust their ability (almost the same thing, in practice) to work a problem when it is unclean. In addition, when you start designing problems, you start to focus on the crucial idea of whether you are right or not. Having an answer handed to you is almost useless, because it short-circuits the other half of problem solving - how do you know whether you have a right answer? If you don't understand how to check your answers, you aren't qualified to be doing the problem! Right there, that suggests a different method of problem solving - trial and error. This is not to be scorned, but encouraged, because it means your brain is engaged again, and you are not just regurigitating the motions.
Second, most people who are good at math like it. What this means is that they are practicing far more often than people who don't like it, because they have some part of their mind on math problems throughout a day, or they find problems that have mathematical solutions. How do you get to like math if you don't? Tough question - I found that good teachers who enjoyed explaining how they got to an answer, what makes it fun or interesting, how it applies, or just how neat it is are better than the rote type. But at some level, you have to start figuring what you want to DO with your math - frequently, practicality and application focus the mind and make it easier to learn and enjoy it.
Third, don't let people who are better at it than you get you down. REAL math is messy. When solving a problem that has not been solved before, mathematicians go through all sorts of detours, false starts, unnecessary constructions... messy, messy, messy! But after thier adventures through the mathematical jungles, after they get the prize, they clean up the mess. They don't mention the false starts, the extra logic that really isn't needed, the play with ideas that turned out to be useless. They just show the clean, sparse, neat path. This is a modern fashion, and I think a bad one, because it removes the human element of play, adventure, and imperfect effort. Learning math is messy - you need to experiment, make mistakes, try to fix them, try different ideas, and PLAY with the stuff. They don't tell you this in the textbooks, at least not the modern ones (of course, there were flowery extremes on the other side - read Cardano for an illustration of 99% prose and 1% math! But he does tell you of his false starts, his dispair, his mistakes, and the joy of his ultimate triumph). AFTER you have made mistakes, tried alternatives, and played with other ways of solving a problem, then the 'standard' way of doing it makes much more sense, and you appreciate the WHY vs. the HOW. This is why, if you don't know how to check your answer for sure, you are not at the level where you should be attempting such a problem.
I am getting so sick of hearing people talk about a hole as if it was a particle. A hole, at least in the semiconductor sense, is where an electron should be in a valence crystaline lattice (I know I'm saying it badly, but if you know what I'm talking about, you'll know what I meant).
So this "Polarion" is said to be an electron-hole pair. You know what an electron + a lack of an electron is? AN ELECTRON. Oy.... Every time I bring this up, some other EE (yes, I am an EE) always says that, yes a hole can move and has a positive charge... No... an electron moves, causing a hole to appear somewhere. A hole has no charge, thus 1e difference from an electron. If it had the +1e everbody keeps saying, then it would be a 2e differnce between. And anyway, why talk about it having charge? It doesn't exist, therefore it cannot have charge.
But, as you are no doubt aware, in a conductor where the outer valence electrons are so weakly held that they are approximately free to drift within the boundaries of the material, if a particular atom at a particular time has one less electron bound to it than it has protons in its nucleus, then as a whole, it is positively charged - and it tends to attract any 'free' electrons in the vicinity. As one of these 'free' electrons has to come from somewhere, the somewhere (being another atom) is now short an electron. Thus, the location of the positive charge has moved. So, in a material, talking about positive holes moving, having a certain density and so forth is quite reasonable.
Many may think I'm crazy, but a hole doesn't exist. It's very concept even being possible, because of something NOT being where it is said to be. It's existence is based off of something not existing (in the right place), I guess.
But yeah, is there some special property of holes that make them a particle that everybody keeps talking about? I just don't understand how they call something an electron-hole pair, and say that it isn't just an electron.
Because electrons aren't dealt with in a vacuum. If you took a small ball of some element, say carbon (Make it 12 g - one mole of the stuff), and it was 'missing' only 1 electron in 1,000,000,000 atoms, our little ball of carbon would have a charge of.1 millicolumbs. If you held this little ball about a centimeter away from its missing electrons, they would attract each other with a force of about 10,000 N - or roughly the weight of a ton! The balance between the number of electrons and the number of protons in a material rarely deviates by more than 1 in 10^15 particles in practice. So, keeping track of the 'holes', since they match the number of electrons to an exquisite level of precision, even in conductors carring hundreds of amps of current, is a very reasonable model of what occurs.
