If by "radiation" you mean electromagnetic radiation, i.e. sunlight, X-rays, heat, et cetera, then these things are unaffected by the Earth's magnetic field. More or less, you have to have a charge to be affected by a magnetic field, and photons have no charge.
The Earth's magnetic field deflects charged particles from the Sun or in cosmic rays. These particles are sometimes called "radiation," but that may be a little bit misleading as they're not at all like light or X-rays.
That being said, it is indeed possible that changes in the Earth's magnetic field have some effect on the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, but what it is, I don't know, and it is likely to have a fairly non-obvious mechanism. I suppose if nothing else the high energy particles can do interesting chemistry in the upper atmosphere, and that can lead to changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases...
Ah, but does he see himself that way? Or does he see himself as a swashbuckling daredevil with a heart of gold and a silver tongue (or at least silver keyboard)?
Erm, wouldn't the story of a pretty girl who rewards with her devotion the poor and unlucky but hard-working and cleverly inventive young lad with a taste for ironic word-play be of significant interest to your generic young male geek?
Or have their mating habits changed?
Well, he did get an amazing reputation.
on
Archimedes Death Ray
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Don't forget Archimedes acquired a reputation in his lifetime that has lasted more than two thousand years. That is, he was not only considered the smartest man in his generation, but one of the smartest men ever to live for another hundred lifetimes of men, all over the Western world. He was very probably the ancient world's equivalent of Newton, Einstein and Fermi all rolled into one.
Further, given that he was at the time of his supposed feat a powerful figure in Syracuse, and the fact that the fate of a conquered ancient city was dire -- the city leaders would be paraded and killed, and everyone else sold into slavery -- Archimedes probably had access to all the material wealth of the city, and as much willing -- nay eager -- manpower as he could wish.
Given those facts I would hesitate to scoff at the myth on the basis of what can be achieved, or not, by a mere dozen modern men, of average intelligence* and creativity, working with trivial amounts of money, and not nearly as motivated as men facing enslavement, an ugly death, or in many cases both.
------------- * Yes, I know the MIT students are no doubt above average in intelligence. But the odds that their number includes someone so clever and inventive that his name and accomplishments will still be common knowledge twenty centuries from now seems remote, to say the least.
Socialism says that society should try its best not to simply abandon people...
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I never studied this political stuff at school -- too busy with math and science. But these goals sound very nice! May I ask, however, where "society" gets the massive resources needed for this noble mission? I mean, where does "society" get the buckets of money and labor it needs to feed everybody, see to their healthcare needs, and educate them? I take it we're assuming large numbers are unable to do so themselves (hence the need for this kind of government), and I take it we're not talking some kind of voluntary mutual help organization. I appreciate your example (donating money to charity), but I was under the impression that socialism was not an individual philosophical choice (such as donating money to the Red Cross) but a system of government imposed on all.
May I assume that in order to get the resources to meet the noble goals "society" finds it necessary to take money and labor by force from -- I suppose I would've naively said rob -- certain people in order to give to others? Sort of a Robin Hood kind of deal? It seems complicated to sort out the morality...unless, of course, one expects to be usually a member of the "receiving" class, or at least a member of the "deciding" class that chooses from whom to take and to whom to give, in which case it sounds like a great system. I'd sure like people to do more work for me than I do for them, or, at least, I'd sure like to be in charge of deciding how the fruit of everyone else's labor should be distributed.
Hmmm, I wish I could say that's enlightening, but it's not.
Isn't a "popular collective" just another name for a government? And so isn't a core belief that a "popular collective" should control the means of power just a basic belief that there should exist a government at all?
In which case, what distinguishes socialism from any other form of government? I certainly thought it was an enhanced attention to the good of society as a whole, and hence a decreased attention to individual rights (since the two are continually in conflict, as anyone who has been asked to turn his stereo down late at night can testify...)
Oh goody. A judge, eh? Like how, in the old days, the bailiff would have to go see the the lord of the manor first, before he could confiscate my crop and sell my barefoot children into slavery.
Perhaps the question we should ask is: why aren't modern governments afraid enough of their own citizens to tread very, very carefully when it comes to peeking into our private affairs?
I shouldn't, but sometimes I think wistfully of the time when a political leader who treated the people with disdain ran the risk not just of early retirement, but of being hanged to the nearest tree. I wonder whether the personal risks associated with being too arrogant in an earlier era might have wonderfully cleared the politician's mind of foolish delusions of grandeur and encouraged a salutary humbleness.
