New efforts!

[JoshexProxy]

[citation needed]

I know, I wish I could remember which issues which articles, who said what etc. heck I wish the nintendo forums were still around.

over half of everything I've learned or read in my life has been deleted/removed, edited out, 404ed or buried under millions of pages of newer entries in google search or lost while moving or switching computers. Such is the cruel fate of citations.

[darkgob]

I know, I wish I could remember which issues which articles, who said what etc. heck I wish the nintendo forums were still around.

over half of everything I've learned or read in my life has been deleted/removed, edited out, 404ed or buried under millions of pages of newer entries in google search or lost while moving or switching computers. Such is the cruel fate of citations.

Must come in handy, not having to prove that you actually know things and are not just making them up out of whole cloth.

[LaughingAlex]

*decides to watch funny lets play videos on seeing Joshex once again disregarding past advice to cool it.*

[Suspicious Package]

good choice, I have 2 cockatoos and they are a blast.

I know maths.  2 cockatoos = 1 cockafours.

[Taceus Jiwede]

I know, I wish I could remember which issues which articles, who said what etc. heck I wish the nintendo forums were still around.

over half of everything I've learned or read in my life has been deleted/removed, edited out, 404ed or buried under millions of pages of newer entries in google search or lost while moving or switching computers. Such is the cruel fate of citations.

I think we just got a huge look at the real problem.  Most of the stuff you learned came from forums.

Hey Joshex.  Did you know I am the king of the universe?  You read it here first.  Bookmark that pancake and cite it anytime someone doesn't believe you.

[Arcana]

over half of everything I've learned or read in my life has been deleted/removed, edited out, 404ed or buried under millions of pages of newer entries in google search or lost while moving or switching computers. Such is the cruel fate of citations.

The problem is that over 95% of everything you've posted here is either massively overstated, subsequently retracted, completely made up, or trivial to falsify.  To make grand statements and claim that backing them up is difficult requires credibility.  Credibility is impossible to earn when all your posts sound like someone claiming to have built a time machine and end with people not even sure you've ever seen a clock in your life.

But even if I believe what you're saying, generalizing the ramblings of a game player internet forum echo chamber into statements about people you've never met and whose profession you have literally no idea about that are as strong as "they're lazy, they're bullied, they're mental" is the very essence of Dan Browning.  Thinking you know way more than you actually do, and splashing that ignorance widely in a way that everyone who actually knows anything is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're clueless.  And you're not as eloquent as Dan Brown is.

In fact, your posts read *exactly* like that Dan Brown intro for Angels and Demons:

FACT

The world's largest scientific research facility - Switzerland's Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) - recently succeeded in producing the first particles of antimatter. Antimatter is identical to physical matter except that it is composed of particles whose electric charges are opposite to those found in normal matter.

Antimatter is the most powerful energy source known to man. It releases energy with 100 percent efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5 percent efficient). Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation, and a droplet could power New York City for a full day.

There is, however, one catch . . .

Antimatter is highly unstable. It ignites when it comes in contact with absolutely anything ... even air.  A single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb - the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Until recently antimatter has been created only in very small amounts (a few atoms at a time). But CERN has now broken ground on its new Antiproton Decelerator - an advanced antimatter production facility that promises to create antimatter in much larger quantities.

One question looms: Will this highly volatile substance save the world, or will it be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made?

The intro starts by saying that the following is factual, then proceeds to be completely wrong in basically every respect.  But its wrong in a very specific way: as if the author spent ten minutes google searching the topic but had no capacity to understand what they were reading, but thinks they have a better understanding than they actually do.

1.  Angels and Demons was published in 2000.  The event Dan Brown was referring to was the turn up of the Antiproton Decelerator (he mentions it later).  The AD doesn't produce particles of antimatter.  It takes antimatter produced by CERNs main accelerator and slows them down to deliver to non-high energy collision experiments.  People have been making particles of antimatter for decades prior.

