People who are scientifically to uneducated to understand things in math which humankind understood 4000years ago and to lazy to even learn in school how long a stone takes to fall down to the ground (which we knew 300 years ago), and who can no predict what the expectation value for winning/losing in roulette is, want to suddenly get in the scientific discussion of the most complicated, dynamical, and coupled systems science ever examined.
Usually this happens as soon as they find the final outcome of the scientific process negative for their income expectation or their views (climate change, evolution, racism etc), even if they have been fine with radar, smarphones, TVs, nuclear bombs/power plants etc. before.
Side remark #1: When i say climate science i dont mean the IPCC (which is political in nature). As a scientist i find it pretty disturbing that they write a report in which the claims of interest groups are packed in without peer review, and declare this to be a result of science.
Side remark #2: There is absolutely no doubt that CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the absorbtion coefficient, and thus has the potential and, assuming that no unpredicted effects compensatign for that appear, likeliness, increase the global solar energy input significatnly. Hoping for such unpredicted effects as excuse for screwing around with this global parameter further is like playing russian roulette with 5 chambers filled and 1 empty.
Side remark #3: Our actions should be long-term (25y-50y) in nature, and they should be based on medium-term observations, per head consumption of ressources/energy and/or emmision of CO2 (compensated for industry production). They should be based on opening additional revenue sources and business fields for companies who delevop good products.
Reminds me when i wanted to text "Sweta" (Short calling name for "Swetlana") on my phone to a colleague of mine and my phone corrected it to "Sweetie".....
And assume that these two things are related, and knowing that Russia has an extreme amount of accidents, i assume that can only mean that the Russians have an extreme amount of sex disorders.
I mean, I would have guessed other things-like alkoholism, bad roads, cars in bad technical state, and cultural deficits in estimating risks, but, ok , i the russian government says that all these accidents are related to sexual disorders, i guess i have to take the extreme perversion troughout russian society for granted......
I think he got something wrong about the relationship between polititics and journalism, at least in a free society.
Because the opponents of the NRA are not nuts enough to go amok there?
Yes, and instead of a few well prepared terrrorists you have 100 times more stupid young people who accidentally have a gun in the wrong moment. I think that the number of students killed in average per year in the US by bullied and/or antisocial classmates exceeds 12.
I looked at the paper and i have the feeling that they misuse the term "entangled". At least their definition of the density operator seems dodgy. If they would not say it's entangled i would call it a superposition state of a single particle.
Which, in terms of the density matrix is not so different. But we experimentalists usually require two particles with multiple states to use the word "entanglement".
Moreover, since they are comparing a mixed state, i would find it particularly interesting if there is a difference in the Energy Expectation value for realistic Hamiltonians. (If yes, i would not wonder so much about a mass defect).
* Assume movement between stars, with a speed of your choice.
* Caculate Energy and momentum convervation in the capture, and show that moving between stars and "consuming" the star (instead of using a tiny fraction of its energy at the peak output)
* Calculate the surface/volume ratio allowable and predict what is the maximum mass of such "intelligent" objects.
* Calculate the minimum time for absormbing energy (as a function of the gravity pressure), and thus the minimum mass/density of the object
* caclualte if solid parts may exist for your parameter range; otherwise state how you intend to process information.
* use the implied timescales to caclulate the number of generations possible since the beginning of the universe
* Compare your estimations of time, momentum and energy conservation, maximum size, and min and see if lifeforms sitting close to the stars and consuming them by using the light from the stars are the biggest and most efficent creature to do so.
Reality: IF our species wants a chance at long term survival, we MUST leave this rock. Its not optional, its required.
If our species really survives long enough that leaving earth and settling down becomes the best option for survival, then technologies beyond your wildest dreams will exist.
Our current attempts to travel will seem like the idea to use a cannon to reach the moon seem to us.
The labs i worked in spent less than 200kDollar/Year and researcher. In average 10-15 impact points in publications per year for each lab. For the cost of the ISS or a moon shot you could finance my expriments a hunred thousand times over, so i really would appreciate if the decisions are made carefully.
What i really love to see is automonous systems in orbit, i.e. telescopes. I would thing if you uses the money for the ISS on other things, maybe we would not have to built radiotelecope arrays on earth, but coul put them in space. Instead of rdeaming of a manned mars mission, we should send many probes to other planets and moons.
The scientific achievement of the rovers on mars (and the comet mission!) are significant beyond anything we could have dreamt of.
Fine! I dont need cameras. I dont need a networked Fridge. I dont need a networked lighting setting. I dont need to look up the curve of my heating over the year in the internet.
IMHO the machines should be as dumb as possible. Heating/AC should have a timer. (Oh, wait, it has that already for the last 20 years). The energy savings you can achieve by not starting your heating/AC at the same time but "just before you come home" are not so high.
So yeah. MCUs with 128bytes of ram, no network connection, and a power consumption in the muW-mW range without any OS work for me. If you really are interested in comsumption data, make a fucking SD slot - if i write 1kB every minute for 1 year, a 1GB card is only filled to 50%.
Is it actually legal to pay the money?
