This may or may not be normal. If the black light is a cheap one, it will produce visible light as well, which is the trivial case. It's also possible that a molecule in the page can absorb a photon of UV light, and then emit the energy as one visible photon and one infra-red (or lower energy) photon. Again, it is visible light that reaches your eye.
If the mother was a tetrachromatic, then that person would not be a mutant.
Unless the child is a pentachromat. Picture this: mother is a tetra chromat, say, with one normal X chromosome and one with genes for two slightly different red cones. If the father is colorblind with two slightly different green cones, the daughter has a 50/50 chance of being a pentachromat. Find a (rare) colour-blind mother with two slightly different red chromosomes on each X chromosome, and you can (almost) guarantee all daughters would be pentachromatic. Now, if we can mutate one blue cone, we can go for hexachromatic kids.
IMHO, I think that "Crystalis" is one of the best NES games I've ever played. Maybe it doesn't belong in the top three ever list, but I think it should be in the best Action/RPG list. I found it far more fun and original than Castlevania 2, and it actually had a decent story to go along with gameplay!
It has the ability to "save to VCR," which (by the sounds of the feature name and A/V connections described) allows you to take a show you've taped and record it on your VCR form the hard drive. Essentially, you can watch the show, and then decide if you want to add it to the permanent collection.
This unit does have a "record to VCR" option. If you like the show, you can keep it. You're stuck with VCR quality, but you can keep it without chewing up disk space. (You need the VCR, too, but most people already have one.)
Thanks for the info. All I know for sure is that it looks like Slashdot, and has Slashdot's content on the main page (and links to it for subsequent pages), but it's fast when Slashdot.org is getting bogged down.
According to the "specifications" link at the above page, it's 150x110x161 mm. At 25.4mm/inch, that's about 6x4x6.4. The websites you've read seem to be right...
Companies don't get "attacked" for producing neat toys, they get attacked in response to their response to the way Linux people respond. Linux users made the:CueCat usable under a new operating system, and screwed up the business model (probably without realizing it right away). Digital Convergence got upset and tried to stop them, and so they will get nothing but negative responses.
On the other hand, you have devices like the TiVo. People hack it all the time, adding hard drive space, etc. The people who make TiVo took a different approach, which basically allows you to do what you want with your TiVo for use in your home, with the understanding that any warrantee is null and void. I have heard very little negative response to TiVo, because the TiVo people did not have a negative response to the hackers.
The response of Linux fans may or may not be the right one, but the response isn't just to random companies that make neat stuff.
He doesn't need to be kidding. Screenshots tell you almost nothing; they just get publicized to keep people talking about the product and anticipating its release. MS is billing Whistler primarily based on its capability, not its look.
There were three different occasions of students setting up a "home business" pirating software at the University of Alberta in the past few years (that I know of). All underwent similar procedures. These are the same sort of measures that would be undertaken if you were suspected of serving out pornography. If you're suspected of serving illegal content, then they take your machine at the time of arrest to look for said content to use as evidence. This just got media attention because the media is keeping a lookout for mp3-related news.
You are not a complete dolt. You're not even a partial dolt, as far as I can tell.
The main reason people have faith in the current theories is that they can predict experimental results that haven't been seen yet, that later pan out. That's why it's still around. There have been several dozen alternatives (at least), but they were all defeated by experiment. Well, most of them. There are extensions to the current theory, which do not contradict the Standard Model, but which can't be tested with current accelerators. (There are theories that can't be tested by accelerators that fit on earth, but most experimentalists pay little attention to those.)
With the Higgs boson, there is a chance the boson itself can be produced and directly observed. (This is not the same situation as quarks; they are identified by their decay products, ie what they make when they fall apart.) Physicists go by more than what is formed in these decays, though. Continuing the recipe analogy, it's like identifying a loaf of bread by its ingredients. If we see all the right ingredients (particles), in all the right proportions (with the right energy/momentum), we think we know which loaf that will make. If we can get the ingredients together (in an accelerator) at just the right temperature (energy), we can hope to make the loaf itself.