Well, isn't socialism all about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few? In other words, the needs of society as a whole being more important than the rights of individuals?
Goodness, who wants the Federal government to be responsible for general IT security in this country? I mean, let's just think carefully through the kind of power over the network they'd need (or say they need) to be given to achieve it.
Look, the problem is not how much data there is in the world, the problem is finding a general automatable algorithm for organizing it in such a way that J. Random User can rapidly find what he's looking for.
Stroll on down to the nearest university library. It's got a lot less information in it that Google is considering, and aboutt a hundred thousand man-years over a few centuries have gone into finding clever ways to organize it all: card catalogs, shelving systems (e.g. Dewey and his decimals), nowadays searchable electronic catalogs, reference books, specialized indices for law and science and medicine, citation indices, reviews, reviews of reviews...and so on and so forth forever. And yet, it can still be immensely difficult to track down a particular piece of information you want. Even if it can be done, often it takes a fair amount of expertise in a field just to know where to look. Where do you find public information on patents for desalination processes? How do you find out if anyone has synthesized a polymer resin that melts between 130 C and 150 C and is resistant to acid, with a tensile strength about X? What was the common law meaning of "ownership in fee simple" in 1680s England? Even to start looking for the answers, you often need great experience in the relevant field, so you know where to start looking -- the "search terms" we might say.
Google may be feeling its oats because they can now very rapidly provide the most obvious things people want -- directions to San Diego from Ukiah, the times and places Serenity is playing on Sunday, the lead story of the New York Times "Style" section last Sunday, or the names and addresses of the six pizzerias closest to me still open at 11:25 PM.
But this is utterly small potatoes compared to the problem of organizing information generally, so that it is useful to professionals during the weekday as well as for amusement on the weekend. It is first, generally speaking, an unsolved problem -- no library or information index I've ever used fails to have at least one frustrating "feature" that leaves me scratching my head, wondering what the heck the designers were thinking. Secondly, I very much doubt Google has the depth of professional expertise in-house to even begin to figure out how to organize all the giant repositories of information in law, science, engineering, literature et cetera in such a way that professionals can use them, let alone amateurs.
And finally, they don't have the money to do it, and it will be very hard for them to raise it. Indices have suffered from this problem for a long time: any given user will only pay a very small price per search, but it costs a huge amount to make the index. Heretofore, makers of indices and dictionaries and references have relied on selling them at very high prices to libraries, which in turn raise the money in small bits from their patrons, or taxes. But Google would cut out the library middleman -- you search directly. So how are they going to cover their costs? They've no easy way to charge you $0.005 every time you do a Google search, for example.
In short, this sounds like the 21st century equivalent of that 1950s nuclear energy braggadocio, "energy too cheap to meter." Call it "information too cheap to meter." Color me skeptical.
Boeing's left themselves vulnerable to no longer being the top dog by resting on the 747.
I dunno about that. Boeing was poised to build their "Sonic Cruiser," which would significantly increase the cruising speed of a commercial jet, bump it right up against the speed of sound. But they dropped that idea, and instead have bet their future on the 787/Dreamliner, which is a subsonic aircraft configured for short to mid-range flights, with only about 200-300 passengers.
Thing is, the 787 is supposed to be much cheaper and more reliable to maintain, because it's got all these fancy microsensors in it, and most importantly it's supposed to be able to fly the same distance for 20% less fuel than any other airplane in its class.
Now, given the way the price of fuel is going, and given that fuel is a dominant fraction of the cost of flying a commercial jet, it's beginning to look like Boeing made a very smart move. They're seeming as prescient as Toyota was with the hybrid Prius. I'd buy Boeing stock right now. It's probably going to be worth three times as much in 5 years, when the 787 debuts.
I think the prevailing theory is that Australia's large marsupials went very well with a gourd of fermented grape, since they all went extinct around the time early humans arrived in Australia...
The Cerenkov radiation itself is just light. The light comes from particles moving faster than light moves in water.
If the core were in vacuum, there would be no Cerenkov radiation, because however fast the particles came out, they could not exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Nothing can.
It's not, I think, that the Soveits were not into quality in the product, but they had a different mindset than the West. Here, we tended to want to Built It Right The First Time, even if that cost a fortune and took wild leaps in technology (cf. the Space Shuttle, arguably way too bold a design leap for 1970s technology). We like technology, and we don't trust low-level employees, so we make sure our high-end products will last and last without any human oversight at all. Think of those rovers on Mars, still chugging along 600 days after landing, i.e. over 10 times the original design lifetime, more or less.
