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San Francisco, 9:32 PM
Fri Dec 11
30 posts in the last 24 hours
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04:17 PM
#tips
02:37 PM
[twitter.com]
[whedonesque.com]
#tips
02:53 PM
#tips
10:57 AM
This is maybe something important
#tips
10:08 AM
#tips
09:11 AM
[www.rottentomatoes.com]
#tips #avatar #observationdeck
10:18 AM
I'll still wait to get the io9 review. Mostly because if I wait, I'll see it for free.
#observationdeck
07:46 PM
90% now, 26 fresh, 3 rotten
#tips #avatar #observationdeck
08:56 AM
A CERN bulletin dated December 14 (that's in the future!) talks about the awesome progress the LHC is making on its way to achieve its planned 3.5 TeV per beam.
[cdsweb.cern.ch]
1 eV = 1 electron-volt is the energy that an electron would receive if you were to accelerate it through a potential difference of 1 volt.
1 TeV = 1 tera eV = 10^12 eV = 1 000 000 000 000 electron-volts.
To put that energy in perspective, 1 TeV is enough energy to create about 1000 protons at once.
The LHC is designed to achieve 3.5 TeV per beam, that is, 7.0 TeV when the two proton beams collide.
So, to grasp what this means, this is like throwing 2 protons against one another with enough energy to produce 7000 more protons.
(It doesn't actually happen that way, though. The proton-proton collision produces a lot of other stuff, rather than 7000 protons)
Another way to grasp how awesomely powerful 7 TeV is, consider the fact that *all* chemical reactions (that is, all of chemistry and all of the biochemistry of life) take place at an energy level of a few tens of electron-volts per reaction, that is, about 100 billion times smaller than what the LHC produces in a single collision.
#tips #LHC #CERN #madscience #physics
08:53 AM
#tips
03:34 AM
Artificial retina gives woman limited vision after decades of darkness
[edition.cnn.com]
#tips #madscience #technology
01:35 AM
[antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov]
#tips #spaceporn
12/10/09
[news.bbc.co.uk]
#tips #dinosaurs
12/10/09
#tips
#avatar
12/10/09
Can the 'silver bullet' of printing revolutionize electronics?
[edition.cnn.com]
#tips
12/09/09
Does death exist? New Theory Says 'No'
[www.huffingtonpost.com]
The article is written by the originator of the "theory", who is a well-respected physician with an ego the size of the universe, but not a physicist.
( Check out the way he represents himself at the end of the article and on his own web site, found here: [www.robertlanza.com] )
His idea (which isn't new, by the way) is that the universe cannot be explained nor understood without taking into account human consciousness. And he uses quantum mechanics and the parallel-universe idea to expand that (un)original idea to imply that there is no death because our "mental energy" (or soul or whatever you want to call it) exists in multiple universes at once, or something like that.
I'm sure he is a very bright and successful scientist in his own field, but his knowledge of quantum mechanics doesn't seem to measure up.
What pisses me off about people like him, who think they understand what thousands of brilliant physicists have spent their entire lives and career trying to understand, is not just his arrogance, but the fact that crap like this is what gives false hope to suffering people and also a chance for unscrupulous people to make money off those who are looking for something to hold on to in order to survive.
More on him, his work, and his "Biocentrism" theory here:
[en.wikipedia.org]
#tips
12/09/09
[www.nasa.gov]
#tips #spaceporn
12/09/09
[edition.cnn.com]
#tips