This comment points out the importance of stating units. A dollar amount can be reasonably interpreted this way. However, the comment I replied to was talking in terms of raw numbers, simply because he forgot the unit. Again, like the period/dot mistake, confusion resulted because the poster failed to say what he meant. You can hand-wave some "clear from the context" argument, but it doesn't change the fact that there's less ambiguity if you do the right thing to begin with.
"222000." has six sig figs, whereas "151.20" only has five. "222000" has three. The period in the first number matters--and, in this case, putting that number at the end of your sentence actually changed the meaning of the number and, from there, your entire statement.
I think it happened right around the time that HDTV became available, but at some point resolution--previously a technical term--somehow became a buzzword related to quality. It's gotten to the point where I can't stand hearing people talk about 640p or 1080i or whatever, because it just comes off as marketing spew and e-penis-waving.
Persisence of color, as I understand it, is due to phosphors in the eyes becoming saturated and taking a finite time to adjust to a non-colored scene. What we're seeing here is actually the brain's misinterpretation of a scene persisting past the point at which, normally, the brain "realizes" its mistake. It's the difference between a phenomenon that happens in the chemistry of the eye versus that of the brain.
Cross your eyes, line up the two squares so they're offset by a few millimeters, and then hit the mask. What I saw was that the squares retained their seeming discoloration--until I uncrossed my eyes.
Slightly off-topic: I'm interested in reading more about these sorts of sites, including engineering disasters like the Bhopal-Union Carbide release. I remember reading a book about this disaster and others when I was younger--it included a few bridge collapses as well as a few descriptions of Superfund sites like Hanford. It was, for some reason, completely fascinating. Accidents like the criticality accidents in the Soviet Union (I forget the name of the reactors--Mayak?) are fine as well. Wikipedia appears to have a bunch of links, but I'd like to have some paper sources as well, in order to get hopefully more complete information.
Does anyone know about any books or have any web sites that talk about these sort of things, or have any sources for similar information? I'd really appreciate some help.
I think that to get the public to _buy into_ science, a bunch of people going around demonstrating scientific principles (maybe something a little more complex than gravitation, too), answering peoples' questions calmly and rationally, and showing them how science helps them and influences their daily lives would not necessarily be a bad thing. And if these people could make a ton of money in donations from doing so, and then send it back up the ladder in the form of extra grant opportunities, it seems like an even LESS bad idea.
The problem, I guess, is that it's a lot easier for religious evangelists to get buy-in from the public--i.e. showing up--than it would be for a "science evangelist." That, and it sounds like it'd be really very boring to attend one of these things.
A gamma-ray laser would certainly have many applications. Maybe the energy density is so high that it becomes irrelevant, but the problem that jumps out at me is that you really can't refract high-energy photons. About all you can do is stop them. I don't see this type of "laser" being used in most applications where you traditionally think lasers would be useful, since you wouldn't be able to easily focus these beams, guide them in fiber, or anything like that. The most useful thing you could do with this type of laser, I would guess, would be ablation--THAT it should be pretty darn good at.
Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see the radiometry for these lasers in however many years it'll take for them to be in a position where they can even think about that sort of thing. From that, you can figure out the dosimetry if you were to turn one onto a person. In this situation, a medical linac should be to this sort of thing what a flashlight is to a laser in terms of photon flux. When you're talking about gamma photons instead of visible ones, I imagine you could give someone a pretty serious radiation dose in pretty short order. From a military perspective I don't think that putting that in a hand-held weapon would exactly rival bullets (which are pretty good at disabling people quickly, something that radiation couldn't do reliably barring stupidly high doses over large areas of the brain or GI), especially considering the cost. Putting one on a satellite and blasting ICBMs in orbit, however, could be a very different story--you don't have nearly as much atmosphere to get through, and you ought to be able to put an awful lot more energy in that missile with similar fluxes of gamma photons versus lower-energy photons. The gammas would probably significantly penetrate the housing of the missile, too, which could be good or bad--bad in that it spreads out the heating effect you'd get, good in that you can significantly heat things that are behind a few layers of metal.
Come to think of it, considering that medical linacs have caused serious burns (and then death from ARS) in the past, turning a gamma laser on someone would probably basically burn right through them--so maybe dosimetry really isn't an issue (for the target--for the operators, on the other hand...)
Anyhow, that's way in the future. For now, all we have are jokes about sharks that can turn people into the Hulk from ten meters.
I had (half) hoped that IGN would man up and admit to trying that purported AO version of the game that's floating aroudn out there on the Internets somewheres.