Me: Physicist who is very happy to be born 1975, and see the best of both worlds, hardware and software. I can use all devices you find in any electronics lab and used >10 programming languages.
There are several factors contributing to his impression. The time since we finally understood electromagnetism and built amplifiers/switches was very homogeneous in terms of technological development. We uses AM/FM for nearly hundred years - basically you can use the very first tube radios to receive the music from your fm transmitter you use to transmit to the radio in your car (hopefully only where it's legal!). So that means that for hundred years, you designed an antenna, a filter, maybe an oscillator and a mixer, another amplifier. In the LF-World it was even simpler. Give me an oscilloscope and a probe, and i find where the amplifier is broken. You could start learning this as soon as you learned how to read (i did).. The devices were expensive (buying a television was a big decision back when i was a child, and would reduce the monthly savings of a family below zero, or if you had a low wage you had actually to save to buy it. The same is true for audio equipment and computers (the computers i buy actually get cheaper each time). This meant that every device actually had a circuit diagram contained. You open the radio from 1920 (i found one), wonder what is broken, an find a circuit diagram inside. Our television actually had a circuit diagram with checkpoints and illustrated waveforms which you should see on the oscilloscope, and a list of parts/modules which typically would distort the signal. Yes, that was for free inside an envelope stuck inside the back cover of the device. So instead of inventing special screws, glueing things together to save the last 0.01cent during manufacturing, and only giving service manual to "selected partners" the manufacturers actually helped you maintain the value of the device. We had that television for 20 years, and it was repaired one time.
So what happens now?
a) There is a big change in technology, which is now stabilized yet, so there is not equivalent of the "standard electronics workbench", which costed $5000. There may be a JTAG standard for actually diagnosing devices, but no standard connector but usually a few spots on the PCB, undocumented. And no manufactuer actually tells you and promises you anything about it.
b) manufacturers donâ(TM)t like to give out access to software, or even diagnosis tools. Partially because of legal reasons, I suppose.
c) I make the observation that bricking by damaged firmware is a substantial fraction of the devices which really fail hard (in my case 2x embedded controllers in thinkpads and one google chromecast, and one time some embedded firmware in an ACER Laptop). One should say that statefulness is a curse if you try to fix things.
d) Taken aside a bluetooth headset and an MP3 player which were fried by a bad USB power supply, i did not observe any personal hardware failing. The only computers which i saw the hardware failing of at work were a few intel Boards with bad capacitors
e) The discrete analog part of the circuits get smaller and smaller.
So up to now this professor was pampered in EE with people who all did analog electronics as a hobby, a very homogenous group who all learned the same technologies. Now he is confronted whit people to whom this knowledge is not valuable because of the world they live in. But they are probably better in programming and fixing software, potentially even hacking the firmware of devices. So on modern devices they may actually fix more than he could. Sure, he may be able to re-solder the broken connector, but instead of asking that his students can follow him from day 1 in using the oscilloscope, he should accept that the mix of students has changed to more software expertes, as have the device functions changes software-defined functions; the EE course anyway should contain a lab-course which give you the basic knowledge. People who change their path or discover it late are valuable in any subject - i always despised the idea that technical skills are absolutely needed to *start* studying EE (or physics). I agree that handling a network analyser is still valuable, but potentially as an advanced skill, for the people actually designing the RF frontends. Anyway for that part you arent going to go far by "fixing" (Believe me, once a rf circuit trace is damaged, it's hard to give it back the right impedance by hand).
The central claim of Linus seem to be that there are many people out there who claim an efficiency increase by parallelism. While i agree that many people claim (IMHO correctly) a increase in the performance (reduction of execution time) within the constraints given by a specific technology level by doing symmetric multiprocessing, i have not heard many people to claim that efficiency (in terms of power, chip area, component count) is improved by symmetric, general parallelization; and nobody with a good understanding of infromation-related aspects of computation.
I am now speaking as a physicist, I find it disturbingly easy to show the opposite for many cases in the limit of ideal performing systems (that is, resource per implemented gate operation remaining constant with the number of gate operations).
Having said that, I speculate that there are reasons to introduce paralellism:
a) The performance you require can not be achieved without it. An example woulf be an FPU, or even just an 8-bit a full adder. You *can* implement it bit-wise, but you dont like to. The full adder also is an excellent example on how paralellism can increase power consumption (i.e. fast-carry-look-ahead) and resource usage
b) Your implementation simulates operations in a way in which requires a significant effort for fetching and decoding to simulated function. The extreme case of a extreme RISC processor with one bit operations and 1bit ALU only is more inefficient for many problems than the processors we use. This means that there probably is an ideal "processing power/RAM (cache)" combination, which is a function of your communication cost (i.e. bus drivers) and your algorithm.
c) From b) we can actually see that it can be extremely resonable to create non-symmetrich mutilprocessing units. For listening to a sensor signal to change, a 8-bit 1MHz Microcontroller with less than 100kGates may be an excellent choice (seen the ti430 line, from example), since it does not insist in keeping an overkill of ALU persistenly on.
d) Paralell programming is almost never used to increase efficiency (unless you really have a distributed input/output and inherent costs of collecting it), but only for these operations where the efficiency loss due to parallelism is negligible (or zero).
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