Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Pauling and Wilson. Wonderful reference to basic QM, a true classic. This text goes into more detail of the math of QM than later texts. Amazing to contemplate that this text was published (1935) only 10 years after Schroedinger published his equation and shows how much had already been accomplished.
As an aside, it has never been clear to me how Schroedinger came up with his equation in which he combined classical wave mechanics with the earlier work of Bohr and others on electrons "orbiting" the nucleus. Also not clear to me is how it was derived, other than by observation, that the product of the wave equation and its complex conjugate is proportional to the probability of finding a particle at a particular location.
What an exciting time it must have been to be a physicist at Gottingen in the twenties. I doubt if there will ever be a ~50 year period (1903-1954) when so much basic scientific information is discovered -- Relativity, quantum mechanics, DNA, and the transistor (solid state physics).
I live in Virginia near DC. There are 3 Circuit Citys and 3 Best Buys within 15 minutes of my house. None of them seems very busy. Eventually something had to give. I recently bought a HDTV at one of the Circuit Citys that just opened because they offered an opending day 10% discount on top of a very good regular discount.
Of course the salesperson wanted me to buy a warranty. I told him I thought that there was a good chance that Circuit City would go under so why would I want their warranty (a rip off anyway). He quietly agreed with me.
Get infidels out of Saudi Arabia: bomb US base >> US leaves
Get rid of corrupt secular Arab leaders: (worse one Saddam) >> Bush does this for him
Get rid of Israel: Weaken US economically so harder to support Israel >> cause US to spend $$$$ by getting sucked into endless war not to mention $$$$ spent on homeland security.
USA pop. projected to grow to about 450 mil (50% increase) by 2050 which will make everything below worse
World oil production by 2050 to be about 25% of current rate -- not a pretty picture especially when the third world can't afford fertilizer and transportation of food
Baby boomers leaching off the economy as a greater fraction of the population (me included)
Politicians afraid to ask any real sacrifice of us
Ideas for sacrifice: make cost of living for Social Security about 1% less than actual (for 2009 4.8% vs 5.8%)
Increase tax rates on those who can afford it. Note Bill Gates has about a billion shares of Microsoft stock which pays 52 cents a share dividends which he pays 15% tax on. Likewise for many other folks, just look at company annual reports at what these folks get paid.
Declare energy emergency and push nuclear, wind, geothermal power. We are going to need this power for transportation.
Maximize use of electrically powered trains for transportation.
65 mph speed limit
Cut cost of medical care by setting max price on drugs. No coverage for Viagra.
Just wishing of course since about half the country is listening to Joe the Plumber for advice.
And the Challanger failure source was fixed. So you should not factor it in when evaluating failure probability of the current Shuttle. Additionally improvements in the foam to prevent it from coming off and damaging the Shuttle wings have also been implemented. The problem with the Shuttle is we don't have enough of the kind of payloads that justify the cost of maintaining it. Or the need for its ability to return large payloads from space.
The Martian atmosphere is too thin to brake a large heavy (manned) lander. So most of the energy to slow it down must come from retro rockets. Just one more problem.
My Dell 630 latitude running XP-SP3 is ready to go in 10 seconds from hibernation. From standby it is even faster but in this case the computer is not fully off. Sometimes it may take a few more seconds for the wireless to connect, but this would be the same with any system. I'll take lean and mean over bloated and slow anytime.
Some thoughts. I was working with a company testing military gear I designed. They put it in a test chamber and exposed it to a Mil Std test of RF external radiation. They commented they had tested a Volvo the week before and it had failed (wipers turned on). This was 15 years ago. They commented this was important as cars often drive close to AM-FM-TV station transmitters where 100s of kilowatts of RF are being emitted. Airplanes must occasionally fly near broadcast stations. They also need to be able to survive lightning strikes. Something like a wireless mouse, which must be quite low power to have long battery life, should have no effect. Do they ever observe problems on taxiing after landing when 100 plus folks turn on their cell phones? I assume fly by wire systems use digital signals with checksums and other forms of redundency to minimize this possiblity.
Another advantage of fly by wire systems is that if the pilot needs to make an evasive maneuver, she can shove the control all the way over as the computer will only move the control surface as much as the plane can safely handle. With a manual system the pilot may not use as drastic a maneuver for fear of crashing the plane.
