Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1891 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
In the words of Deep Thought
"The Milliard Gargantubrain, A mere abacus"
(RIP Douglas Adams)
Or just use Parson's steam turbine
The Babbage engine in turbo mode
The difference in hours is explainable in core-collapse supernovae, because light gets absorbed and re-emitted many times before reaching the surface, whereas neutrino zip through the dense core matter. The currently observed effect would result in 4 years difference even in a nearby SN in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
"Someone actually gave you a thumbs up for that?"
May have hit the wrong button ;-)
One problem is the 1987 supernova
The neutrino burst from this was detected 3 hours before the first light, which was expected because the neutrinos travel from the collapsing core to the outside much faster IN THAT MEDIUM than the light. This is because the photons are constantly absorbed and re-emitted by all the nuclei and electrons in the dense stellar matter, whereas the neutrinos move like ghosts through everything. If the current difference is correct, the neutrinos should have arrived 4 years before.
Now these neutrinos may behave differently than the ones observed in OPERA, but it shows not all neutrinos move faster than light.
Re:Dude
The Dirac equation is a Taylor approximation of a relativistic Schrödinger equation. The latter is a non-relativistic equation. QM arose independent of Relativity (see Planck), and it is still not possible to combine general relativity with QM.
I gather the result was six sigma
60ns measured, vs 10ns error. They also repeated the measurement 15,000 times. I agree there is room for systematic errors in the OPERA experiment, and we should simply wait for confirmation (or the reverse) from independent experiments.
It ain't over till the fat lady signs
Nice boffinry
It would seem fitting that a game of ping-pong heralds a new type of computer.
Posted in Acer Iconia A100 7in Android tablet
Sounds interesting. I might give this one a more detailed look.
Posted in Mars trips could blind astronauts
My thoughts exactly
Does require an even bigger craft and thus even bigger rocket. It does seem to be a simple problem compared to shielding against cosmic rays and the like.
I always expect the world to be abnormal
mine is the one with the nonparametric statistics book in the pocket
There is tangible proof of a massive impact
exactly on the K-T boundary. Paleontology that, not climate science. You are right in saying that the exact mechanisms of the extinction and the climate change as a result of the asteroid impact are speculative, but there is proof of massive forest fires in the fossil record. The estimate of the asteroid size (approx 5-10km, estimated from the impact crater remains) combined with the fact that the iridium-rich layer at the K-T boundary is found all over the world is powerful evidence that something affected the whole world just at the point dinosaurs went extinct. Bit of a coincidence that.
So the result from the break up could still be out there.....
RUN FOR THE HILLS!!
Oh, wait.
GET BRUCE WILLIS INTO A SHUTTLE,
Darn, that wont work
WE'RE DOOMED, DOOMED
always a trusty fall-back
Explosion, because well ....
That is fairly automatic these days
The Earth's rotation is the big one, but even my little equatorial mount can correct quite nicely for that. I think the 2.2 m is also on an equatorial mount. Nowadays, autotrackers are available for amateur scopes, so this big kind of scope should be fine. The Earth's movement around the sun has very little effect, the parallax created in one night or a few days is smaller than the point spread function of the optics.
Actually, the hard thing is to get a wide field
No zooming required with a telescope, but a big (268 megapixel or so) camera to get this wide (OK maybe it was not the 268 megapixel OmegaCAM, but still a biggie). The other hard part is collecting enough data, as these objects are faint. Hours of exposure are needed, and postprocessing to remove artifacts introduced imperfections in the camera (dark-current, hot pixels, slight differences in pixel sensitivity, and shading by the optics), and finally dynamic-range compression to show both he brighter and fainter parts in one shot.
What are the odds of politicians making sense of pure maths?
Apparently vanishingly small. If you look at many of the current innovative technologies, so many derive from other fields of mathematics than statistics and applied probability the mind boggles at the sheer stupidity of this policy. We are currently working (amongst other things) on diffusion tensor imaging. Tensor maths are quite hard to get your mind around, but of outstanding use in e.g. finding out how the brain is wired (cheap shot: politician's brains contain serious wiring defects), apart from being of use in general relativity (hands up who does not use GPS).
Shortsighted policy? Willfully blind more likely.
yes?
unless you had fun smoking whatever it was.
Ye cannae change the laws of physics capt'n!
The smaller the camera, the smaller its aperture, the smaller the number of photons reaching the sensor. This causes an increase in photon noise. Though of course noise reduction techniques have improved, there is no substitute for more photons, and therefore a cleaner input image.
Still a cool looking little device. Could even be used by a playmobil puppet. Could this be useful for LOHAN? ;)
Comparatively measured statement
by Stallman's standards
Unless like me
you have put in a bios password, and set the boot sequence to HDD only. It will then not boot from CD USB or (heavens forbid) floppy (remember them). You can still open up the PC, zero the CMOS RAM by shorting it and try again, but that is not trivial to do without drawing some attention.
I still prefer my Linux, but the missus and the kids want their windows.
