Unfortunately the size of the house of representatives has remained capped at 435 since 1911, when Congress decided that not needing a larger building was more important than actually representing the views of the public.
To be fair, the frightening thing about astroids isn't that the probability: P(me dying in comet impact) is high. What's frightening is that the conditional probability: P(extinction of humanity | me dying in comet impact) is high.
In order for an LED to lase, not only would it have to be placed inside of an oscillator, but the optical mode overlap (with the gain region) would have to be greatly improved. Efficient laser designs are considerably different from efficient LED designs. However, modern LED's do make use of stimulated emission to boost efficiency.
I'm not sure what the GP was referring to, though.
True, but if the ponzi scheme falls apart due to further credit no longer being extend, then the dollar will fail, and the US people will be the ones to "pay".
500 Trillion Watts is old news. A petawatt laser has existed for years, now. The record set by NIF is energy per pulse. The petawatt laser has only 190J per pulse, whereas the NIF has ~100000 times more energy per pulse.
I, myself, don't know how much climate scientists really know about the climate. Few people probably do, in much the same way that most people don't know anything about my field. However, based on my cursory understanding of general systems, the difficulty in climate science is that it's a chaotic system. The rules are well known, and the observations can be well modeled, but making predictions about the future of a chaotic system is inherently difficult.
Leakey, with his recent statements on religion and his findings is to be chastised as being biased and net very scientific. But then, if you sell Chevys, you are going to bag on Fords, probably without applying any unbiased rational, reason to it. I won't detract from what he has done scientifically, but I will point out his lack of scientific detachment and therefore call into doubt his ad hoc finding of Gods existence. Not to mention being a closed minded old codger without a helpful imagination.
At least were I grew up (Dallas - Fort Worth area of Texas), there was significant coverage of native Americans, small pox blankets, the trail of tears, Cortez's domination of the Aztec's, etc. It wasn't romanticized (at least not past the elementary school depiction of Thanksgiving Day).
Notice that I said faith and not religion. I am not a fan of organized religion by any means. Neither is my Savior.
If you want to talk about children being killed, you should consider what "religious fanatics" fight against every day. Over 54 million children killed legally under US law since the 60s, in the name of choice.
Children or fetuses? Is a fetus not part of a woman's body? Could you really consider a fetus a human being prior to the moment it is capable of living outside of a woman's womb? There is certainly the possibility of a fetus becoming a child, but there are many ways in which it might not. Should we simply make it illegal for a fetus to be terminated through deliberate action? What about irresponsible action, such as alcoholism? What about deliberate inaction, such as starving oneself? Where do you draw the line? Or should we maybe stick with the current clear definition of homicide (the killing of a human being)?
It's already been pointed out that this doesn't violate the first law of thermodynamics, because heat is turned into light. However, it's less obvious how the second law of thermodynamics stays intact. The reason has to do with the temperature difference between the LED and its environment. Notice how the efficiency at room temperature is several orders of magnitude below 1, and only at 135 C do you see an efficiency greater than 1, and only for very, very small output powers. Really, they could have taken any old piece of metal and heated it to 135 C and measured the amount of light generated. It's known as the blackbody effect. The fact that it's an LED is completely irrelevant.
This is just foolish science. It happens all the time. Someone thinks they discovered something new, but really it can be completely understood from fundamental laws.
In all of the instances I can think of in which bridges collapse or shuttles explode, it is precisely the engineers that warned against faulty materials, etc. It is always upper management that brushes the warnings under the rug, and continues on in order to keep budget/schedule.
It doesn't matter. The amount of energy dissipated to air friction depends on the square of the velocity and is approximately linear in surface area, whereas the energy lost to accelerating fuel grows exponentially with mass. As long as the lift mass is large enough, a properly designed railgun will be more efficient. Most likely, that minimum mass is not very large.
Ever notice that anytime some researcher claims a cool sounding new development will have applications in/within/in about five years, someone says 'Call me when you actually have something to show us.'?
Some of us actually like hearing about basic research, and not just the latest gadget I'm supposed to go buy.
Except special relativity actually requires the true mass to increase when the speed increases. Mass/Energy is still conserved because energy is converted into mass (E=mc^2).