Unfortunately, many loaves aren't stable, and revert back to their ingredients quickly. Quarks are never seen as a loaf, but the Higgs can be. This is common with bosons. Others, like the W and Z bosons, were predicted before they were seen by the interactions of other particles. Their masses were predicted by looking at reactions which did not actually involve any Z or W bosons! Eventully, we found the right "oven temperature" to make the loaf show up, and stay around long enough to be seen as a loaf.
About 30 years ago, particle physicists were trying to explain the way the world worked. Murray Gell-Mann and others developed a basic mathematical structure that could explain why people kept seeing all sorts of new particles every time they went looking. First, there was the electron and the proton. Then, Chadwick found the neutron (in 1932, I think), and the numbers kept growing. Soon, there were hundreds of so-called "elementary" particles and their antiparticles, and that was just more than anybody wanted to deal with.
Gell-Mann, Feynman, and several others soon realized that these could all be brozen down into about a dozen "elementary" particles, if you assumed that some of the ones we were seeing weren't actually elementary, but were actually composed of a small set of other particles, which Gell-Mann named quarks. They found a set of rules that could be applied to the way quarks combined (for the inclined: it's group theory, specifically the SU(3) group) that predicted which particles should exist, and which particles they could decay into.
The theory lacked one thing: an explanation for why things have mass. They could prove the theory worked in many cases, but in certain processes, the predictions for the probability of certain reactions happening were infinite. (Anything outside the range from 0 to 1 is impossible.) This made them very nervous, and was a rather large problem.
Higgs made a suggestion that worked. If there was another particle, which came to be known as the Higgs particle, then there would be other terms in the equation, which exactly matched the existing terms, apart from a negative sign. These extra terms correspond to the mass of a particle, which is why it's said that the Higgs boson is responsible for giving things mass. With this inclusion to the theory, the predictions began to match what was seen in the lab. The only thing that was missing was the Higgs Boson.
There have been various theoretical limits placed on the mass of the Higgs. It's massive enough to be hard to find, but just barely within the reach of some of the current accelerators, such as Fermilab and the LEP. The results reported at CERN may or may not be part of the random background events. Currently, the LEP is supposed ot shut down in late October/early November to make way for the LHC, the new, high-energy collider that should be able to find the Higgs boson, assuming the theories are correct. (Most of the LEP physicists have jobs on the LHC, so those of you writing this off as a reaction to unemployment just don't have all the relevant information.)
Anyway, all the experiments are saying is that the events they've seen may or may not be the evidence needed to support the only theory we have that predicts mass. They need to take another month of data to know for sure.
The LHC is a proton-proton collider. This will be acheived by having two rings that cross each other in four places. Everything else you've said is correct. (If you're interested, I'm working on my M.Sc. in Particle Physics, and I'm currently at CERN to do it. I'm working on a piece of ATLAS, which is a detector that will be used on the LHC. If anyone has further questions, feel free to use my e-mail address...
We're getting better at physics. It comes from slashing the defense budget and staying friends with our neighbors to the south. We've also got the world's largest cyclotron in B.C., called TRIUMF.
Yeah. On Monday, a colloquium speaker at CERN told us to expect the announcement on Friday. I'd have submitted an article then, but I had to URL to link to...
They don't do the calorimetry on the neutrino itself. They saw the creationg and decay of a tau lepton inside the tank. The sudden presence of a tau lepton cannot be explained by current theories without having a tau neutrino present.
That's true. I've heard of cases where test audiences in 1970's sci-fi movies thought something was wrong with the print because there was no sound in space. Hollywood chose to run with the most common misconceptions rather than correct them, and now they propogate them. "Sound in space" is the most forgivable error. Nothing like the old Star Trek "he won't remember what happened when we beam him back to the past because it wouldn't have happened yet" cop-out. The sad thing is, Lois & Clark ripped that off thirty years later, in the episode where H. G. Wells built a time machine and came to visit.
