As a low-temperature physicist, I've been following this issue for some time now, as have many others in my field. At a conference this summer there was a panel discussion on the problem, and how seriously it is affecting not just the low-temp physics community, but many others, as well. A few years ago we could buy He-3 for a few hundred dollars per gaseous liter; it is now pretty much impossible to get your hands on any new He-3, and the prices quoted are in the many thousands of dollars per liter (for when it does eventually become available). As another poster above pointed out, it's used in dilution refrigerators to achieve sub-Kelvin temperatures, necessary for many scientific experiments, as well as some other specialized applications. As others have also pointed out, it's used for MRI; and obviously it's used for neutron detection. There are myriad applications for He-3, and only some of them can be achieved with lesser efficiency with other materials.
Part of the reason prices were so low until very recently is that the government had tens of thousands of liters stockpiled, collected over time from tritium decay. A decision was made to start releasing the stockpile, and so global production was bolstered by this stockpiled material, which, while substantial, pales in comparison to the amounts required by DHS. The stockpile has been steadily shrinking for a number of years, and even if we were to access it and use it, that would be a very brief respite to the shortage. He-3 production has been decreasing as we disarm, and it's mind-boggling to think that nobody in the government saw this coming. They're basically the only ones producing He-3, so you'd think they'd be able to do the simple math and see that the amount they'd need to implement their plan would be leaps and bounds beyond what even the US and Russia combined could supply.
On a slightly more technical note, this is also very bad news for the low-temperature community. As mentioned before, dilution fridges need He-3 to function, but they also generally need to be immersed in a bath of liquid He-4. With the global He-4 shortage that has also recently been in the news, most new dilution fridges are now what is called cryogen-free, not requiring the bath of 4K He-4 to stay cold, and thus not requiring hundreds of dollars of helium to be cycled through the system daily. However, the cryogen-free fridges happen to require a significantly larger quantity of He-3 to get cold. So not only are we forced to move away from more traditional helium-cooled cryostats, we're also currently unable to fill any of the new type of fridge, at least until the hold on He-3 is lifted, and then probably at significantly increased prices. In the most recent issue of Science there was an article about this, and there's a quote from of one of the dilution fridge manufacturers that if things don't change for the better, they will be out of business in a year. All thanks to the monumental short-sightedness of DHS.
If this is what you're looking for, check out Vendetta Online (http://www.vendetta-online.com/). It's an MMO space fighter simulator with a focus on the dogfighting element. It has a small but dedicated userbase, user-contributed content, and 4 developers who are responsive and active in the community (if you're around at the right times, usually around the weekly updates, you can even shoot at some of them!). They recently introduced dynamic warfare, where factions fight for control of various sectors in an on-going war, and are working towards player-owned stations and capitol ships.
If a space fighter simulator is what you're looking for, check VO out. Just be warned that it can be very, very addictive.
As a counter-counter anecdote for Leopard, I also have it running on my 12" PowerBook G4, though mine is only 867 MHz. Trying to watch any videos online is impossible, neither the sound nor the video track properly, and the box grinds to a nearly complete halt. For regular computing, it works, but there's a definite sluggishness that was not there in Tiger. I currently have Gentoo installed on it while I check to see if my family has any Tiger install disks lying around, and even though I can't watch anything online on it, it still works better than in Leopard.
Of course, it's working gloriously on my Intel iMac, which is only a couple of years old, but it doesn't function gracefully at all on lots of older hardware.
As a physics grad student, I can tell you that there are still scientists doing "their thing to broaden humankind's knowledge" all over the place. I'm working in a field with pretty much zero possibility of finding something that will make tons of money, or will feed into anyone's skewed worldview, something that is basically science for the sake of science. While we certainly have to put down possible things the science can be used for in our grants, most of those are still about understanding more about the world around us in general, and unconventional transport in particular. There are still a lot of scientists doing this kind of thing, you just never hear about it because no non-scientific journal is going to say one word about a new collective mode in the order parameter of superfluid Helium-3.
I'm not sure if it's the one you are referring to (I doubt it, as I don't think anyone would refer to it as rather funny), but Vendetta Online has a native client for Linux as well. OSX, Windows, and both 32- and 64-bit Linux. The only trouble I've ever had with it on Linux is purely a third-party issue, where the voice chat implementation (not done by Guild Software, who makes VO) segfaults with Pulse Audio. But that is not something they have any control over, and other than that the game runs just as well (sometimes better) in Linux than on other platforms.