When natural gas was cheap, many people had air conditioners that used the heat from burning natural gas to run the fluid portion (not the fans) of an air conditioner. My guess is this idea is similar in principle but on a much smaller scale of course. See http://www.gasairconditioning.org/robur_how_it_works.htm for an example of how this works. Sort of counter intuitive at first glance.
My dell 630 laptop with XP returns from hibernation in less than 10 secs and boots up (disk activity light is mostly off) in less than 45 secs. Hibernation works well on this system. If the system is in standby (small amount of power consumption) then is ready almost instantly, main delay in this case is the wireless connecting which for word processing shouldn't be necessary.
Unless they can produce it at 45 nm or less, I don't see how they could compete with Intel, right now AMD is not able to do this so Intel has this technology to themselves for the x86 processors. If they could produce something, as others has mentioned, Intel has to be very careful about not hindering rivals since they are in such a dominant position the market.
Best use is react with CO2 to form methane and water. Methane can be expelled thru resitojets (believe that is the right name) (electrically heated nozzles) to generate minor trust.
I remember visiting a facility in Brooklyn shake testing a 5 ton piece of gear for a Navy ship. When we got out of the car we noticed the parking meter was vibrating due to vibrations being transferred to the earth. I'm sure the folks living nearby must have enjoyed it when stuff fell over in their apartments. Later the gear was shock tested by attaching it to a barge and setting off explosive charges in the water. This was done in an old flooded slate quarry.
Civil service positions (not political appointees) are supposed to be appointed on merit. Getting around this process is spitting in the eye of the values of American Constitution that we were all taught in school.
Even Ashcroft would not do this and specifically instructed his staff that as employees of DOJ they were to be non partisian.
Without a doubt the worst administration in modern history. Hopefully America can recover from the deep hole in which it has dug itself.
The SRB's have a good track record. Only one failure in 100+ launches. Cause of the failure identified and fixed so it should not be factored into reliability calculations. Unless some new system is significantly cheaper in the long run,then stick with the SRB's for a heavy lift vehicle. Remember they are recovered after launch and reused. The steel cylinders (about 1/2" thick walls) are taken apart and refilled with propellant and reassembled. All the infrastructure to do this is already in place.
Whether people need to go to the moon or Mars is another question. If not do we need heavy boosters in the first place?
This is why I love/. Along with the hype, etc. is a response like this one that documents that this is not new technology. Thanks John for responding so well to this article.
In that part of the world people, ducks and pigs live in close proximity which facilitates the exchange of viruses. They use human waste as fertilizer also. This is why the origin of most flu viruses begins there. I still remember the Hong Kong flu. Three days of feeling like death warmed over for me and most of my friends, took a month to only need a normal amount of sleep after getting over it.
The book Spycatcher details how shortly after WWII the British tapped the powerline feeding the coding machine in the French embassy in London. Electrical noise on the line could be correlated with different keys typed on the machine. When this book came out it was banned in Britain.
My second semester freshman physics text (Sears and Zemansky, the standard of its day (1965)) has the price of $7.50 stamped in it. This was about 4x the miniumum wage. It has ~500 pages, weighs 2.2 lbs (1 kg), and no color.
No reason why this book could not be used today, except a conspiracy by publishers to raise profits by adding lots of extra material, color photos etc, frequently changing editions to devalue used copies.
Life was good then, the was no tuition at the University of California where I attended and gas was $0.29 a gallon (6 gal = 1 hr minimum wage). The biggest downside was no word processors.
Looked up the ST506 specs. 3600 rpm and 612 tracks. Thus I calculate it can read 60 tracks/sec or about 500 kbytes/sec or 10 secs to read the entire disk. Current 1 Tb disk drives can read about 50 Mb/sec which means to read the entire disk would take about 20,000 secs or about 6 hours. Didn't find how much it weighed but recall these old drives weighed somewhat around 10 lbs and actual MTBF was about 1 year for an office environment. Also recall computer had to wait 5-10 secs on boot up for drive to get up to speed. The specs for the ST-506 had a date of 1990. Of course then the internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.
Learn to accept and live with failure, if it was easy to do, it would have been done. Learn from failures and keep trying. At the top of most fields many decisions are made for political reasons or personal ones rather than what is the best science. The best thing I could say or hear about someone for a job recommendation when asked was: "they write well."
Slashdot Mirror
Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Pauling and Wilson. Wonderful reference to basic QM, a true classic. This text goes into more detail of the math of QM than later texts. Amazing to contemplate that this text was published (1935) only 10 years after Schroedinger published his equation and shows how much had already been accomplished.