As for whether 'holes' are real, read up on what Dirac has to say about electrons sometime - you can google it.
Sorry that I'm unable to boil all of quantum mechanics and solid-state physics into a single easily-comprehensible slashdot posting
Unacceptable! I'm sure the AC who was complaining about unfamiliar words like "crystal" could write a similar length article on some easy technical topic, like how to write a C compiler, without using technical terms like 'bit' or 'keyboard' that might confuse...
Seriously, thanks for the explanation - some of us appreciate it when a professional in a field takes the time to give an accurate description.
The problem is that "theory" has so many shades of meaning at this point, from 'a possible explanation of the available evidence' to 'a predictive, robustly tested framework that makes no predictions contrary to observation or experiment'. String 'theory' leans to the former. "The String Hypothesis" just doesn't sound good - but that's all that it is, and all it may ever be, unless our calculational methodolgies start improving a lot.
How many wars have been fought among states in the US?
One. But that one was sufficient to kill more Americans than any other war we have been involved in, including WWII. I mention that not because I disagree with your point in the main, but to remind that while "When you have food in your belly and a future to look forward to, you don't need fanaticism to hide from reality. When your neighbor doesn't have anything you couldn't get, you have no reason to envy him. When the hand feeds you, you don't bite it." is generally true, it is not a guarantee. People don't just hide from reality (if they are miserable), they actively delude themselves into better fantasies if reality doesn't agree with them (if they are comfortable enough to get away with it). Look at the fantasies regarding Iraq's capabilities and weapons in the leadup to Iraq II, among very comfortable, well fed men.
My point being, food and shelter are not enough to keep people from fantasizing, thinking they are more powerful and right than the other guy. A cultural attitude of humility and rationality are needed as well, and those are MUCH harder to export, not in the least because we seem to have less of them to supply as of late.
The comparison with dictators is therefore not really apt. Hitler and Stalin had no such assurance of destruction hanging over their heads, and it's probable that they discounted any future possibility of punishment for their actions.
In other words, Hitler and Stalin were "homicidal maniacs" because they thought they could get away with it, while Russians like Petrov didn't push the button because they knew they wouldn't get away with it.
Homicidal maniacs come in very different flavors, though. Toward the end of WWII, Hitler gave his troops orders to burn their own buildings and shoot their own citizens, specifically children - lest you think this was some sort of 'scorched earth' policy (deny assets to the enemy), he made it very clear that since the Germans lost WWII, they didn't deserve to live as a people and thus should be anhiliated. Stalin would have never done such a thing - while he was paranoid and ruthless, he killed for purposes that related to his hold on power and his perception of the safety and security of the USSR, as opposed to Hitler's deluded fantasies of apocalypse and volk. Just because you are a homicidal maniac does not mean you don't have a grip on reality. Hitler (toward the later part of his life, anyway) would not have cared whether he would have gotten away with it or not - Stalin would. But Stalin, being the intensely paranoid individual that he was, would be much more likely to make a mistake in the direction of paranoia vs. caution. So give Petrov his due - when he had the fate of the world (not just his home) in his hands, he chose to be stubbornly careful - risking the destruction of his home for being too cautious vs. the destruction of his home and the rest of the world for being too paranoid. That's worth quite a bit.
Mine had a deep breath for having made it through the Cuban Missle Crisis.
Kids these days, they don't know how to sing, "Duck; and cover, Duck; and cover. .."
You can still get a sense of it if you are observant. Wander around almost any older (meaning, not recently redeveloped) area of NYC, and you will see tons of those old "Fallout shelter" signs posted on the sides of buildings. I keep meaning to lift one of them as a reminder of that. Strangely, my father didn't worry too much about nuclear war until Reagan. Up until then, he thought that, compared to Hitler (he was a Holocaust survivor), the leaders of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R (I wonder if that name confuses kids now? 'Back to the USSR? WTF?') were pretty rational, and wanted to protect their countries, therefore MAD worked. Reagan seemed a bit more 'spacey', like some days, he might really believe a nuclear war was winnable. Funny how we lived our lives under a real threat of anhiliation for decades, and now 'ter'rizm' sends people quaking, running to their shredders with bits of the Constitution in hand....