But the Soviets thought different. For them technology was expensive, but people were cheap, and they specialized at rigorous training and constant checks on one's reliability. So in keeping their aerospace stuff up to snuff they probably relied a lot more on platoons of rigidly-trained technicians checking and re-checking and fixing any little boo-boos. It is almost certain that this has now vanished. The State can no longer command the efforts of huge numbers of people effortlessly, and the apparatus for making people function as reliably as robots is gone. As a consequence a system designed to work with giant amounts of low-level but reliable labor is now struggling to do without it. Without success.
ICBMs blowing up before orbit is one thing, but it's sobering to think about (for example) all those aging nuclear reactors on Soviet-era subs rusting in White Sea ports. They, too, were probably designed with the assumption that they would get constant tending from armies of Soviet technicians. They're not getting it now.
The symbol c in the subject equation, and generally, stands for the speed of light in a vacuum, 299792452 meters/second. In any other medium light travels slower than c, by a factor equal to the inverse of the index of refraction. Id est, for water the index of refraction is about 4/3, so light travels through water 3/4 as fast as it does through vacuum.
While people may have set up interesting media through which light travels at some odd speed, no one has ever observed light traveling through a vacuum at other than c. Indeed, it's a bedrock principle of relativity that it cannot.
Interestingly, the eerie blue glow you see coming from nuclear reactor cores that live at the bottom of pools of water (called Cerenkov radiation) is emitted by particles coming from the core that are traveling faster than the speed of light in water (although of course slower than c). The blue light is a sort of "optic boom" similar in its origin to the "sonic boom" you hear from aircraft exceeding the speed of sound.
Um, there's this odd little gap in your summary: why did capitalism/democracy take over in the 1990s if the experiment was as successful as you say?
No, wait, don't tell me -- I can guess. Stalin trod this path long before you. It was "wreckers" and kulaks (wealthy peasants) and petty bourgeousie and evil foreign influence and the cruel false seductions of money that ruined the noble experiment. It certainly had nothing to do with the majority of plain folks looking around at their lives and concluding: this just sucks. We've given the "experiment" a good long run and it doesn't work. Time to try something else, anything else.
If you can pass over the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical restructuring of the economy in Communist China and Vietnam -- indeed in all surviving socialist countries -- since the 1990s without seeing the stark fact that almost everyone who has himself lived under these "experiments" has soundly rejected your premise, that the "experiments" are a success, then there is no arguing with you. You are in the grips of ideology!
Large portions of the population, after having had a taste of both systems, now favor a return to Communist times.
Sure, here is a report of a survey in which about 20% of Russians surveyed wanted a return to Communism. That is, indeed, a "large portion." But it's a minority. What you might have said -- indeed what I would have said -- is this: "Despite the chaos and misery occasioned by the sudden transition from Communism to the free market, and despite the steep decline in international influence after the Soviet Union broke up, a remarkable 80% of Russians do not want to return to Communism. One can only conclude that, having had a taste of both systems, they prefer capitalism/democracy (with all its warts) to Communism by substantial and enduring majorities."
For tenured professors, there is close to zero incentive to continue research and publication, except social stature and respect.
Is that so? In what country would that be? At least in the U.S., where I'm personally familiar with the system, if you aren't "research-active," as they say, your office migrates away from the windows, your full-time secretary turns into a 20% secretary, your pay immediately drops by 30% (no more "summer salary" from the research grant), you have to buy office supplies and computer equipment out of your own pocket, not to mention being unable to hire graduate students and post-docs to help with your work, and you are assigned sharply more teaching and administrative duties, so that the time in which you can do what you want plummets. Then of course you don't get any more promotions and raises except for the piddling 2% every other year cost-of-living bump, assuming your university does even that.
In short, as far as U.S. universities go, you're dead wrong. The incentives on tenured professors to research and publish are strong and strongly economic. And why would that be? Would it be because (A) that's what works, or (B) wreckers and evil foreign influence have subverted US university administrations, so that the latter falsely imagines "social stature and respect" are not quite as effective in motivating professors to do good work as filthy degrading money and the things that disgusting but curiously attractive stuff can buy?
Yes, but you have stopped your simulation of the alternate reality too soon. It's as if you said: what if Germany had won the Battle of Britain and invaded England in 1941? Ha! Germany would have conquered Britain....but forgotten about what the rest of the world would have done after 1941, and how long Germany would have kept control of England.
