you mean ubuntu 10.10?

For me, it's the best release of ubuntu of all times. Or should I say the last release of ubuntu?

Still on it, and still haven't plans for switching. I hope it won't take 5 years for an acceptable update to appear, though.

Well, as it is information, it certainly has entropy; let's assume that the best possible encoding of an mp3 is the mp3 itself (not a terrible assumption, since a mp3 is a compressed file, and as such highly entropic). By Landauer's principle, to write a bit irreversibly one spends kTlog(2) Joules. This corresponds to an increase of m = E/c^2 = kTlog(2)/c^2 kg per bit. If one assumes a 8 MB mp3 (One more time @ 256 VBR) at room temperature (300 K), that's 2.55E-31 kg for you.

Even premium bus lines can't give you the comfort of a train ride; I for one feel sick when I try to read in a bus.

A very simple reason: Ryanair is cheap. I have traveled by Ryanair many more times than I've traveled by train. Let's say you are at Berlin and wants to go to Paris. About 900 km apart, a meaningful distance in my opinion. Who would want to take a bus, go to Schönefeld, grab a plane, descend at Charles de Gaulle (or a shitty airport 100 km apart from Paris, if you chose Ryanair), take another bus, and get to Paris, instead of taking the subway, going to Hauptbahnhof (central station), getting on a train, and getting down at downtown Paris? Me, who can't afford the train always. But I'm just a poor boy from a poor family, and when I can afford to not suffer the inconvenience, I won't anymore.

It's true that for very large distances the speed of the airplane beats the convenience and comfort of the train. But it's very large distances, not just meaningful distances.

You have obviously never been to Europe.

Their favourite means of transportation is train. You can go through high-speed rail to almost anywhere in western Europe. I've been to the central bus station in Berlin. It's so desert it's scary.

The rail system in the US is archaic. It's slow and expensive. Of course no one wants to use it. I grant you that, bus is cheaper than train in Europe as well, but the difference in comfort and speed is worth it.

Yes, this is evidence against SUSY. And I agree that this is much bigger than "electron shape".

But it is not huge, because their measurement was not precise enough to actually rule out SUSY; about alternative models, I prefer to stay silent, because this is not my area of expertise.

Yes, you are mostly correct. We use the word dipole because there are monopoles and quadrupoles and octopoles and so on, so we need to differentiate between them to be precise. But the dipole moment is what corresponds to polarity, so you can understand the magnetic dipole moment as amount of polarity.

No, no theory says it so. The origin of the predict electric dipole moment of the electron is very fundamental, and no one thinks that it is due to a slight + charge. The most simple example of a system that has an electric dipole moment is a combination of a + and a - charge, but that is by no means the only example. Things that have an electric dipole moment have an electric field like the one in the picture.

This study found that our best measurements can't see any polarity in the electric field of the electron.

Hmm no. The issue of the shape is that if the electron were a uniformly charged sphere (it isn't), and you distorted this sphere a bit, it would display an electric dipole moment. So by measuring the electric dipole moment one can measure how much the sphere deviates from a perfectly round sphere, as a perfectly round sphere has no electric dipole moment.

The issue is that the electron is not a uniformly charged sphere, so it's meaningless to measure its roundness through the electric dipole moment; and I think that it just obscures the issue, because you have to know a bit of electromagnetism to know that a imperfectly round sphere has a nonzero electric dipole moment.

I think Sebastopol is representative of the typical layman that is interested in reading about the latest developments in modern physics. He remembers what he learnt in high school, has probably read a wikipedia article or two, and usually reads these quantum physics articles when they appear. So a electron as a little ball is contrary to everything he has ever learnt about the subject.

You're forgetting that no more than a few percent of the general population is interested in this subject.

Science Daily is not taking approach 'a'. They are mangling the information until there's almost no relation to the actual results. They are inventing a story about roundness to make the subject appear more simple, but in doing so they are just obscuring the facts and confusing the reader. Allow me to xkcd you. I'm not against the rubber sheet kind of analogy (as long as you say that it is an analogy; actually Feynman has an analogy that is more correct and simpler, but I digress); but what they are doing here is saying that Einstein's theory is like fairies pushing the stars around to make it seem like gravity.

I'm not saying that they should give all the details (because oh the actual details are hideously complicated), I'm saying that they should have given less details. They have measured a fundamental property of the electron, called electric dipole moment, that has profound implications on our understanding of the physical world.

Now it's much easier for the interested reader to search "electric dipole moment" and find out what it is, and ask the interesting questions, like "how can it have an electrical dipole moment if it is a single charge without structure?", instead of the nonsensical ones I'm seeing here on slashdot, like

No it's not. Your head exploding is a perfectly normal reaction to trying to comprehend the piece of shit that passes as scientific journalism nowadays. I'm a physicist and after reading the article I still had no idea about what the researches discovered. At least Science Daily had the original reference so I could look up. Even more appalling is BBC's coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13545453

They both only said "lasers" about what the group actually measured. As if the measurement technique were as relevant as what they were actually measuring. Even laymen like OP see that there's something weird about saying the electron has a shape and is a sphere. Of course, this makes absolutely no sense. This talk about sphere is a semiclassical analogue that someone in the 20's once thought that could be true and was quickly disproved. What they measured was the electron's electric dipole moment. What is that?

Imagine a small bar magnet, with south and north poles. This is what we call a magnetic dipole. The strength of the magnet (measured in a standard way) is what we call magnetic dipole moment. Now imagine that instead of south and north poles, we have negative and positive electric charges. This is an electrical dipole, and it's strength is likewise the electrical dipole moment.

Now the beauty of the electron is that despite not being a small bar magnet, it still displays a strong magnetic dipole moment, which we call spin. Originally people thought that it could be explained by postulating a structure on the electron (an electric charged spinning sphere gives rise to a magnetic dipole moment, hence the name spin), but quickly we found out that it couldn't be so. We have no explanation for it, it is what it is, just a property of the electron.

But what the electric dipole moment? The electron is a single charge, so it can't be an actual electrical dipole. But despite this, the Standard Model predicts that it has a very small electric dipole moment, too small to be measurable. But Supersymmetry predicts that it is quite larger, and even measurable, and these folks' measurement showed that Supersymmetry's prediction is probably wrong.

Ok, but why did they call it measuring the roundness? Analogously with the spinning sphere model for the magnetic dipole moment, a distorted sphere gives rise to an electric dipole moment. But calling it measuring the roundness makes as much sense as saying that when we measure the magnetic dipole moment (spin) we are measuring the speed with which the electron spins about itself.

So, makes more sense now?

You're right, it isn't. This article makes me sick. If people take shit like this seriously they can't be blamed for not being able to differentiate real science from quantum woo.

It's better to just ignore than try to correct it.

Teleportation is a real phenomenon, albeit a bit old. This is not their breakthrough. The breakthrough is doing it with a cat state (the name is a reference to Schrödinger's cat; this kind of state was inspired in it). These states are usually very fragile, and strongly entangled, hence the interest.

Also other breakthrough is doing it with the measurement of the number of photons and position. This is a promising technique, that I am personally working with at the moment to test Bell inequalities, because of its high resistance to noise. But I don't think it is very exciting to the general public...

actually, this problem is trivial. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Rabin_primality_test