imatfaal

...

 

The same problem bedevils another field entirely - that of Thermodynamics.

 

So many would be engineers fail simply because they do not properly identify the system.

This. The first parts of the MIT advanced mechanics course were

1. Identify the System

2. Ensure you have identified the system correctly

It is another attack in an area I know well and frequent - just makes me more determined not to give into to fear

I am afraid that Sensei is correct - but I think that it will have the opposite effect to that which the scumbag terrorists hope for. We will not allow this to breed extremism - not of the islamic sort, nor of the anti-islamic sort.

I'm tired of us holding comedians and actors to higher standards than presidents. I'm tired of manufactured rage storms and overblown hysteria fests distracting us all from the issues that are truly important like our response to climate change, collusion with foreign states, desire to delegitimize the press, take healthcare away from tens of millions of people, give more ethics waivers and lobbying exemptions in 100 days than past presidents did in 8 years, and ad infinitum... Stop chasing the laser pointer, people. We're not cats FFS.

Not holding them to higher standards than the president - but claiming that only by distinguishing ourselves by word and deed in both style and content from Breitbart and its hoards are we different from those deplorables.

It is noble and perhaps doomed to failure but we look to win by soaring above the moral depravity of trump and his new swamp-minions and not by compromising ourselves by stooping to brawl in their mire-filled gutter

Completely agree however that the furore over this has been ridiculous and a deliberate attempt to move the eye of the public and the press away from the trumpster. If the right-wing pseudo-press and president can make the argument about trivialities then they will win or at least not be able to be held to account.

That does not detract from a judgment by those here and in other places that the sketch was ill-considered - but you are correct that this inconsequential sketch will be used to distract from massively important flaws at the heart of government à la mode de "...but the emails!"

There is a tutorial

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/73369-uploading-images/#entry732878

I think this is an ethical question as much as a political one; I like to think that I (and the sort of people I am friends with and politically aligned with) would eschew making jokes which rely on recycling images of brutal beheadings. Those that do allude to violence in a "humorous manner" or as part of an "entertainment" tend to be on the other side of the political divide; I would like to keep it that way.

I will let UKIP/Tea Party right-winger engage in personality politics, character assassination (see how hard it is to avoid), and attack ads; I would like the liberal left to counter with evidence based politics, honest debate, and face-to-face engagement with the electorate. Of course this it is not as clear cut as I have painted - but in the UK without doubt and I believe in the USA there is a clear difference. When someone from the left uses the inflammatory and brutal language of the right-wing gutter press I am personally a little bit ashamed - one of ours has stooped to their level.

Btw 1e = première= 1st , 2e = deuxième= 2nd French ordinals are (can be) formed in shortened form by the digit and the letter e

Wow...I've had diarrheas better formed than that idea/argument.

 

I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.

 

If you spoke your mind, you'd be speechless.

 

I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you.

 

I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and shit out a better argument than that.

 

You're as useless as a knitted condom.

I've missed the old barbed iNow

Fox1981 has been placed in the mod queue

Sensei - the difference in our approaches is that I am looking at this from a theoretical calculational complexity / Big O viewpoint whereas you are looking at it as a practical computational complexity / C++ perspective; both are, of course, equally valid. At very large numbers and serious computing power the two concepts will converge - but it is very difficult to compare one to the other without two sets of code or two sets of complexity calculations; and I just do not have the knowledge for that.

 

Multiplication can be implemented as series of left-bit shift operations.

...

Not sure I could make it through the pseudocode if I tried. The crux of the matter is that the calculational complexity of multiplication is similar to that of division in that the fastest growing term in the complexity of division is a multiplication operation. However, for any calculation of actual time used the division will take about Log(n) times longer - this is because the calculationally fastest method of division for large numbers is to take the reciprocal of one and then multiply by the other; so how ever quick you make the multiplication the division is always longer because you have to take the reciprocal as well as doing the multiplication.

I did see some art installations in a gallery where there were tiny foil spinners totally sealed into light bulb shaped glasses... These little foil spinners were spinning due to their own accord. I guess it was either internal currents in the bulb caused by warming of the glass in the shop window; a draft let in through a very small hidden hole; or the artist sitting in the corner using his mind power to keep his artwork turning.

Crookes radiometer [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], by The original uploader was Timeline at English Wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer They are fascinating, beautiful, and scientifically interesting

It looks like a variant of the overall heat transfer coefficient

U is the Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (Watts per metre^2 per Kelvin)

Q is the Energy transferred in time t ( Joules per second ie Watts)

Delta T is the difference in temperature between two surfaces (Kelvin)

A is surface Area (metres^2)

"Vibration" is a classical notion that you pretty much have to discard at this level of analysis.

I was hoping you would weigh in - I understand on the vibration; the expected velocity value is not something I have imagined is it?

