In other news today...
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
Why make one so monstrously large?
Because they assume it doesn't matter because no-one expects a large icon to screw up the OS?
Why would a large icon crash the phone as opposed to, I dunno, displaying a default icon or not drawing an icon at all?
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Because after the EU referendum, Tory leadership contest and Labour having another vote to confirm that yes, people do actually want Jeremy Corbyn, the British public obviously aren't thoroughly sick of votes yet.
This will probably result in a stronger Tory majority and keep them in power until 2022
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@RaceProUK his party don't but the actual members seem rather keen on him. Possibly due to the other guy being completely forgettable
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In other news today, the font looks different.
Is the font different, or is it just me?
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@anotherusername It's definitely different: it's rendering in Roboto now.
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@RaceProUK
@ben_lubar is testing for next year's AFD CSS?
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@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername It's definitely different: it's rendering in Roboto now.
It's change. I'm not sure I like it.
It doesn't have the same aspect ratio as the old font, so it seems kinda stretched.
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@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
It's change. I'm not sure I like it.
It's probably a change on your machines. Everything looks the same to me today.
There was some recent discussion about this starting here:
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/21933/america-first/80
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
It's probably a change on your machines. Everything looks the same to me today.
Same here.
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The odd thing is, in that thread, it shows my machine using the same font it does now. Yet the text looks different.
Note to self: check machines at home - there may be a difference.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
It's probably a change on your machines. Everything looks the same to me today.
Same here.
It looks different now I'm on Windows & Chrome rather than OSX & Firefox. I'm not sure if it is different though or if I'm imagining it.
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@loopback0 Windows systems typically don't have Roboto installed (not by default, anyway), and the fallback font is more likely to be Arial than e.g. San Francisco or Lucida Sans or whatever.
Then again, Roboto is loaded here from Google Fonts, so it should be the same on all devices
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Mine is getting overridden by my theme (Slate) anyway, so I don't have Roboto in play at all.
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@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
Windows systems typically don't have Roboto installed
Neither does OSX.
@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
Roboto is loaded here from Google Fonts
Yeah, that.
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Hmm
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@loopback0 It's not the difference I'm seeing, but...
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@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
In other news today, the font looks different.
Is the font different, or is it just me?
Ok... here's what the font looked like yesterday...
And here's what it looks like now:
There's definitely a difference.
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@loopback0 OSX and Windows have slightly different implementations of cleartype tech that MS created and patented in the late 90s. Part of the patent sharing deal with MS that Apple when MS gave them a life line back in the late 90s was the cleartype patent.
Fedora and other distros who's parent company were in the US wouldn't include the same patches as Microsoft at the time had a patent on cleartype technology. On Fedora you had to install something like infinality patches. Where Ubuntu could get around this as Canonical is registered in the Isle of Man if I remember correctly so they could bundle the packages. The patent expired last year so now Font Rendering works fine in non-ubuntu distros.
Firefox, Chrome/Opera, Safari and Edge all have different ways of rendering fonts as well.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@loopback0 It's not the difference I'm seeing, but...
I have noticed font rendering differences between major versions of chrome.
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I'd like if I could stop my stupid mobile browser from loading custom fonts and avoid wasting my bandwidth with this silliness.
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To add to the fire: I've now seen the font on two machines I use daily, and it looks different on them both.
But here's the weird thing: they're both rendering in Roboto.
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@RaceProUK one of them probably has the old version cached. Or, the new version hasn't rolled out to some Google servers yet, and one of the computers is hitting a server that has the old version.
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@RaceProUK I'd love to see an analysis of that by someone who understands the QM behind it. The abstract in the paper goes over my head completely
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@Jaloopa said in In other news today...:
@RaceProUK I'd love to see an analysis of that by someone who understands the QM behind it. The abstract in the paper goes over my head completely
Yeah, I felt this way, too.
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A negative effective mass can be realized in quantum systems by engineering the dispersion relation. A powerful method is provided by spin-orbit coupling, which is currently at the center of intense research efforts. Here we measure an expanding spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate whose dispersion features a region of negative effective mass. We observe a range of dynamical phenomena, including the breaking of parity and of Galilean covariance, dynamical instabilities, and self-trapping. The experimental findings are reproduced by a single-band Gross-Pitaevskii simulation, demonstrating that the emerging features—shock waves, soliton trains, self-trapping, etc.—originate from a modified dispersion. Our work also sheds new light on related phenomena in optical lattices, where the underlying periodic structure often complicates their interpretation.
Bold is up to the point I got lost
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@RaceProUK An important point to note in that article is a quote from one of the scientists:
What's a first here is the exquisite control we have over the nature of this negative mass, without any other complications
In other words, this isn't the first time we've got negative mass, and although negative mass is exciting, it's not as exciting as it sounds, and it's almost certainly never going to be possible to use it to run a warp engine.
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@CarrieVS
soo. no mass effect field?
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@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
Physicists have created a fluid with negative mass, which accelerates backwards when pushed.
Cats have done that for ages.
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@Jarry 'fraid not.
That one appears to use some kind of exotic matter that can have negative mass. This and the other one I knew a little about, the Casimir effect, seem to involve doing weird things to matter and/or energy in a small region.
It has been suggested that the Casimir effect could power an Alcubierre drive, but from my limited understanding it sounds like pure wishful thinking. Not that that stopped me from picking that over exotic matter in a sci-fi universe I hope to set a book in at some point, which was the reason I looked into all this.
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@CarrieVS said in In other news today...:
@RaceProUK An important point to note in that article is a quote from one of the scientists:
What's a first here is the exquisite control we have over the nature of this negative mass, without any other complications
In other words, this isn't the first time we've got negative mass, and although negative mass is exciting, it's not as exciting as it sounds, and it's almost certainly never going to be possible to use it to run a warp engine.