Or he uses a different definition of "science fiction" than people who label Knight Rider that way. I prefer the general term "speculative fiction" for most of what Hollywood calls sci-fi. This is any premise built on the "what if the world was just a little bit different..." idea, and includes all of science fiction, as well as fantasy, alternate history (if you consider that outside the sci-fi realm), etc. When I refer to science fiction, I usually mean to "hard science fiction," which is something that can be built upon (and does not violate) the known laws of science. That means that anything which has sound in space is immediately tossed out of sci-fi and into spec-fi, for one example.
The strong nuclear force is given credit for holding the nucleus together. It doesn't affect our everyday lives because it is short range (about 10^-15m) and it doesn't effect leptons or photons. (Leptons are electrons and a few other particles like neutrinos that you won't see unless you look for them, or make them in particle accelerators.)
When you compare with masses and electric charges, you aren't giving a fair comparison. Some particles (like the neutron) have zero electric charge; any comparison with these (over scales large enough to ignore the other two forces, and the charged quarks within the neutrons) will say gravity is the stronger force.
You need to compare by a universal meterstick; something that is independant of which particles are being tested, and of how the test is performed. That's where the coupling constants come in. They are dimensionless, and determine the relative strengths of competing processes.
So far I've never need a decent case presented that says gravity pulls and isn't a push effect.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "push" effect. There are two possible interpretations I can think of. First (and least likely), you mean gravity can be repulsive. Repulsive gravity has never been observed. The second (and more likely) interpretation is that the interaction of gravity involves mediating particles that push instead of pull. ie. When body A is gravitationally attracted to body B, A is in between B and the mediator, rather than have the mediator in the middle.
This is a little tricky. You probably learned that energy and momentum is always conserved. Well, that's not quite true. (I don't want to get too wordy here; when I say "true", I mean "consistent with the theories currently accepted by the people doing this research.") In fact, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allows the Universe to cheat. Particles produce fields around them, full of whatever particles mediate the forces that particle can feel. These mediators are created from nothing; energy is borrowed from the Universe. They can do this, as long as they can't get caught. Heisenberg's principle gives conditions under which this energy violation can never be measured. As long as it can't get caught, it can break any rule it wants.
This lies at the heart of the current explanations of forces. Mediating particles appear and disappear, and transfer energy and momentum from one particle to another. These can act to repel or attract two objects, according to their charges. The electromagnetic force has infinite range because its mediator is a photon; light has no mass. Massless mediators can have arbitrarily low energy, and can therefore live an infinite amount of time. The weak nuclear force, on the other hand, can choose any of three mediating particles, but they all have mass. Since mass and energy are equivalent (as shown by Einstein), there is a minimum amount of energy needed to conjure up that much mass. That's why the weak force has an effective range on the order of a few Angstroms.
The current proposal for gravity involves a massless mediator that has never been observed. (The mediators for all the other forces have been produced in particle accelerators.) Having the mediators go around the object to come in from behind means it has to live longer, which reduces the amount of energy it can have. Nothing prohibits it, but the most efficient mediators will take the shortest path between bodies A and B.
We wouldn't need to wait for a particle accelerator to be built to witness such effects--those stellar furnaces known as stars should be a constant source of evidence for reactions so extreme that they violate the bounds of this 3D environment.
Except that the reactions inside stars are not that energetic on a particle-by-particle basis. To study these effects, we need huge energies in a single collision, not a bunch of (relatively) low energy collisions that happen next to each other.
As far as the accelerators go, they've already far exceeded the energy of events that happen in a star. In fact, a single collision in today's accelerators is of comparable energy to a single collision a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. That's still not quite enough energy to test this. The SSC would have been nice, with its 17TeV (I think) collision energy, but that's been mothballed. However, the 14TeV proposed collision energy for the LHC at CERN (under construction at this very moment) is going to break a lot of new ground.
Slashdot Mirror
This may or may not be normal. If the black light is a cheap one, it will produce visible light as well, which is the trivial case. It's also possible that a molecule in the page can absorb a photon of UV light, and then emit the energy as one visible photon and one infra-red (or lower energy) photon. Again, it is visible light that reaches your eye.
