I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.
Summary for those who won't fight through four blocking pop-ups to read the article:
When a high-energy particle (cosmic ray, say) hits ice, it creates an interaction cascade. (Think of what the Fly's Eye experiment sees, but in ice.) That interaction cascade creates (among other things) a radio signal. This detector is a radio detector under Antarctic ice, looking for exactly that.
The point is that, if a high-energy neutrino were to hit the ice, it could create the same kind of cascade, but it would make it much further into the ice. By having multiple detectors, they can pin down the location, and so they can try to tell the difference between "regular" cosmic rays and high-energy neutrinos.
The detector seems to be functioning as designed. They have seven candidate neutrino interactions.
Let me clarify, as someone involved in writing this paper.
This radio emisison (Askaryan emission) is the mechanism by which we hope to detect neutrinos with detectors like ARA (and also PUEO, RNO-G, etc. which I also work on :) ), but these events are actually candidate impacting cosmic rays. UHE cosmic rays (protons, and heavier nuclei) are charged particles that will start cascading in the atmosphere, but in certain near- vertical geometries, the shower is not "expended" before reaching the ice (which lies at an altitude of ~3km), so the dense shower core enters the ice, producing radio emission from the same mechanism through which we hope to detect neutrinos. While the Askaryan mechanism was detected in ice in beam line experiments and also in the atmosphere (where it is subdominant to radio emission from charged particles bending in the Earth's magnetic field), this is the first detection of the Askaryan effect in natural ice, proving that the emission matches our models. The cosmic rays themselves are not super interesting in the sense that there are other detectors that are much better at detecting cosmic rays (e.g .TA or Pierre Auger).
Follow up question: So if it's a cosmic ray, it has to be near vertical, or it would interact with the atmosphere and never make it to the ice? So if it's far from vertical, then it was a high-energy neutrino? Do I have that right?
It has to be nearish vertical (how close depends on energy, but it's a pretty wide band around vertical) so that all of its energy is not absorbed in the atmosphere. As you get closer to horizontal trajectories you go through way more atmosphere. Neutrino-induced cascade would typically be initiated within the ice , not at the surface (in principle they could be at the surface but we would reject them since it's much more likely that it's something else in that case).
I just turned off my ad blocker to see how bad it is. Because with it turned on I didn't see any popups.
They have Google ads on their site promoting a paid ad free version of their site? WTF? Why would you pay google to put ads for on your site for your own service?
> The world will never run out oil supply, demand will likely go first.
Not sure I buy that. Oil will still be in demand as a chemical feedstock. In fact, there are already people saying that oil is too precious to use as a fuel.
Oil will only be in demand as a chemical feedstock as long as it's economically competitive with the alternatives. There's a substitute for virtually every petrochemical process if oil becomes scare (or expensive) enough.
Substitution is highly impractical in the short term but in a conversations of decades/centuries it's significant. Venezuela's reserves alone could run the world's petrochemicals for 60 years (Gemini) so it's a realistic perspective. Together with other proven reserves we could be okay for centuries.
Some oil fields also produce Helium. That's actually an element we don't have plenty of anyway. But most don't do that, the toxic black goop they're producing is almost all just a mess of Hydrogen + Carbon chains. Similarly "Natural gas" ie Methane is just CH4.
If we have plenty of energy anyway we can just make exactly what we need, no need to drill for a mix of pot luck hydrocarbons. If we don't have enough energy anyway then we're burning hydrocarbons to get energy and we might as well use them as a feedstock too.
As I got older and more experienced, I didn't produce code faster. I just produced the right code. If you don't have to try five different things, and debug them along the way, you can be a lot faster without "going fast".
I've seen people work very quickly to create vaporware. I've seen people spend a week to change 2 lines of code and save a release. I don't know how people who practice engineering haven't seen these types of things happen.
I've even seen a guy spend most of his work hours as a mentor even though his title was something like senior engineer. If anyone fired him that company would tank so fast...
The Wikipedia page for it is pretty good. Basically, there are a number of short-chain carbohydrates that tend to pass through the small intestine (where nutrients are digested and absorbed into the bloodstream) and reach the large intestine (where water is removed). Bacteria in the large intestine eat these nutrients (fermentation). In some people, this causes intestinal distress. (Bloating, gas, discomfort, watery stool, etc.) It's not clear why this only affects some people.
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. FODMAPs generate gas as side effect of being fermented in the gut. Most people just pass this gas, but for some people, usually people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), it can be very uncomfortable and amplify their other IBS problems.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
But when you see people confidently stating unreasonable things in short posts, it's a common tip-off for a bot/shill/zealot/troll. When they assume a starting point that is two standard deviations out of most peoples' Overton Window, and they don't defend it, just kind of "Of course X is true", that's someone who is blasting propaganda, not having a reasonable discussion. They just want to say "X is true" enough times that people start to believe it.
As I said, that's not 100%. For any individual instance, you can look at their posting history. But for a comment section, when you start to see such posts taking over more and more of the discussion, you can say that the discussion has been taken over with very close to 100% certainty, even if you can't be certain about any one post.
That works... for the duration of this administration. Given the precedent, though, there's no reason for the next president not to fire all the new ones and replace them again.
The current administration does not appear to care at all about what the next administration will do, which should terrify us. It's like a kidnapper who doesn't seem concerned with you seeing their face.
All right, let's say that the current war isn't legal, and neither was Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. It's not what the Constitution says, but it's been that way for a long time, across multiple presidents of both parties.
The current setup has gone from "only Congress can declare war, requiring a majority of Congress" to "Congress has to pass a War Powers resolution to stop the president from going to war, with enough of a majority that they can override a presidential veto". That is a massively different standard, and was done without amending the Constitution.
So I agree with you. Just don't try to make this something special to Trump, because it's not.
I got "rated limited" by HN after 2 whole comments. Rediculous.
Anyway, I agree with you fully. And I firmly believe the world would be a better place had we actually weighed each of those conflicts and voted to officially declare war or not. Those presidents knew what they were doing and should be tried for it.
Just like Trump should be today.
He's not special, but I'm not sure I can bring LBJ or Nixon back from the dead and stop the Vietnam War. Meanwhile this is an active conflict that can be stopped now.
Though I would argue that, yes, this time is different. At least those pretended to have a justification.
Off topic: Does it blow anyone else's mind that a DRAM chip has more transistors on it than there are humans on the planet?
reply