three random things makes a random post
Aug. 17th, 2016 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevencharismatic fauna:
courtesy UPI.
ok, you probably saw that already. fine. i like it.
ars technica reports couple of small victories for privacy, one of which allows gügle to be sued for scanning all email sent to gmail, even by people who haven't agreed to their 'privacy' policy. excellent! i await my pile of money; or more likely i'll have to opt out of the lawyer-enriching bogus settlement and pursue my own case. that's fine; the class action suit will do most of the work for me.
i watched particle fever last night. it's an ok documentary about the large hadron collider and the race for the higgs boson, but not a great one. the introduction is very slow, since the movie spends a lot of time introducing some LHC scientists and the science. yup, scientists often aren't motivated by the same things as non-scientists. thanks, i knew that. perhaps a non-scientist would like the beginning more than i do.
the movie starts to get going after one spoiler and really gets its act together after the other spoiler. after that, it's a great documentary. shame about the first two-thirds, though.
the movie improves after the LHC springs a helium leak, which causes the superconducting magnets in a section of the ring to quench (rapidly stop superconducting) and melt. this takes the LHC out of action for almost a year while it's repaired and upgraded. needless to say, this boo-boo generates a lot of interesting reactions among the people involved.
the movie really hits its stride after the data suggests a possible mass for the higgs boson (140 GeV, or almost exactly 140 times heavier than a proton == atomic mass units == daltons). this apparently is an unmagic number that strongly indicates that not only are there infinitely many universes, but also that we can't know anything about them. this makes physicists crazy, in the same way that gödel's incompleteness theorem made math jocks crazy: "what!? we can't know everything!? it's all over! we're doomed!"
fortunately for them, this turns out to be a false alarm, and the real value of 126.5 means that we have no clue what's happening. everybody's thrilled: more stuff to discover. well, everybody except those with pet theories which have been blown to hell by that value. but details, details.
i'm not sure if i can recommend particle fever. maybe non-scientists will like it from beginning to end. people who know science stuff should probably watch the first little bit to learn who the players are, then keep an itchy fast-forward finger to skip forward until they reach the start of the good part. i think it's obvious. or, y'all could just skip the whole movie. hard to say.
courtesy UPI.
ok, you probably saw that already. fine. i like it.
ars technica reports couple of small victories for privacy, one of which allows gügle to be sued for scanning all email sent to gmail, even by people who haven't agreed to their 'privacy' policy. excellent! i await my pile of money; or more likely i'll have to opt out of the lawyer-enriching bogus settlement and pursue my own case. that's fine; the class action suit will do most of the work for me.
i watched particle fever last night. it's an ok documentary about the large hadron collider and the race for the higgs boson, but not a great one. the introduction is very slow, since the movie spends a lot of time introducing some LHC scientists and the science. yup, scientists often aren't motivated by the same things as non-scientists. thanks, i knew that. perhaps a non-scientist would like the beginning more than i do.
the movie starts to get going after one spoiler and really gets its act together after the other spoiler. after that, it's a great documentary. shame about the first two-thirds, though.
the movie improves after the LHC springs a helium leak, which causes the superconducting magnets in a section of the ring to quench (rapidly stop superconducting) and melt. this takes the LHC out of action for almost a year while it's repaired and upgraded. needless to say, this boo-boo generates a lot of interesting reactions among the people involved.
the movie really hits its stride after the data suggests a possible mass for the higgs boson (140 GeV, or almost exactly 140 times heavier than a proton == atomic mass units == daltons). this apparently is an unmagic number that strongly indicates that not only are there infinitely many universes, but also that we can't know anything about them. this makes physicists crazy, in the same way that gödel's incompleteness theorem made math jocks crazy: "what!? we can't know everything!? it's all over! we're doomed!"
fortunately for them, this turns out to be a false alarm, and the real value of 126.5 means that we have no clue what's happening. everybody's thrilled: more stuff to discover. well, everybody except those with pet theories which have been blown to hell by that value. but details, details.
i'm not sure if i can recommend particle fever. maybe non-scientists will like it from beginning to end. people who know science stuff should probably watch the first little bit to learn who the players are, then keep an itchy fast-forward finger to skip forward until they reach the start of the good part. i think it's obvious. or, y'all could just skip the whole movie. hard to say.