If the mother was a tetrachromatic, then that person would not be a mutant.
Unless the child is a pentachromat. Picture this: mother is a tetra chromat, say, with one normal X chromosome and one with genes for two slightly different red cones. If the father is colorblind with two slightly different green cones, the daughter has a 50/50 chance of being a pentachromat. Find a (rare) colour-blind mother with two slightly different red chromosomes on each X chromosome, and you can (almost) guarantee all daughters would be pentachromatic. Now, if we can mutate one blue cone, we can go for hexachromatic kids.
IMHO, I think that "Crystalis" is one of the best NES games I've ever played. Maybe it doesn't belong in the top three ever list, but I think it should be in the best Action/RPG list. I found it far more fun and original than Castlevania 2, and it actually had a decent story to go along with gameplay!
It has the ability to "save to VCR," which (by the sounds of the feature name and A/V connections described) allows you to take a show you've taped and record it on your VCR form the hard drive. Essentially, you can watch the show, and then decide if you want to add it to the permanent collection.
This unit does have a "record to VCR" option. If you like the show, you can keep it. You're stuck with VCR quality, but you can keep it without chewing up disk space. (You need the VCR, too, but most people already have one.)
Thanks for the info. All I know for sure is that it looks like Slashdot, and has Slashdot's content on the main page (and links to it for subsequent pages), but it's fast when Slashdot.org is getting bogged down.
It works now; I just checked.
The addresses to a couple were posted in the threads after the DOS attack a few months ago. I think http://slapdash.org was one...
The "specifications" link from the page lists capacity as about 1.5GB.
According to the "specifications" link at the above page, it's 150x110x161 mm. At 25.4mm/inch, that's about 6x4x6.4. The websites you've read seem to be right...
Companies don't get "attacked" for producing neat toys, they get attacked in response to their response to the way Linux people respond. Linux users made the :CueCat usable under a new operating system, and screwed up the business model (probably without realizing it right away). Digital Convergence got upset and tried to stop them, and so they will get nothing but negative responses.
On the other hand, you have devices like the TiVo. People hack it all the time, adding hard drive space, etc. The people who make TiVo took a different approach, which basically allows you to do what you want with your TiVo for use in your home, with the understanding that any warrantee is null and void. I have heard very little negative response to TiVo, because the TiVo people did not have a negative response to the hackers.
The response of Linux fans may or may not be the right one, but the response isn't just to random companies that make neat stuff.
He doesn't need to be kidding. Screenshots tell you almost nothing; they just get publicized to keep people talking about the product and anticipating its release. MS is billing Whistler primarily based on its capability, not its look.
There were three different occasions of students setting up a "home business" pirating software at the University of Alberta in the past few years (that I know of). All underwent similar procedures. These are the same sort of measures that would be undertaken if you were suspected of serving out pornography. If you're suspected of serving illegal content, then they take your machine at the time of arrest to look for said content to use as evidence. This just got media attention because the media is keeping a lookout for mp3-related news.
You are not a complete dolt. You're not even a partial dolt, as far as I can tell.
The main reason people have faith in the current theories is that they can predict experimental results that haven't been seen yet, that later pan out. That's why it's still around. There have been several dozen alternatives (at least), but they were all defeated by experiment. Well, most of them. There are extensions to the current theory, which do not contradict the Standard Model, but which can't be tested with current accelerators. (There are theories that can't be tested by accelerators that fit on earth, but most experimentalists pay little attention to those.)
With the Higgs boson, there is a chance the boson itself can be produced and directly observed. (This is not the same situation as quarks; they are identified by their decay products, ie what they make when they fall apart.) Physicists go by more than what is formed in these decays, though. Continuing the recipe analogy, it's like identifying a loaf of bread by its ingredients. If we see all the right ingredients (particles), in all the right proportions (with the right energy/momentum), we think we know which loaf that will make. If we can get the ingredients together (in an accelerator) at just the right temperature (energy), we can hope to make the loaf itself.