I suppose if we send another rover to Mars, they might--out of optimism--include a way for the solar panels to free themselves of dust? I know they supposedly didn't expect the rovers to last for quite this long, but it seems like being proactive about this sort of thing really wouldn't hurt for the next time around. I imagine it'd have to be a pretty low-energy method for doing so, and if it's really fine dust it might be a tough job. Maybe piezoeletrically vibrating the panels, if they're set at an angle, would work.
If this happened in my town--and if I were using Vista--I'd be pretty damn unhappy. Usually a story is funny because someone got what they deserved in a particularly humorous way, or because someone subjectively considered evil takes it in the pants. Here I see a bunch of people getting shafted by two corporations that don't want to play nice, and this perhaps for the crime of simply owning a new computer.
For some reason, this procedure makes me think of magnetic resonance imaging. I can't really seem to exactly pinpoint why that is, however, and I think the link I'm imagining might be totally specious.
Does it take into account magnitude of error corrections? If major portions of someone's articles are being rewritten, that's a good reason to de-rep them. If someone makes a bunch of minor spelling or trivial errors, then that's not necessarily a reason to do so.
And, of course, there is the potential for abuse. If the software could intelligently track reversions and somehow ascribe to those events a neutral sort of rep, that would probably help the system out.
As it stands, they're essentially trying to objectively judge "correctness" of facts without knowing the actual facts to check. That's somewhat like polling a college class for answers and assigning grades based on how many other people DON'T say that they disagree with a certain person in any way.
Where does one draw a line between blog and "online diary"? I didn't notice a definition when I skimmed TFA. I would think that things like LJ skew the results quite a bit, since lots of teens are liable to hit up these sites and the post to them every once in a blue moon.
I meant "don't want" as in "have undesirable traits that we very much don't want spread." That was intended as more of a typical knee-jerk reaction to genetics rather than a commentary on maximizing the effectiveness of the organisms.
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
Between that and the guy who wants to extend the genetic code to twelve bases, it seems a little avant-garde to just trust everything to evolution (although, in a sense, I suppose that's the point of being a forerunner). It seems that would be more useful to trust evolution for advancement only in the intermediate phases of getting organisms that do what we want, rather than letting them evolve and evolve until we have the final designs for proto-organisms that do what we want. Upon reflection, I don't really expect them to try the latter method since it would lead to all kinds of dead ends, but I do sorta wonder how many other people out there will jump to that conclusion like I did. Of course, dead ends in genetics maybe don't matter if you're breeding billions of proto-organisms and have a reliable method for killing the ones you know you don't want. Then again, unless you remove the ability of the organisms to breed (which, if we're designing them from scratch, may not be too hard), evolution will just continue on even after you have what you think is your final design.
I guess all this thinking is a little preliminary. People will begin to take these issues perhaps a little more seriously when the time comes to start breeding little proto-organisms.
Be that as it may, isn't it a deliberate and valid artistic choice to go out of your way to avoid using that tool? Punctuation is a valuable tool for poets and authors, but at least one person made himself very famous by avoiding its use.
Now, the disclaimer is that I'm hardly artistic, but from my perspective it seems to be just another stylistic choice if done deliberately. Of course, any new student artist could make a mistake and misuse or ignore a creative tool, but aren't "good" artists always finding new uses for their tools?
Ionizing radiation is much like most other poisons in that dose is critical in determining subsequent health effects. You are--right now--not only being bombarded by tiny amounts of ionizing radiation from most things around you, but your body tissues themselves are releasing ionizing radiation: they contain completely natural but radioactive potassium-40. It is, however, a very, very low level of radiation.
According to our best theories--which, to be honest, are not by any means set in stone--there is no absolutely safe lower threshold for radiation exposure IF you consider the chances for causing cancer and genetic effects. These are called "stochastic" radiation effects, because they are best described in terms of risk and probability and do not have definite thresholds. For acute radiation toxicity--vomiting, blistering, and so on--there are fairly well-defined threshold doses; these radiation sicknesses are called "deterministic" effects because we can safely say that, given a certain amount of damage, you have a certain (high) chance of acute radiation sickness. These latter effects are similar to other toxic substances, in that they are talked about in terms of doses that have some specific chance (say, 50% or 99%) of causing an effect.
The amount of radiation-induced damage caused by the gammas released by a thunderstorm is very likely to be well below the thresholds for deterministic effecs, which means that an average person has essentially no chance of developing acute radiation sickness from a thunderstorm. Exposure to low levels of radiation may increase your chance of developing cancer, but such an increase is naturally impossible to quantify.
