♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

ps - "mops" is pug in german

thanks for nybooks article link! great!

ha i will have a look in the gummi section of my supermarket next time e! (there is a gummi section. it is next to the ritter sport section.)

:D

where are you going to be working now again?

so many bores complaining about comic sans in the higgs slides

i am in munich for the next couple of years i think xp

that's a nice city, i have some cousins there. one is a foxy tv presenter, i'll send you her facebook.

i like foxy people

ugh i hate this shit

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/523589_444526022235081_226372658_n.jpg

there was an article on cnn headlined "what you need to know about the higgs boson" and i was hoping it would just "what everyone already thought was true is true, move along"

xp

you would hope that people who pride themselves on knowing about science might have some understanding of the way popular journalism works but hey ho

dear christians

it is called the god particle because it is the final piece of matter required to build the altar upon which we summon mighty cthulhu

aka "the where-is-your-god-now particle"

i feel like it's kid of a a mixture of solipsism and total fucking ignorance about everything

xp

kid = kind

also ungratefulness re: the $10bn particle physics got from european taxpayers (although tbf most of the people posting stuff like that are dawkins-type dilletantes seeking to align themselves with "science")

yeah that's why i said "knowing about science" rather than being actually in the field or anything.

yep. that kind of person is not a minority in science, but scientists are a minority of that kind of person.

Hi dere caek, refereeing question for u -- when determining stoppage time, what factors would make a referee initially call for 5 minutes and then increase that time to over 8 minutes?

stoppages within stoppage time

Otm. If not that then was this a game with a 4th official?

yes

does the 4th official set a suggested minimum that the ref can over-rule? i cdn't remember

basically shakes out like this

5 min stoppage time announced
~3 minutes in, player commits second yellow card foul, is sent off, but does not leave field of play immediately
player's coach protests, is also ejected & leaves slowly
once play resumes, play continues up into 8th minute of stoppage when 10-man team scores goal, game immediately ends

(and yes this means the team I support was denied a win but I am trying to understand this from an objective point of view)

time can and is added during extra time

e.g. i think there's an explicit directive to add at least 30s for ever substitution during extra time

so sounds like the ref added some time for the nonsense

i'm not actually sure if the ref can overrule the 4th off. he can certainly overrule the linesmen.

that's what I figured, thx!

'ello caek. The bbc reckons (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20249753) that 42 light-years away is "not too far away". it bloody is, isn't it?

probably wdn't get mobile reception but in galactic terms 42 light years is knack all iirc

we are not galactic we are humantic.

speak for yourself i am made of star stuff iirc

we should invade now while they're still in the early 1970's. hippies'll never know what hit'em.

the second nearest star to us (i.e. after the sun) is 4 ly away. Our galaxy is about 50,000 ly across. so 42 ly is "the solar neighborhood".

i guess it's like saying, compared to the entire plant earth, woking is not too far away from london. obviously if you can't move then woking is effectively very far away. in this metaphor, we are shut-ins in woking.

so where is Hull then? is there a part of the galaxy that looks forlornly outwards idly waiting to be slowly engulfed?

how has the world of physics reacted to

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-denise-milani-conspiracy-honey-trap-professor-gets-five-years-in-argentina-jail-8340525.html

One observation: A physicist I know posted it on his Facebook not one hour ago.

Professor Frampton, described by his 71-year-old ex-wife as a “naive fool”, said he had been lured into travelling to South America by criminals posing as the amply-proportioned fitness trainer...

ex-wife otm

Ha, yeah. It's kind of ridiculous, right. He's a particle physicist so I never met him, but I know ppl who have. Tbh it kind of surprises me that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Many male physicists (especially toward the maths/high energy theory end) are a little, ahem, wet behind the ears. I mean even the person who told me this story struck me as the kind if person to whom it could happen.

He sounds like he is safer in prison than in the real world.

I like that he has published papers with the prison as his affiliation: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/nov/22/paul-frampton-hit-by-56-month-drugs-sentence

hay caek is "exotic matter" in this any more than subtle handwaving? What are my chances of actually getting to alpha centauri in my lifetime? And does FTL always and irrevocably imply time travel (which is problematic obviously) or is there any kind of loophole there?

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive?post=54599539

"exotic" is a term of art in particle physics, so it's a weird choice, but they don't give any indication they are actually talking about exotic matter. i think here they just mean regular mass that is converted into energy by nuclear fission or whatever, yielding e=mc2.

the point with this thing, afaict, is that it does not involve faster than light travel. imagine spacetime is a living room rug. you can't walk across the rug at FTL, but given preposterously contrived circumstances, someone else can stretch the rug in such a way just that your location changes in a way that is equivalent to moving (and perhaps a very long way very quickly).

key quote: "Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice."

also i have no idea if the field equations even predict this is possible. i skipped gen rel (via not being clever enough).

the point with this thing, afaict, is that it does not involve faster than light travel.

but it still effectively means a signal could propagate faster than light. no?

ha, i guess. god i never understood this stuff.

is anything faster than aaron lennon over five yards tho

where is layman's maths-free guide to GR. anyway i guess this is mostly bullshit, no trips to stars near or far in my or maybe anyone's lifetime, sadface. what a senseless waste.

cheer up, maybe the onset of catastrophic climate change will focus minds on ways to get out of this solar system pronto