The effect described in the article is quantum mechanical in nature. In fact, the mass of the electrons is not changing. Only the "effective mass" is changing. Well, it turns out the effective mass is just an approximation we use to make the problem tractable. Basically, we look at the band structure in the material, and calculate an effective mass based on the curvature. If there is no curvature, such as in graphene, then there is no effective mass. However, the band structure for carbon nanotubes does have curvature, and therefor there is a finite effective mass. When the article talks about rolling graphene into nanotubes, they mean as a thought experiment. No one is actually sitting there with an atomic force microscope trying to roll a sheet of graphene into a carbon nanotube. So really, the paper brings nothing new. We already knew that there was zero effective mass in graphene, and finite effective mass in carbon nanotubes. Most likely, they are just suggesting a corollary to some other part of theoretical physics.
The whole problem with the "the universe is a simulation" gig is that it doesn't answer any questions or solve any problems. It's just one more turtle on the stack. Sure, it might be true, Occam's Razor says it's not very likely.
A commenter posted something on here a few months ago that I thought was extremely insightful:
The real problem is that Facebook is only free on the surface. There is a cost to using it, namely giving up your privacy. However, there is also a large social cost to not using it. I try to walk the line, and keep as little presence as is necessary, without sacrificing my privacy. Unfortunately, with Zuckerberg's insistence that privacy is a overrated, this is becoming more and more difficult.
IANAD, but as far as I am aware, the general idea with bacteriophage treatment would be to create a cocktail of several different strains, similar to how flu vaccines are actually a cocktail of several different strains. So, you would take a cocktail with a 90% chance of curing your infection, if it didn't work, you would resort to antibiotics.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer to put it straight into the toaster oven on toast. It comes out crispier than fresh, so not exactly the same, but incredibly delicious.
Unfortunately the size of the house of representatives has remained capped at 435 since 1911, when Congress decided that not needing a larger building was more important than actually representing the views of the public.
To be fair, the frightening thing about astroids isn't that the probability: P(me dying in comet impact) is high. What's frightening is that the conditional probability: P(extinction of humanity | me dying in comet impact) is high.
In order for an LED to lase, not only would it have to be placed inside of an oscillator, but the optical mode overlap (with the gain region) would have to be greatly improved. Efficient laser designs are considerably different from efficient LED designs. However, modern LED's do make use of stimulated emission to boost efficiency.
I'm not sure what the GP was referring to, though.
That's because flash memory uses electric charge, rather than magnetic "charge". Degaussing won't do a think. 10,000 Volts, on the other hand...
True, but if the ponzi scheme falls apart due to further credit no longer being extend, then the dollar will fail, and the US people will be the ones to "pay".
500 Trillion Watts is old news. A petawatt laser has existed for years, now. The record set by NIF is energy per pulse. The petawatt laser has only 190J per pulse, whereas the NIF has ~100000 times more energy per pulse.
I, myself, don't know how much climate scientists really know about the climate. Few people probably do, in much the same way that most people don't know anything about my field. However, based on my cursory understanding of general systems, the difficulty in climate science is that it's a chaotic system. The rules are well known, and the observations can be well modeled, but making predictions about the future of a chaotic system is inherently difficult.
Leakey, with his recent statements on religion and his findings is to be chastised as being biased and net very scientific. But then, if you sell Chevys, you are going to bag on Fords, probably without applying any unbiased rational, reason to it. I won't detract from what he has done scientifically, but I will point out his lack of scientific detachment and therefore call into doubt his ad hoc finding of Gods existence. Not to mention being a closed minded old codger without a helpful imagination.
Fail.
This is officially the best slashdot article EVAH
HAHAHA. Oh man. That was a good one.
Now I just need to think of a way to involve indian pale ales with semiconductor optoelectronics...
Subsidies are usually a bad idea, too. In this case, however, two wrongs (Chinese subsidies & US tariffs) might make a right.
At least were I grew up (Dallas - Fort Worth area of Texas), there was significant coverage of native Americans, small pox blankets, the trail of tears, Cortez's domination of the Aztec's, etc. It wasn't romanticized (at least not past the elementary school depiction of Thanksgiving Day).
Notice that I said faith and not religion. I am not a fan of organized religion by any means. Neither is my Savior.
