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Comment Re:Transition backwards at negative pressure? (Score 1) 334

I Read tfa earlier and then a bunch more about it. It mentions something about metallic hydrogen forming a lattice similar to those in iron or steel and would indeed remain a shiny metal. There was mention also of it being useful as a room-temperature superconductor and later i found that metallic hydrogen may also be a great rocket fuel with a specific impulse of around 1700 seconds!

That's about all i've come across so far.

Comment Re:Cosmological Constant (Score 4, Informative) 86

I'm not a physicist (oops - i mean IANAP) so the standard dose of salt should apply but i have watched many lectures online about many topics within physics. My understanding is that it really is the same term but used a bit differently.

Einstein favoured a steady state term(iirc he used gamma for it) in the equations for GR which was called the cosmological constant. Along came hubble who discovered the expansion of the universe and Einstein finally gave up on the fudge-factor term he had inserted to keep the universe mostly static..

60 or so years go by until scientists in the mid 90's discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating contrary to most of their expectations. They reinstate the fudge-factor term but this time to represent so-called dark energy and it's effects on space-time.

That pretty much brings it up to date. For more info find Susskind lectures on all kinds of physics on youtube and on the Stanford site with a few honourable mentions in the repository of the Perimeter Institute's public lectures available at their site.

Comment Re:Missing a target with a laser weapon (Score 1) 508

Stormtrooper Precision Quotient, or PQ, is quite low. Untrained civilians would hit their target by chance far more often than stormtroopers seem to.

A good kitchen squad may come out with a PQ approaching 1 but the other place down the street that messes up food orders all the time rates closer to .7 - every third time there's an error with the meal.

Civilians doing the stormtroopers' jobs would likely have a PQ of close to .05 or so in combat situations and i would rate the stormtroopers closer to .03.

Bobba is close to .9999 or so on this scale btw.

Comment Re:There's that confusion again: (Score 1) 46

Read this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Even when sent through the slits one at a time the electrons interfere with themselves and the full interferance pattern will emerge over time. The pattern vanishes when using a detector to determine which of the two slits the particle goes through. This is one of the factors that confirms wave-particle duality in the framework of Quantum Mechanics. It's also currently a 1st year physics lab for University students at many institutions.

Comment Re:Can we all agree (Score 1) 134

To be fair the extra couple of lines of code may have caused keyboard lag on early IOS devices like my iPod touch 3g. A capable device it was not!

My later iPod touch 4g could probably have handled it but then but then they would have had different devices exhibiting different behavior.

Typed on my droid with it's correctly capitalized keyboard.

Comment 1 issue with the menu (Score 1) 86

The top menu does not display link text in opera on android. Just a bevy of square placeholders. the topics menu renders as well as the links at the bottom; it's only the very top of the page near the logo. Luckily i was already logged in.

Submission + - Hewlett-Packard pleads guilty to Bribery (usatoday.com)

Charliemopps writes: Hewlett-Packard and three subsidiaries pleaded guilty Thursday to paying bribes to foreign officials in Russia, Mexico and Poland and agreed to pay $108 million in criminal and regulatory penalties. For over 10 years Hewlett-Packard kept 2 sets of books to track slush-funds they used to bribe government officials for favorable contracts.

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