Please stop killing my dreams
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@Boner said in In other news today...:
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Previously, these apps were “free with new device purchase,” which meant that many but not all Apple device users had them; Apple started bundling the apps with new iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac devices in 2013.
Now, however, anyone with and iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac can download the apps for free, even if they bought their device before 2013. The change was first spotted by MacRumors and subsequently confirmed by TechCrunch.No idea about iWork but I had GarageBand and iMovie for free, on my refurbished 2011 Macbook bought in 2012. When was this supposed time when these apps weren't included?
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@hungrier So Apple has run out of ideas to copy and claim as original from other people and have started in on their own previous ideas?
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@RaceProUK I understood the "which is currently at the center of intense research efforts." part too
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@CarrieVS just tell me what I have to eat to gain negative mass
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@wharrgarbl Apparently lasers and -270 degrees atoms.
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@Magus said in In other news today...:
@wharrgarbl Apparently lasers and -270 degrees atoms.
Or lasers and 90° atoms. Same result.
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@wharrgarbl said in In other news today...:
just tell me what I have to eat to gain negative mass
Try this:
Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight.
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@antiquarian said in In other news today...:
CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings.
Before Pratchett & Gaiman came up with this, Fred Pohl postulated what he called "CHON food", a synthetic mishmash of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms arranged in a way that it satisfied all nutritional requirements and no aesthetic ones like taste or appearance. It was touted as a cheap solution to world hunger.
What the other authors have apparently done is replace the nitrogen with tungsten, turning into something more expensive and nutritionally worthless.
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@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
<rant>Goddamn condensed-matter physicists are always putting out news reports that make their work sound like physics-defying magic and hoping nobody notices the weasel words "effective", "virtual", or "quasi". Then readers are disappointed when the magic is completely useless in that you can't do anything with it.
Previously seen:
- "Light going faster than the speed of light": except the velocity that matters for sending signals is group velocity, which is always at most c. Although, in this experiment, the presence of weird materials muddy even the definition of group velocity, so nobody knows what speed anything is traveling at, or even in what direction.
- "Magnetic monopoles discovered": "The [magnetic] charge isn't attached to any physical object, but it behaves just as a monopole would." It's a quasi-particle, not a new fundamental particle, meaning it's a collective effect of many super-cooled particles. Fake
newsparticle!
Bastards!</rant>
Anyway (enough of my fundamental particle physics bias), the key term in this paper is effective mass: a concept used to simplify the models of electrons and other particles moving through condensed matter like semiconductor crystals or, in this case, a Bose-Einstein condensate, so they more closely approximate the simpler motion of particles in a vacuum. This allows calculations that effectively ignore the complicated surrounding structure. Because effective mass is a mathematical trick with a tenuous connection to reality, it can take on arbitrary values, even negative. In this way, it's a bit similar to creating faster-that-light motion by shining a laser pointer at the moon and then flicking your wrist to the side. The spot will move at a speed faster than light, but the spot is not really a physical thing, to relativity is still valid.
The dispersion relation refers to how different wavelengths/energies move through a medium at varying speeds. This can be seen in waves on the surface of water here. Notice how individual waves (red dots) can move faster than the "pulses" (green dots). If the waves were light, that's how you get faster-than-light light. It is primarily a wave concept, and the current experiment is primarily explained in terms of the wave properties of matter, so talking about mass without distinguishing between particle mass and effective mass doesn't serve much purpose in a news article meant for the wider public other than being able to talk about "negative mass" weirdness.
The actually cool result of the paper: Specially shaped particle traps can cause particles to move in the opposite direction of applied forces, hence the "negative" effective mass. Remember that the effective mass concept is meant to allow scientists to ignore the surrounding structure, so the particles are responding to other forces that are left out of the effective mass model. But, the paper (which I have, if anyone is interested) is an experimental demonstration that the effective mass model is accurate. The experiment matches computer simulations, so the negative effective mass was expected. This is still cool since it can help explain the microscopic behavior of semiconductors, where the crystal structure acts similarly to the artificial particle trap. Common descriptions describe the activity inside the semiconductor with moving electrons and positively charged "holes" which are really where electrons have vacated. These holes act like independent particles (quasiparticles) and the negative effective mass of surrounding electrons helps explain their persistence.
Condensed-matter physicists are still marketing-level, double-talking bastards, though.
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@RaceProUK said in In other news today...:
A negative effective mass can be realized in quantum systems by engineering the dispersion relation. A powerful method is provided by spin-orbit coupling, which is currently at the center of intense research efforts. Here we measure an expanding spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate whose dispersion features a region of negative effective mass. We observe a range of dynamical phenomena, including the breaking of parity and of Galilean covariance, dynamical instabilities, and self-trapping. The experimental findings are reproduced by a single-band Gross-Pitaevskii simulation, demonstrating that the emerging features—shock waves, soliton trains, self-trapping, etc.—originate from a modified dispersion. Our work also sheds new light on related phenomena in optical lattices, where the underlying periodic structure often complicates their interpretation.
Thanks for dumbing it down for us.
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@MZH said in In other news today...:
Condensed-matter physicists are still marketing-level, double-talking bastards, though.
You cannot imagine my hatred for condensed-matter physicists.
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@chozang said in In other news today...:
@MZH said in In other news today...:
Condensed-matter physicists are still marketing-level, double-talking bastards, though.
You cannot imagine my hatred for condensed-matter physicists.
It sounds like there's a story here. Care to share?