As an aside, it has never been clear to me how Schroedinger came up with his equation in which he combined classical wave mechanics with the earlier work of Bohr and others on electrons "orbiting" the nucleus. Also not clear to me is how it was derived, other than by observation, that the product of the wave equation and its complex conjugate is proportional to the probability of finding a particle at a particular location.
What an exciting time it must have been to be a physicist at Gottingen in the twenties. I doubt if there will ever be a ~50 year period (1903-1954) when so much basic scientific information is discovered -- Relativity, quantum mechanics, DNA, and the transistor (solid state physics).
I live in Virginia near DC. There are 3 Circuit Citys and 3 Best Buys within 15 minutes of my house. None of them seems very busy. Eventually something had to give. I recently bought a HDTV at one of the Circuit Citys that just opened because they offered an opending day 10% discount on top of a very good regular discount.
Of course the salesperson wanted me to buy a warranty. I told him I thought that there was a good chance that Circuit City would go under so why would I want their warranty (a rip off anyway). He quietly agreed with me.
Bin Laden's goals
Get infidels out of Saudi Arabia: bomb US base >> US leaves
Get rid of corrupt secular Arab leaders: (worse one Saddam) >> Bush does this for him
Get rid of Israel: Weaken US economically so harder to support Israel >> cause US to spend $$$$ by getting sucked into endless war not to mention $$$$ spent on homeland security.
So how would you grade Bin Laden???
USA pop. projected to grow to about 450 mil (50% increase) by 2050 which will make everything below worse
World oil production by 2050 to be about 25% of current rate -- not a pretty picture especially when the third world can't afford fertilizer and transportation of food
Baby boomers leaching off the economy as a greater fraction of the population (me included)
Politicians afraid to ask any real sacrifice of us
Ideas for sacrifice: make cost of living for Social Security about 1% less than actual (for 2009 4.8% vs 5.8%)
Increase tax rates on those who can afford it. Note Bill Gates has about a billion shares of Microsoft stock which pays 52 cents a share dividends which he pays 15% tax on. Likewise for many other folks, just look at company annual reports at what these folks get paid.
Declare energy emergency and push nuclear, wind, geothermal power. We are going to need this power for transportation.
Maximize use of electrically powered trains for transportation.
65 mph speed limit
Cut cost of medical care by setting max price on drugs. No coverage for Viagra.
Just wishing of course since about half the country is listening to Joe the Plumber for advice.
And the Challanger failure source was fixed. So you should not factor it in when evaluating failure probability of the current Shuttle. Additionally improvements in the foam to prevent it from coming off and damaging the Shuttle wings have also been implemented. The problem with the Shuttle is we don't have enough of the kind of payloads that justify the cost of maintaining it. Or the need for its ability to return large payloads from space.
The Martian atmosphere is too thin to brake a large heavy (manned) lander. So most of the energy to slow it down must come from retro rockets. Just one more problem.
My Dell 630 latitude running XP-SP3 is ready to go in 10 seconds from hibernation. From standby it is even faster but in this case the computer is not fully off. Sometimes it may take a few more seconds for the wireless to connect, but this would be the same with any system. I'll take lean and mean over bloated and slow anytime.
Some thoughts. I was working with a company testing military gear I designed. They put it in a test chamber and exposed it to a Mil Std test of RF external radiation. They commented they had tested a Volvo the week before and it had failed (wipers turned on). This was 15 years ago. They commented this was important as cars often drive close to AM-FM-TV station transmitters where 100s of kilowatts of RF are being emitted. Airplanes must occasionally fly near broadcast stations. They also need to be able to survive lightning strikes. Something like a wireless mouse, which must be quite low power to have long battery life, should have no effect. Do they ever observe problems on taxiing after landing when 100 plus folks turn on their cell phones? I assume fly by wire systems use digital signals with checksums and other forms of redundency to minimize this possiblity. Another advantage of fly by wire systems is that if the pilot needs to make an evasive maneuver, she can shove the control all the way over as the computer will only move the control surface as much as the plane can safely handle. With a manual system the pilot may not use as drastic a maneuver for fear of crashing the plane.
When natural gas was cheap, many people had air conditioners that used the heat from burning natural gas to run the fluid portion (not the fans) of an air conditioner. My guess is this idea is similar in principle but on a much smaller scale of course. See http://www.gasairconditioning.org/robur_how_it_works.htm for an example of how this works. Sort of counter intuitive at first glance.
