Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.

Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts with all the cars around it. If the driver accelerates, they will pull up close to the care behind and that driver may speed up a bit too, sending a diminishing wave of acceleration through the traffic, so compared to the same car alone on the road the car in dense traffic appears to have a much higher effective mass. Alone, you hit the gas and speed up a lot. In traffic, you hit the gas and speed up a little bit. That's what the electron in the surface looks like: a car in traffic.

But on the scale of car-car interactions, the "bare" mass of the car is what matters. If two cars collide you get an energy of 0.5*m*v^2, not 0.5*Meff*v^2.

Yeah, there are multi-car pileups that muddy the analogy, but they add up to nothing like the effective mass of the whole traffic block, so there. And the difference in scales between "cars and traffic" is tiny compared to the difference in scales between "nuclei and the lattice", so the effect that analogy hopefully makes obvious will be that much larger in the latter case.

While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.

is the number of Astroturfer comments. I'd like to see some effort made to find and eliminate them.

because most of the games that came with the consoles were digital copies. This was done because digital copies are cheaper (no disc pressing, and yes, at these volumes it's an expense worth talking about) and there's not second hand market depressing the price of the physical copies in store. Having a pack in game basically tanks the value of the game at retail because of how the used market works.

If you were given an Xbone for xmas you will not be playing anything today. It will take at LEAST 6 hours to update the box, then any game you buy will have a 20-40gb "patch" that will need to download.

It's the biggest SUCK there is about the Xbox One.

Maybe it was Nintendo? ^.^

This is like a moron that wants the special gold plated PS4 with free T-shirt over a standard PS4 and is willing to pay a $50 premium for some spraypaint and t-shirt.

$199 Nexus 7 blows the nokia tablet out of the water hard.

Nexus tablet is better in every way, and they price this thing at Mini ipad pricing? are they nuts?

Dont buy any of this crap, Nexus7 or Samsung Pro tab 12.2 are the only two real android tablets at honest pricing.

Yes that 12.2 tablet is sexy as freaking hell and the most business usable tablet out there. it lets me view CAD files perfectly with clients.

make movies look like they were shot on a daytime TV cam to me. I saw Braveheart on one of those modern tvs and I suppose the lighting was more natural, but it was considerably less dramatic. It just killed it for me. Also (and this is mostly just me) I can perceive noticeable drops in framerate on those newer tvs. The rate goes up and down like crazy. Drives me nuts.

That can be adjusted.

Tom Bombadil served as a projection of absolute mystery in a fantasy world where much wonder was already well documented. Even the Valar didn't know who he was. Probably. Tolkien believed you should never tell all the secrets, and frankly HE didn't know what Tom was, and was happy that way. Even mysteries should have mysteries.

And TB was his young son Christopher's favorite doll, in the real world. He put it in to make his son happy, I think.

Middle Earth is never boring. I could watch a 100 hour travel documentary with NO dialogue and be fascinated. (It really would be fascinating! The place is bloody enormous, and that was just the NW tip of the northern continent)

As a cloaked and rather spiritually amnesiac Maia, Gandalf has, along with all the other Ainur now locked into Arda who listened to the Eru Illuvatar Lecture about how the new worlds would work, has sort of a feeling, based on impressive but never quite remembered foreknowledge, of how the rabbit is gonna jump. He's got prophetic mojo, in small amounts, and he's on a Really Real Mission from God, or at least God's lieutenant, Manwe.

(Ever wonder who foretold all those prophecies everyone keeps talking about? Foreknowledge is part of ME. Some have it).

The crap was in the LOTR appendices. Tolkien just never had time enough to fill in the blanks. Christopher won't let Jackson have the other books, but the story Jackson told IS what happened off-screen, as it were, in the Hobbit book. Galdalf went off mysteriously, met with the White Council, got imprisoned, went after Sauron with the others and drove him out of his body (again). He interacted with a lot of people off-book, and Tolkien wrote a history documenting it. There are other creatures under the ground than Tolkien listed - practically an infinite number left over from when Ea was a void- inumerable other sentient species and far-off lands and continents. I was happy to see a little fill - there's so much room to grow the world. Doesn't make the movie bad, unless you think the Hobbit was bad, which it kinda was, as a novel, being a child's story. The Battle of Five Armies *was* that vicious - Tolkien simply Knocked Out the Protaganist and moved the story past the hero, keeping the violence down. ME wasn't a bonnie bucholic place, not at all.

Tolkien wrote the Hobbit for small children. Twee in tone - the dwarves had green, and yellow, and blue beards, for instance. In his short piece, A Meeting in Erebor (adapted into the movie!), he had Gandalf and Aragorn meet at the Pony, I think, and they discussed dark and grave matters in an adult tone, setting the Hobbit events up for the LOTR. Had Tolkien not had a day job, he'd probably had rewritten the Hobbit to bring in in line with the LOTR and the older stories.

Jackson had the appendices of the LOTR to work with, but nothing else from the Simarillion or Untold Tales, because the Tolkien estate doesn't like what he did. Perhaps that was shooting themselves in their own feet, as he had little story material and so had to make up filler.

Do recall that the Hobbit, as a story, is rather thin.