I think the idea you are half-remembering is 'neutron' bombs - bombs designed to put out most of their energy as neutron radiation, 'sterilizing' (i.e. killing) the buildings, structures and roads while leaving the structures themselves relatively intact. As for most of the 'dread' surrounding fission bombs being due to radiation, read up on what the VC thought of operation Rolling Thunder, and what that did to humans, or just look at the 'puny' bomb we dropped on Hiroshima did, forgetting the effects of radiation, or Iraq I or II. Go to the Hiroshima museum sometime. Most of the dread surrounding bombs has to do with sudden death, destruction, and rending of people from limb to limb. The radiation is just one more tramua of dozens for the survivors to go through.
It's worth pointing out that the reason a nuclear winter was thought likely to occur was not due to the explosions themselves (horrific as they are), but the resultant uncontrollable fires in the large majority of the urban areas of the world. AFAIK, all above ground atomic testing was conducted in places where there was no potential for uncontrollable fires to result. So, there is a relevant difference between a few hundred test nukes and a few hundred hurled in anger at some of the most densly populated places in the world.... But I THINK you are right, as the quantity of stuff to burn in India/Pakistan is much less than the U.S.A + Russia + Europe. This is one of those experiments that I hope never gets conducted to find out for sure.
You might want to wait for the second model year. There's still some question about whether they're just selling cat oil or not.
Indeed. As someone who has suffered from allergies to a greater or lesser extent, and with a recently retired mom who is looking for things to do, a pet aquisition seems probable - and as I'll therefore frequently be stuck around the critter, I HOPE they are not just selling cat oil!
Bah! Lemme know when they breed one that isn't allergenic, doesn't shed, doesn't scratch, is toilet trained by default, responds to it's name, and actually pretends to care when I come home.
Until then, it's still a cat. For some of us, that's still a big problem.:-P
Cheers
All the other attributes are part of their charm - it's good training for marriage, but the divorce is MUCH cheaper
Well... not really. Just evolution in action, with manmade selection vs. the 'natural' kind. I like cats, but hate the allergic reactions I get from them. Sign me up.
As someone who has taught H.S. classes and tutored students in Math and Physics, I can tell you that most of the time, calculators do more damage than good. The reason is that there is a certain amount of drill and repetition to learn any topic well, and the calculator (except with the best students) does not encourage students to use their capabilities and experiment, but to instead put in the minimum amount of effort necessary to do the problems. If they were forced to rely on pencil and paper skills, they would (whether they liked it or not!) get a certain intuition as to what is a right or a wrong answer.
Think of it this way - in 10 years, except for the people who use math professionally, 99% of what you teach them will escape their heads. The one significant thing you can leave them with is an intuitive sense (mental back of the envelope calculation, if you will) of numbers, of the importance and validity of ESTIMATING answers. The biggest problem I saw (this is going back 10 years now) was students who could use a calculator to answer 160 / 5, but when asked how to split up 160 dollars among 5 people, had no clue what to do, and when presented with possible answers 3 10 32 50 and 100, had NO clue which was right, without the calculator telling them.
I agree that we should teach the use of tools in common use in society, but the problem is math is not just calculator imitation skill. With more advanced students, or older ones who have mastered the fundamentals, calculators are appropriate, but I saw them serving as a crutch for students who had no clue what they were doing and teachers who really didn't want to be bothered with teaching. They are too easy a temptation. Can you imagine what teaching foreign languages would be like if every student was allowed to carry an English-Language X electronic dictionary with them all the time? Sure, they could pass exams, but their real-world skills with that language would be about 0. I think calculators do the same thing to math....
