It is true we are winding down, and that the most recent requests (ie last week) were for a few thousand troops to stay. But that number has been continuously decreasing from much higher levels, in July 2011 for example they were arguing for 10,000 troops:
It seems the negotiated strategy now is to keep 5000 civilian security forces in iraq, as part of a 16,000 strong civilian force, thus technically satisfying the withdrawal condition.
It is hard to say what the administration's true intentions are, since their comments are all filtered for PR.
He gets no credit for winding down Iraq. He and his administration in fact lobbied hard to keep the troops there longer, but the Iraqi govt forced the US to honor the Bush deal/promise for an end of 2011 deadline.
Two other things are important that I forgot to note:
1. They are not measuring the 'shape' of the electron at all.. they are measuring its electron dipole moment. They are using the word 'spherical' metaphorically to mean 'symmetric' or 'with zero dipole'. So my comment about cross section, while answering your question, is actually irrelevant to the study.
2. Assuming zero electroc dipole (so the electron's electric field is symmetric) the electron actually has an infinite cross section, so in this case the cross section is not very intuitive anyway.
They are using 'spherical' somewhat metaphorically.. what they are actually measuring here is the electron dipole moment. A particle with a nonzero dipole moment causes an asymmetric electric force: A water molecule, for example, has a large dipole moment, so you feel a different electric force when you are near the negative oxygen vs when you are near the positive hydrogen.
So, if the electron has a nonzero dipole moment, it means it is a bit asymmetric in its electromagetic properties, and in this paper they have found that the dipole moment must be very very small. As they point out though, the Standard model (the best model of subatomic physics we have) predicts that the electron _will_ have a tiny but nonzero electric dipole moment.
The (differential) cross section of an atomic or subatomic particle is well defined and quite close to our idea of 'shape'. It tells you how a test particle being shot a the target 'bounces' off the target. For classical objects it reduces to our intuitive picture (ie, if you are shooting at a sphere, you know how your bullet bounces) but it applies to fuzzy particles too. Unfortunately the wikipedia pages on it are not very detailed and miss a lot. Also check out the 'scattering cross section' and 'rutherford scattering' wikipedia pages for more info.
Actually, according to the paper the electron is aspheric in many theories, including the standard model (the best theory we have). From the article abstract:
The electron is predicted to be slightly aspheric, with a distortion characterized by the electric dipole moment (EDM), de. No experiment has ever detected this deviation. The standard model of particle physics predicts that de is far too small to detect, being some eleven orders of magnitude smaller than the current experimental sensitivity. However, many extensions to the standard model naturally predict much larger values of de that should be detectable. This makes the search for the electron EDM a powerful way to search for new physics and constrain the possible extensions.
Hansen again wildly distorted what I wrote by taking a Twitter comment and tearing it out of context. I most certainly never "agreed" that "journalists were violating [Assange's] privacy by reporting the details of rape and molestation allegations against him in Sweden," That's a total fabrication. I don't believe that and never said that. Hansen made that up.
Assange was asked in a BBC interview questions such as "how many women have you slept with?" When Assange refused to answer, many WikiLeaks critics pointed to this as hypocrisy -- oh, see, he doesn't believe in transparency for himself -- and my tweet pointed out the obvious fallacy of that claim: there is nothing inconsistent about demanding transparency for government while insisting upon personal privacy.
Moreover, the question Assange refused to answer -- "how many women have you slept with?" -- is relevant to absolutely nothing of public interest, including the rape accusation. By stark contrast, the information Wired is concealing -- whether Lamo is telling the truth about his various claims -- goes to the heart of one of the most significant political controversies in the world.
water is quite opaque to light except for a narrow range of frequecies around the visual spectrum, where there is a sharp dip in the absorbtion spectrum. Look at the graph here:
Cool link, but I disagree with your interpretation. It looks very much like poor people are money conscious from that table.
First of all, I don't think that the lowest income bracket is 'poor' people, I think they are students on loans. They are 4% of the population, earn less than $1000 a year, and spend $20,000 a year. They spend their income in a very similar way to the $10,000 to $15,000 income bracket, except for education where they spend almost twice as much as the $50,000 bracket. The >$60,000 bracket spends much more on education, but I think this is rich parents paying for their children.
So ignore the lowest two income brackets for a moment, and look at the $10,000 to $20,000 income brackets. These are probably genuinely poor people who are working to make a living. You see that they DO spend less than higher earners. Furthermore, it looks to me like they are spending the bare minimum possible. All 4 of the income bracets below $20,000 spend a constant $3000 on food. This suggests to me that this is the minimum possible. Similarily, housing stays constant at $7000, and transportation mostly constant around $2000 in these brackets. These things make up the bulk of income.