Protons don't vibrate. Are you thinking about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

I think they might. Whilst they are not little balls huddled together with electrons whizzing around them in beautiful elliptical orbits there are quantum mechanical treatments which place protons within orbitals (weird shaped things) with expected velocities which are not zero - this is a long way from saying that proton_1 moved from point A to point B however. And protons are indistinguishable from each other so in a nucleus you cannot really even think of them as proton_1 and proton_2 - so much so that you can never tag an individual proton. But I think the wave-equations still have room for expected values of velocity, vibration, and shape of orbital

AFAICT, the answer is none.

There's a table here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_of_mathematical_operations

If I understand it correctly then the time taken to do division is of the same order as the time for multiplication (if you use this to do the division with)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_algorithm#Newton.E2.80.93Raphson_division

I think the complexity is of the same order - but that does not mean the time taken for a real world example will be so. I think big O notation works in the limiting case as the numbers tend to infinity; thus the two complexities will be the asymptotically similar but in practice different. In this case, the multiplication is of polynomial complexity and the division is logarithmic * polynomial complexity; when the numbers get very large the polynomial swamps the logarithmic and big O only notes the important fastest growing term.

But for any actual calculation, there will always be a greater load for the division than for the multiplication; ie a pair of 20 digit numbers will take very roughly 20 times longer to divide than to multiply

http://www.sysifos.cz/index.php?id=vypis&sec=1344094631〈=en

I would draw a little diagram of a simplified spinner if I were you and consider the forces required to keep it together; think of the accelerations / forces involved.

Remember:

1. Things will travel in a straight line in the absence of anything else

2. The outside bearings (*) are travelling in a circle - thus they are being accelerated inwards all the time (otherwise the straight line thingie above)

3. The acceleration inwards requires a force directed inwards - the centripetal force

4. The force means that the arms are under tension - work out roughly how much.

5. If one of the arms fails under the load - there is no longer any inward acceleration; so what happens?

* Why do these things have bearings on the outside arms?

Some people get really intense about MWI, though - I've been reading over on another website where a guy offers up what seems like a fairly good presentation of quantum theory, from the ground up. In the beginning there's no controversy - he just starts out with configurations and amplitudes and it all holds together pretty well. But it's a long series of posts, and by the end of it he's taking the position that MWI is the only rational way to look at it all. I've never gotten comfortable with that interpretation so I didn't enjoy that part as much. But he's very... "zealous" about it.

You picked up on exactly the point I was thinking of - people are zealous, and over-defensive about their interpretations; that was what made me use the god/religion analogy.

it is amazing how people can be far more extreme in both their defence of and loyalty towards that which can have no proof than they are for things with empirical validity. I suppose it is part of the equation of investing time, effort, and love (?) into something so abstract which cannot yield specific reward that one must never allow complacency to merge into equivocation to become doubt; it is a spiritual/mental sunk costs fallacy.

Further to Geordief and Dimreeper's comments - the Many-world's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is the most regularly seen version of this concept of multiple independent universes. By its very nature as one of many interpretations there can be no evidence for it at present - as soon as there is evidence or even the possibility of evidence then it stops being a member of the group of interpretations and stands out as a part of testable empirical quantum theory. At present none of the interpretations have characteristics which are testable by currently envisaged means - some have tests that might become possible in the future. This does not stop it being a great thing to think about - especially as it has jaw-dropping notions which even the layman can repeat and seem to understand

My view is that maths is not science - it relies on axioms and proof rather than observation and evidence.

None whatsoever. Presuming you are talking about multiverse ideas rather than Sci-Fi parallel universes; it is a very good and useful interpretation of some aspects of science. But the very nature of our definitions means that there can be no evidence of something outside our universe; there are some anomalies (eg the cold spot on WMAP ) that some wishful thinking claims to be the influence of other universes upon our own - but most of them rely on the multiverse being the default explanation in absence of any other proven idea. This smacks of religion to me - if you cannot explain it then it might be God (or in this case the Multiverse) which is failing to acknowledge that pink unicorns have the same explanatory value.

Is that a revolution of science or technology?

Both? Neither? Paraphrasing -- Any sufficiently profound advance in technology is indistinguishable from an advance in science.

I think it will be a scientific breakthrough in that it is seeking to do something which is theoretically novel within the current practical constraints; whereas technological progress is the overcoming of practical barriers within the current theoretical environment.

 

Yes, that really would feel like a revolution to me. Good one. Transistor electronics and digital architectures are my profession, and I know quite a bit about software (though I don't have formal training in computer science), and I have no idea how we get from here to there.

I have listened to an hours debate between world experts and they didn't get beyond whether the term artificial intelligence was an oxymoron or a valid expression. It is a fascinating topic - but to an extent it is like trying to observe oneself falling asleep; very difficult, totally subjective / impossibly introspective, and any results could be just a dream. The idea of Artificial intelligence and its discussion winds up telling us more about ourselves than about the subject - and the practice is dangerously close to eugenics without a firm moral and ethical code.

I don't suppose it is mainstream to say that various forms of energy are particular fixed descriptions expressible within the mathematical bulk...

I don't think it makes enough sense to be mainstream or otherwise.

Energy is a tricky concept to nail down once the usual definitions have been dismissed (perhaps rightly perhaps wrongly) but no search for a clear definition is helped by deliberate obfuscation