Most of my first gaming experiences were with Angband back in the 1.0 days, and while I did play Nethack some after that, I was always more a fan of Angband. It's certainly somewhat less sadistic (though you can make it as sadistic as you please with some of the birth options), and the variety of things you can find in the game is truly phenomenal.
Sad to say I'm past the days of jumping at purple j's, but somewhere in the back of my mind success is still spelled Ringil.
Well, I for one am sick and tired of all these tee-totalling P2P geeks getting together to fight brewing. They may not like beer, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to suffer!
Actually, from the quote of the CEO, the ratio is 3:1 "alerts to actual events," so 4 events, three of which are false positives and one of which is real. I would think that, as posters further up have discussed, one large deployment area for these would be in retail, to catch shoplifters, where the number of events is possibly quite high indeed. But even for the events you discuss, taking rape as an example, if the technology keeps on throwing out false positives just because couples keep snogging in its field of view, then the GP's point about crying wolf might well be valid.
Well, IANAL, but I read through the pertinent section of the bill to which you linked, and it seemed to me like it didn't actually give the Executive power to halt any court case, just any court case involving the "alleged provision to an element of the intelligence community of any information . . . or any other assistance." To me that reads that if you break any privacy laws to give information to the government, you're pretty much scot free. Which, while not the blank check you suggested, is certainly bad enough.
On the other hand, I didn't read the entire text of the bill, so there may be further sections to which you refer, in which case feel free to correct me.
TFA has a correction up: it's not just going to be for multiplayer.
The original story said the "sword-swinging" segments were only available during a "duel mode," however this is incorrect, as lightsaber action will be playable throughout the game.
While I agree in principle with what you're saying, the fact is that if you don't sell your research to have some type of real-world application, you very likely won't get funded at all. I just finished an undergraduate physics degree, and the research I did there was done purely for the sake of finding out about new materials, how they structure themselves, and how they behave. However, we couldn't write down "science for the sake of science" on the grant proposal, because otherwise we would've been sol. The unfortunate truth is that most sources of funding, at least in my experience, are only interested in things that could have potential foreseeable use (disregarding possible useful advances due to "pure research").
Now, IANAQP, but I am a Physics student, and I have had reasonable experience with quantum tunneling. From what I've learned, quantum tunneling is most easily described in terms of electons hopping across barriers. The electron has a non-zero probability of being found outside the potential well created by its parent atom/molecule, and (skipping over most of the science and math) this means that there will be a non-zero rate of tunneling from that well to the other wells nearby. Now, in many cases that rate is infinitessimally small, but in a case like this it would be conceivable that the rate could go up to something non-trivial. The molecules would have to get pretty darn close, but if they're bound then that solves the problem.
If this were the actual paper, instead of a popular article, you would certainly expect to see a whole lot of nigh-incomprehensible gibberish that explained what exactly they thought was going on. As this was written for a less specialized audience, they simplified it using, as far as I know, one of the standard ways of describing what we think is actually going on.
The error originally came from the article itself. If you RTA now it says electron volts with a score through electron, so obviously someone on the publishing side had much the same problem.
If journalists were physicists, we would be teleporting around willy-nilly by now in our flying cars with interstellar capabilities. Of course, then all the freelance physicists embedded in active units would be constantly complaining about the divergence of their field, so it's probably a good thing things are the way they are (sorry, I've been thinking too much about E&M recently, couldn't restrain myself).
Getting a lot of press lately
on
Singing Science
·
· Score: 1
One of my physics professors was interviewed several times with a number of articles written in major newspapers like the New York Times for his physics songs. One such article can be found at http://www.grammy.com/features/2005/0415physics.as px. All his songs can be found at http://www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/. He usually has a song for each major subject in the syllabus, and, unlike the students in TFA, we were usually quite receptive, to the point where we would write our own songs. Some in the class even cited some of the songs as being extremely helpful during exams, because the equations come easier with a tune behind them. I don't know why there's such a strong connection between science and music, but it certainly seems to be shining through lately.
Unfortunately, that's not a very good analogy. What might be better is if the coins were spinning completely freely, not just along one axis, and when you stopped one the other stopped as well. But, and I may be wrong, considering that I learned this in class half a year ago, TFA struck me as significantly downplaying the communication between the atoms. From the article:
To illustrate, if an entangled photon meets a vertical polarizing filter (analagous to the fence in Figure 4.4), the photon may or may not pass through. If it does, then its entangled partner will not because the instant that the first photon's polarization is known, the second photon's polarization will be the exact opposite.
