I have often wondered if the Universe might be the single particle at the center of a black hole, which are always created with a high spin. I understand that this particle takes the shape of a disk due to its rotation, rather than collapsing to a single point. It would explain why galaxies are spreading apart rather than joining together - somehow the stretching of the black hole translates into a 3D effect on the 'inside'. If the black hole were not spinning, I would expect matter in the universe to condense to a black hole, and there would be no 'inside' or 'outside', only a black hole regardless of how you look at it.
To me, this makes sense as energy seems to flow into the patterns of matter - subatomic particles and atoms - like jelly into a mold. There are some hidden rules at play that make matter the way it is, and not some other way. No matter how you convert energy to matter, you end up with it forming these elementary particles. I would expect that to be true for the mass inside of a black hole, in the same way it's true for matter on the outside. The black hole, viewed from the outside, would have the same mass as our Universe.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to test this hypothesis, though it might be interesting to the compute the spin of such a black hole, and see if we can correlate it to any phenomenon we can observe.
And yet, the CIA world factbook lists US military expenditures at 4% of the GDP. As they list the GDP as 14.66 trillion, that's 595 billion dollars annually. That matches what the wikipedia says, that the US spent over 600 billion on the military in 2008.
An SMS message has a maximum of 120 characters, which is packed into 140 bytes. $10 per 1000 messages works out to 1 cent per message, or 1 cent per 140 bytes. That gives us 7.31 cents per kilobyte, or 73.1 dollars per megabyte. Of course it's actually a lot higher, since you don't always send exactly 160 characters per message. If the average message is only half the maximum length, we get a whopping 146.2 dollars per meg. I don't know how many texts people send a month on average, but if it's less than 2000 the new plan is no better.
I subscribe to the theory that the price of oil is about to skyrocket as demand gradually outstrips supply. If I'm right, wouldn't it be better to have Americans driving fuel-efficient cars before this happens, rather than 5-10 years later? I mean, not everyone's able to immediately buy a new, fuel-efficient car when gas prices rise.
I know this is probably going to go down in flames, but exactly how do creationists deal with this sort of finding? Answers from actual creationists preferred...
I notice you still can't control where your character moves in Star Wars. He follows a pre-defined path, and you just swipe at enemies as you approach them. What I'd really like to see is Kinect + some sort of hand-held controller for moving around. Then you'd have a truly immersive experience; ducking to avoid fire, using your body for emotes, crouching with a sniper rifle, throwing a grenade...
I strongly suspect that projects like interstellar colonization and Dyson spheres are theoretically possible, but that so far no intelligent species has ever managed it. It seems the simplest explanation by far. My theory is that advanced civilizations only last for a few centuries before they run out of metals. Or at least, that this is what will happen here on earth. See what you think: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451
It's possible that the answer to Fermi's Paradox is a depressing one...
For me it's never been about pushing graphics to the limit, it's about the input. Playing an FPS with a mouse and keyboard is just vastly superior to doing the same with thumb-controlled joysticks.
On the other hand, if you put a mouse and keyboard on a console, you have something that looks an awful lot like a PC with limited software compatibility.
That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day
Here's what the United States Department of Energy has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png It shows US production at 5 million barrels/day in 2005, down from 9.5 million in 1970. The CIA world fact book shows current US production at 9 million barrels/day - a pretty large discrepancy. I wonder if they're using some kind of different barrel size.
Power analysis can be used to calculate the minimum sample size required to accept the outcome of a statistical test with a particular level of confidence. It can also be used to calculate the minimum effect size that is likely to be detected in a study using a given sample size.
For example, if we were expecting a population correlation between intelligence and job performance of around.50, a sample size of 20 will give us approximately 80% power (alpha =.05, two-tail) to reject the null hypothesis of zero correlation. However, in doing this study we are probably more interested in knowing whether the correlation is.30 or.60 or.50. In this context we would need a much larger sample size in order to reduce the confidence interval of our estimate to a range that is acceptable for our purposes.
I normally don't respond to trolls, but I'm tired of seeing this particular complaint on slashdot. We CAN tell when we have enough participants, without having to test more than a tiny fraction of the population.
"It does appear that the buildings in New York collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition, which employed explosives as well as certain incendiary substances found in the rubble."
