mattheww

11 ms·

61.
by mattheww 16y ago
Bad news guys. Carroll, Farhi, and Guth along with 't Hooft already looked into this in the 1990s. The only way time travel is possible is if there is already a time machine in the universe. If there isn't one already, it's impossible to cr
62.
by mattheww 16y ago
For me, scanning personal information and scanning friends, tags, connections information ... both seem to take a long time (now been ~20 minutes). I'm running Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/2010031
63.
by mattheww 16y ago
While you're right that it's not a dimension in the sense that most people are used to, I think that it appropriately conveys the fact that time and space are intertwined. When you start traveling very quickly your sense of distance and tim
64.
by mattheww 16y ago
Yes, the basic ideas underlying cosmology are the assumptions of isotropy (it looks the same in every direction) and homogeneity (it is the same everywhere). These two assumptions combine to tell you that it looks the same in every directio
65.
by mattheww 16y ago
Just so we're clear, there is no real physics in this talk. There is no information in this talk. It's true that the value of the speed of light depends on units that are relevant to humans. To suggest that this implies something about phys
66.
by mattheww 17y ago
Thanks, I checked the book out from the library; it's exactly what I was looking for.
67.
Ask HN: Recommend a Technical Virtualization Reference
5 points by mattheww 17y ago|2 comments
68.
by mattheww 17y ago
Wikipedia paraphrasing of a related Shakespeare scene, which is one of my favorite ways to remember an important lesson: Caesar saw the seer and joked "Well, the Ides of March have come," to which the seer replied "Ay, they have come, but t
69.
by mattheww 17y ago
Somebody posted the original article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151369
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by mattheww 17y ago
If you don't know where the peak is, you can't argue that raising taxes will reduce GDP because you don't know if you're going up the hill or down it.
71.
by mattheww 17y ago
One obvious issue with the Laffer curve: Nobody actually knows where the peak is.
72.
by mattheww 17y ago
We used 3.8 TW-hrs in 2005 (which translates to average 434 GW usage, so 500GW is probably a bit low for peak). DOE ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/pdf/overview.pdf ) projects usage of 5.3 TW-hours in 2035, which translates to about 605 G
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by mattheww 17y ago
The work discussed was actually done at the PHENIX detector, not STAR.
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by mattheww 17y ago
Short answer: glitch isn't the right word. There was almost certainly a particle with an extremely high energy. Whether they can measure energies that high is questionable. Long answer: I'm not familiar with this specific experiment, but I
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by mattheww 17y ago
You can't skip the story about Niels Bohr at the bottom.
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by mattheww 17y ago
If they can reach create a controlled fusion reaction, a commercial reactor would be designed to continually feed fuel into it to continue the reaction. Reaching "break-even" is when the lasers don't have to be fired for the reaction to con
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by mattheww 17y ago
Your concerns are certainly legitimate, and I'm sure there are some situations where they apply. However, in many physical sciences (I would venture to say the vast majority), simulations are not chaotic. They are based on stochastic models
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by mattheww 17y ago
"I'd say emergent, especially intelligent life would make the stats pages. Given the age of the universe and how long it has taken for Earth to evolve an intelligent lifeform I'd say it's even possible we are one of the first, if not THE fi
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by mattheww 17y ago
It's interesting to see that when you look at all of the pictures of Obama, mostly the same people show up.
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Why a Physicist Invented SSLVPN(mixergy.com)
1 points by mattheww 17y ago|0 comments
81.
by mattheww 17y ago
If all of the data is positive, but the mean - 1*sigma is negative, the gaussian approximation probably isn't very good....
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by mattheww 17y ago
Display the H-index of users on the leaders board: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
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by mattheww 17y ago
Could you add a couple from multiple angles (including front)? It's not clear to me what the whole case looks like.
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by mattheww 17y ago
I work in a fairly large scientific collaboration. Our data sets are on the scale of a few hundred terabytes per year. So, there's a lot of software to convert from the bits that stream out of the detectors to something that end users (grad
85.
by mattheww 17y ago
With regard to investing into superstars, I can't help but think I already have two investors: my parents. And to ruin the sentimentality, I guess I've probably returned 2-3% of my gross in gifts, though I never thought of it that way until
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by mattheww 17y ago
I turn it off on weekends. It's easier to remember where I was the day before if I leave everything open.
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If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?(infoproc.blogspot.com)
2 points by mattheww 17y ago|1 comments
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by mattheww 17y ago
"What you say is well-put, but to nitpick the last paragraph: the limits of quantum mechanics are well-established. QM is a special case of quantum electrodynamics, which is a low-energy special case of the Grand Unified Theory." Somewhat m
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by mattheww 17y ago
Newsweek also recently devoted its cover to shortening 4 year college programs to 3 years ( http://www.newsweek.com/id/218183 ) and also asked a team of "experts" to discuss the idea ( http://www.newsweek.com/id/218234 ). Much like the blog
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by mattheww 17y ago
Multi-pupil gestures? Cross your eyes to zoom out!

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