I don't think even the dumbest electrical engineer out there would design a dimmer with the resistor in parallel unless their goal was burning down houses.

Nope, that's not right. Since we're talking about a resistive load, I can make the simplification that Power=Volts times Amps (and Power is proportional to Dollars).

We know that V = I*R. Since V is constant (120v RMS), we can only change the current in a circuit.

Undimmed the Light provides a resistance RL on the circuit.

Dimmed the Light plus dimmer (assuming a resistive dimmer, some are choppers, but I'm ignoring that now) provides a resistance RL+RD on the circuit.

So Undimmed the current, IL, is V/RL

Dimmed the current, ID, is V/(RL+RD)

That means that ID is less than IL and if the Power is V*I, then PD=V*ID is less than PL=V*IL. So less power is being consumed.

The point of this is to be able to use less chemo with the nano tubes, not using the nano tubes as a treatment for the side effects. If you can get away with less chemo, then the side effects will be less, and that's always a good thing. I took more drugs to deal with the side effects of the chemo than the chemo itself (and no, the pot didn't help me). Anything that can make treatment more bearable is great.

Light itself doesn't make a zig-zaggy motion, but the electric and magnetic waves oscillate in a zig-zaggy way. Light is nothing more than an oscillating electric (and magnetic) wave. Probably have to go to wikipeida for a good picture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation

Going back to the wave on a string example. If two people hold the string and one shakes it. The string itself will oscillate but the energy associated with that motion travels straight to the other person. It's hard to explain or imagine if you haven't spent a lot of time in physics classes, but a wave is just a way to transfer energy. The wave may make the string move up and down but the energy is going "straight". This is a terrible explanation, maybe someone else can do better.

The trouble is when you actually start to get into the details of wave motion and how light behaves, basically you just need to trust the equations and there are few physical examples of how it actually works (other than a wave on a string). And then the people who study this all the time just think in terms of the equations and don't really know how to explain it.

I see what you did there.

Anyway, to answer the the OPs question here's a simplified example (real physicists, don't hate on me, I'm not going to get into the gory details here).

First, lets think of a wave in the water. It's traveling in one direction (towards the shore) and vibrating in another (up and down from the plane of the water). Light is the same. It travels in one direction (from the theatre screen to your eye), but it can vibrate in two directions: up and down, or left and right (and technically any combination of that like diagonal and such). This is called the polarization: vertical or horizontal.

So what these 3D theaters do is have a special theater screen that preserves polarization (most just randomize it) and they have one image for one eye sent out in vertical polarization and the other sent out in horizontal polarization. Then by using special glasses they can show only one polarization to each eye.

Think of polarized glasses as having little bars in them, if they're aligned up and down only vertical light can squeeze through the bars, the horizontal gets stuck. Likewise the bars can go horizontally and the vertical light gets stuck.

Actually it's the other way, but that's more complicated. If the bars (i.e. molecules aligned such that they conduct electricity) are vertical, the vertical polarized light resonates with the bars and gets dissipated and the horizontal makes it through. But that's just technical matters.

This is also why polarized sun glasses are great for boating and driving. Since most of the time you're looking out at a big horizontal reflector (the water or your car hood or the road), most of the light that's reflected (glare) is horizontally polarized (I won't go into the details why), so the polarized sunglasses are set up to filter out horizontally polarized light which removes glare and you only get the vertical light which is just about everything else.

I see your point, but think conversely: I make a quantum computer that's cheap enough to fill a data center but there's no algorithms out there? What use is it? We need the physicists our there making the quantum computers and we need the computer scientists out there developing the algorithms. One without the other is useless. Also think of this: Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" was published in the late 60's, there weren't many cheap computers to fill data centers then. He was working on the theory of algorithms not worrying about how to actually implement it. The same thing here, there are people working on the theory of these algorithms, other people will worry about actually using it when the time come.

This is fairly old news. We've been seeing the same stuff in our lab for about 8 years (also came across it during Quantum Dot research). It's been very hard to characterize. Cool stuff. Since you have x, y, and z resolution when you're "writing" to the photosensitive material, and these spots can be diffraction limited in size, you can imagine the storage density of read-only optical media for this.

"tip" is British (maybe Austrialian too, I don't know) for dump.

Then when you get new cabinets you just decommission the oldest ones. Keep rotating the old ones out once they fall below some flop/dollar threshold.

I agree with you that letting people see the source is the only way to verify that things are done right. I'm just questioning if there's the GPL has any legal way to make them show the source code, or really what constitutes "distributing".

Well, I think in the case of movies or music when you purchase the CD or DVD you're also purchasing a license that prohibits public performance (or maybe it's implied that you're not allowed to do public performance). I know that the guy who runs my gym is aware that he's not really allowed to play music off of his iPod during classes, but he does anyway. So in your example, the large portable theaters are a case of public performance (the definition of public performance is all insane - I remember during the Superbowl, you weren't allowed to have a party and have a screen size greater than 52" or it was considered public). But I'm definitely allowed to take my CD or DVD to a friend's house and watch that.

This is something I never thought of before today. But how would they (the GPL folks) handle it if the hardware was leased just for election day. I.e., the precincts pay Diebold $LARGE sum to deliver, set up, run, tear down, and take back the machines each election. Then Diebold isn't distributing anything. They're just providing a service. This would be similar to if I modify a GPL webserver that stays on my personal server. I'm never distributing the software, just giving the output to someone (people who browse my site). Here Diebold isn't distributing the software, just giving the tallies of the votes to someone (people who count the votes).