If the test showed statistical significance, it won't matter if they increase the sample size, the results will be the same.That's what statistical significance is FOR. Besides, this effect is well known in the field of human memory. The longer your brain focuses on something, the better you'll remember it.
In a video game, packets are usually only dropped due to interference on the line - the game itself sends at a fixed rate, which is normally well below what a broadband connection provides. The congestion control never kicks in.
Solutions which require the internet's infrastructure to be replaced (all the routers and switches and so forth) have been proposed for many years, and never go anywhere. The only one I'm aware of is IPv6, and look how slowly that beast has taken off. That said, TCP sawtooth isn't as bad as you make it out to be - in most cases. Whenever a packet is dropped, the TCP connection drops its speed to around half, then gradually ramps up to where it was previously. You don't get 100% of your bandwidth utilization, but you do get to automatically adjust to changing network conditions. And as the number of TCP connections over one pipe increases, you get closer and closer to max utilization rates.
TCP fails when:
-competing against UDP, which has no congestion control and will clog a line even if every UDP packet is dropped
-there is interference in the line causing packet corruption, which TCP interprets as congestion
-competing against Microsoft products, which have TCP stacks that are tweaked to grab more than their fair share of the bandwidth
My understanding is that TCP congestion control generally isn't applied to backbones - I believe that ISPs throttle your traffic before sending it over an optic link so as not to overbook its capacity. You're probably just competing with your household, and possibly people on your block - can someone verify this?
"any notion of sending these 20-generation, half-the-speed-of-light fanciful starships to other stars is a waste - unless you WANT your great-grandaughter to watch someone overtake them, waving as they go"
You're assuming that propulsion technology will continue to improve over the course of a century, and that FTL travel is possible. However, there's a big possibility that neither of these is true.
Slashdot Mirror
I have often wondered if the Universe might be the single particle at the center of a black hole, which are always created with a high spin. I understand that this particle takes the shape of a disk due to its rotation, rather than collapsing to a single point. It would explain why galaxies are spreading apart rather than joining together - somehow the stretching of the black hole translates into a 3D effect on the 'inside'. If the black hole were not spinning, I would expect matter in the universe to condense to a black hole, and there would be no 'inside' or 'outside', only a black hole regardless of how you look at it.
To me, this makes sense as energy seems to flow into the patterns of matter - subatomic particles and atoms - like jelly into a mold. There are some hidden rules at play that make matter the way it is, and not some other way. No matter how you convert energy to matter, you end up with it forming these elementary particles. I would expect that to be true for the mass inside of a black hole, in the same way it's true for matter on the outside. The black hole, viewed from the outside, would have the same mass as our Universe.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to test this hypothesis, though it might be interesting to the compute the spin of such a black hole, and see if we can correlate it to any phenomenon we can observe.
And yet, the CIA world factbook lists US military expenditures at 4% of the GDP. As they list the GDP as 14.66 trillion, that's 595 billion dollars annually. That matches what the wikipedia says, that the US spent over 600 billion on the military in 2008.
Oops, should have been 160 characters.
An SMS message has a maximum of 120 characters, which is packed into 140 bytes. $10 per 1000 messages works out to 1 cent per message, or 1 cent per 140 bytes. That gives us 7.31 cents per kilobyte, or 73.1 dollars per megabyte. Of course it's actually a lot higher, since you don't always send exactly 160 characters per message. If the average message is only half the maximum length, we get a whopping 146.2 dollars per meg. I don't know how many texts people send a month on average, but if it's less than 2000 the new plan is no better.
So I guess SMS is still on par with the cost of communicating with the Hubble space telescope: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/14/txts_r_v_pricey/
I subscribe to the theory that the price of oil is about to skyrocket as demand gradually outstrips supply. If I'm right, wouldn't it be better to have Americans driving fuel-efficient cars before this happens, rather than 5-10 years later? I mean, not everyone's able to immediately buy a new, fuel-efficient car when gas prices rise.
What about a vent?
But... how can mutations occur but not evolution? Do they believe that it's impossible for mutations to be passed down to your offspring?
I know this is probably going to go down in flames, but exactly how do creationists deal with this sort of finding? Answers from actual creationists preferred...
I notice you still can't control where your character moves in Star Wars. He follows a pre-defined path, and you just swipe at enemies as you approach them. What I'd really like to see is Kinect + some sort of hand-held controller for moving around. Then you'd have a truly immersive experience; ducking to avoid fire, using your body for emotes, crouching with a sniper rifle, throwing a grenade...