So the total story I pick up from the table is that poor people spend the miminum it is possible to live on for food, housing and transporation which makes up almost all of expenditures. Your claim that they spend more on 'random things' doesn't seem supported at all. In fact, the highest bracket in that table, >$60,000, only spends about 2 to 3x as much as them for food, housing, transporation, but 5x as much for entertainment, personal care, and 10x as much on miscellaneous. They also spend 10x as much on education (presumably for their children) which I think points to the real problem poor people have.
As I understand, it was not the chinese factories producing the toothpaste and cough syrup. They were producing glycerin, which they sold to south american companies who produced toothpase/syrup. These companies did not check their glycerin before mixing it in. Turns out the chinese factory had shipped antifreeze instead of glycerin (they're similar).
Also, note that the head of China's Food and Drug Administration was *executed* for this. They really took it seriously.
The project history is sort of amusing.. Originally scheduled for release in Summer 2005, the release date was delayed to Sept 2005, the Dec, then March 2006, then June. In July 2006 it was announced the fonts would be ready "in two weeks". Every two weeks since then, they've made announcements that it would be ready in two weeks more. (literally.. see their news page). Anyway, they must be happy it's almost done!
A couple days ago the bbc news technology website had a poll titled "Will you be buying Leopard?". They've taken the poll down now, but here's one report I found of the results:
18.26% Yes - I need new spots 5.61% No - I'm happy with Tiger 11.62% No - Linux is my OS of choice 64.49% No - I'm a Windows user
I couldn't find the number of pollers, but I vaguely remember is was quite large.
The intervals may be mathematical, but the absolute pitch is not as far as I understand You could shift all the notes half-way up to the next note, and the intervals would be preserved, but the notes would be different. Therefore people with perfect pitch are artificially tuned to the A=440 Hz scale. (rather than eg. A=450 Hz)
The full page of graphs put out by NASA is here. The problematic graph in question is "Annual Mean Temperature Change in the United States", the second graph from the bottom. Many of the other graphs show recent temperature increase globally, as you suggest, though the US graph is no longer so clear.
Just because science has given us 'magic wands' in the past doesn't mean it will give us more in the future.
While we have been discovering what amazing things are possible in the last century, we have also been discovering which things *aren't* possible. There is a balance between eliminating paths of thought and creating new ones. At some point, science will be limiting the possibilities more than creating them. At that point, if we say we can't do interstellar travel, it is probably true.
I'm pretty sure we're not at that point yet, but I can't say for sure that we haven't reached it either. I think there is still hope for more 'magic wands'.
I think we have a reasonable idea of how water works in the range we can survive, and what you say probably isn't possible.
I think that rather than struggle to move our biological bodies around, it is more likely that our descendants will be minds run on some hardware we design which we can easily send on a trip through the galaxy. It's much easier to put your computer in hibernation than our bodies. Once a ship is there, we could probably upload additional minds or knowledge at the speed of light.
Judging from the article those yahoos are First Peoples/Native Americans who went on to eat the whale, and who have a limit of 255 whales per 5 years. These whales are slightly endangered though, with 8,000-9,200 individuals worldwide. Personally I think it was OK to kill it in this scenario and for their reasons.
Re:Wrong number, in both the GP and the summary!
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 2, Informative
nope, your parent is right. The number starts 589068086... and is 313 digits. The spaces are from slashdot filtering. A post below gives the correct 3 factors, which give 589068086... when multiplied.
If anyone is interested, I saw an excellent documentary, "Manufactured Landscapes", which showed footage of the supertanker dismantling in India, people working in/on the huge piles of broken chips in china (and the pollution it causes in the towns it is done), the preparations to flood the three gorges area (people breaking down their homes with sledgehammers), and more. It's surreal. Pleasantly, this documentary doesn't push politics in you face, though it might sound like it would.
I agree with you on almost everything, except I don't think the misinformation is due to malice on the part of the candidates, and they are not fascists in disguise. I think the reason they don't say anything meaningful is because they are afraid to. Once they say something specific, that's something their opposition can criticize them for. If they say things that don't really mean anything, there's nothing to criticize, but it looks like they are taking a stance.
Quantum physics isn't 'fundamentally broken beyond the level of fixing'. It gives correct results not predicted by other theories. What quantum physics may be is the limiting case of a greater theory which we haven't discovered yet.
Was newtonian mechanics 'wrong'? It gave a very good idea of how physics worked, good enough that the superseding theory still uses largely the same ides, just tweaked and expanded. (momentum, mass, force, kinetic/potential energy etc).