RPN is NOT hard. It is only hard if you don't understand what a mathematical statement really means - which is what scared people off from it. The fact that 6+4*27/(sqrt(90-9)) needed to be translated into the actual sequence of operations it represents, namely 90 - 9 = result, take square root result, keep as result a, do 4 * 27, call that result b, do a/b, and then add 6.... or, in RPN: 6 [enter] 4 [enter] 27 * 90 [enter] 9 - SQRT / + and you are done. RPN teaches you how to visualize what is going on in many different ways - it was not only superfast, it was also a great teaching tool....
Sorry about the rant. It was from when HP was a great company, not the bloated husk of crap it is today. I miss the old HP.
Yah, but you aren't a REAL nerd unless you programmed the HP48GX in System RPL - I still have the intro to SysRPL programming by Jim Donnelly. I used to tutor kids in Math and Physics for a living, and that calculator was a work of art and a pleasure to use. >. I loved that thing....
If I had mod points, you'd get them all for this post. Spot-on brilliant. But forget lightning. Compare auto fatality rates. Not too many people are deathly afraid to get in a car, but statistically, it's one of the most common forms of death for people under the age of 35. Disease begins to catch up after that. Yet, we don't suggest background checks, fingerprint scanners, dna analysis, a 'blow-under-.04-before-you-drive' tube by the ignition, speed governers and gps trackers for every vehicle, do we?
Much as I would like to see Wikipedia hew to its original idea of "anyone can edit anything", experience seems to demonstrate that if Wikipedia is to remain a USEFUL reference, as opposed to a merely entertaining/misleading one, some sort of restriction is necessary to rein in the 5% of the contributors who are asses and trying to promote a personal agenda vs. the 95% who want to enlighten and inform.
I frankly vote for the useful model. There are plenty of useless websites out there already. I'm glad they are experimenting with the right balance between user contribution and editorial control, because there is NOT an obvious answer, and the most practical choice may only be determined by experiment.
Of course, no details on the website, other than the typical PMM favorite, obtaining energy from 'interacting' magnetic fields. I hope since they took out an advert in the Economist, the Economist will happily publish the results of testing by independent experts. Might be funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's why I put "Department of Privacy" in quotes. It was the suggestion of a gereral idea, not a call to create another Department of Homeland Security. But a standard tool of larger organizations is to appoint an omnibudsman with substantial power of investigation to look for systemic problems in that organization, independent of any particular department. Privacy rights are enforced by the right of judges to throw out evidence obtained illegally, such evidence typically obtained by violating privacy rights in the process. It's NOT impossible - but it is complex, and has to be thought out as to how to set up a system that encourages people, companies, organizations and the government to respect privacy rights as a default, at their peril if they don't.
...but if you think you have no chance to stop losing your privacy, you resign yourself to it and give up. Everyone has a limited, increasingly limited, amount of spare time in their lives to worry about things other than work. The problem with "protecting your privacy" is that it is an increasingly complex, time-consuming, byzantine, and inconvienent task. You as an individual have to keep track of all the myriad ways that your privacy is being ignored or taking advantage of and spend your spare time tracking down, learning about and trying to change this. There is no "Department of Privacy", no mechanism in the government, other than individuals who have discovered that their privacy was violated bringing up individual cases in court, to stop its erosion in fact. And the most recent suggested constitutional amendments have had nothing to do with enhancing and/or extending or simply MODERNIZING the privacy rights individuals have....
The only reason North Korea exists is because of China, giving them food, oil, diplomatic sheilding, and just about everything else. China, and the country they don't get on with very well, Japan, issued a joint communication saying a N. Korean nuclear test would be "unacceptable". I wonder if China is going to be a bit more... interested in how to deal with little dictator states when they start disobeying, collecting nukes and have missles with the range to hit most of China's main cities.
Whoops! Thanks for the correction - it gave me an excuse to pull it off the shelf and thumb through it. It's STILL as good as I remembered - [cue nostalgic music while I wish I was 21 again...]
...I can't imagine memorizing 100,000 ANYTHING. Most people know about 25,000 words, 1,000 or so people, etc. - there is a certain amazement at what the human mind is capable of. Can you imagine if he memorized 100,000 faces and names? 100,000 cities and populations? It is astonishing how much information we can learn...