I can't believe no-one's done it yet.
I strongly suspect that projects like interstellar colonization and Dyson spheres are theoretically possible, but that so far no intelligent species has ever managed it. It seems the simplest explanation by far. My theory is that advanced civilizations only last for a few centuries before they run out of metals. Or at least, that this is what will happen here on earth. See what you think: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451
It's possible that the answer to Fermi's Paradox is a depressing one...
What if FTL communication doesn't exist?
For me it's never been about pushing graphics to the limit, it's about the input. Playing an FPS with a mouse and keyboard is just vastly superior to doing the same with thumb-controlled joysticks.
On the other hand, if you put a mouse and keyboard on a console, you have something that looks an awful lot like a PC with limited software compatibility.
Heh, they fell right into your little trap. If they reply to you, they can't mod you anymore.
That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day
Here's what the United States Department of Energy has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png It shows US production at 5 million barrels/day in 2005, down from 9.5 million in 1970. The CIA world fact book shows current US production at 9 million barrels/day - a pretty large discrepancy. I wonder if they're using some kind of different barrel size.
The start menu had horizontal scrolling. Is that still the case?
If your results are different because you had a small sample size, then they DID come about by chance. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power Some excerpts:
Power analysis can be used to calculate the minimum sample size required to accept the outcome of a statistical test with a particular level of confidence. It can also be used to calculate the minimum effect size that is likely to be detected in a study using a given sample size.
For example, if we were expecting a population correlation between intelligence and job performance of around .50, a sample size of 20 will give us approximately 80% power (alpha = .05, two-tail) to reject the null hypothesis of zero correlation. However, in doing this study we are probably more interested in knowing whether the correlation is .30 or .60 or .50. In this context we would need a much larger sample size in order to reduce the confidence interval of our estimate to a range that is acceptable for our purposes.
I normally don't respond to trolls, but I'm tired of seeing this particular complaint on slashdot. We CAN tell when we have enough participants, without having to test more than a tiny fraction of the population.
"It does appear that the buildings in New York collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition, which employed explosives as well as certain incendiary substances found in the rubble."
-William Blum
If the test showed statistical significance, it won't matter if they increase the sample size, the results will be the same.That's what statistical significance is FOR. Besides, this effect is well known in the field of human memory. The longer your brain focuses on something, the better you'll remember it.
In a video game, packets are usually only dropped due to interference on the line - the game itself sends at a fixed rate, which is normally well below what a broadband connection provides. The congestion control never kicks in.
Solutions which require the internet's infrastructure to be replaced (all the routers and switches and so forth) have been proposed for many years, and never go anywhere. The only one I'm aware of is IPv6, and look how slowly that beast has taken off. That said, TCP sawtooth isn't as bad as you make it out to be - in most cases. Whenever a packet is dropped, the TCP connection drops its speed to around half, then gradually ramps up to where it was previously. You don't get 100% of your bandwidth utilization, but you do get to automatically adjust to changing network conditions. And as the number of TCP connections over one pipe increases, you get closer and closer to max utilization rates.
TCP fails when:
-competing against UDP, which has no congestion control and will clog a line even if every UDP packet is dropped
-there is interference in the line causing packet corruption, which TCP interprets as congestion
-competing against Microsoft products, which have TCP stacks that are tweaked to grab more than their fair share of the bandwidth
My understanding is that TCP congestion control generally isn't applied to backbones - I believe that ISPs throttle your traffic before sending it over an optic link so as not to overbook its capacity. You're probably just competing with your household, and possibly people on your block - can someone verify this?
The books are in an open format that can be read by multiple devices. (Not the Kindle though!)
Or that interstellar travel is so difficult that it's been infeasible for every intelligent species that has ever evolved.
ET Phone Home
"any notion of sending these 20-generation, half-the-speed-of-light fanciful starships to other stars is a waste - unless you WANT your great-grandaughter to watch someone overtake them, waving as they go"
You're assuming that propulsion technology will continue to improve over the course of a century, and that FTL travel is possible. However, there's a big possibility that neither of these is true.
Or you could, I dunno, NOT maximize your application. You might even find that there's room for more than one on there.