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Comment Re: Not sure what they're looking at? (Score 1) 161

The point is that legally DICE can do whatever the fuck they want with this site. There is no law saying that any medium needs to label an advertisement as such. The reason newspapers don't try to pass ads off as legit news* stories is about journalistic ethics, not legal concerns.

*well, this used to be true...

Submission + - Scientists crack viral "enigma code" (huffingtonpost.com)

barlevg writes: A new paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims a breakthrough in our understanding of viral replication and could lead to new to new treatments for polio, HIV and even the common cold. Biologist Peter Stockley, with the help of mathematician Reidun Twarock, has cracked the code for how replicated viral RNA molecules self-assemble, a process Stockley calls a "Harry Potter moment:" the instructions are in plain sight... but only appear once the RNA has been folded.

Comment Re:Why a default? (Score 0) 65

A better question is why routers are accepting incoming connections by default. I see no problem with lax security on a home network when the only way to access a device on the network is if you're in the network, in which case a simple admin/password default is, in my opinion, OVERKILL--you shouldn't even need credentials to manage it.

Comment In the words of the editor of Charlie Hebdo (Score 5, Informative) 1350

After their offices were firebombed in 2011, cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, who is rumored to be one of the causalities of today's attack, said he did not see the bombing as the work of French Muslims, but of what he called "idiot extremists." Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Comment Re:more simplifications and fewer cats, please (Score 1) 197

So I haven't read too much into pilot wave theory, but it's a hidden variable theory, and according to Bell's Theorem, you can have hidden variables, you can have "locality" (meaning no action at a distance), but you can't have both. And most physicists would MUCH RATHER have locality than hidden variables.

Comment Re:Thanks, next stop - single particles don't inte (Score 3, Informative) 197

One particle doesn't interfere with itself, and can't because the interference pattern is seen in the density of collisions over an area.

As many of these single dots build up, they tend to cluster around an interference pattern - as if some particles went through one slit, and some particles went through the other slit.

Not quite--and that's really the key element of this whole thing: the particle somehow DOES interfere with itself, because the interference pattern that builds up, just one particle / one dot at a time is DIFFERENT than what you'd get if each particle only went through one hole. Imagine you're up on a ladder, dropping beanbags through a plank with two slits in it (you can cover those slits if you want), and they form a pile on the ground below. If the beanbags can only go through one slit, the pile you get on the ground is a nice mound. If you open up BOTH slits, then what you expect is TWO mounds. If the slits are close enough together, you expect those mounds to overlap, with the height at each spot being AT LEAST AS HIGH as the height you'd see dropping the beanbags through just one hole.

But instead, what you see in the double-slit experiment is that, in between the two mounts, you get spots where there are FEWER beanbags than you'd get dropping them through just one hole. Somehow, instead of getting that 1+1=2, you're finding that 1+1=0. The beanbags are all still there--it's not like they're cancelling each other out.. they're just not all where you'd expect them.

The ONLY WAY to explain this (that we've found so far) is if each beanbag, which, again, you're dropping one at a time, somehow goes through BOTH slits and INTERFERES WITH ITSELF. This is where the idea of wave-particle duality comes in, because the patterns that you see (with valleys where there should be ridges) are similar to what you'd see with water waves or sound waves (sound waves can cancel each other out--that's the whole premise behind noise-cancelling headphones).

So then why don't we just say that photons (and beanbags) are waves and not particles at all? Well, because classical waves aren't "quantal," meaning you can't divide sound waves into discrete, indivisible components. You can have one "particle" of light (a photon). There's no corresponding discrete element of sound. So we say that they're particles after all, and simply adjust our thinking regarding just what a particle is and how one behaves.

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