So what happens after the events you have described? S may be a small and poor, but he is obviously clever, and more importantly, he has something of value to sell. So, let's see, at the end of our last episode, he tried to publish it in Wikipedia. But, alas, L paid off the 'pedia and it was suppressed. Ha! we find S thinking, as the opening credits recede, you do realize This Means War! So S writes a long letter to the New York Times, including not only his discovery but also that L is paying to have it suppressed -- imagine the effect on L's PR if word gets out!
But L is no dummy and pays off the NYT, too. Only, since NYT, Inc., is a much fatter cat than Wikipedia they want a lot more dough. Say $10 million. "Curses, foiled again!" mutters S to himself, as he furiously pens more letters, to the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as submits learned articles to the Journal of the American Medical Association, National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal...
L is now writing checks like crazy to suppress all this. Moreover, the number of people who necessarily know about S's invention grows exponentially. Initially, just editors and the treasurer and top management of L know. Er, plus the friends of S, possibly his secretary....hmm, plus some pretty women and handsome men at cocktail parties whom people in the know have let in on the secret to try to impress them...
One of these is E, who has a bit of money to invest, and who can see that commercializing and selling S's idea is a great way to break into the high-profit pharmaceutical business. He can undersell L (not least of all because L's bribery budget has been exploding) and make a killing. So E contacts S, they form E&S, Inc., and start selling product. By word of mouth full of cocktail, um, so to speak, at first, maybe. And, yes, they must compete with L's deep-pocket-funded FUD.
But, you see, S&E have got money always coming in, more and more of it as people buy their immensely valuable product. L, by contrast, has got money going out, only, because they have nothing to sell. Sooner or later, L will no longer be rich and S&E will be.
I think the misconception you've got is that being rich is some kind of indefinite personal resource, like being strong. If you're strong you can exert your strength indefinitely and doing so never makes you less strong. But rich is quite different. If you're rich you can't exert your power -- pay people off -- without decreasing it. The more you try to throw your weight around, the faster your wealth drains away.
Getting rich means more money comes in than goes out. It means people buy from you more than you buy from them. It means you are influenced in what you do by what other people (your market) want more than you try to influence others (by paying them). Being rich certainly means you have the power to influence others, but it is a very curious power, a power that diminishes rapidly as soon as you start using it. So staying rich when there's a free market means, ipso facto, that you have to use your power as little as possible. That's why a free market has historically proven to be the best possible guarantee against tyranny of the privileged.
I know it seems like all these lovely techie things -- Wikipedia, OSS, the Internet itself -- are so well-established and obviously good that they will persist as they are forever; indeed, that the only question is how fast will they come to dominate our society, and which nifty innovation will appear next. And it seems crazy to imagine that some unforeseen social force might wreck them entirely, so that we look back in a few decades and say: what the heck? I thought the future was almost here, and now it's receded into the distance...
But let's remember the "Space Age." Remember how in 1970, say, the future seemed to belong to space travel? The only question was how fast interplanetary -- if not interstellar! -- travel would transform society, and which nifty innovations would happen next. Now we look around us and say (cf. Calvin and Hobbes): what the heck? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the Federation starships and all that?
I'm not denying the persuasive power of the theory that the 'net as it has been, more or less a tech weenie's utopia, and the OSS movement, and, yes, Wikipedia and the communitarian spirit that moves it might well prove to be permanent fixtures of tomorrow's society. May it happen! I'm only saying that such theories have in the past had a sad tendency to suffer brutal collisions with reality. The wise investor (of money or personal time) thinks about that, and tries to prepare.
In the context of my original observation, what this is meant to suggest is that perhaps the Wikipediasts -- and even the/. community -- might take a page from older books, and by incorporating some aspects of the famously robust institution of the free market, try to armor themselves against those social forces that have, historically, torn apart every communitarian utopia.
Can you imagine a world where only "us" americans with money were the only ones able to "edit" the material?
Not really, no. Because there'll be, say, an article on current business conditions in China, and in good etiquette when closing a sensitive deal. And some guy in China is going to have exactly the right information on that topic, and so his article on the subject is going to sell for the highest price.
Slashdot Mirror
Right you are. My bias is towards the physicists, 'cause I understand what they did better. But both Gauss and Euler awe me, ayup.
Well, not you or me, of course.