Or
just drop a book on the keyboard. new password owrfqjerlkcsm, which will be displayed as *************
:D
Maybe the BOFH will now allow shiny NEW macbooks in the workplace. The possibilities, the possibilities
Neat article
Maybe I should make this mandatory reading for the new business computing track in our curriculum
Don't bother
the hills will be vapourized as well
Imagine if they had landed
"Hello Houston, this is Tranquility Base. Snoopy has landed"
Doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
that is just excellent
and not only just
Latency?
I tried running a nicely parallel shared memory workload (75% efficiency on 24 cores in a 4 socket opteron box) on a 64 core ScaleMP box with 8 2-socket boards linked by infiniband. Result: horrible. It might look like a shared memory, but access to off-board bits has huge latency.
BTW, I once got 110% efficiency on two cores, because the problem did not fit into the memory band of one socket, so spreading the workload over 2 cores or more reduced the latency nicely. Weird but true.
Cheers to them
Now there is a game worth playing! Excellent manners to give the gamers full credit.
We used a metal thermos-flask from a department store to transport liquid nitrogen quite safely (when we were running a test for an infrared spectrograph. Never encountered any problems
My Windows 7 install has not shown BSODs yet, neither has my XP install on my decidedly aged laptop done so for years. Having said that, a smiley like that would not go far to improve my temper once it did happen. Seeing one in a demo of a product is perhaps not too odd, as it is probably still in beta. I will give MS the benefit of the doubt here. If the BSOD is not likely to pop up at all in the final product, I don't much care what it looks like.
Absolutely!
Reports like that are a clear case of write only memory
Fair enough
Several researchers have been looking to change our theory of gravity, and many more sense there is a paradigms shift coming up, given mismatches between theories and observation. Whether M-theory is the answer is another matter. However, if someone actually finds dark matter (or dark energy for that matter) it would be of great interest. Looking for something predicted by a theory sounds good science, provided you are open to an outcome which rejects your own most cherished theory.
An ex PhD student of mine
and a very talented one at that, avoided applying for a job in the UK because the salary is a pittance compared to similar posts in many places in Europe. He is not in science for the money, but He does expect to make a decent living.
When you apply for PhD project funding
as I have done several times, you have to show what the impact will be in your own branch of science, in other fields of science, and preferably also in society (even in the distant future). If you cannot make a case for at least one of the latter two, it is much harder to get a grant. So instead of letting politicians decide which fields are deserving, why not let anyone apply who can make a good case for the usefulness of their research, whatever the field.
And please note that usefulness can include giving people better insight into sociology, history, art and literature as well. Not all "use" can be expressed in a currency which has an exchange rate with the euro/pound/US dollar you can look up on the net.
BTW, if anyone knows someone with a recent MSc in Computer Science, and is looking for a PhD position in Computer Vision, please direct them to
http://www.cs.rug.nl/~michael/HyperGAMMA
The position is still open.
It's because we play cricket
Just that
So WIMPs may beat MACHOs yet?
MACHO = MAssive Cold Halo Object, an alternative source of dark matter
Posted in Galaxy Tab remains illegal in Germany
I forget who said it, but it is true
"If judges and professors were really that wise, they would need no gowns to prove it"
I remember doing a project at school
about fusion. The said it was just a decade or two (three on the outside) away. That was 1978. Still, lets hope someone get fusion going (and not in an H-bomb, please).
Posted in Early Earth’s ‘golden shower’
That was one from Magrathea too
mine is the one with a trilogy in 5 parts in the pocket
but we need bodies, preferably heavenly ones
May do the kicking?
May I? May I? May I?
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE PLEASE?
Icon, because, well, obvious, innit?
Posted in Early Earth’s ‘golden shower’
If you want a planet made of gold
just order one from Magrathea
I do not think WebOS is a pile of junk
Maybe you are right that good people will leave, but WebOS is interesting. The big question is what to put it on. If HP can license it to hardware makers they could be on to something. Do not forget that there is a far bigger profit (margin) to be made on software than on hardware.
You mean
Playmobil, or it didn't happen
don't you?
Posted in Teen tags disintegrating comet
Scientists are usually enthusiasts as well
Rigour need not be questioned. And anyway, Twitter is not meant to be used exclusively for meaningless chatter, as far as I know.
Oh Please!!!!
Now I have this image of Steve Balmer in turtle neck sweater (and BOY will it be sweaty) bouncing around yelling "Developer, developers, developers,......."
That is not a moon!!
Having said that, why does the styling remind me of the cylons in the early Battlestar Galactica series?
Cool specs, but what a monster. Must start weightlifting to handle that beast
Alien, because well,....
Posted in Acer claims first Core-i7 Ultrabook
Acer running Windows?
Not when I have finished installing Linux.
Only I wouldn't because it seems to lack a good enough video board for my kind of OpenCL and CUDA code. Shame that.
Mine is the one with the OpenCL reference card in the pocket
