Posts by despun 52 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2012
Urban legend from a certain industrial R&D lab. They did some very early liquid crystal work under government funding. You can picture it. 1ft square plates of glass accurately ground, in a jig with spacers. The cynics "when you can make that the size it'll fit on someone's wrist, I'll be useful - ha, ha."
Caveat - I've not found out what they actually did - physics-wise.
But, it's not an individual atom emitting - this is solid state physics. There's some clever stuff with making structures that change band gaps by being sized at the quantum wavelength scale in 1, 2 or 3 dimensions. I.e. quantum well, ... quantum dot technologies.
What these guys did - dunno - need more info. Did they really come up with the underlying physics and take it through to a workable device ? Not normally the same teams doing both.
Agree. As a small business owner, I'm fine with the Open Office suite (plus LibreOffice) to the extent that I have not upgraded Windows Office since '97. But the lack of a contact manager from my veiwpoint has been a serious omission for years, and has inhibited migration to Linux. Some add-on solution which is not part of the "official" suite would take time to evaluate, and might disappear the day after I migrated.
I may be "wrong" in the eyes of the experts, but with limited time to address these issues, that's where I am. That said, the latest Windows offering are so unattractive that the next move may well be Linux.
IIRC they're not being installed. The ship was to be capable of retrofit for convential aircraft - opening the purchase options considerably, but then BAe can back with a silly price for it, forcing the government to carry on with the F35x. (which it part builds)
OT. The caaier is a "shared resource" of the European Rapid Reaction Force. Which may go some way to explaining the distortion of the UK naval capacity that it represents.
Government has a need for this fiction
As the result of government mishandling of globalisation, the UK has suffered massive industrial decline, inclusive of high-tech industries. We’ve been caught between state support/protectionism within the EU ( the French are masters, but by no means the only ones with “social ownership ) and low wage economies that have rocketed up the value chain. In the Thatcher era, economists were telling us it didn’t matter if the low added value stuff went to China – did they get that wrong. There are exceptions where the UK has a global position, but when you scratch the surface, they are far fewer than one would imagine, and far more vulnerable than one would imagine.
But our rulers aren’t going to own up to this, and the “high-tech led industrial flowering, always just around the corner” narrative has nowhere else to go.
I'm reading this in the context of Big Government's control freakery. They have an ill disguised antipathy to the freedom of private motoring. Just another potential way of controlling driver, alongside full positional tracking.
Looking wider, there is the state research funding allocated EU-wide to "intellegent cities". That could pan out in all sorts of ways.
Yes. The only climate scientist who I knew personally was a shit hot, top of the range, mathematical and computational physist. The type of bloke who when he says he's solved a set of coupled non-linear differential equations, you can believe has. Now very senior in the climate science field in the US. So, I've looked up some of his papers, and they're not "on message".
As for the bulk of those calling themselves "climate scientists". Look at their c.v. s.
The flaw is blindingly obvious to you, me and readers of El Reg. A more interesting, and probably important, question is why it isn’t also blindingly obvious to our “Minister of State for Universities and Skills “.
I wish I knew. But them that rules over us exist intellectually in a parallel universe. And when reality doesn’t match it, it’s reality that’s wrong. So, they’ve presided over the destruction of much of the UK’s industrial base. But they used to chant that it doesn’t matter, we can be “post-industrial, the Chinese can do the low value added stuff and Britain’s future lies in the cutting edge of pharma, telecoms (the likes of Huawei will not register on their consciousness) and IT. When it doesn’t happen, and UK IT graduates aren’t being sucked up into a UK Microsoft, Google, well – what to do ?
Dunno if that was /sarc or not ? Just in case. Some (minor) distiguishing features of doesn't make a new species. As you say - breeding is the test. Uless they geographically relocate individuals, plus allow for trauma / social effects causing reluctance, it's flakey. Did they ?
[ A couple of days ago, there was the same thing on t'telly re. killer whales - and they were pushing the endagerment line explicitly. ]
Biologists etc. are playing a game. Redefine groups of existing species as " really a different species" on whatever pretext they can dream up. Then this new "species", being much smaller, having a more specific habitat etc., jumps up several catagories on the endangerment list. Your work then becomes more important/urgent/ up for funding.
OK, so this is a beta version. My question is, has this test been done on the code that they are using for publications? Given the issues exposed during climategate etc., re. software QA, lack of version control and archiving of data sets etc., I wouldn't be shocked to find that they haven't.
"Waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy".
If the predictions are now in the lower range, a policy of wait and see, and adapt if and when we have to becomes much more attractive. It was only ever the catastrophic predictions that could be used for wrecking the ecomony etc.
Looks liek a game-changer to me.
As others have said, you're assuming a perfectly ridged body, and there isn't any such thing. In fact, special relativitive is ruling out perfectly ridged bodies. The mechanism is that you push one end, the interactions with the molecules, electrons, whtever pushing the next molecule along is takes a finite time, it's light speed limited.
AFAIK, the more alarmist of the temperature increase predictions required various positive feedback mechanisms in the models to estimated on the high side. Obviously, positive feedback mechanisms are destabilising, and will predict increased severe weather events.
The ab initio ( as oposed to the IPCC's Detect and Atribute methodology ) basis for the parameter in these mechanisms will be less sound than the rest of the model. And the soundness of any quanitfied historical record of "extreme events" even less believable.
Dunno why you are getting the down votes. The problem with climate "science" is, as you say, its lack of a record of prediction (or retrodiction).The system it proports to understand is hideously complex, so the models are massively under-contrained and it always will be. You are spoiled for choice in proposing mechanisms for whatever effects you see in the data. This is quite explicit in the practicioners' Detect and Atribute methodology, which is clearly distinct from bottom-up inderstandings where all of the sub-mechanisms are well understood quantatively with fewer free parameters than data. and the system behaviour can be uniquely preditced from these understandings.
"Spin .. and angular momentum ... are two out of the electron’s three quantum properties, the other is charge
You guys really don't know your QM, do you ?
Charge and spin are 2 intrinsic (fixed value) properties of an electron, as is rest mass. Angular monentum of an electron "orbing" a nucleus ( if and when it is part of an atom ) is one of several descrete but variable eigen values that will have at a particular time. If your counting that as a "quantum property " (eh ?) , then you need to count spin orientation and energy eigenvalue as well. The 2 out of 3 comment makes no sense at all.
I'd say it's relatively simple. Wife's a cancer scientist. OK - maybe simpler is the wrong word, but it is much more tightly understood. Simply because you can repeatedly observe it in the lab and understand various cancers down to the molecular level. "Curing" it is something else, of course. In contrast climate modelling is a muddle, a tangle of ad hoc mechanisms ( Detect and Attribute is ther jargon for their peculiar methodology ). Little - very little - quantatively and reliably understood at the mechanistic level. "The science is settled" is BS.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