If by "radiation" you mean electromagnetic radiation, i.e. sunlight, X-rays, heat, et cetera, then these things are unaffected by the Earth's magnetic field. More or less, you have to have a charge to be affected by a magnetic field, and photons have no charge.
The Earth's magnetic field deflects charged particles from the Sun or in cosmic rays. These particles are sometimes called "radiation," but that may be a little bit misleading as they're not at all like light or X-rays.
That being said, it is indeed possible that changes in the Earth's magnetic field have some effect on the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, but what it is, I don't know, and it is likely to have a fairly non-obvious mechanism. I suppose if nothing else the high energy particles can do interesting chemistry in the upper atmosphere, and that can lead to changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases...
Merciful God, even my own mother was a bride! How far has this evil conspiracy spread?
Ah, but does he see himself that way? Or does he see himself as a swashbuckling daredevil with a heart of gold and a silver tongue (or at least silver keyboard)?
Erm, wouldn't the story of a pretty girl who rewards with her devotion the poor and unlucky but hard-working and cleverly inventive young lad with a taste for ironic word-play be of significant interest to your generic young male geek?
Or have their mating habits changed?
Don't forget Archimedes acquired a reputation in his lifetime that has lasted more than two thousand years. That is, he was not only considered the smartest man in his generation, but one of the smartest men ever to live for another hundred lifetimes of men, all over the Western world. He was very probably the ancient world's equivalent of Newton, Einstein and Fermi all rolled into one.
Further, given that he was at the time of his supposed feat a powerful figure in Syracuse, and the fact that the fate of a conquered ancient city was dire -- the city leaders would be paraded and killed, and everyone else sold into slavery -- Archimedes probably had access to all the material wealth of the city, and as much willing -- nay eager -- manpower as he could wish.
Given those facts I would hesitate to scoff at the myth on the basis of what can be achieved, or not, by a mere dozen modern men, of average intelligence* and creativity, working with trivial amounts of money, and not nearly as motivated as men facing enslavement, an ugly death, or in many cases both.
-------------
* Yes, I know the MIT students are no doubt above average in intelligence. But the odds that their number includes someone so clever and inventive that his name and accomplishments will still be common knowledge twenty centuries from now seems remote, to say the least.
Socialism says that society should try its best not to simply abandon people...
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I never studied this political stuff at school -- too busy with math and science. But these goals sound very nice! May I ask, however, where "society" gets the massive resources needed for this noble mission? I mean, where does "society" get the buckets of money and labor it needs to feed everybody, see to their healthcare needs, and educate them? I take it we're assuming large numbers are unable to do so themselves (hence the need for this kind of government), and I take it we're not talking some kind of voluntary mutual help organization. I appreciate your example (donating money to charity), but I was under the impression that socialism was not an individual philosophical choice (such as donating money to the Red Cross) but a system of government imposed on all.
May I assume that in order to get the resources to meet the noble goals "society" finds it necessary to take money and labor by force from -- I suppose I would've naively said rob -- certain people in order to give to others? Sort of a Robin Hood kind of deal? It seems complicated to sort out the morality...unless, of course, one expects to be usually a member of the "receiving" class, or at least a member of the "deciding" class that chooses from whom to take and to whom to give, in which case it sounds like a great system. I'd sure like people to do more work for me than I do for them, or, at least, I'd sure like to be in charge of deciding how the fruit of everyone else's labor should be distributed.
Hmmm, I wish I could say that's enlightening, but it's not.
Isn't a "popular collective" just another name for a government? And so isn't a core belief that a "popular collective" should control the means of power just a basic belief that there should exist a government at all?
In which case, what distinguishes socialism from any other form of government? I certainly thought it was an enhanced attention to the good of society as a whole, and hence a decreased attention to individual rights (since the two are continually in conflict, as anyone who has been asked to turn his stereo down late at night can testify...)
they still have to go see a judge first
Oh goody. A judge, eh? Like how, in the old days, the bailiff would have to go see the the lord of the manor first, before he could confiscate my crop and sell my barefoot children into slavery.
Perhaps the question we should ask is: why aren't modern governments afraid enough of their own citizens to tread very, very carefully when it comes to peeking into our private affairs?
I shouldn't, but sometimes I think wistfully of the time when a political leader who treated the people with disdain ran the risk not just of early retirement, but of being hanged to the nearest tree. I wonder whether the personal risks associated with being too arrogant in an earlier era might have wonderfully cleared the politician's mind of foolish delusions of grandeur and encouraged a salutary humbleness.