The way I learned it, it went beyond this. He may be talking about a different method of creating the entangled photons, but we were told that the photons would be like most other photons before measurement, a superposition of all possible states, rather than one in horizontal and one in vertical. Thus, the photon would pass any measurement, but it would take on the characteristics of that measurement, and its partner would become the opposite. To use the example above, the measured photon would pass through the vertical filter, becoming vertically polarized, and its partner would AT THE SAME INSTANT become horizontally polarized, and vice versa. I may have it wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's the way they teach it at my school.
Slashdot Mirror
As a low-temperature physicist, I've been following this issue for some time now, as have many others in my field. At a conference this summer there was a panel discussion on the problem, and how seriously it is affecting not just the low-temp physics community, but many others, as well. A few years ago we could buy He-3 for a few hundred dollars per gaseous liter; it is now pretty much impossible to get your hands on any new He-3, and the prices quoted are in the many thousands of dollars per liter (for when it does eventually become available). As another poster above pointed out, it's used in dilution refrigerators to achieve sub-Kelvin temperatures, necessary for many scientific experiments, as well as some other specialized applications. As others have also pointed out, it's used for MRI; and obviously it's used for neutron detection. There are myriad applications for He-3, and only some of them can be achieved with lesser efficiency with other materials. Part of the reason prices were so low until very recently is that the government had tens of thousands of liters stockpiled, collected over time from tritium decay. A decision was made to start releasing the stockpile, and so global production was bolstered by this stockpiled material, which, while substantial, pales in comparison to the amounts required by DHS. The stockpile has been steadily shrinking for a number of years, and even if we were to access it and use it, that would be a very brief respite to the shortage. He-3 production has been decreasing as we disarm, and it's mind-boggling to think that nobody in the government saw this coming. They're basically the only ones producing He-3, so you'd think they'd be able to do the simple math and see that the amount they'd need to implement their plan would be leaps and bounds beyond what even the US and Russia combined could supply. On a slightly more technical note, this is also very bad news for the low-temperature community. As mentioned before, dilution fridges need He-3 to function, but they also generally need to be immersed in a bath of liquid He-4. With the global He-4 shortage that has also recently been in the news, most new dilution fridges are now what is called cryogen-free, not requiring the bath of 4K He-4 to stay cold, and thus not requiring hundreds of dollars of helium to be cycled through the system daily. However, the cryogen-free fridges happen to require a significantly larger quantity of He-3 to get cold. So not only are we forced to move away from more traditional helium-cooled cryostats, we're also currently unable to fill any of the new type of fridge, at least until the hold on He-3 is lifted, and then probably at significantly increased prices. In the most recent issue of Science there was an article about this, and there's a quote from of one of the dilution fridge manufacturers that if things don't change for the better, they will be out of business in a year. All thanks to the monumental short-sightedness of DHS.
If this is what you're looking for, check out Vendetta Online (http://www.vendetta-online.com/). It's an MMO space fighter simulator with a focus on the dogfighting element. It has a small but dedicated userbase, user-contributed content, and 4 developers who are responsive and active in the community (if you're around at the right times, usually around the weekly updates, you can even shoot at some of them!). They recently introduced dynamic warfare, where factions fight for control of various sectors in an on-going war, and are working towards player-owned stations and capitol ships. If a space fighter simulator is what you're looking for, check VO out. Just be warned that it can be very, very addictive.
As a counter-counter anecdote for Leopard, I also have it running on my 12" PowerBook G4, though mine is only 867 MHz. Trying to watch any videos online is impossible, neither the sound nor the video track properly, and the box grinds to a nearly complete halt. For regular computing, it works, but there's a definite sluggishness that was not there in Tiger. I currently have Gentoo installed on it while I check to see if my family has any Tiger install disks lying around, and even though I can't watch anything online on it, it still works better than in Leopard. Of course, it's working gloriously on my Intel iMac, which is only a couple of years old, but it doesn't function gracefully at all on lots of older hardware.
As a physics grad student, I can tell you that there are still scientists doing "their thing to broaden humankind's knowledge" all over the place. I'm working in a field with pretty much zero possibility of finding something that will make tons of money, or will feed into anyone's skewed worldview, something that is basically science for the sake of science. While we certainly have to put down possible things the science can be used for in our grants, most of those are still about understanding more about the world around us in general, and unconventional transport in particular. There are still a lot of scientists doing this kind of thing, you just never hear about it because no non-scientific journal is going to say one word about a new collective mode in the order parameter of superfluid Helium-3.
