The bottom interactive graph is kinda neat. Setting zero friction and minimal spring tension and gravity center turns the whole thing into a spheroidal structure much like the accretion of objects in space.
Animals do not grow as fast on grass. Also, they do not taste the way Americans like their animals to taste. Land availability also plays a factor as it takes more acre per animal using grass vs corn/sugar.
It's not that ship spinning is some preferred activity in Eve, it's simply a preferred activity vs. Captains Quarters (CQ). The problem with CQ is that it did not run very good on most machines and the movement of the characters was very stiff. Also the load times to get to CQ were longer than that of ship spinning.
As far as the item shop, it turned out that a monocle cost around $80 after converting isk (in game currency) into real money via the purchase of plex (Eve supported gold buying). The items were grossly over priced which made CCP seem like a desperate broke evil corporation with which the player base has lost most of it's trust with.
As far as the direction of the game, with the introduction of a long awaited feature, Captains Quarters, that was not even completed upon release, it made it seem that CCP was not willing to listen to the wants of the player base in which direction they should devote their programming hours. Plenty of activities in Eve have not been updated nor has the game play had an injecting of new and invigorating play style in a few years. With CCP's latest move, it has made me and other players think twice about investing more time in a game that the developers seem to no longer care about.
'Ship spinning' also covers an easier way to access certain well-used menus for managing your ship, without having to open the 'Ships' window. The 'spinning' part is a minor loss, not being able to easily access cargo/fuel/hangars is a major UI drawback.
Free only works if everyone participates equally. If just one person is lazy, the system crumbles from resentment.
Money does not create inequality, it simply is the scorecard to show the inequality of those people involved in the system. In a system not corrupted by greed and theft, those with money are simply people that work harder, and/or smarter than those who have less money.
Your final statement only holds if (a) all environments in which people live are equally rich in opportunity/resources or (b) there are sufficient environments with adequate opportunity/resources to which people can move cheaply. That is not the world we currently occupy.
Most of the laws (as summarized on the page) seem to address only interfering with a person making a call ("it is a crime for batterers to prevent their victims from making a call for help") or interrupting the service (prank calls?). If BART is the one providing the service (or at least the communications medium), it'd be harder to say they are interfering. They simply stopped offering the service. Also, it's pretty rare for an agency like BART to be charged with crimes.
The worst that's likely to happen is someone sues them, but good luck proving damages.
I'm pretty sure being able to use your cell phone to dial 911 is a basic human right in America.
You can pick up any cellphone that has a battery in it, regardless of contract status, and call 911. That is of course unless you ride BART during a protest, a time when you are much more likely to be in need of emergency services.
Sure, given that you have reception. Is BART obligated to provide you reception?
If you say yes, how about the USFS? When I'm up in the mountains in land managed by the USFS, I cannot always place a 911 call. Can I sue the USFS for obstructing one of my most basic human rights, access to rapid sophisticated medical response?
Do the mountains have cell towers that are shut off when it is politically inconvenient? If it does, then yes, I would recommend legal action if you needed to contact emergency services and couldn't because they went out of their way to shut them off.
BART is fairly dangerous. It has it's own dedicated police force. Is it ok for movie theaters to jam cell phones? What happens when someone dies because they couldnt get thru to 911 during a protest in a major city? What about when they shut the Internet off during a riot in NY?
What's funny about all this is that cutting off communication stops people from calling in emergency, thus preventing life saving services from arriving at the scene in a timely manner. "shutdown the cellphone service for the safety of everyone". Sounds reminiscent of President Hosni Mubarak's plan of stopping the protest by shutting down cellphone and internet.
We need to hurry up and give our government the ability to have an Internet off switch, you know, for the safety of everyone.
If I buy a cellphone jammer and run it on my property near a government building because there is a protest going on... for the safety of everyone. I would be immediately arrested upon discovery of what I was doing.
I've always been curious about this. If electrons are spheres and so are protons and neutrons, what type of matter is filling up the area in between? Are protons and neutrons not spheres? Can electrons get squished into different shapes depending on arrangement? Or, does there even have to be matter in the voids surrounding adjacent spheres?
