To Anthony Watts,
Letter before action in accordance with the rules of common law jurisdictions in general and of the English Civil Courts1 in particular.
In the general context of this letter, my use of the term 'you' shall be taken to mean, include and imply any or all of the persons Anthony Watts, Steve Goddard, Christopher Monckton and any other person who may have, at the relevant time, been responsible for the provision of main content or the administrative oversight of articles and / or comments unless the context hereunder clearly indicates otherwise.
The redefiner Ɽt can be mimicked by a trail of infinitesimal unitary transforms. Each subsequent trail element has eigenvectors that differ from those of its predecessor. These eigenvectors are also eigenvectors of Ɽt. For a single vector, which is not an eigenvector of Ɽt, the action of Ɽt can be represented by the integrated activity of this trail on that vector. This can be interpreted as the activity of a genuine unitary transform Ut. When a redefiner Ɽt is applied to the eigenvector |q> of an operator Q with eigenvalue q, then the eigenvector is transferred into another vector |Ut q>. The expectation value for |QUt q> is no longer q, but
The difficult thing about popularizing movements is that, in the beginning, you want recognition but as time goes on the interests of the movement may be divergent from the people involved in it.
So it goes with the singularity. In 1993, Vernor Vinge said "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." But 17 years into that, only the most optimistic thinkers think substantial progress has been made. Ray Kurzweil thinks so, but he said so in 2005 also, including a whole book called The Singularity is Near.
Not long ago, many scientists had the belief that after the age of about three, the brain was pretty much fixed in function. You could imprint new memories and learn new skills, but that was about it. There was an opposing belief too, that said the brain was a 'blank slate' upon which the various human parameters were written almost ad lib as life went on - an idea, of course, that Steven Pinker refuted in his famous book of the same name (Pinker, 2002).
W bosons have been thoroughly studied at the Tevatron collider. Discovered by the UA1 experiment at the CERN SppS proton-antiproton collider in 1984, these particles have since been produced also in electron-positron collisions at LEP II (in pairs), and recently at the Large Hadron Collider. But the CDF and DZERO experiments have some of the most precise measurements of the physics of these particles, thanks to their now very large datasets.
About 18 months ago, in late January 2009, during the tempestuous cyclone Klaus in France, which killed 26 people and wreaked enormous damage to the nearby once ancient region of Aquitaine, a new island suddenly appeared, 7 miles out to sea in the mouth of the Gironde estuary in the Bay of Biscay.
The French have called it the l'île mystérieuse or "the mysterious island," after the Jules Verne novel and film as depicted in youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os0l808oM9g but officially the newly formed mysterious island remains unnamed, and does not appear on maps of the region.
As a first post (ever) I would like to write a little about
Santorini, the volcano I plan to spend the next three years studying. It may be a little self-indulgent, but I hope you'll find this volcano is
interesting enough regardless.
You must be quite familiar with what happens when you toss a pebble into a pond. You might describe the simple event as a massive rotating object splashing into a deformable fluid. Or, you might… not. However, astronomical bodies are like these pebbles sloshing around in a deformable fluid, called space-time, and this interaction, too, can produce those expected waves extending out from where the pebble drops.
Propaganda - An Application Of The Forgetting CurveLearning curves, forgetting curves, adjacency and the scientific roots of the black art of propaganda.
The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D'you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering grad student removes the clunky and outdated interface of keyboard and lets his brain tweet for him.
That's right, he straps an electrode-coated swim cap to his head and watches as letters scroll across his computer screen. When his brain recognizes the letter he wants, the swim cap knows and uploads it directly to Twitter.