All the people who have said that there is no difference in ability, and any arbitrary person can advance to any arbitrary level of mathematical ability are pretty unrealistic. I base this statement on my own abiding comfort and love of the subject, as well as five years tutoring and teaching it at levels varying from elementary school level to graduate school. That said, here are my own personal observations as to which people succeed in their math goals and which people fail.
First, what people said about practice is partway true. But HOW you practice is as important as how much. Many people think that if they do the same problem over and over and over, perhaps with minor variations, this will somehow improve their mathematics ability. Except for at a very base rote level, this is untrue. A far better challenge would be to INVENT problems like the ones you have been solving, and see if you can solve those. Frequently, the 'canned' problems you are given for most mathematics instruction below second year university level are designed to have 'neat' answers. This very quickly becomes a crutch for students, because they are so used to looking for the 'neat' answer that they are unable, or don't trust their ability (almost the same thing, in practice) to work a problem when it is unclean. In addition, when you start designing problems, you start to focus on the crucial idea of whether you are right or not. Having an answer handed to you is almost useless, because it short-circuits the other half of problem solving - how do you know whether you have a right answer? If you don't understand how to check your answers, you aren't qualified to be doing the problem! Right there, that suggests a different method of problem solving - trial and error. This is not to be scorned, but encouraged, because it means your brain is engaged again, and you are not just regurigitating the motions.
Second, most people who are good at math like it. What this means is that they are practicing far more often than people who don't like it, because they have some part of their mind on math problems throughout a day, or they find problems that have mathematical solutions. How do you get to like math if you don't? Tough question - I found that good teachers who enjoyed explaining how they got to an answer, what makes it fun or interesting, how it applies, or just how neat it is are better than the rote type. But at some level, you have to start figuring what you want to DO with your math - frequently, practicality and application focus the mind and make it easier to learn and enjoy it.
Third, don't let people who are better at it than you get you down. REAL math is messy. When solving a problem that has not been solved before, mathematicians go through all sorts of detours, false starts, unnecessary constructions... messy, messy, messy! But after thier adventures through the mathematical jungles, after they get the prize, they clean up the mess. They don't mention the false starts, the extra logic that really isn't needed, the play with ideas that turned out to be useless. They just show the clean, sparse, neat path. This is a modern fashion, and I think a bad one, because it removes the human element of play, adventure, and imperfect effort. Learning math is messy - you need to experiment, make mistakes, try to fix them, try different ideas, and PLAY with the stuff. They don't tell you this in the textbooks, at least not the modern ones (of course, there were flowery extremes on the other side - read Cardano for an illustration of 99% prose and 1% math! But he does tell you of his false starts, his dispair, his mistakes, and the joy of his ultimate triumph). AFTER you have made mistakes, tried alternatives, and played with other ways of solving a problem, then the 'standard' way of doing it makes much more sense, and you appreciate the WHY vs. the HOW. This is why, if you don't know how to check your answer for sure, you are not at the level where you should be attempting such a problem.
Feynman
But, as you are no doubt aware, in a conductor where the outer valence electrons are so weakly held that they are approximately free to drift within the boundaries of the material, if a particular atom at a particular time has one less electron bound to it than it has protons in its nucleus, then as a whole, it is positively charged - and it tends to attract any 'free' electrons in the vicinity. As one of these 'free' electrons has to come from somewhere, the somewhere (being another atom) is now short an electron. Thus, the location of the positive charge has moved. So, in a material, talking about positive holes moving, having a certain density and so forth is quite reasonable.
Because electrons aren't dealt with in a vacuum. If you took a small ball of some element, say carbon (Make it 12 g - one mole of the stuff), and it was 'missing' only 1 electron in 1,000,000,000 atoms, our little ball of carbon would have a charge of .1 millicolumbs. If you held this little ball about a centimeter away from its missing electrons, they would attract each other with a force of about 10,000 N - or roughly the weight of a ton! The balance between the number of electrons and the number of protons in a material rarely deviates by more than 1 in 10^15 particles in practice. So, keeping track of the 'holes', since they match the number of electrons to an exquisite level of precision, even in conductors carring hundreds of amps of current, is a very reasonable model of what occurs.