From the photo in a newscast I saw there were at least half a dozen $100.00 dollar bills. Doubt anyone would leave these around for a hoax.
My dell 630 laptop with XP returns from hibernation in less than 10 secs and boots up (disk activity light is mostly off) in less than 45 secs. Hibernation works well on this system. If the system is in standby (small amount of power consumption) then is ready almost instantly, main delay in this case is the wireless connecting which for word processing shouldn't be necessary.
just hope the IRS or state govt doesn't pull your credit card records and find a significant discrepency between reported and received income.
Unless they can produce it at 45 nm or less, I don't see how they could compete with Intel, right now AMD is not able to do this so Intel has this technology to themselves for the x86 processors. If they could produce something, as others has mentioned, Intel has to be very careful about not hindering rivals since they are in such a dominant position the market.
Best use is react with CO2 to form methane and water. Methane can be expelled thru resitojets (believe that is the right name) (electrically heated nozzles) to generate minor trust.
I remember visiting a facility in Brooklyn shake testing a 5 ton piece of gear for a Navy ship. When we got out of the car we noticed the parking meter was vibrating due to vibrations being transferred to the earth. I'm sure the folks living nearby must have enjoyed it when stuff fell over in their apartments. Later the gear was shock tested by attaching it to a barge and setting off explosive charges in the water. This was done in an old flooded slate quarry.
Salon has a updated story today http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/
relating to false information provided to ABC news early on about the investigation. Really makes you wonder what was going on here.
Civil service positions (not political appointees) are supposed to be appointed on merit. Getting around this process is spitting in the eye of the values of American Constitution that we were all taught in school. Even Ashcroft would not do this and specifically instructed his staff that as employees of DOJ they were to be non partisian. Without a doubt the worst administration in modern history. Hopefully America can recover from the deep hole in which it has dug itself.
The SRB's have a good track record. Only one failure in 100+ launches. Cause of the failure identified and fixed so it should not be factored into reliability calculations. Unless some new system is significantly cheaper in the long run,then stick with the SRB's for a heavy lift vehicle. Remember they are recovered after launch and reused. The steel cylinders (about 1/2" thick walls) are taken apart and refilled with propellant and reassembled. All the infrastructure to do this is already in place.
Whether people need to go to the moon or Mars is another question. If not do we need heavy boosters in the first place?
This is why I love /. Along with the hype, etc. is a response like this one that documents that this is not new technology. Thanks John for responding so well to this article.
Would anyone have looked in the patent office in Switzerland in 1904?
In that part of the world people, ducks and pigs live in close proximity which facilitates the exchange of viruses. They use human waste as fertilizer also. This is why the origin of most flu viruses begins there. I still remember the Hong Kong flu. Three days of feeling like death warmed over for me and most of my friends, took a month to only need a normal amount of sleep after getting over it.
The book Spycatcher details how shortly after WWII the British tapped the powerline feeding the coding machine in the French embassy in London. Electrical noise on the line could be correlated with different keys typed on the machine. When this book came out it was banned in Britain.
My second semester freshman physics text (Sears and Zemansky, the standard of its day (1965)) has the price of $7.50 stamped in it. This was about 4x the miniumum wage. It has ~500 pages, weighs 2.2 lbs (1 kg), and no color.
No reason why this book could not be used today, except a conspiracy by publishers to raise profits by adding lots of extra material, color photos etc, frequently changing editions to devalue used copies.
Life was good then, the was no tuition at the University of California where I attended and gas was $0.29 a gallon (6 gal = 1 hr minimum wage). The biggest downside was no word processors.
Looked up the ST506 specs. 3600 rpm and 612 tracks. Thus I calculate it can read 60 tracks/sec or about 500 kbytes/sec or 10 secs to read the entire disk. Current 1 Tb disk drives can read about 50 Mb/sec which means to read the entire disk would take about 20,000 secs or about 6 hours. Didn't find how much it weighed but recall these old drives weighed somewhat around 10 lbs and actual MTBF was about 1 year for an office environment. Also recall computer had to wait 5-10 secs on boot up for drive to get up to speed. The specs for the ST-506 had a date of 1990. Of course then the internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.
Learn to accept and live with failure, if it was easy to do, it would have been done. Learn from failures and keep trying. At the top of most fields many decisions are made for political reasons or personal ones rather than what is the best science. The best thing I could say or hear about someone for a job recommendation when asked was: "they write well."