shoegumfoot

Haven't read the paper, but it sounds like they just rediscovered the microcannonical ensemble (but for quantum mechanics). Probably works, probably hard to do anything interesting with it in the near to medium term.

Don't you think that is says something (not terribly good) about society that these very intelligent people must spend their time this way if they want to be rewarded?

Why spend 80 hours a week chasing grant money when you can spend 60 moving numbers around?

In theory, maybe. But phil21 is correct that credit card users have zero liability in practice.

Most card issuers these days will proactively contact the customer to inquire about suspicious charges.

Actually, atmospheric pressure is enough, and oxygen boils at a slightly higher temperature than nitrogen.

Zoning isn't needed just for low and high noise.

You also have to consider factors like industrial safety. For example, fertilizer[1] and pesticide[2] plants must be built a certain distance away from populated areas. There are, of course, many other industrial processes that also require a safety perimeter, but those are two that come immediately to mind.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explos...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Would it be correct to think that you would be shocked to learn that the FAA has a publicly-accessible aircraft registration database?

http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Inquiry.aspx

> However, I'm not certain that's the case.

I am.

> That would hold if we assume all things which fly (aside from animals, obviously) are under the jurisdiction of the FAA by default.

There's plenty of statute and precedent making it blindingly clear that this is the case.

Aviation GPS typically have a greater update rate, and support WAAS (wide area augmentation system) and RAIM (receiver autonomous integrity monitoring).

> Some time late in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute commute.

Nah, the second phase of the Expo line will be complete in a few years, and the purple line will be finished long before then, too. Won't be quite 15 minutes, but should be under 25.

Keep in mind that the Mormon church funds about half of the homeless program in Salt Lake City. They also donate free food to anyone in need. I would argue that the outcomes (for both homeless and non-homeless residents) are better in SLC than SF, but the total amount spent per homeless person is not radically different between the two cities.

When the above is combined with the fact that SLC has fewer homeless per capita, it's easy to see why the SLC method looks like the easy way out.

> Can you show that [generating a number of records to skip instead of a yes/no for each record] will still maintain a uniform probability distribution?

That should work if you pull the skip count from the appropriate distribution (negative binomial, I think).

Prior to their communist revolutions, both the USSR and PRC were actually practicing something not very different from feudalism. In fact, one of the reforms of the last Tsar was to unbind (legally, if not in practice) serfs from their estates.

Perhaps it tells you something about how strongly the employee feels about the company's work that he is willing to say something like this in public. For such a big problem, firing the employee won't make it go away.

Well, except that the same thing has been found in other studies as well. The results of this study are completely unsurprising to anyone who has read any other study of helmet laws in his/her life.

At some point you just have to accept the evidence.

> In fact, you can always observe which slit the particle passes through, so measurement has no effect on the wave interference pattern.

The first half of that sentence is true, while the second half is not (unless I am misinterpreting what you are trying to say).

Empirically, nobody has (yet) managed to come up with an experiment that measures which slit the photon/electron/other quantum object passes through AND preserves the wave nature of the double-slit effect. In other words, when you set up an experiment to measure which slit is traversed, the characteristic double-slit interference pattern disappears. Again, I'm talking about this purely in practice, or what people observe when they try to perform this experiment[1].

Theoretically, this is result is completely expected. To determine which slit the photon traversed, you must interact with the photon to observe it. Any observation has two results: First, you know the state of the quantum object. Second, the quantum object is in an eigenstate of whatever operator you used to observe it. Since you have forced the photon into an eigenstate, the interference pattern disappears.

[1] Not that you can still see two superimposed single-slit interference patterns, which might confuse some people into thinking they are seeing a double-slit pattern.

Yup, and the CPU in that one is slower than the CPU in a (base-model) Mid-2011 Mini. What a deal!

Part of the problem with that technique is that the waves are effectively propagating in a waveguide (between the surface of the earth and the ionosphere). So the characteristics of the waveguide (such as the conductivity of the ground) influence the speed of propagation. It's certainly important for things like LORAN, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't for this.