I especially like Taiwan's approach described in the show. By having trash collection comes around at common hour and requiring people to take out their trash by themselves, it actually, to some level, SHAMES people into separating their trash because it is easy to spot by your neighbor if you don't have a recyclable bag. Nothing like peer/neighbor-pressure modifies behavior fast.
Besides, not a bad way for/.-er to come out of their basement and meet some chick
They are trying to electrically polarize vacuum. And physical vacuum can be seen as a dielectric.
Distortion and ripping open of space-time are ultimately a gravity thing and gravity is sensationally weak unless you are near some stellar object.
I agree. I have the tablet version of x201 and to my surprise, the touch screen also works almost out of box. I had to google something, but it was quick. Fingerprint reader also doesn't work, but quite frankly I don't trust fingerprint authentication anyway so.
But I don't know where you go for support. I kept a small win7 partition just so that I don't run into the "we don't support linux" when CSR tries to blinding diagnose hardware issue over the phone. So far, never had to boot it.
Probably wouldn't work. Who would take a scientific journal owned by the Chinese government seriously? All it would do is kill that journal off... as the staff quit in protest, crossed the street to some open office space and established a new one.
I agree with this point.
No, the problem is that the staff at most scientific journals are academic types who when push comes to shove are on the side of the Communists and thus do not want to censure them. So they have to speak out in extreme cases like this one to maintain credibility but will quietly accede to the demands once the hubbub dies out a bit.
Citation needed. Many of the academics scientists I work with are more Ron Paul than Ron Paul. I hardly know anyone remotely Marxist. Maybe there'd more in social science, I don't know. Anyway, most are fairly central and apolitical. If I put them in a distribution, I think it's pretty bell-curved. Just like any reasonably large sample. Although on social issue, it'd be skewed left, but that's a different discussion.
So large, naturally occurring sheets of graphene will naturally curl up into tubes? What are the odds of them being contaminated with H, O, N and P, "just so"? Pretty high given the numbers?
We know that stars chunk out carbon and if graphene can be made out of Girl Scout cookies (http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/12/0359230/Researchers-Make-Graphene-From-Girl-Scout-Cookies), it is not surprising that graphene can form. But graphene is only stable when it sticks to a substrate such as SiO2. Freestanding graphene tends to roll up into more stable configuration such as scroll, carbon nanotube, and fullerene. Given that CNT's band structure is closed related to that of graphene and therefore also responds to infrared, I would venture to guess that's what they are actually seeing. Of course, it'd be pleasantly surprising if their claim is true.
I am not saying that it's not happening in other countries. But unfortunately there are so many incidents like this in Chinese news that new terms like "second generation rich" and "second generation official" has entered the Chinese lexicon.
I've heard that in China, sometimes richer people drive cars while poorer people ride bicycles. If a car hits a bike rider, the bike rider can sue for damages. Thus, it can be advantageous, and it's allegedly common, for a car driver to accidentally hit a biker, back up, and run him over again to finish him off. I wonder if and when some company (maybe Google, maybe not) will have cars that do this.
Given that FOSS software is readily available from official website, downloading from anywhere else is just plain stupid. An argument can be made for people behind firewall or somehow cannot access any mirror, but it is otherwise true. Many project publish checksum of their tar balls and binaries, against which you can verify the downloaded item.
On the other hand, if there is a piece of commercial software that you must get your hands on but cannot afford. And the only way for many is get it is via some untrusted source illegally. That has to carry to much higher risk of malware.
I have no data to back up this claim, but it seems plausible.
....See how long it takes for your status to disappear. Or if it doesn't, ask your friends if they can see it, you might find that it has been made invisible to everyone but you.
Running experiment now...So I posted a link to a greasemonkey script that blocks facebook ads: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46560 It's been an hr now and my friend and I can still see it on my profile.
But a self-identified cancer cluster is never really convincing. There was a recent situation in San Diego where parents believe that a school build on contaminated ground are causing a cancer cluster among the children of the community. But repeated reveal by the state (yae, it's a conspiracy!) has shown that not to be the case. Yes, dosimetry monitoring and actual analysis of cancer cases among TSA employee are in order. But I am not jumping to conclusion too quickly. As far as I understand, cancer causing radiation doesn't act this way, this fast.
I clicked the link and was about to RTFA, then I spotted that it's from "The Epoch Time" referencing an article from "The Apple Daily". I am from HK and those are not two news sources that I trust. The first is a media front for the Fa Lun Gong, which as much as I dislike communism, I have a worse distaste for a money sucking "religious" cult. The latter is a sensationalist tabloid paper. It is famous for its yellow journalism. If you want a report on fact, that's not it.