2.  Antimatter is not identical to normal matter except for electric charge.  Neutrons have no charge, but anti-neutrons exist and also have no charge.

3.  Antimatter is not technically speaking an energy source.  Antimatter as generated by humans can store energy, but it takes vastly more energy to make it than it can release.  Antimatter ultimately consumes net energy to produce on Earth.

4.  It makes no sense to talk about antimatter "efficiency."  When antimatter interacts with matter, 100% of the mass of the antimatter is converted to radiation (more on that in a moment).  But when uranium or plutonium generates heat through fission, less mass is converted into energy.  That doesn't necessarily make it less "efficient" unless you are measuring efficiency in terms of mass conversion.  We don't normally do that.  If that were the case, car engines wouldn't be tens of percentage points efficient, they would be 0.000000001% efficient or something.

5.  Even ignoring the nonsensical use of the word "efficiency" uranium and plutonium fission in nuclear reactors convert about a tenth of a percent of their mass into energy, and only a fraction of that gets converted into usable energy.  Best I can figure, Dan Brown stumbled across an article about *fusion* converting about one percent or so of the reaction mass into energy, conflated fusion with fission, mangled the definition of efficiency, and just plain made up the 1.5% number.

6.  Antimatter reacts with normal matter by annihilation and generates gamma rays as energy.  Saying antimatter creates no radiation is just plain nuts.

7.  Hypothetically speaking, if you possessed an amount of antimatter with the density of water, a "droplet" is going to contain a lot less than a gram of antimatter.  New York City uses about 10,000 megawatt-hours of electricity in a day.  That's about 3.6 x 10^14 joules.  In E=mc^2 terms one kilogram (1000 grams) converts to about 9 x 10^16 joules.  So one gram converts to 9 x 10^13 joules.  So that's about 4 grams of mass.  It takes 2 grams of mass to annihilate with two grams of matter to generate about that much energy, or about two sugar cube sized containers of water.  A very large droplet.  Not the worst error here, more like an exaggeration by a factor of about a hundred.

8.  Antimatter is not inherently unstable.

9.  Antimatter does not "ignite" when it comes into contact with air.  That's not how antimatter works.

10.  20 kilotons of explosive force roughly translates to about 8.4 x 10^13 joules.  That's about one gram of mass converted to energy.  Technically speaking, one gram of antimatter annihilates with one gram of matter, so a gram of antimatter has the energy potential of two grams of mass converted.  But this is actually almost right.  It is the only time Dan Brown is almost right.

11.  Little boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had a yield of 15 kilotons.  Fat man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was the bomb that had a yield of about 20 kilotons.

12.  In 2014, fourteen years after the time of writing, the Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons experiment (ASACUSA) generated and measured a beam of anti-hydrogen atoms composed of eighty atoms of anti-hydrogen.  This is "much larger" than one, but relative to the quantities Dan Brown suggests the Antiproton Decelerator "promises" to generate, not so much.  CERN has no plans to generate antimatter on anything remotely near the scale Dan Brown suggests is possible in his "FACT" section, nor do they have the technological capability to even contemplate doing so.

This is what Dan Brown calls "FACTS."  Just think about how good he is with the stuff he calls fiction.

[MM3squints]

I think we just got a huge look at the real problem.  Most of the stuff you learned came from forums.

Hey Joshex.  Did you know I am the king of the universe?  You read it here first.  Bookmark that pancake and cite it anytime someone doesn't believe you.

Forums are credible sources of information that dose not require small stuff life facts or citations. From this forum I am told you are a Time Traveling Elite Boss. It's not like such title is just given out arbitrarily. (I hope I don't need to put Kappa on this)

[ivanhedgehog]

I know maths.  2 cockatoos = 1 cockafours.

more like 22..they are explonential

[Ulysses Dare]

I know maths.  2 cockatoos = 1 cockafours.

Don't be silly. Obviously two cockatoos are a cockatwice.