I'm not sure if it's the one you are referring to (I doubt it, as I don't think anyone would refer to it as rather funny), but Vendetta Online has a native client for Linux as well. OSX, Windows, and both 32- and 64-bit Linux. The only trouble I've ever had with it on Linux is purely a third-party issue, where the voice chat implementation (not done by Guild Software, who makes VO) segfaults with Pulse Audio. But that is not something they have any control over, and other than that the game runs just as well (sometimes better) in Linux than on other platforms.
Most of my first gaming experiences were with Angband back in the 1.0 days, and while I did play Nethack some after that, I was always more a fan of Angband. It's certainly somewhat less sadistic (though you can make it as sadistic as you please with some of the birth options), and the variety of things you can find in the game is truly phenomenal. Sad to say I'm past the days of jumping at purple j's, but somewhere in the back of my mind success is still spelled Ringil.
Well, I for one am sick and tired of all these tee-totalling P2P geeks getting together to fight brewing. They may not like beer, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to suffer!
Actually, from the quote of the CEO, the ratio is 3:1 "alerts to actual events," so 4 events, three of which are false positives and one of which is real. I would think that, as posters further up have discussed, one large deployment area for these would be in retail, to catch shoplifters, where the number of events is possibly quite high indeed. But even for the events you discuss, taking rape as an example, if the technology keeps on throwing out false positives just because couples keep snogging in its field of view, then the GP's point about crying wolf might well be valid.
Well, IANAL, but I read through the pertinent section of the bill to which you linked, and it seemed to me like it didn't actually give the Executive power to halt any court case, just any court case involving the "alleged provision to an element of the intelligence community of any information . . . or any other assistance." To me that reads that if you break any privacy laws to give information to the government, you're pretty much scot free. Which, while not the blank check you suggested, is certainly bad enough. On the other hand, I didn't read the entire text of the bill, so there may be further sections to which you refer, in which case feel free to correct me.
While I agree in principle with what you're saying, the fact is that if you don't sell your research to have some type of real-world application, you very likely won't get funded at all. I just finished an undergraduate physics degree, and the research I did there was done purely for the sake of finding out about new materials, how they structure themselves, and how they behave. However, we couldn't write down "science for the sake of science" on the grant proposal, because otherwise we would've been sol. The unfortunate truth is that most sources of funding, at least in my experience, are only interested in things that could have potential foreseeable use (disregarding possible useful advances due to "pure research").
Now, IANAQP, but I am a Physics student, and I have had reasonable experience with quantum tunneling. From what I've learned, quantum tunneling is most easily described in terms of electons hopping across barriers. The electron has a non-zero probability of being found outside the potential well created by its parent atom/molecule, and (skipping over most of the science and math) this means that there will be a non-zero rate of tunneling from that well to the other wells nearby. Now, in many cases that rate is infinitessimally small, but in a case like this it would be conceivable that the rate could go up to something non-trivial. The molecules would have to get pretty darn close, but if they're bound then that solves the problem. If this were the actual paper, instead of a popular article, you would certainly expect to see a whole lot of nigh-incomprehensible gibberish that explained what exactly they thought was going on. As this was written for a less specialized audience, they simplified it using, as far as I know, one of the standard ways of describing what we think is actually going on.
The error originally came from the article itself. If you RTA now it says electron volts with a score through electron, so obviously someone on the publishing side had much the same problem.
If journalists were physicists, we would be teleporting around willy-nilly by now in our flying cars with interstellar capabilities. Of course, then all the freelance physicists embedded in active units would be constantly complaining about the divergence of their field, so it's probably a good thing things are the way they are (sorry, I've been thinking too much about E&M recently, couldn't restrain myself).
One of my physics professors was interviewed several times with a number of articles written in major newspapers like the New York Times for his physics songs. One such article can be found at http://www.grammy.com/features/2005/0415physics.as px. All his songs can be found at http://www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/. He usually has a song for each major subject in the syllabus, and, unlike the students in TFA, we were usually quite receptive, to the point where we would write our own songs. Some in the class even cited some of the songs as being extremely helpful during exams, because the equations come easier with a tune behind them. I don't know why there's such a strong connection between science and music, but it certainly seems to be shining through lately.