Here's my take, if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence,...
If you are thinking about a nuclear explosion of a plant. No, not going to happen. Chemical explosion? Yes, see Fukushima and Chernobyl. The condition for a nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb is completely and utterly different. What makes a good n-bomb makes for a poor nuclear power. Also, we did blow up two nuclear weapons above two Japanese cities, which are still habitable today. That there are no long term high level radiation left has a lot to do with n-bomb physics.
Ideally, industrial accidents should not happen. Unfortunately, they do. We take a lot of risks when we intend to live our modern live with modern things. Nuclear contamination, as least, has a half-life and in some cases, we can wait it out in a few generations.
Agreed. Whenever someone claim extraordinary claim that X is quantum, the first thing I check is with Planck's constant. That is, try to come up with some quantities that is most relevant to the process and try to construct a product that has the same dimension of hbar (energy-time) and compare. If it is within order-of-magnitude, then such claim is plausible and many desert further investigation. If not, there is a very good chance that the QM is not important in explaining this process at all.
It is not strictly rigorous, even for a back-of-envelop kind of estimation, but not bad for a first guess.
Looking up information about Neuron firing action potential on wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential, I get that order-of-magnitude for AP energy is about 100meV and firing duration is about 1ms. So I get something like 1e-4 eV-s, much larger than h~1e-15 eV-s. One would immediate guess that a single such process can be well described by some kind of classical theory.
It is important to distinguish the size of an electron versus the size of its trajectory under certain potential. Tunneling of electron (or electron under any long range potential) is not squeezing the electron into certain shape, but rather its position wave function: probability amplitude of where it can be. It provides NO information about what internal structure, if any, an electron has.
I believe by round it means one cannot distinguish any orientation of the electron. e.g. perhaps the experiment can measure quantity X as function of laser angle and found that X do not depends on angle at all to very good precision. This means the electron looks the same from all angle, inferring that it is "round".
One consequence of a non-round electron would possess a dipole moment. Judging from the article, I got the impression that they tried to measure the effect of electron having any dipole moment. A charge dipole would experience a torque in the field of the nucleus and therefore alter the electron's motion and make it "wobble". They did not observe any such wobble and this quantitatively allows them to put an upper limit on the dipole moment (if any) of electron.
Why are all main stream distribution still only release their live/install media in CD/DVD image file? Why not USB? The only distro that I know of offers that is Arch. I have at least two laptop that doesn't have an optical drive. Yes, I can use UNetbootin to make one, but in this day and age, why not just offer an image? Why are we still burning onto write-once media (few, if any, use cd-rw for this purpose?) like cdr/dvdr that become obsolete when a new version comes out and are really toxic to the dumpster.
Side question: what is the proper way to throw away cdr/dvdr's?
All my machines are Arch or Gentoo, except two I leave home for my parents to use, which run Ubuntu. I recently upgraded to Nauty remotely for them, forgetting to tell them that the default desktop is now Unity. So far, besides slightly slower start up after login (the machines could use more RAM anyway), they like the new Desktop. Their commonly used apps' are automatically set up as big and visible icon on the left-edge dock. (I used to put AWN, a bottom-screen dock, up for them, but they always find it obstructing even with auto-hide). They also like that menu item for all apps consistently appears when the cursor hovers over the top edge. I am ambivalent myself toward Unity, but if it pass their test. I would say it can't be all that bad.
Chrome has a plugin form Google that let you just talk from the browser. I have Google Voice, and my (Linux) laptop has essentially become my land line. My phone calls are about a three-way split between my cell, laptop, and office phone. All using the same number.
Since TFA cites the example of Miller, may I remind everyone that the rapture is happening this month: http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/may21/ and I predict a recalculation on May 22nd.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone not heard this episode of Freakonomics http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/01/13/freakonomics-radio-the-economics-of-trash/?
I especially like Taiwan's approach described in the show. By having trash collection comes around at common hour and requiring people to take out their trash by themselves, it actually, to some level, SHAMES people into separating their trash because it is easy to spot by your neighbor if you don't have a recyclable bag. Nothing like peer/neighbor-pressure modifies behavior fast.
Besides, not a bad way for /.-er to come out of their basement and meet some chick
They are trying to electrically polarize vacuum. And physical vacuum can be seen as a dielectric.
