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Your Next Project Starts with Brownstoner
By lechacal on February 18, 2011 9:28 AM
DH are you still planning on joining us today?
nope – have to work 🙁
“They do tend to show an amazing lack of logic when it comes to discussing economic and social issues for people with rigorous scientific training.”
An interesting rant from one of my “letter writers”
this is why I love financial people. Take the budget situation, take all the numbers and show them to financial people, and you know what financial people are going to say? They are going to say that you are completely out of your tree, that this thing is going to blow sky-high, and that they are going to move to Switzerland for a while to lay low while the rates market sorts this one out. Financial people know how this ends. You want to know why financial people know how this ends? Because most financial people (there are a few exceptions) know that you cannot deny reality, that if your budget revenue consists of $10 billion, that you can only spend $10 billion, and if you do spend more, and take out debt, it eventually must be repaid. That is what financial people know. Nonfinancial people do not know this, the numbers are too complicated, they have gone their entire lives with people making decisions for them about money. To understand money is to understand how the world works. People who don’t have a basic understanding of money shouldn’t be put in charge of anything. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
BDSM, there is no group of people anywhere on Earth that is easier to profile and stereotype than white liberals. They all think alike.
There’s nothing funnier than listening to some moonface chick with a women’s studies degree from hampshire college argue about global warming when 100% of her information comes from the Al Gore movie and a couple of NY Times op ed pieces, and then she inevitably resorts to calling anyone who disagrees with her “stupid” and “uneducated” because they just don’t understand science like she does. LOL.
The scientific community is no more immune to the perils of sheep-like behavior than the general population.
In some ways, they excuse their rigidity of thought with their degrees.
Case in point:
the global warming debate and the “hockey stick” papers.
Dave, apologies for last night’s error – I thought you said you make people flip to accommodate your preference. Must brush-up on my DIBS factoids.
“oh it’s thunken. half the moonfaces i see in supermarkets have EBT cards. it’s cuz it only goes by income. they dont count parent support OR trust funds if you could believe it!â€
Those moonfaces could be americorps volunteers – they make a very low salary and qualify for food stamps.
Legion – thanks for the article, I don’t doubt that states have major obligations, but they all don’t come due at once – looking at it one interest period at a time makes it a lot less scary.
nurses have science degrees technically.
’nuff said
*rob*
Morning, losers. I’m having a good hip day so I may crash this so-called republican lunch. Where are you going? Address?
I wish I could do lunch some time, but my I have meetings until 12:30 every Friday, and often have 1:00 or 1:30 meetings as well.
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Daily OT Science and Math Smackdown
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Legion and Bxgrl;
Here is the wikipedia entry for “Diffraction Grating”
“According to the Huygens–Fresnel principle, each point on the wavefront of a propagating wave can be considered to act as a point source, and the wavefront at any subsequent point can be found by adding together the contributions from each of these individual point sources.
An idealised grating is considered here which is made up of a set of long and infinitely narrow slits of spacing d. When a plane wave of wavelength λ is incident normally on the grating, each slit in the grating acts as a point source propagating in all directions. The light in a particular direction, θ, is made up of the interfering components from each slit. Generally, the phases of the waves from different slits will vary from one another, and will cancel one another out partially or wholly. However, when the path difference between the light from adjacent slits is equal to the wavelength, λ, the waves will all be in phase. This occurs at angles θm which satisfy the relationship dsinθm/λ=|m| where d is the separation of the slits and m is an integer”
Hence, my points:
-the phenomenon you described is known as a “diffraction grating”
-it can be precisely modelled by wave theory. Probability theory is not involved at all.
-Photon modelling is not involved at all either. The rule of thumb in modelling light propogation is that if the dimensionality of the problem approaches the wavelength of light, one must use wave theory, and that is the case with a diffraction grating. As another example, in fiber optics, wave modelling is used, and in fact the proper name for an optical fiber is “optical waveguide”.
As I mentioned, my company did alot of work in a particular form of a diffraction grating called an “Arrayed Waveguide Grating”. If you google that phrase and my name, you will find a paper I wrote on the topic with my Japanese colleagues about 12 years ago.