Also, Bush used a new provision from the PATRIOT act to bypass Senate approval of the new attorneys. He bypassed one of the checks and balances that are the foundation of our goverment, using a law meant to stop terrorists (supposedly).
He didn't get approval for the replacements from the senate, one the checks & balances in the govt we learn to admire in middle school. Before, the senate always approved replacements uf US attorneys. But here, Bush used a new provision of the PATRIOT act (the one meant to stop terrorism..) to bypass senate approval, and did the replacements without consent. The dismissals Clinton carrie out were at the start of his term, as many (most?) presidents have done by tradition, and was with senate approval.
Slashdot Mirror
It is true we are winding down, and that the most recent requests (ie last week) were for a few thousand troops to stay. But that number has been continuously decreasing from much higher levels, in July 2011 for example they were arguing for 10,000 troops:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/07/05/politics/main20077049.shtml
It seems the negotiated strategy now is to keep 5000 civilian security forces in iraq, as part of a 16,000 strong civilian force, thus technically satisfying the withdrawal condition.
It is hard to say what the administration's true intentions are, since their comments are all filtered for PR.
He gets no credit for winding down Iraq. He and his administration in fact lobbied hard to keep the troops there longer, but the Iraqi govt forced the US to honor the Bush deal/promise for an end of 2011 deadline.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/u-s-troop-withdrawal-motivated-by-iraqi-insistence-not-u-s-choice-20111021?print=true
Two other things are important that I forgot to note:
1. They are not measuring the 'shape' of the electron at all.. they are measuring its electron dipole moment. They are using the word 'spherical' metaphorically to mean 'symmetric' or 'with zero dipole'. So my comment about cross section, while answering your question, is actually irrelevant to the study.
2. Assuming zero electroc dipole (so the electron's electric field is symmetric) the electron actually has an infinite cross section, so in this case the cross section is not very intuitive anyway.
The electron cloud model is the more correct one.
They are using 'spherical' somewhat metaphorically.. what they are actually measuring here is the electron dipole moment. A particle with a nonzero dipole moment causes an asymmetric electric force: A water molecule, for example, has a large dipole moment, so you feel a different electric force when you are near the negative oxygen vs when you are near the positive hydrogen.
So, if the electron has a nonzero dipole moment, it means it is a bit asymmetric in its electromagetic properties, and in this paper they have found that the dipole moment must be very very small. As they point out though, the Standard model (the best model of subatomic physics we have) predicts that the electron _will_ have a tiny but nonzero electric dipole moment.
The (differential) cross section of an atomic or subatomic particle is well defined and quite close to our idea of 'shape'. It tells you how a test particle being shot a the target 'bounces' off the target. For classical objects it reduces to our intuitive picture (ie, if you are shooting at a sphere, you know how your bullet bounces) but it applies to fuzzy particles too. Unfortunately the wikipedia pages on it are not very detailed and miss a lot. Also check out the 'scattering cross section' and 'rutherford scattering' wikipedia pages for more info.
Actually, according to the paper the electron is aspheric in many theories, including the standard model (the best theory we have). From the article abstract:
Greenwalds reply to that section:
Then why are there over 200 comments, more than usual? Good programming practice is an interesting topic for many of us.
water is quite opaque to light except for a narrow range of frequecies around the visual spectrum, where there is a sharp dip in the absorbtion spectrum. Look at the graph here:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/chemical/watabs.html
It's interesting that our eyes evolved to see light in just this narrow range where water is transparent.
Cool link, but I disagree with your interpretation. It looks very much like poor people are money conscious from that table.
First of all, I don't think that the lowest income bracket is 'poor' people, I think they are students on loans. They are 4% of the population, earn less than $1000 a year, and spend $20,000 a year. They spend their income in a very similar way to the $10,000 to $15,000 income bracket, except for education where they spend almost twice as much as the $50,000 bracket. The >$60,000 bracket spends much more on education, but I think this is rich parents paying for their children.
So ignore the lowest two income brackets for a moment, and look at the $10,000 to $20,000 income brackets. These are probably genuinely poor people who are working to make a living. You see that they DO spend less than higher earners. Furthermore, it looks to me like they are spending the bare minimum possible. All 4 of the income bracets below $20,000 spend a constant $3000 on food. This suggests to me that this is the minimum possible. Similarily, housing stays constant at $7000, and transportation mostly constant around $2000 in these brackets. These things make up the bulk of income.
So the total story I pick up from the table is that poor people spend the miminum it is possible to live on for food, housing and transporation which makes up almost all of expenditures. Your claim that they spend more on 'random things' doesn't seem supported at all. In fact, the highest bracket in that table, >$60,000, only spends about 2 to 3x as much as them for food, housing, transporation, but 5x as much for entertainment, personal care, and 10x as much on miscellaneous. They also spend 10x as much on education (presumably for their children) which I think points to the real problem poor people have.