Strictly speaking, I don't think these things have a 'size' with a border where you can be inside or outside of a lepton 'surface'. Its a basically a point source with a field effect as far as we can determine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius
I think the article is saying that the field affect appears to be completely uniform.
Technically, if the electron can affect something at a great distance via gravity or releasing photons you could say the size of an electron is many light years in diameter. Or you could call it infinitesimally tiny.
Neutrons and protons we know to be complicated little parties of quarks and gluons, each of which are, as far as we know, are also elementary particles like leptons.
I wondered about this too. It's not a point, though, that doesn't make sense in QM. So do they mean that the wave function is totally spherical?
Plus I want to point out that it's pointless to say that something is spherical to within 1e-20m unless you also say what the "radius" is. If the radius is 1e-21m it's not a very good sphere at all...
On microscale it's wrong to think about "in between".
There is no in between, there are vacuum, fields (quantized),
field state evolution and amplitudes between initial and final states and so on.
Protons and neutrons are not spheres exactly. They are made of 3 quarks and have a structure.
Electrons are point particles - they are true 0 dimensional objects - they have no size at all. However they do have an equivalent wavelength due to their mass, and they have an area of influence.
There are voids. A lot of voids. A good deal of matter (even solid) are actually 'nothing'. If you take materials science, you get the 'atoms made of hard ball' approximation of the world (which usually yields pretty good answers), and even then, the densest you can get anything like 75% matter or something. And that's severely high-balling it (the ball radius approximates the electron cloud as a hard continuous shell, when it's really actually mostly just empty.
These voids are actually full of a crazy mess of virtual particles that exist within time/energy uncertainty. Empty space isn't really a meaningful concept when you're dealing with field theories.
When you study quantum field theory one of the first mind blowing things that you learn is that an electron at rest can be thought of as a superposition of an infinite number of somewhat classical scenarios. For instance, the electron can shoot of a virtual photon, which creates an electron/positron pair, which annhilate and create a new photon, which is then absorbed by the original electron. These processes can be arbitrarily complex; just imagine substituting in the whole process we just described for the electron that was pair produced- you can do that as many times as you want. These things are all ocurring at once. This leads to the necessity of renormalization and in turn a great joke. What is positive infinity plus negative infinity? If you ask a mathematician he'll tell you that it's undefined. If you ask a physicist he'll tell you it's the mass of the electron.
In between atoms is nothing. Inside atoms (between the electrons and the nucleus) is more nothing. Electrons are point particles and have no size. In between the protons and neutrons of the nucleus is nothing. Inside a proton are quarks, and between those quarks is nothing. Quarks themself are point particles and have no size.
"If electrons are spheres and so are protons and neutrons, what type of matter is filling up the area in between?"
In quantum theory, a particle is described as a probability field that fills space. For example, an electron might have a 2.5% chance of being in some little cube of space, a 10% chance in a nearby cube, and so forth. The rules for how it works are called quantum mechanics.
So the particles are fuzzy. They have no defined size, they can overlap with each other, and so forth.
As usual, this research has been simplified to the point of silliness for the popular press. What they probably mean is that a particular electron orbital in a particular type of atom was measured to be spherically symmetric. That means that they went looking for lumpiness of that electron's probability cloud and found to be perfectly smooth and round.
Particle accelerators have already measured this smoothness at high energies. They crash electrons together at high speed, watch how they scatter off each other, and the scattering statistics are consistent with electrons having no internal bits and pieces. They're just smooth, continuous electron all the way through. (Proton collisions scatter as if there are lots of lumpy bits inside. The bits turn out the be quarks and gluons.)
"Can electrons get squished into different shapes depending on arrangement?"
Yes. While electrons can overlap because their borders are fuzzy, they repel each other in the process, changing each other's shapes.
More and more people have been bringing laptops to some of my classes. I find the clicking keys to be very annoying. I'd go nuts if the whole class typed their notes.