Unfortunately, many loaves aren't stable, and revert back to their ingredients quickly. Quarks are never seen as a loaf, but the Higgs can be. This is common with bosons. Others, like the W and Z bosons, were predicted before they were seen by the interactions of other particles. Their masses were predicted by looking at reactions which did not actually involve any Z or W bosons! Eventully, we found the right "oven temperature" to make the loaf show up, and stay around long enough to be seen as a loaf.
I can try. :)
About 30 years ago, particle physicists were trying to explain the way the world worked. Murray Gell-Mann and others developed a basic mathematical structure that could explain why people kept seeing all sorts of new particles every time they went looking. First, there was the electron and the proton. Then, Chadwick found the neutron (in 1932, I think), and the numbers kept growing. Soon, there were hundreds of so-called "elementary" particles and their antiparticles, and that was just more than anybody wanted to deal with.
Gell-Mann, Feynman, and several others soon realized that these could all be brozen down into about a dozen "elementary" particles, if you assumed that some of the ones we were seeing weren't actually elementary, but were actually composed of a small set of other particles, which Gell-Mann named quarks. They found a set of rules that could be applied to the way quarks combined (for the inclined: it's group theory, specifically the SU(3) group) that predicted which particles should exist, and which particles they could decay into.
The theory lacked one thing: an explanation for why things have mass. They could prove the theory worked in many cases, but in certain processes, the predictions for the probability of certain reactions happening were infinite. (Anything outside the range from 0 to 1 is impossible.) This made them very nervous, and was a rather large problem.
Higgs made a suggestion that worked. If there was another particle, which came to be known as the Higgs particle, then there would be other terms in the equation, which exactly matched the existing terms, apart from a negative sign. These extra terms correspond to the mass of a particle, which is why it's said that the Higgs boson is responsible for giving things mass. With this inclusion to the theory, the predictions began to match what was seen in the lab. The only thing that was missing was the Higgs Boson.
There have been various theoretical limits placed on the mass of the Higgs. It's massive enough to be hard to find, but just barely within the reach of some of the current accelerators, such as Fermilab and the LEP. The results reported at CERN may or may not be part of the random background events. Currently, the LEP is supposed ot shut down in late October/early November to make way for the LHC, the new, high-energy collider that should be able to find the Higgs boson, assuming the theories are correct. (Most of the LEP physicists have jobs on the LHC, so those of you writing this off as a reaction to unemployment just don't have all the relevant information.)
Anyway, all the experiments are saying is that the events they've seen may or may not be the evidence needed to support the only theory we have that predicts mass. They need to take another month of data to know for sure.
The LHC is a proton-proton collider. This will be acheived by having two rings that cross each other in four places. Everything else you've said is correct. (If you're interested, I'm working on my M.Sc. in Particle Physics, and I'm currently at CERN to do it. I'm working on a piece of ATLAS, which is a detector that will be used on the LHC. If anyone has further questions, feel free to use my e-mail address...
We're getting better at physics. It comes from slashing the defense budget and staying friends with our neighbors to the south. We've also got the world's largest cyclotron in B.C., called TRIUMF.
Yeah. On Monday, a colloquium speaker at CERN told us to expect the announcement on Friday. I'd have submitted an article then, but I had to URL to link to...
They don't do the calorimetry on the neutrino itself. They saw the creationg and decay of a tau lepton inside the tank. The sudden presence of a tau lepton cannot be explained by current theories without having a tau neutrino present.
That's true. I've heard of cases where test audiences in 1970's sci-fi movies thought something was wrong with the print because there was no sound in space. Hollywood chose to run with the most common misconceptions rather than correct them, and now they propogate them. "Sound in space" is the most forgivable error. Nothing like the old Star Trek "he won't remember what happened when we beam him back to the past because it wouldn't have happened yet" cop-out. The sad thing is, Lois & Clark ripped that off thirty years later, in the episode where H. G. Wells built a time machine and came to visit.