Well, isn't socialism all about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few? In other words, the needs of society as a whole being more important than the rights of individuals?
Goodness, who wants the Federal government to be responsible for general IT security in this country? I mean, let's just think carefully through the kind of power over the network they'd need (or say they need) to be given to achieve it.
Brrr.
Look, the problem is not how much data there is in the world, the problem is finding a general automatable algorithm for organizing it in such a way that J. Random User can rapidly find what he's looking for.
Stroll on down to the nearest university library. It's got a lot less information in it that Google is considering, and aboutt a hundred thousand man-years over a few centuries have gone into finding clever ways to organize it all: card catalogs, shelving systems (e.g. Dewey and his decimals), nowadays searchable electronic catalogs, reference books, specialized indices for law and science and medicine, citation indices, reviews, reviews of reviews...and so on and so forth forever. And yet, it can still be immensely difficult to track down a particular piece of information you want. Even if it can be done, often it takes a fair amount of expertise in a field just to know where to look. Where do you find public information on patents for desalination processes? How do you find out if anyone has synthesized a polymer resin that melts between 130 C and 150 C and is resistant to acid, with a tensile strength about X? What was the common law meaning of "ownership in fee simple" in 1680s England? Even to start looking for the answers, you often need great experience in the relevant field, so you know where to start looking -- the "search terms" we might say.
Google may be feeling its oats because they can now very rapidly provide the most obvious things people want -- directions to San Diego from Ukiah, the times and places Serenity is playing on Sunday, the lead story of the New York Times "Style" section last Sunday, or the names and addresses of the six pizzerias closest to me still open at 11:25 PM.
But this is utterly small potatoes compared to the problem of organizing information generally, so that it is useful to professionals during the weekday as well as for amusement on the weekend. It is first, generally speaking, an unsolved problem -- no library or information index I've ever used fails to have at least one frustrating "feature" that leaves me scratching my head, wondering what the heck the designers were thinking. Secondly, I very much doubt Google has the depth of professional expertise in-house to even begin to figure out how to organize all the giant repositories of information in law, science, engineering, literature et cetera in such a way that professionals can use them, let alone amateurs.
And finally, they don't have the money to do it, and it will be very hard for them to raise it. Indices have suffered from this problem for a long time: any given user will only pay a very small price per search, but it costs a huge amount to make the index. Heretofore, makers of indices and dictionaries and references have relied on selling them at very high prices to libraries, which in turn raise the money in small bits from their patrons, or taxes. But Google would cut out the library middleman -- you search directly. So how are they going to cover their costs? They've no easy way to charge you $0.005 every time you do a Google search, for example.
In short, this sounds like the 21st century equivalent of that 1950s nuclear energy braggadocio, "energy too cheap to meter." Call it "information too cheap to meter." Color me skeptical.
Boeing's left themselves vulnerable to no longer being the top dog by resting on the 747.
I dunno about that. Boeing was poised to build their "Sonic Cruiser," which would significantly increase the cruising speed of a commercial jet, bump it right up against the speed of sound. But they dropped that idea, and instead have bet their future on the 787/Dreamliner, which is a subsonic aircraft configured for short to mid-range flights, with only about 200-300 passengers.
Thing is, the 787 is supposed to be much cheaper and more reliable to maintain, because it's got all these fancy microsensors in it, and most importantly it's supposed to be able to fly the same distance for 20% less fuel than any other airplane in its class.
Now, given the way the price of fuel is going, and given that fuel is a dominant fraction of the cost of flying a commercial jet, it's beginning to look like Boeing made a very smart move. They're seeming as prescient as Toyota was with the hybrid Prius. I'd buy Boeing stock right now. It's probably going to be worth three times as much in 5 years, when the 787 debuts.
Maybe it means "your finger"?
You know...the guy points to the animal, turns and asks his Native American friend..."So what's this called?"
I think the prevailing theory is that Australia's large marsupials went very well with a gourd of fermented grape, since they all went extinct around the time early humans arrived in Australia...
It was in a superposition of states, clearly:
{ |leopard> + |puma> } / sqrt(2)
When they measure the carcass, they will of course find that it has collapsed to one or the other.
The Cerenkov radiation itself is just light. The light comes from particles moving faster than light moves in water.
If the core were in vacuum, there would be no Cerenkov radiation, because however fast the particles came out, they could not exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Nothing can.