So poor != stupid.
As I understand, it was not the chinese factories producing the toothpaste and cough syrup. They were producing glycerin, which they sold to south american companies who produced toothpase/syrup. These companies did not check their glycerin before mixing it in. Turns out the chinese factory had shipped antifreeze instead of glycerin (they're similar).
Also, note that the head of China's Food and Drug Administration was *executed* for this. They really took it seriously.
The project history is sort of amusing.. Originally scheduled for release in Summer 2005, the release date was delayed to Sept 2005, the Dec, then March 2006, then June. In July 2006 it was announced the fonts would be ready "in two weeks". Every two weeks since then, they've made announcements that it would be ready in two weeks more. (literally.. see their news page). Anyway, they must be happy it's almost done!
boo hoo
Instead of:
>>> print "Hello World!"
you now have to do
>>> print("Hello World!")
just two extra paretheses, and no more of this >> stuff.
The intervals may be mathematical, but the absolute pitch is not as far as I understand You could shift all the notes half-way up to the next note, and the intervals would be preserved, but the notes would be different. Therefore people with perfect pitch are artificially tuned to the A=440 Hz scale. (rather than eg. A=450 Hz)
The full page of graphs put out by NASA is here. The problematic graph in question is "Annual Mean Temperature Change in the United States", the second graph from the bottom. Many of the other graphs show recent temperature increase globally, as you suggest, though the US graph is no longer so clear.
Just because science has given us 'magic wands' in the past doesn't mean it will give us more in the future.
While we have been discovering what amazing things are possible in the last century, we have also been discovering which things *aren't* possible. There is a balance between eliminating paths of thought and creating new ones. At some point, science will be limiting the possibilities more than creating them. At that point, if we say we can't do interstellar travel, it is probably true.
I'm pretty sure we're not at that point yet, but I can't say for sure that we haven't reached it either. I think there is still hope for more 'magic wands'.
I think we have a reasonable idea of how water works in the range we can survive, and what you say probably isn't possible.
I think that rather than struggle to move our biological bodies around, it is more likely that our descendants will be minds run on some hardware we design which we can easily send on a trip through the galaxy. It's much easier to put your computer in hibernation than our bodies. Once a ship is there, we could probably upload additional minds or knowledge at the speed of light.
Judging from the article those yahoos are First Peoples/Native Americans who went on to eat the whale, and who have a limit of 255 whales per 5 years. These whales are slightly endangered though, with 8,000-9,200 individuals worldwide. Personally I think it was OK to kill it in this scenario and for their reasons.
nope, your parent is right. The number starts 589068086... and is 313 digits. The spaces are from slashdot filtering. A post below gives the correct 3 factors, which give 589068086... when multiplied.
If anyone is interested, I saw an excellent documentary, "Manufactured Landscapes", which showed footage of the supertanker dismantling in India, people working in/on the huge piles of broken chips in china (and the pollution it causes in the towns it is done), the preparations to flood the three gorges area (people breaking down their homes with sledgehammers), and more. It's surreal. Pleasantly, this documentary doesn't push politics in you face, though it might sound like it would.
I agree with you on almost everything, except I don't think the misinformation is due to malice on the part of the candidates, and they are not fascists in disguise. I think the reason they don't say anything meaningful is because they are afraid to. Once they say something specific, that's something their opposition can criticize them for. If they say things that don't really mean anything, there's nothing to criticize, but it looks like they are taking a stance.
Quantum physics isn't 'fundamentally broken beyond the level of fixing'. It gives correct results not predicted by other theories. What quantum physics may be is the limiting case of a greater theory which we haven't discovered yet.
Was newtonian mechanics 'wrong'? It gave a very good idea of how physics worked, good enough that the superseding theory still uses largely the same ides, just tweaked and expanded. (momentum, mass, force, kinetic/potential energy etc).
Also, Bush used a new provision from the PATRIOT act to bypass Senate approval of the new attorneys. He bypassed one of the checks and balances that are the foundation of our goverment, using a law meant to stop terrorists (supposedly).
It's even worse than that:
He didn't get approval for the replacements from the senate, one the checks & balances in the govt we learn to admire in middle school. Before, the senate always approved replacements uf US attorneys. But here, Bush used a new provision of the PATRIOT act (the one meant to stop terrorism..) to bypass senate approval, and did the replacements without consent. The dismissals Clinton carrie out were at the start of his term, as many (most?) presidents have done by tradition, and was with senate approval.