Or he uses a different definition of "science fiction" than people who label Knight Rider that way. I prefer the general term "speculative fiction" for most of what Hollywood calls sci-fi. This is any premise built on the "what if the world was just a little bit different..." idea, and includes all of science fiction, as well as fantasy, alternate history (if you consider that outside the sci-fi realm), etc. When I refer to science fiction, I usually mean to "hard science fiction," which is something that can be built upon (and does not violate) the known laws of science. That means that anything which has sound in space is immediately tossed out of sci-fi and into spec-fi, for one example.
P (power, in Watts) = IV (product of current and voltage).
P = E/t (rate energy is performed, over time)
It's not equating charge and energy. The equations tell you that it takes energy to move charges around inside a potential.
The strong nuclear force is given credit for holding the nucleus together. It doesn't affect our everyday lives because it is short range (about 10^-15m) and it doesn't effect leptons or photons. (Leptons are electrons and a few other particles like neutrinos that you won't see unless you look for them, or make them in particle accelerators.)
When you compare with masses and electric charges, you aren't giving a fair comparison. Some particles (like the neutron) have zero electric charge; any comparison with these (over scales large enough to ignore the other two forces, and the charged quarks within the neutrons) will say gravity is the stronger force.
You need to compare by a universal meterstick; something that is independant of which particles are being tested, and of how the test is performed. That's where the coupling constants come in. They are dimensionless, and determine the relative strengths of competing processes.
So far I've never need a decent case presented that says gravity pulls and isn't a push effect.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "push" effect. There are two possible interpretations I can think of. First (and least likely), you mean gravity can be repulsive. Repulsive gravity has never been observed. The second (and more likely) interpretation is that the interaction of gravity involves mediating particles that push instead of pull. ie. When body A is gravitationally attracted to body B, A is in between B and the mediator, rather than have the mediator in the middle.
This is a little tricky. You probably learned that energy and momentum is always conserved. Well, that's not quite true. (I don't want to get too wordy here; when I say "true", I mean "consistent with the theories currently accepted by the people doing this research.") In fact, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allows the Universe to cheat. Particles produce fields around them, full of whatever particles mediate the forces that particle can feel. These mediators are created from nothing; energy is borrowed from the Universe. They can do this, as long as they can't get caught. Heisenberg's principle gives conditions under which this energy violation can never be measured. As long as it can't get caught, it can break any rule it wants.
This lies at the heart of the current explanations of forces. Mediating particles appear and disappear, and transfer energy and momentum from one particle to another. These can act to repel or attract two objects, according to their charges. The electromagnetic force has infinite range because its mediator is a photon; light has no mass. Massless mediators can have arbitrarily low energy, and can therefore live an infinite amount of time. The weak nuclear force, on the other hand, can choose any of three mediating particles, but they all have mass. Since mass and energy are equivalent (as shown by Einstein), there is a minimum amount of energy needed to conjure up that much mass. That's why the weak force has an effective range on the order of a few Angstroms.
The current proposal for gravity involves a massless mediator that has never been observed. (The mediators for all the other forces have been produced in particle accelerators.) Having the mediators go around the object to come in from behind means it has to live longer, which reduces the amount of energy it can have. Nothing prohibits it, but the most efficient mediators will take the shortest path between bodies A and B.
We wouldn't need to wait for a particle accelerator to be built to witness such effects--those stellar furnaces known as stars should be a constant source of evidence for reactions so extreme that they violate the bounds of this 3D environment.
Except that the reactions inside stars are not that energetic on a particle-by-particle basis. To study these effects, we need huge energies in a single collision, not a bunch of (relatively) low energy collisions that happen next to each other.
As far as the accelerators go, they've already far exceeded the energy of events that happen in a star. In fact, a single collision in today's accelerators is of comparable energy to a single collision a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. That's still not quite enough energy to test this. The SSC would have been nice, with its 17TeV (I think) collision energy, but that's been mothballed. However, the 14TeV proposed collision energy for the LHC at CERN (under construction at this very moment) is going to break a lot of new ground.