Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Ask Rym & Scott - Monday Sci/Tech
We're going to do an ask Rym + Scott week. Ask your science and technology related questions here. Make sure to listen to the end of episode 070924 for hints on how to write a question that won't be ignored or laughed at.
Comments
I would think using the codec of HDDVD combined with the disc space of Blu Ray would be ideal but meh... I'll wait.
I missed the boat on Linux, is Ubuntu the version that you recommend to dual boot with Vista? Are Steam games the only thing you have to go back to Windows for?
How long do you think Japan will stay ahead of the world in technology?
It was quite surprising when I visited it, even the toilet seats were electronic! They were quite ahead of Australia technologically and I can imagine probably the same with the US and definately further ahead than the UK, the UK like 10 years behind the rest of the world, people still use cheques and are scared to buy stuff off the internet. (A greater majority of the population, it's not a blanket statement obviously.)
Have you ever been violent with each other?
Do you torrent any comics?
What would be your ideal electronic reading device - books, comics, video, photos?
What companies do you work for currently and do you change often?
I really need a desktop or laptop as soon as possible should I just pick up a laptop that can play Bioshock and wait till the most recent CPU war has finished (whoever wins out of AMD and Intel for the quad core chips) to build my awesome desktop machine?
Did you ever do the old school overclocking of CPUs and video cards; Did you think Dell would ever eventually walk down the path of overclocking for their customers?
How about that same question for a fresh Linux (I assume Ubuntu) box?
Many products today are made with nanoparticles, such as khakis that are stain and wrinkle resisitant. What is your opinion of nanotech in general and do you think we will ever see nanotech like Michael Crichton describes in his novel Prey?
Why does a mirror appear to invert the left-right directions, but not up-down?
Related (kinda) question: Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical between left and right, future and past, and between matter and antimatter? I.e., what is the mechanism of CP violation, and what is the origin of parity violation in Weak interactions? Are there right-handed Weak currents too weak to have been detected so far? If so, what broke the symmetry? Is CP violation explicable entirely within the Standard Model, or is some new force or mechanism required?
Why are the strengths of the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak and strong forces, and gravity) what they are? For example, why is the fine structure constant, that measures the strength of electromagnetism, about 1/137.036? Where do such dimensionless constants come from? Or is this an unanswerable question?
What is the resistance between various pairs of vertices on a lattice
of unit resistors in the shape of a
1. Cube,
2. Platonic solid,
3. N dimensional Hypercube,
4. Infinite square lattice,
and
5. between two small terminals on a continuous sheet?
Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?
Do black holes really exist? (It sure seems like it.) Do they really radiate energy and evaporate the way Hawking predicts? If so, what happens when, after a finite amount of time, they radiate completely away? What's left? Do black holes really violate all conservation laws except conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum and electric charge? What happens to the information contained in an object that falls into a black hole? Is it lost when the black hole evaporates? Does this require a modification of quantum mechanics?
In what program on a computer do you prefer to listen to music or watch video in?
What is your take on multivitamins? Are they fluff? Do we need them, or are we getting everything we need from a proper, well-balanced diet?
You mentioned before about how bad the aluminum in deodorant is and recommended the natural kind. I couldn't find this at the local grocery store the last time I went, do you have a link or the name of the brand you use that you could share?
I have a hardware raid and I never could install Ubuntu outside of VMware because there wasn't any drivers for the controller that I could find. I did however come across some source code, but I have no idea how to compile it/what to do with it, and that would require previous Linux knowledge, which was why I wanted to install it in the first place, so I could learn how to use it. Is there any other option around this, or should I just stick with emulation?
How far off do you think we are from a world like that in the Ghost in the Shell universe? What, if any, cyber enhancements would you guys get installed?
If you guys had a choice of any one "hard" science to study and get into, no matter how broad or specialized, which one would you pick and why?
EDIT:
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me for physics! ***So at normal temperatures, atoms jump around a lot, really fast. Also, according to Heisenberg, we can't know exactly their location and momentum. Theoretically, if you cooled something to absolute zero, you could look at the atoms' position, and you know their velocity; it's at absolute zero. So when you get REALLY close to absolute zero, matter tends to collapse into this weird "Bose-Einstein condensate" stuff that has some very weird properties.
Enough about BECs. Light goes 3.00 * 10^8 m/s in a vacuum. It is slower in everything else. Passing through the interface is what refracts light. Generally, the denser it is, the more it refracts. Unfortunately, the really dense stuff (lead, uranium, iridium, etc.) just blocks light. So whatever this condensate is, it's super-cold, so I think it has to be therefore pretty dense. It must allow some light through, so my guess is that it slows down the photons enough to catch them with their laser-whatever-contraption. Because light reflects straight off of a flat mirror. Left stays on the left, right stays on the right, top stays on top, and bottom stays on bottom. The same reason left and right get inverted when you stand behind a person as opposed to looking at their front. Hmm, not really sure. The best I can give you is that all these strengths have to be something, but that's not really a reason why. We can measure them, but that doesn't tell us anything about why they are what they are.
***WARNING: This section is missing citations, and may come from unverifiable sources. Please help Foxipedia by adding sources. I am going off of what I learned (a while ago) in physics classes, and making educated guesses as to what I think. I am not a physicist. I could be 1000% wrong.
My idea of that mirror question. I too could be wrong of course, but I feel I'm pretty close.
I too am not a physicist, or a biologist. I am also just making educated guesses and deductions from what I've learned in class. Please don't help Ninepedia by adding sources, we do not like to be proven wrong. Though of course you may try...
What is the best way for me to programmatically implement an Ant Colony Optimization of an NP-Hard problem such as the Traveling Salesman Problem? What data structure would be best in representing a weighted graph?
How did the native Americans treat trade with the Europeans when they first made contact? In what ways did the two cultures differ in trading technology and how did this trade practice affect the dissemination of technology among the Native Americans? Please include specific references to the Algonquian tribes dependance on the French technology and their ideals of besoins.
Can every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes? If so, prove it.
Will there ever be a working quantum computer?
Why is the world we live in today so different from the "world of the future" that all the old sci-fi authors wrote about? Pocket supercomputers are nice and all, but I was really looking forward to space colonies and personal hovercars. :)
It does. That's why I said theoretically. It collapses into the condensate to prevent this, and then there's all kinds of shady business going on.
What do you think of this idea?
This would be my first real Linux project. Is the hibernation/wake on LAN thing too complex for a noob? The articles I find online could be interpreted that way.
As an intermediate computer user, I've never gotten into using Linux. What's the best way to keep my current PC functionality, but try out Linux?
Note: It actually does work. The link goes to a Scientific American article.