Distortion and ripping open of space-time are ultimately a gravity thing and gravity is sensationally weak unless you are near some stellar object.
I agree. I have the tablet version of x201 and to my surprise, the touch screen also works almost out of box. I had to google something, but it was quick. Fingerprint reader also doesn't work, but quite frankly I don't trust fingerprint authentication anyway so.
But I don't know where you go for support. I kept a small win7 partition just so that I don't run into the "we don't support linux" when CSR tries to blinding diagnose hardware issue over the phone. So far, never had to boot it.
Probably wouldn't work. Who would take a scientific journal owned by the Chinese government seriously? All it would do is kill that journal off... as the staff quit in protest, crossed the street to some open office space and established a new one.
I agree with this point.
No, the problem is that the staff at most scientific journals are academic types who when push comes to shove are on the side of the Communists and thus do not want to censure them. So they have to speak out in extreme cases like this one to maintain credibility but will quietly accede to the demands once the hubbub dies out a bit.
Citation needed. Many of the academics scientists I work with are more Ron Paul than Ron Paul. I hardly know anyone remotely Marxist. Maybe there'd more in social science, I don't know. Anyway, most are fairly central and apolitical. If I put them in a distribution, I think it's pretty bell-curved. Just like any reasonably large sample. Although on social issue, it'd be skewed left, but that's a different discussion.
So large, naturally occurring sheets of graphene will naturally curl up into tubes? What are the odds of them being contaminated with H, O, N and P, "just so"? Pretty high given the numbers?
A lot, graphene edge tends to be pretty "dirty" due to all those dangling carbon bonds. Remember organic chemistry is possible because carbon is the most promiscuous of all the elements: http://startalkradio.net/2011/05/22/the-political-science-of-the-daily-show
We know that stars chunk out carbon and if graphene can be made out of Girl Scout cookies (http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/12/0359230/Researchers-Make-Graphene-From-Girl-Scout-Cookies), it is not surprising that graphene can form. But graphene is only stable when it sticks to a substrate such as SiO2. Freestanding graphene tends to roll up into more stable configuration such as scroll, carbon nanotube, and fullerene. Given that CNT's band structure is closed related to that of graphene and therefore also responds to infrared, I would venture to guess that's what they are actually seeing. Of course, it'd be pleasantly surprising if their claim is true.
This feels kinda heavily anecdotal. It's not like things like that don't happen in other countries as well. http://www.cyclechat.net/topic/86407-us-driver-deliberately-hits-then-runs-over-cyclist-faces-no-charges/
I am not saying that it's not happening in other countries. But unfortunately there are so many incidents like this in Chinese news that new terms like "second generation rich" and "second generation official" has entered the Chinese lexicon.
I've heard that in China, sometimes richer people drive cars while poorer people ride bicycles. If a car hits a bike rider, the bike rider can sue for damages. Thus, it can be advantageous, and it's allegedly common, for a car driver to accidentally hit a biker, back up, and run him over again to finish him off. I wonder if and when some company (maybe Google, maybe not) will have cars that do this.
Or he gets out of the car and stabs you to death when he notices you eyeing his license plate: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/world/asia/08china.html
Is this for desktop market? Then what's that 5.77% non Windows/OSX/Linux. BSD?
since it's been acting like an jealous ex ever since G+ showed up...
For non-Chinese speaker: Wei = Micro, Bo = Blogging. Just sayin'.
Given that FOSS software is readily available from official website, downloading from anywhere else is just plain stupid. An argument can be made for people behind firewall or somehow cannot access any mirror, but it is otherwise true. Many project publish checksum of their tar balls and binaries, against which you can verify the downloaded item.
On the other hand, if there is a piece of commercial software that you must get your hands on but cannot afford. And the only way for many is get it is via some untrusted source illegally. That has to carry to much higher risk of malware.
I have no data to back up this claim, but it seems plausible.
....See how long it takes for your status to disappear. Or if it doesn't, ask your friends if they can see it, you might find that it has been made invisible to everyone but you.
Running experiment now...So I posted a link to a greasemonkey script that blocks facebook ads: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46560 It's been an hr now and my friend and I can still see it on my profile.
Use awesome.
But a self-identified cancer cluster is never really convincing. There was a recent situation in San Diego where parents believe that a school build on contaminated ground are causing a cancer cluster among the children of the community. But repeated reveal by the state (yae, it's a conspiracy!) has shown that not to be the case. Yes, dosimetry monitoring and actual analysis of cancer cases among TSA employee are in order. But I am not jumping to conclusion too quickly. As far as I understand, cancer causing radiation doesn't act this way, this fast.