It's really one of those jargon-related things that happen so often in physics. Your average physicist uses "intensity" in ways that make optical scientists rip their hair out, since in optics intensity has a very specific definition. In the same vein, radiation scientists reserve "gamma" to describe photons originating from nuclear processes. Physicists in other specializations generally just go by energy because gammas tend to be higher in energy than X-rays. It's not necessarily the case though.
A basic calculation indicates that as many as 0.7-3% of 10 MeV gammas could make it down from 2000 m. Put another way, any gamma headed for their detector will make it there about that percentage of the time. Starting with a high flux could mean that a significant number of gammas make it to the scintillators, which can trigger off of relatively small numbers of photons.
That having been said, 2000m is the lower end of the altitude range (as I understand it) for storm clouds, and my calculation assumed dry air at sea level. The attenuation of photons does go up pretty sharply as you get to energies less than 10 MeV, as well.
I've never heard of a more appropriately-named government project. $84M for a continually-updated filter that a kid (sounds like a smart kid, but a kid nonetheless) can break in less than an hour.
Why can't America's politicians up and admit to their schemes, too? Imagine it: the PATRIOT Scheme, the Communications Decency Scheme, and so on.
Ok, I did Google it, and I guess it's "Sunoco." I guess I could've seen that one coming.
(Totally off-subject, but I'm finding that Google should be responsible for a significant decrease in general ignorance: whenever someone wonders some basic question, the answer is usually a few keywords away. This hasn't happened yet for some reason.)
How the hell do they define terms like "average brand familiarity," "cool," and "automotive purchase consideration," anyhow? How did they select the groups? Randomly, or were they already gamers who play these types of games to begin with? Where was the study published, and who were the prinicpal authors? Was it ever formally published, so that we can look up their methods for ourselves, or did they just ask a bunch of people to play games and fill out forms over the years? The obvious conflict of interest has been pointed out already.
Now, before the defenders rally, the disclaimer: I'm disinclined to trust marketers, marketing research, and anyone who uses phrases like "quick service restaurant."
Slashdot Mirror
The way I look at it is that if you swear all the time, what do you say in those situations where you really need to let loose?
You say it louder.
This comment points out the importance of stating units. A dollar amount can be reasonably interpreted this way. However, the comment I replied to was talking in terms of raw numbers, simply because he forgot the unit. Again, like the period/dot mistake, confusion resulted because the poster failed to say what he meant. You can hand-wave some "clear from the context" argument, but it doesn't change the fact that there's less ambiguity if you do the right thing to begin with.
Given how hard it's been for me to get a copy of Arcanum, maybe this will end up being a good thing.
(Before anyone says anything: I'm not looking any longer. I don't want snarky links to ebay auctions or torrents.)
"222000." has six sig figs, whereas "151.20" only has five. "222000" has three. The period in the first number matters--and, in this case, putting that number at the end of your sentence actually changed the meaning of the number and, from there, your entire statement.
I think it happened right around the time that HDTV became available, but at some point resolution--previously a technical term--somehow became a buzzword related to quality. It's gotten to the point where I can't stand hearing people talk about 640p or 1080i or whatever, because it just comes off as marketing spew and e-penis-waving.
Persisence of color, as I understand it, is due to phosphors in the eyes becoming saturated and taking a finite time to adjust to a non-colored scene. What we're seeing here is actually the brain's misinterpretation of a scene persisting past the point at which, normally, the brain "realizes" its mistake. It's the difference between a phenomenon that happens in the chemistry of the eye versus that of the brain.
Cross your eyes, line up the two squares so they're offset by a few millimeters, and then hit the mask. What I saw was that the squares retained their seeming discoloration--until I uncrossed my eyes.
Slightly off-topic: I'm interested in reading more about these sorts of sites, including engineering disasters like the Bhopal-Union Carbide release. I remember reading a book about this disaster and others when I was younger--it included a few bridge collapses as well as a few descriptions of Superfund sites like Hanford. It was, for some reason, completely fascinating. Accidents like the criticality accidents in the Soviet Union (I forget the name of the reactors--Mayak?) are fine as well. Wikipedia appears to have a bunch of links, but I'd like to have some paper sources as well, in order to get hopefully more complete information.
Does anyone know about any books or have any web sites that talk about these sort of things, or have any sources for similar information? I'd really appreciate some help.