As for whether 'holes' are real, read up on what Dirac has to say about electrons sometime - you can google it.
Unacceptable! I'm sure the AC who was complaining about unfamiliar words like "crystal" could write a similar length article on some easy technical topic, like how to write a C compiler, without using technical terms like 'bit' or 'keyboard' that might confuse...
Seriously, thanks for the explanation - some of us appreciate it when a professional in a field takes the time to give an accurate description.
The problem is that "theory" has so many shades of meaning at this point, from 'a possible explanation of the available evidence' to 'a predictive, robustly tested framework that makes no predictions contrary to observation or experiment'. String 'theory' leans to the former. "The String Hypothesis" just doesn't sound good - but that's all that it is, and all it may ever be, unless our calculational methodolgies start improving a lot.
One. But that one was sufficient to kill more Americans than any other war we have been involved in, including WWII. I mention that not because I disagree with your point in the main, but to remind that while "When you have food in your belly and a future to look forward to, you don't need fanaticism to hide from reality. When your neighbor doesn't have anything you couldn't get, you have no reason to envy him. When the hand feeds you, you don't bite it." is generally true, it is not a guarantee. People don't just hide from reality (if they are miserable), they actively delude themselves into better fantasies if reality doesn't agree with them (if they are comfortable enough to get away with it). Look at the fantasies regarding Iraq's capabilities and weapons in the leadup to Iraq II, among very comfortable, well fed men.
My point being, food and shelter are not enough to keep people from fantasizing, thinking they are more powerful and right than the other guy. A cultural attitude of humility and rationality are needed as well, and those are MUCH harder to export, not in the least because we seem to have less of them to supply as of late.
Homicidal maniacs come in very different flavors, though. Toward the end of WWII, Hitler gave his troops orders to burn their own buildings and shoot their own citizens, specifically children - lest you think this was some sort of 'scorched earth' policy (deny assets to the enemy), he made it very clear that since the Germans lost WWII, they didn't deserve to live as a people and thus should be anhiliated. Stalin would have never done such a thing - while he was paranoid and ruthless, he killed for purposes that related to his hold on power and his perception of the safety and security of the USSR, as opposed to Hitler's deluded fantasies of apocalypse and volk. Just because you are a homicidal maniac does not mean you don't have a grip on reality. Hitler (toward the later part of his life, anyway) would not have cared whether he would have gotten away with it or not - Stalin would. But Stalin, being the intensely paranoid individual that he was, would be much more likely to make a mistake in the direction of paranoia vs. caution. So give Petrov his due - when he had the fate of the world (not just his home) in his hands, he chose to be stubbornly careful - risking the destruction of his home for being too cautious vs. the destruction of his home and the rest of the world for being too paranoid. That's worth quite a bit.
Cheers,
Nice post.
I think the idea you are half-remembering is 'neutron' bombs - bombs designed to put out most of their energy as neutron radiation, 'sterilizing' (i.e. killing) the buildings, structures and roads while leaving the structures themselves relatively intact. As for most of the 'dread' surrounding fission bombs being due to radiation, read up on what the VC thought of operation Rolling Thunder, and what that did to humans, or just look at the 'puny' bomb we dropped on Hiroshima did, forgetting the effects of radiation, or Iraq I or II. Go to the Hiroshima museum sometime. Most of the dread surrounding bombs has to do with sudden death, destruction, and rending of people from limb to limb. The radiation is just one more tramua of dozens for the survivors to go through.
It's worth pointing out that the reason a nuclear winter was thought likely to occur was not due to the explosions themselves (horrific as they are), but the resultant uncontrollable fires in the large majority of the urban areas of the world. AFAIK, all above ground atomic testing was conducted in places where there was no potential for uncontrollable fires to result. So, there is a relevant difference between a few hundred test nukes and a few hundred hurled in anger at some of the most densly populated places in the world.... But I THINK you are right, as the quantity of stuff to burn in India/Pakistan is much less than the U.S.A + Russia + Europe. This is one of those experiments that I hope never gets conducted to find out for sure.
