jackdawjack

I was rather hoping this would be a hawking radiation method, i.e. actually generating light using gravity

This is more of a sales pitching device (and it's a nice one) than a useful tool

Looks really good, can't quite tell if it can interleave lines from several sources if not this would be an excellent feature.

I think this might be a daft question, but why can't they inject packets with a (roughly) appropriate TTL for the current sequence that they're hijacking? From the two examples shown one might think they're picking ttl's more randomly

in figure 7, Faradays Law: changing magnetic field in the left torus induces a variable current in the wire, then via ampere's law the changing current in the wire induces a magnetic field in the second torus.

However in figure 8 while there is an A field which extends to infinity, don't forget that B = curl(A) and so the magnetic field of the torus is going to be confined within it. As such there's no way to induce a new field in the additional torus. A is a potential, it's not a "real" field in as much as you can only measure things like |B| and |E| (or quantum phases induced by A in the Ahranovov-Bohm experiment)

In which area of interest? As for journal access, i suggest using public computers in a university library. Not tremendously practical but they're always subscribed.

The desk of a physics grad student... (coffee induced blurrycam)

http://phy.duke.edu/~cec24/CIMG0120.jpg

Yet another article about the parity breaking at rhic, i work in this field and while this would be very exciting it's not a cut and dry result. Running the numbers for the proposed theoretical cause of the parity violation leads to something a lot smaller than what is observed. While making simpler, non parity violating, arguments based on geometry and the elliptic flow in the fireball can get you near the right numbers.

See this paper for another explanation of the observed charge correlations http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1758

edit clarification

downloaded the linux version, nice music and it seems like it mostly takes place through bbs conversations which is great but its a shame you cant type the messages, just click.

Fantastic music

don't forget the yang-mills mass gap and the navier-stokes initial value problem, both clay millennium problems and both rather important. Well the yang-mills one is probably more important, this list is a bit m-theory biased.

I think the m is originally for membrane, not "magic" but apparently its open to interpretation.

title is misleading, the gold nucleii collide to create the a quark-gluon-plasma (probably) which eventually cools and condenses to create these new particles which are made from regular old quarks and gluons like every other baryonic particle.

Rather than somehow magically creating a new form of matter from gold.

I guess the exciting part is that they contain a hyperon which is a baryon with one strange quark in it, in this case it looks like a lambda-bar which is gonna be made from anti up, down and strange quarks. Well that and you've managed to bind three of these anti-particles into an anti-Helium or anti-Hydrogen isotope

I think the imaginary time should be taken as an indication that it doesn't make sense to talk about travelling at v > c, in terms of a Special Relativistic framework at least :)

The usual energy loss mechanism for cosmic-rays (fast protons) is reverse-compton scattering off the cosmic-microwave background photons, which is quite amazing really. Some of the most energetic particles scattering off the ubiquitous but very low energy background.

Anyway, if you propose that this is the mechanism for energy loss and you know how dense the CMB photons are (which we do very well) then you can predict interesting things like the maximum distance a cosmic ray can travel before it runs out of steam entirely, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin_limit

Although i'm not sure how the OMG particle fits in with this scheme yet

Sirens of titan! :)

inspiration and life path seeking? a little too rich a dish for my liking

One of the authors, Baez, wrote "Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity" a lovely, cheap, and fairly accessible intro to applications of topology in mathematical physics. Worth a glance if you find yourself wondering about all this

The Brothers Karamazov

Gravity's Rainbow

check out "the structure and interpretation of classical mechanics" by sussmann et al for a whole raft of things like this done in scheme.

I don't see why would you want to stay away from floats, using rationals isn't going to magically fix the numerical errors from approximating derivatives and such.

I believe they develop an automatic differentiation routine in SICM that will actually allow you to make a pretty good planetary motion simulator, i.e one that won't just go horribly wrong if you run it for a few thousand years.

Of course if you're really interested/mathematically inclined one of the best ways to simulate Hamiltonian systems is via iterated maps, not unlike what was in the article. A good (but quite hard) ref to this is "simulating hamiltonian dynamics" by Leimkuhler and Reich.

Seems pretty clear to me, it doesn't claim to be an article for the non mathematically inclined. Not that "pop" articles on this subject wouldn't be pretty cool too.

a one page comparison of NYC vs SF, blurgh...

I liked this but it really slowed things down. Perhaps because my home folder etc are all on nfs shares?

I've a print copy of this, the content is quite good but rather marred by the annoying typsetting everything is all jammed in right up to the marigns (something which is sadly true across this whole series of great books).

The problems however are absolutely fantastic, a great mix of computational and theoretical which go from half an hours fun to really unanswered problems. Fun fun fun! I highly recommend trying them and referring to the text as needed.

Really? I'd have thought jerusalem would have been a more likely target

Nice. This helped straighten up my idea that svd is just eigenvalues for nonsquare matricies.

I'm all for the good things in modern life, dentists, technology &c &c and I don't believe that the author is explicitly against this either.

Rather his main point was that we-the-people have been manipulated into thinking that the onus of environmental destruction is squarely upon our shoulders, as opposed to the meta-shoulders of "industry".

The whole back-to-the-land ideal is flawed and short-sighted, as he suggests making changes at the personal level is pointless if mandates at the government/global level end up being the cause of all the damage. Sweeping change is needed but of course this doens't mean stand at the barricades waving gaia flags revolution. It's just that revolution in a che-guavera/1917 fashion is far more romantic than revolution in the form of sensible change brought about by public opinion & lobbying and all that.

"the nervous system is essentially an electrical aparatus using very low powerlevels"

Signal propagation in neurons is not by electrical conduction, in the wire sense, i believe that this would actually be incredibly slow for the conductivities / currents involved. Rather signals are transmitted by an active chemical process where potassium ions are pulled into and out of the axon in serquence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential.

I'm not sure that this has a direct implication for any kind of interference effect, but just wanted to point out that nerves don't really work like metal wires so how external fields effect the internal currents is not trivial. Also skin-depth/screening is going to play a big role in stopping most of the external radiation.

Good resource, i had to start using R recently and most of the examples and books i found were of the "stats with R" variety which all emphasise how to just roll along with the library functions. The general advice i got from some statisticians was to find someone else's code that kind of works and copy|paste. Blurg

The official help docs are very good, also the extensions guide is pretty vital if you're linking to c etc. http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html

Also the ESS(emacs speaks statistics) extension is really really good, well certainly if you're doing something statisticy with R.

string theory, if you look at it too cynically it's a high dimension optimisation process.

edit: also the headline seems a bit over-dramatic it's not running out it's slowing down.

strange article, they seem to cite one example of the scary feds huting one guy down without really going into any of the details at all.

Does fox have some kind of devolution agenda?

A little off topic but i can't get over that damn name, i read it as "cul" which is, by my shoddy translation, french for ass-hole. "Va mis en cul!" And from its performance that's actually pretty sound advice.