It's a matter of history. Red Hat, then Pink Tie and Fedora 1, worked fine on my Compaq Armada.

My white box, using a Via chip set with a 64 bit AMD processor, and which was retired in November 2010 after working since the summer of 2006, would only boot cold with Fedora or Windows 2000. I used Knoppix with a hot reboot to use video and the K desktop. But, when Fedora improved and I could download packages conveniently, I abandoned Knoppix and Debian hot rebooting.

Yum updating has the advantages of incremental package updates, and of an extra stage of prechecking installations to avoid certain manual repairs that can be precipitated by apt-get. The yum command line is not perfect though. Some command line options are sometimes needed to work around upgrade conflicts.

I am annoyed at the thought of the new Ubuntu desktop; it's all but proprietary. Gnome 3 is sweet but takes initial study to exploit. I do login to the xfdce desktop often on my Toshiba 11.6", so that problems and overhead with compositing can be avoided. My new black box with an i5 processor exhibits no problems with Fedora 15

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Michael J. Burns

You should require your professor of physics to diagram the interplay of Kaluza-Klein fields in coordinate free format. The diagram should imply approximately correct calculations of the electromagnetic effects even if the diagram is both scaled and sparse - the principle of general covariance. Drop that class, I say, if she cannot. If no one in the department can, you could consider leaving the university.

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Michael J. Burns

These results confirm that Einstein's spacetime is a foundation of reality (locked in by theorem as I have argued) and not an approximation to be replaced by arbitrary newcomers with lesser a priori merit.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110630111540.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028153447.htm

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Michael J. Burns

If there are truths that are logically accidental, and they do not reduce to historical accident in their context, then I may as well apply the word God to them in that context.

I do not see analytical justification for this exigency in any scientific context though. The rationalist philosophers, Spinoza and Leibniz, did not write of God in this sense. They dismissed this sense with their principles of possibility and plenitude (respectively). I differ with them by not using the word, God, to designate a plenitude of logical possibility. After all, there is nothing suitable to worship concerning logical possibility.

And I need to argue that historical accident does not demonstrate divine power, since the contrary accident can and does happen elsewhere in history, even in an alternative universe.

Isaac Newton was a radical theist, and his method of science, by contrast with the rationalists, was entwined with theism. He was an alchemical sort of theist; he pursued the secret formulae for benefits that were left for his loyal and diligent followers by a clever and arbitrary God.

So I claim that the philosophy of falsificationism falls into the dead end of implicit theism (and deism reduces to theism by the evidence of quantum mechanics). And this philosophy also misrepresents the nature of the science of physics, and it actively obstructs the enterprise.

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Michael J. Burns

Classical Greece was the first advanced civilization to bring its kings and land barons under some sort of effective control. (No doubt, the Oedipus myth was clever propaganda in support of the effort.) The Greek cities were able to exile kings and land owners who did not carry out their function sufficiently well as patrons of the city.

So Alexander was able to apply political superiority, as well as all of the other Greek advancements, to his conquest of Persia.

The book, "The Rise of the State" I think, identifies accountability to the populus as one of the elements of a strong central state. The Roman Republic also had such mechanisms: elections, division of jurisdiction, limited terms of office, and the exercise of veto by tribunes.

The United States of America is poised to be overcome by the moneyed influence of large corporations. It is a bit difficult to think of effective countermeasures, but lets say that the National Academies should convene tribunals for the purpose of issuing symbolic vetoes on the acts of various organizations with a deleterious effect on the public.

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Michael J. Burns

I have already written on superluminal charges when understood as Kaluza-Klein effects. But the classical understanding becomes simply inconsistent when charges are superluminal. In my tutorial, I present a diagrammatic argument that light speed must exceed any possible speed of an accelerating charge, else a contradiction to the definition of the potential field of the charge is had. So a superluminal charge that accelerates thereby invokes the necessity of superluminal light. Diagram the potential field from a superluminal charge and see. Remember that the potential is actually a 1-form, and that anything other than a Lorentz gauge dishonors the function of the potential to preserve conservation of momentum for any test charge.