I think that to get the public to _buy into_ science, a bunch of people going around demonstrating scientific principles (maybe something a little more complex than gravitation, too), answering peoples' questions calmly and rationally, and showing them how science helps them and influences their daily lives would not necessarily be a bad thing. And if these people could make a ton of money in donations from doing so, and then send it back up the ladder in the form of extra grant opportunities, it seems like an even LESS bad idea.
The problem, I guess, is that it's a lot easier for religious evangelists to get buy-in from the public--i.e. showing up--than it would be for a "science evangelist." That, and it sounds like it'd be really very boring to attend one of these things.
A gamma-ray laser would certainly have many applications. Maybe the energy density is so high that it becomes irrelevant, but the problem that jumps out at me is that you really can't refract high-energy photons. About all you can do is stop them. I don't see this type of "laser" being used in most applications where you traditionally think lasers would be useful, since you wouldn't be able to easily focus these beams, guide them in fiber, or anything like that. The most useful thing you could do with this type of laser, I would guess, would be ablation--THAT it should be pretty darn good at.
Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see the radiometry for these lasers in however many years it'll take for them to be in a position where they can even think about that sort of thing. From that, you can figure out the dosimetry if you were to turn one onto a person. In this situation, a medical linac should be to this sort of thing what a flashlight is to a laser in terms of photon flux. When you're talking about gamma photons instead of visible ones, I imagine you could give someone a pretty serious radiation dose in pretty short order. From a military perspective I don't think that putting that in a hand-held weapon would exactly rival bullets (which are pretty good at disabling people quickly, something that radiation couldn't do reliably barring stupidly high doses over large areas of the brain or GI), especially considering the cost. Putting one on a satellite and blasting ICBMs in orbit, however, could be a very different story--you don't have nearly as much atmosphere to get through, and you ought to be able to put an awful lot more energy in that missile with similar fluxes of gamma photons versus lower-energy photons. The gammas would probably significantly penetrate the housing of the missile, too, which could be good or bad--bad in that it spreads out the heating effect you'd get, good in that you can significantly heat things that are behind a few layers of metal.
Come to think of it, considering that medical linacs have caused serious burns (and then death from ARS) in the past, turning a gamma laser on someone would probably basically burn right through them--so maybe dosimetry really isn't an issue (for the target--for the operators, on the other hand...)
Anyhow, that's way in the future. For now, all we have are jokes about sharks that can turn people into the Hulk from ten meters.
I had (half) hoped that IGN would man up and admit to trying that purported AO version of the game that's floating aroudn out there on the Internets somewheres.
I suppose if we send another rover to Mars, they might--out of optimism--include a way for the solar panels to free themselves of dust? I know they supposedly didn't expect the rovers to last for quite this long, but it seems like being proactive about this sort of thing really wouldn't hurt for the next time around. I imagine it'd have to be a pretty low-energy method for doing so, and if it's really fine dust it might be a tough job. Maybe piezoeletrically vibrating the panels, if they're set at an angle, would work.
If this happened in my town--and if I were using Vista--I'd be pretty damn unhappy. Usually a story is funny because someone got what they deserved in a particularly humorous way, or because someone subjectively considered evil takes it in the pants. Here I see a bunch of people getting shafted by two corporations that don't want to play nice, and this perhaps for the crime of simply owning a new computer.
For some reason, this procedure makes me think of magnetic resonance imaging. I can't really seem to exactly pinpoint why that is, however, and I think the link I'm imagining might be totally specious.
Does it take into account magnitude of error corrections? If major portions of someone's articles are being rewritten, that's a good reason to de-rep them. If someone makes a bunch of minor spelling or trivial errors, then that's not necessarily a reason to do so.
And, of course, there is the potential for abuse. If the software could intelligently track reversions and somehow ascribe to those events a neutral sort of rep, that would probably help the system out.
As it stands, they're essentially trying to objectively judge "correctness" of facts without knowing the actual facts to check. That's somewhat like polling a college class for answers and assigning grades based on how many other people DON'T say that they disagree with a certain person in any way.
Where does one draw a line between blog and "online diary"? I didn't notice a definition when I skimmed TFA. I would think that things like LJ skew the results quite a bit, since lots of teens are liable to hit up these sites and the post to them every once in a blue moon.
I meant "don't want" as in "have undesirable traits that we very much don't want spread." That was intended as more of a typical knee-jerk reaction to genetics rather than a commentary on maximizing the effectiveness of the organisms.