If you want to talk about children being killed, you should consider what "religious fanatics" fight against every day. Over 54 million children killed legally under US law since the 60s, in the name of choice.
Children or fetuses? Is a fetus not part of a woman's body? Could you really consider a fetus a human being prior to the moment it is capable of living outside of a woman's womb? There is certainly the possibility of a fetus becoming a child, but there are many ways in which it might not. Should we simply make it illegal for a fetus to be terminated through deliberate action? What about irresponsible action, such as alcoholism? What about deliberate inaction, such as starving oneself? Where do you draw the line? Or should we maybe stick with the current clear definition of homicide (the killing of a human being)?
It's already been pointed out that this doesn't violate the first law of thermodynamics, because heat is turned into light. However, it's less obvious how the second law of thermodynamics stays intact. The reason has to do with the temperature difference between the LED and its environment. Notice how the efficiency at room temperature is several orders of magnitude below 1, and only at 135 C do you see an efficiency greater than 1, and only for very, very small output powers. Really, they could have taken any old piece of metal and heated it to 135 C and measured the amount of light generated. It's known as the blackbody effect. The fact that it's an LED is completely irrelevant.
This is just foolish science. It happens all the time. Someone thinks they discovered something new, but really it can be completely understood from fundamental laws.
In all of the instances I can think of in which bridges collapse or shuttles explode, it is precisely the engineers that warned against faulty materials, etc. It is always upper management that brushes the warnings under the rug, and continues on in order to keep budget/schedule.
Why? How does that benefit them in any way? It's not like they will be making more money. That's just mind blowing.
It doesn't matter. The amount of energy dissipated to air friction depends on the square of the velocity and is approximately linear in surface area, whereas the energy lost to accelerating fuel grows exponentially with mass. As long as the lift mass is large enough, a properly designed railgun will be more efficient. Most likely, that minimum mass is not very large.
Ever notice that anytime some researcher claims a cool sounding new development will have applications in/within/in about five years, someone says 'Call me when you actually have something to show us.'?
Some of us actually like hearing about basic research, and not just the latest gadget I'm supposed to go buy.
Unless she wants to go to college...
Who gets to define "intelligence?"
Society.
Except special relativity actually requires the true mass to increase when the speed increases. Mass/Energy is still conserved because energy is converted into mass (E=mc^2).
The effect described in the article is quantum mechanical in nature. In fact, the mass of the electrons is not changing. Only the "effective mass" is changing. Well, it turns out the effective mass is just an approximation we use to make the problem tractable. Basically, we look at the band structure in the material, and calculate an effective mass based on the curvature. If there is no curvature, such as in graphene, then there is no effective mass. However, the band structure for carbon nanotubes does have curvature, and therefor there is a finite effective mass. When the article talks about rolling graphene into nanotubes, they mean as a thought experiment. No one is actually sitting there with an atomic force microscope trying to roll a sheet of graphene into a carbon nanotube. So really, the paper brings nothing new. We already knew that there was zero effective mass in graphene, and finite effective mass in carbon nanotubes. Most likely, they are just suggesting a corollary to some other part of theoretical physics.
The whole problem with the "the universe is a simulation" gig is that it doesn't answer any questions or solve any problems. It's just one more turtle on the stack. Sure, it might be true, Occam's Razor says it's not very likely.
A commenter posted something on here a few months ago that I thought was extremely insightful:
Any chain of logic (or causality) must either extend forever and ever, or stop at something that just 'is', and both options are nonsensical. (This is equally true whether or not any of the links in the chain are God)." - Slashdot comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1774738&cid=33449910 by http://slashdot.org/~timeOday
The real problem is that Facebook is only free on the surface. There is a cost to using it, namely giving up your privacy. However, there is also a large social cost to not using it. I try to walk the line, and keep as little presence as is necessary, without sacrificing my privacy. Unfortunately, with Zuckerberg's insistence that privacy is a overrated, this is becoming more and more difficult.
IANAD, but as far as I am aware, the general idea with bacteriophage treatment would be to create a cocktail of several different strains, similar to how flu vaccines are actually a cocktail of several different strains. So, you would take a cocktail with a 90% chance of curing your infection, if it didn't work, you would resort to antibiotics.