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Michael J. Burns

The dimness of distant SNe Ia explosions is not evidence of a cosmological acceleration when the simple kinetic effect of this acceleration is accounted for. Namely, events that you are now accelerating away from and have attained a given speed of separation are geometrically closer than in the case where you are simply coasting apart. Remember that in the cosmological case the predecessors of the event and you start with a zero distance of separation.

You might ask about gravitation redshift and blueshift, but they both leave the redshift vs dimness curve with the slope unaffected. Divergent spacial curvature does cause dimming that departs from the curve expected in the case of flat spacetime, but so does an accumulation of carbon dust over time, or even a cosmic deceleration.

I think that I see a boneheaded mathematical error here, a complete omission of the kinetic effect.

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Michael J. Burns

My new song, "Porn King of Abbottabad", is up.

Some asked me when I might follow up on my song "Osama Bin Laden, You Ruined My Birthday" (for which I won a coveted Schrammie award). Then, driving into work last week, hearing news about the porn cache Bin Laden had in his compound, it struck me that he probably used his terrorist information network to make some extra money on the side and became the number one provider of porn to the Greater Abbottabad region of Pakistan.

So there you go.

This strong equivalence principle is stronger than I thought at first, if it actually constrains Hawking radiation to be only vertical to the horizon even to a nearby observer. Consider the side effects of nonvertical radiation that are visible or communicable to a distant observer - probably none.

Consider again the experience of a physically plausible observer that could possibly be communicated out to a distant post. That observer would report that a different location is inferred by her for the event horizon that she sees in front of her as she travels near light speed into the center. This horizon is arguably the current location of light that can still reach her before catastrophe at the center. This is a different horizon which can be closer in than that inferred at a distant post.

Now consider further that any observer could set an arbitrary criterion, an arbitrary deadline for arrival from an Unruh horizon. This brings into play a big relativity principle, maybe too big for an uncertainty principle. It seems, for example, that Unruh radiation is red shifted and dimmer to the sides - if not zeroed by a strong equivalence principle. But then the uncertainty principle would widen the beam.

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Michael J. Burns

I did have teh lulz...

Slayer goes to church

He writes in the June 2011 Discover magazine about an inflationary catastrophe when an in falling observer meets an event horizon. The graphics presented are spectacular.

But I can not confirm his results. It seems that a coordinate distortion is responsible for the disagreement. Consider that there is an insufficient number of photons leaving the event horizon to provide a truly hot environment near the horizon, even though they are more energetic there. Consider again the strong equivalence principle. A close by observer would see a brighter event horizon, which must therefore seem smaller according to the Hawking formula.

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Michael J. Burns

Subluminal Kaluza-Kein charges are not polarized in an encounter with the superluminal variety as they are with other subluminals. So they see and change their path only in response to the difference of the red and blue fields instead of the sum of the magnitudes. This reduces the effect to the level of a gravitational interaction, twenty powers of ten smaller than the subluminal electrostatic interactions.

Consider the 1-form that represents the potential of a superluminal charge, even neglecting the Kaluza-Klein model. When the superluminal charge changes path, how can the implication that changes in the potential must propagate superluminally be avoided? Superluminal light really is a logical problem.

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Michael J. Burns

Consider a superluminal center of dilation (a center of a sequence of blue partitions in my descriptive scheme) that crosses paths with a subluminal center of dilation (red). In that plane, there is a resemblance to the Kaluza-Klein charge. With sufficient interaction, such as in a Kaluza-Klein dimension, These centers will carry out a push me pull you interaction so that the subluminal center is accelerated to near light speed, and the superluminal slowed to near light speed. This is a result even mere closely resembling what is needed for a Kaluza-Klein charge.

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Michael J. Burns

It seems that, for the Kaluza-Klein picture of charges to work, the internal polarization of the event and spacial horizon complex must be appealed to. A push me pull you effect arises from the polarization in the vicinity of another charge. This resulting behavior like electromagnetism is then all accountable to pure spacetime dynamics, the Bianchi identities.

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Michael J. Burns

I fixed a problem with Firefox, and maybe other browsers, where the entire target was not clickable. Should be good now: just click the target, see the links.