It's not, I think, that the Soveits were not into quality in the product, but they had a different mindset than the West. Here, we tended to want to Built It Right The First Time, even if that cost a fortune and took wild leaps in technology (cf. the Space Shuttle, arguably way too bold a design leap for 1970s technology). We like technology, and we don't trust low-level employees, so we make sure our high-end products will last and last without any human oversight at all. Think of those rovers on Mars, still chugging along 600 days after landing, i.e. over 10 times the original design lifetime, more or less.
But the Soviets thought different. For them technology was expensive, but people were cheap, and they specialized at rigorous training and constant checks on one's reliability. So in keeping their aerospace stuff up to snuff they probably relied a lot more on platoons of rigidly-trained technicians checking and re-checking and fixing any little boo-boos. It is almost certain that this has now vanished. The State can no longer command the efforts of huge numbers of people effortlessly, and the apparatus for making people function as reliably as robots is gone. As a consequence a system designed to work with giant amounts of low-level but reliable labor is now struggling to do without it. Without success.
ICBMs blowing up before orbit is one thing, but it's sobering to think about (for example) all those aging nuclear reactors on Soviet-era subs rusting in White Sea ports. They, too, were probably designed with the assumption that they would get constant tending from armies of Soviet technicians. They're not getting it now.
The symbol c in the subject equation, and generally, stands for the speed of light in a vacuum, 299792452 meters/second. In any other medium light travels slower than c, by a factor equal to the inverse of the index of refraction. Id est, for water the index of refraction is about 4/3, so light travels through water 3/4 as fast as it does through vacuum.
While people may have set up interesting media through which light travels at some odd speed, no one has ever observed light traveling through a vacuum at other than c. Indeed, it's a bedrock principle of relativity that it cannot.
Interestingly, the eerie blue glow you see coming from nuclear reactor cores that live at the bottom of pools of water (called Cerenkov radiation) is emitted by particles coming from the core that are traveling faster than the speed of light in water (although of course slower than c). The blue light is a sort of "optic boom" similar in its origin to the "sonic boom" you hear from aircraft exceeding the speed of sound.
Um, there's this odd little gap in your summary: why did capitalism/democracy take over in the 1990s if the experiment was as successful as you say?
No, wait, don't tell me -- I can guess. Stalin trod this path long before you. It was "wreckers" and kulaks (wealthy peasants) and petty bourgeousie and evil foreign influence and the cruel false seductions of money that ruined the noble experiment. It certainly had nothing to do with the majority of plain folks looking around at their lives and concluding: this just sucks. We've given the "experiment" a good long run and it doesn't work. Time to try something else, anything else.
If you can pass over the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical restructuring of the economy in Communist China and Vietnam -- indeed in all surviving socialist countries -- since the 1990s without seeing the stark fact that almost everyone who has himself lived under these "experiments" has soundly rejected your premise, that the "experiments" are a success, then there is no arguing with you. You are in the grips of ideology!
Large portions of the population, after having had a taste of both systems, now favor a return to Communist times.
Sure, here is a report of a survey in which about 20% of Russians surveyed wanted a return to Communism. That is, indeed, a "large portion." But it's a minority. What you might have said -- indeed what I would have said -- is this: "Despite the chaos and misery occasioned by the sudden transition from Communism to the free market, and despite the steep decline in international influence after the Soviet Union broke up, a remarkable 80% of Russians do not want to return to Communism. One can only conclude that, having had a taste of both systems, they prefer capitalism/democracy (with all its warts) to Communism by substantial and enduring majorities."
For tenured professors, there is close to zero incentive to continue research and publication, except social stature and respect.
Is that so? In what country would that be? At least in the U.S., where I'm personally familiar with the system, if you aren't "research-active," as they say, your office migrates away from the windows, your full-time secretary turns into a 20% secretary, your pay immediately drops by 30% (no more "summer salary" from the research grant), you have to buy office supplies and computer equipment out of your own pocket, not to mention being unable to hire graduate students and post-docs to help with your work, and you are assigned sharply more teaching and administrative duties, so that the time in which you can do what you want plummets. Then of course you don't get any more promotions and raises except for the piddling 2% every other year cost-of-living bump, assuming your university does even that.
In short, as far as U.S. universities go, you're dead wrong. The incentives on tenured professors to research and publish are strong and strongly economic. And why would that be? Would it be because (A) that's what works, or (B) wreckers and evil foreign influence have subverted US university administrations, so that the latter falsely imagines "social stature and respect" are not quite as effective in motivating professors to do good work as filthy degrading money and the things that disgusting but curiously attractive stuff can buy?