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
Between that and the guy who wants to extend the genetic code to twelve bases, it seems a little avant-garde to just trust everything to evolution (although, in a sense, I suppose that's the point of being a forerunner). It seems that would be more useful to trust evolution for advancement only in the intermediate phases of getting organisms that do what we want, rather than letting them evolve and evolve until we have the final designs for proto-organisms that do what we want. Upon reflection, I don't really expect them to try the latter method since it would lead to all kinds of dead ends, but I do sorta wonder how many other people out there will jump to that conclusion like I did. Of course, dead ends in genetics maybe don't matter if you're breeding billions of proto-organisms and have a reliable method for killing the ones you know you don't want. Then again, unless you remove the ability of the organisms to breed (which, if we're designing them from scratch, may not be too hard), evolution will just continue on even after you have what you think is your final design.
I guess all this thinking is a little preliminary. People will begin to take these issues perhaps a little more seriously when the time comes to start breeding little proto-organisms.
Be that as it may, isn't it a deliberate and valid artistic choice to go out of your way to avoid using that tool? Punctuation is a valuable tool for poets and authors, but at least one person made himself very famous by avoiding its use.
Now, the disclaimer is that I'm hardly artistic, but from my perspective it seems to be just another stylistic choice if done deliberately. Of course, any new student artist could make a mistake and misuse or ignore a creative tool, but aren't "good" artists always finding new uses for their tools?
Ionizing radiation is much like most other poisons in that dose is critical in determining subsequent health effects. You are--right now--not only being bombarded by tiny amounts of ionizing radiation from most things around you, but your body tissues themselves are releasing ionizing radiation: they contain completely natural but radioactive potassium-40. It is, however, a very, very low level of radiation.
According to our best theories--which, to be honest, are not by any means set in stone--there is no absolutely safe lower threshold for radiation exposure IF you consider the chances for causing cancer and genetic effects. These are called "stochastic" radiation effects, because they are best described in terms of risk and probability and do not have definite thresholds. For acute radiation toxicity--vomiting, blistering, and so on--there are fairly well-defined threshold doses; these radiation sicknesses are called "deterministic" effects because we can safely say that, given a certain amount of damage, you have a certain (high) chance of acute radiation sickness. These latter effects are similar to other toxic substances, in that they are talked about in terms of doses that have some specific chance (say, 50% or 99%) of causing an effect.
The amount of radiation-induced damage caused by the gammas released by a thunderstorm is very likely to be well below the thresholds for deterministic effecs, which means that an average person has essentially no chance of developing acute radiation sickness from a thunderstorm. Exposure to low levels of radiation may increase your chance of developing cancer, but such an increase is naturally impossible to quantify.
It's really one of those jargon-related things that happen so often in physics. Your average physicist uses "intensity" in ways that make optical scientists rip their hair out, since in optics intensity has a very specific definition. In the same vein, radiation scientists reserve "gamma" to describe photons originating from nuclear processes. Physicists in other specializations generally just go by energy because gammas tend to be higher in energy than X-rays. It's not necessarily the case though.
A basic calculation indicates that as many as 0.7-3% of 10 MeV gammas could make it down from 2000 m. Put another way, any gamma headed for their detector will make it there about that percentage of the time. Starting with a high flux could mean that a significant number of gammas make it to the scintillators, which can trigger off of relatively small numbers of photons.
That having been said, 2000m is the lower end of the altitude range (as I understand it) for storm clouds, and my calculation assumed dry air at sea level. The attenuation of photons does go up pretty sharply as you get to energies less than 10 MeV, as well.
I've never heard of a more appropriately-named government project. $84M for a continually-updated filter that a kid (sounds like a smart kid, but a kid nonetheless) can break in less than an hour.
Why can't America's politicians up and admit to their schemes, too? Imagine it: the PATRIOT Scheme, the Communications Decency Scheme, and so on.
Who trades under "SUN"?
Ok, I did Google it, and I guess it's "Sunoco." I guess I could've seen that one coming.
(Totally off-subject, but I'm finding that Google should be responsible for a significant decrease in general ignorance: whenever someone wonders some basic question, the answer is usually a few keywords away. This hasn't happened yet for some reason.)
How the hell do they define terms like "average brand familiarity," "cool," and "automotive purchase consideration," anyhow? How did they select the groups? Randomly, or were they already gamers who play these types of games to begin with? Where was the study published, and who were the prinicpal authors? Was it ever formally published, so that we can look up their methods for ourselves, or did they just ask a bunch of people to play games and fill out forms over the years? The obvious conflict of interest has been pointed out already.
Now, before the defenders rally, the disclaimer: I'm disinclined to trust marketers, marketing research, and anyone who uses phrases like "quick service restaurant."