Cheers,
All the other attributes are part of their charm - it's good training for marriage, but the divorce is MUCH cheaper
Well... not really. Just evolution in action, with manmade selection vs. the 'natural' kind. I like cats, but hate the allergic reactions I get from them. Sign me up.
As someone who has taught H.S. classes and tutored students in Math and Physics, I can tell you that most of the time, calculators do more damage than good. The reason is that there is a certain amount of drill and repetition to learn any topic well, and the calculator (except with the best students) does not encourage students to use their capabilities and experiment, but to instead put in the minimum amount of effort necessary to do the problems. If they were forced to rely on pencil and paper skills, they would (whether they liked it or not!) get a certain intuition as to what is a right or a wrong answer.
Think of it this way - in 10 years, except for the people who use math professionally, 99% of what you teach them will escape their heads. The one significant thing you can leave them with is an intuitive sense (mental back of the envelope calculation, if you will) of numbers, of the importance and validity of ESTIMATING answers. The biggest problem I saw (this is going back 10 years now) was students who could use a calculator to answer 160 / 5, but when asked how to split up 160 dollars among 5 people, had no clue what to do, and when presented with possible answers 3 10 32 50 and 100, had NO clue which was right, without the calculator telling them.
I agree that we should teach the use of tools in common use in society, but the problem is math is not just calculator imitation skill. With more advanced students, or older ones who have mastered the fundamentals, calculators are appropriate, but I saw them serving as a crutch for students who had no clue what they were doing and teachers who really didn't want to be bothered with teaching. They are too easy a temptation. Can you imagine what teaching foreign languages would be like if every student was allowed to carry an English-Language X electronic dictionary with them all the time? Sure, they could pass exams, but their real-world skills with that language would be about 0. I think calculators do the same thing to math....
RPN is NOT hard. It is only hard if you don't understand what a mathematical statement really means - which is what scared people off from it. The fact that 6+4*27/(sqrt(90-9)) needed to be translated into the actual sequence of operations it represents, namely 90 - 9 = result, take square root result, keep as result a, do 4 * 27, call that result b, do a/b, and then add 6.... or, in RPN: 6 [enter] 4 [enter] 27 * 90 [enter] 9 - SQRT / + and you are done. RPN teaches you how to visualize what is going on in many different ways - it was not only superfast, it was also a great teaching tool....
Sorry about the rant. It was from when HP was a great company, not the bloated husk of crap it is today. I miss the old HP.
Yah, but you aren't a REAL nerd unless you programmed the HP48GX in System RPL - I still have the intro to SysRPL programming by Jim Donnelly. I used to tutor kids in Math and Physics for a living, and that calculator was a work of art and a pleasure to use. >. I loved that thing....
If I had mod points, you'd get them all for this post. Spot-on brilliant. But forget lightning. Compare auto fatality rates. Not too many people are deathly afraid to get in a car, but statistically, it's one of the most common forms of death for people under the age of 35. Disease begins to catch up after that. Yet, we don't suggest background checks, fingerprint scanners, dna analysis, a 'blow-under-.04-before-you-drive' tube by the ignition, speed governers and gps trackers for every vehicle, do we?
Much as I would like to see Wikipedia hew to its original idea of "anyone can edit anything", experience seems to demonstrate that if Wikipedia is to remain a USEFUL reference, as opposed to a merely entertaining/misleading one, some sort of restriction is necessary to rein in the 5% of the contributors who are asses and trying to promote a personal agenda vs. the 95% who want to enlighten and inform.
I frankly vote for the useful model. There are plenty of useless websites out there already. I'm glad they are experimenting with the right balance between user contribution and editorial control, because there is NOT an obvious answer, and the most practical choice may only be determined by experiment.
Hope they can figure it out.
Of course, no details on the website, other than the typical PMM favorite, obtaining energy from 'interacting' magnetic fields. I hope since they took out an advert in the Economist, the Economist will happily publish the results of testing by independent experts. Might be funny.
In all probability, once it has been vetted and accepted, it will be called a theorEM. Theories are for the inductive sciences. Little nitpick, sorry.