Window shopping then go place order on NG.
I clicked the link and was about to RTFA, then I spotted that it's from "The Epoch Time" referencing an article from "The Apple Daily". I am from HK and those are not two news sources that I trust. The first is a media front for the Fa Lun Gong, which as much as I dislike communism, I have a worse distaste for a money sucking "religious" cult. The latter is a sensationalist tabloid paper. It is famous for its yellow journalism. If you want a report on fact, that's not it.
Here's my take, if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence, ...
If you are thinking about a nuclear explosion of a plant. No, not going to happen. Chemical explosion? Yes, see Fukushima and Chernobyl. The condition for a nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb is completely and utterly different. What makes a good n-bomb makes for a poor nuclear power. Also, we did blow up two nuclear weapons above two Japanese cities, which are still habitable today. That there are no long term high level radiation left has a lot to do with n-bomb physics.
On the other hand, what if a chemical factory explode and it had happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster, and it killed and maimed a lot of people..
Ideally, industrial accidents should not happen. Unfortunately, they do. We take a lot of risks when we intend to live our modern live with modern things. Nuclear contamination, as least, has a half-life and in some cases, we can wait it out in a few generations.
Agreed. Whenever someone claim extraordinary claim that X is quantum, the first thing I check is with Planck's constant. That is, try to come up with some quantities that is most relevant to the process and try to construct a product that has the same dimension of hbar (energy-time) and compare. If it is within order-of-magnitude, then such claim is plausible and many desert further investigation. If not, there is a very good chance that the QM is not important in explaining this process at all.
It is not strictly rigorous, even for a back-of-envelop kind of estimation, but not bad for a first guess.
Looking up information about Neuron firing action potential on wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential, I get that order-of-magnitude for AP energy is about 100meV and firing duration is about 1ms. So I get something like 1e-4 eV-s, much larger than h~1e-15 eV-s. One would immediate guess that a single such process can be well described by some kind of classical theory.
It is important to distinguish the size of an electron versus the size of its trajectory under certain potential. Tunneling of electron (or electron under any long range potential) is not squeezing the electron into certain shape, but rather its position wave function: probability amplitude of where it can be. It provides NO information about what internal structure, if any, an electron has.
I believe by round it means one cannot distinguish any orientation of the electron. e.g. perhaps the experiment can measure quantity X as function of laser angle and found that X do not depends on angle at all to very good precision. This means the electron looks the same from all angle, inferring that it is "round".
One consequence of a non-round electron would possess a dipole moment. Judging from the article, I got the impression that they tried to measure the effect of electron having any dipole moment. A charge dipole would experience a torque in the field of the nucleus and therefore alter the electron's motion and make it "wobble". They did not observe any such wobble and this quantitatively allows them to put an upper limit on the dipole moment (if any) of electron.
Why are all main stream distribution still only release their live/install media in CD/DVD image file? Why not USB? The only distro that I know of offers that is Arch. I have at least two laptop that doesn't have an optical drive. Yes, I can use UNetbootin to make one, but in this day and age, why not just offer an image? Why are we still burning onto write-once media (few, if any, use cd-rw for this purpose?) like cdr/dvdr that become obsolete when a new version comes out and are really toxic to the dumpster.
Side question: what is the proper way to throw away cdr/dvdr's?
All my machines are Arch or Gentoo, except two I leave home for my parents to use, which run Ubuntu. I recently upgraded to Nauty remotely for them, forgetting to tell them that the default desktop is now Unity. So far, besides slightly slower start up after login (the machines could use more RAM anyway), they like the new Desktop. Their commonly used apps' are automatically set up as big and visible icon on the left-edge dock. (I used to put AWN, a bottom-screen dock, up for them, but they always find it obstructing even with auto-hide). They also like that menu item for all apps consistently appears when the cursor hovers over the top edge. I am ambivalent myself toward Unity, but if it pass their test. I would say it can't be all that bad.
Chrome has a plugin form Google that let you just talk from the browser. I have Google Voice, and my (Linux) laptop has essentially become my land line. My phone calls are about a three-way split between my cell, laptop, and office phone. All using the same number.
You sentiment seems sensible, and I mostly agree. Unfortunately people like you and I are not going to make bunch of lawyers money. So there...
Since TFA cites the example of Miller, may I remind everyone that the rapture is happening this month: http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/may21/ and I predict a recalculation on May 22nd.