Yes, but you have stopped your simulation of the alternate reality too soon. It's as if you said: what if Germany had won the Battle of Britain and invaded England in 1941? Ha! Germany would have conquered Britain....but forgotten about what the rest of the world would have done after 1941, and how long Germany would have kept control of England.
So what happens after the events you have described? S may be a small and poor, but he is obviously clever, and more importantly, he has something of value to sell. So, let's see, at the end of our last episode, he tried to publish it in Wikipedia. But, alas, L paid off the 'pedia and it was suppressed. Ha! we find S thinking, as the opening credits recede, you do realize This Means War! So S writes a long letter to the New York Times, including not only his discovery but also that L is paying to have it suppressed -- imagine the effect on L's PR if word gets out!
But L is no dummy and pays off the NYT, too. Only, since NYT, Inc., is a much fatter cat than Wikipedia they want a lot more dough. Say $10 million. "Curses, foiled again!" mutters S to himself, as he furiously pens more letters, to the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as submits learned articles to the Journal of the American Medical Association, National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal...
L is now writing checks like crazy to suppress all this. Moreover, the number of people who necessarily know about S's invention grows exponentially. Initially, just editors and the treasurer and top management of L know. Er, plus the friends of S, possibly his secretary....hmm, plus some pretty women and handsome men at cocktail parties whom people in the know have let in on the secret to try to impress them...
One of these is E, who has a bit of money to invest, and who can see that commercializing and selling S's idea is a great way to break into the high-profit pharmaceutical business. He can undersell L (not least of all because L's bribery budget has been exploding) and make a killing. So E contacts S, they form E&S, Inc., and start selling product. By word of mouth full of cocktail, um, so to speak, at first, maybe. And, yes, they must compete with L's deep-pocket-funded FUD.
But, you see, S&E have got money always coming in, more and more of it as people buy their immensely valuable product. L, by contrast, has got money going out, only, because they have nothing to sell. Sooner or later, L will no longer be rich and S&E will be.
I think the misconception you've got is that being rich is some kind of indefinite personal resource, like being strong. If you're strong you can exert your strength indefinitely and doing so never makes you less strong. But rich is quite different. If you're rich you can't exert your power -- pay people off -- without decreasing it. The more you try to throw your weight around, the faster your wealth drains away.
Getting rich means more money comes in than goes out. It means people buy from you more than you buy from them. It means you are influenced in what you do by what other people (your market) want more than you try to influence others (by paying them). Being rich certainly means you have the power to influence others, but it is a very curious power, a power that diminishes rapidly as soon as you start using it. So staying rich when there's a free market means, ipso facto, that you have to use your power as little as possible. That's why a free market has historically proven to be the best possible guarantee against tyranny of the privileged.
I know it seems like all these lovely techie things -- Wikipedia, OSS, the Internet itself -- are so well-established and obviously good that they will persist as they are forever; indeed, that the only question is how fast will they come to dominate our society, and which nifty innovation will appear next. And it seems crazy to imagine that some unforeseen social force might wreck them entirely, so that we look back in a few decades and say: what the heck? I thought the future was almost here, and now it's receded into the distance...
/. community -- might take a page from older books, and by incorporating some aspects of the famously robust institution of the free market, try to armor themselves against those social forces that have, historically, torn apart every communitarian utopia.
But let's remember the "Space Age." Remember how in 1970, say, the future seemed to belong to space travel? The only question was how fast interplanetary -- if not interstellar! -- travel would transform society, and which nifty innovations would happen next. Now we look around us and say (cf. Calvin and Hobbes): what the heck? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the Federation starships and all that?
I'm not denying the persuasive power of the theory that the 'net as it has been, more or less a tech weenie's utopia, and the OSS movement, and, yes, Wikipedia and the communitarian spirit that moves it might well prove to be permanent fixtures of tomorrow's society. May it happen! I'm only saying that such theories have in the past had a sad tendency to suffer brutal collisions with reality. The wise investor (of money or personal time) thinks about that, and tries to prepare.
In the context of my original observation, what this is meant to suggest is that perhaps the Wikipediasts -- and even the
Can you imagine a world where only "us" americans with money were the only ones able to "edit" the material?
Not really, no. Because there'll be, say, an article on current business conditions in China, and in good etiquette when closing a sensitive deal. And some guy in China is going to have exactly the right information on that topic, and so his article on the subject is going to sell for the highest price.