[Arcana]

more like 22..they are explonential

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=bestanimations.com%2FMilitary%2FExplosions%2Fexplosion-animated-gif-1.gif

[LadyVamp]

I find this all very interesting and can see everyone's points.  We try to use agile/scrum at my company or rather one of our divisions does.  The division I work for runs the QA testing cloud for the applications development division.  Arcana, you stated in a previous post that developers can become timid when an org tries to do agile/scrum but they end up trying to still manage top down.  The application division does just that.  However, in my experience, the devs aren't becoming timid, they are becoming bolder.  And when they don't get what they want, they go crying to their managers claiming we are slowing them down.  What I do find is their ideas and almost always their attempt to design infrastructure almost always fails.  I also find they are highly resistant to documenting requirements often preferring to tell us how to do our jobs.  They code.  We manage infrastructure.

And lastly I'll say this.  I find that many devs are experts at teaching computers to do tasks, ie they know C, C++, C#, Java, etc. really well.  But, they are not experts at actually doing the tasks, ex. writing an encryption algorithm.  I also find that many devs want to design the tools they use not understanding that tool development is not their core business.

That, of course, is my opinion based on what I've observed over the last 45 years of my life.  Each of us has a unique set of experiences and may have different, even opposing opinions.

The one thing I know I can say we all share is the feelings and thoughts of our beloved city, our community, and what we built within City of Heroes/Villains.

LV

[JoshexProxy]

I find this all very interesting and can see everyone's points.  We try to use agile/scrum at my company or rather one of our divisions does.  The division I work for runs the QA testing cloud for the applications development division.  Arcana, you stated in a previous post that developers can become timid when an org tries to do agile/scrum but they end up trying to still manage top down.  The application division does just that.  However, in my experience, the devs aren't becoming timid, they are becoming bolder.  And when they don't get what they want, they go crying to their managers claiming we are slowing them down.  What I do find is their ideas and almost always their attempt to design infrastructure almost always fails.  I also find they are highly resistant to documenting requirements often preferring to tell us how to do our jobs.  They code.  We manage infrastructure.

And lastly I'll say this.  I find that many devs are experts at teaching computers to do tasks, ie they know C, C++, C#, Java, etc. really well.  But, they are not experts at actually doing the tasks, ex. writing an encryption algorithm.  I also find that many devs want to design the tools they use not understanding that tool development is not their core business.

That, of course, is my opinion based on what I've observed over the last 45 years of my life.  Each of us has a unique set of experiences and may have different, even opposing opinions.

The one thing I know I can say we all share is the feelings and thoughts of our beloved city, our community, and what we built within City of Heroes/Villains.

LV

well said.

[LadyVamp]

You know, Arcana, Dan's Fiction might be more Factual.  Or is that Anti-Fiction?  lol

JoshexProxy, I once read a paper from a webserver on IBM's domain.  It was interesting to say the least.  The idea was that a particle of neutron radiation from the sun could, if it struck silicon at the right angle, cause a transistorized circuit to fail.  I suppose it's plausible.  Then again it could be an engineer pulling one on anyone who read it.  I don't know.  But, I'll leave it to someone like Arcana to do the research and tell me if it's true.

One thing I do, however, is take everything with a grain of salt.  Even what Arcana says though I find her logic to be sound and her facts, those I happen to know as well, to be true.  If I had to guess, I would say you're a fairly young guy.  I'm also guessing you read things, hear things, see things and assume it's factual.  Especially when it's been presented as fact when it's just an opinion.  It's pretty common mistake.  Most people do it.  Especially young guys.  I'm sure everyone here is guilty of that blunder.  Hell, I'm 45, and I have to check myself in some of my meetings.

You're in the company of some very smart people.  Some with a lot of life experiences too.  And there is much you can learn here from them.  Instead of stating something as fact according to some website you happened across, perhaps state that you read some information somewhere and was wondering if it were true.  I'm sure there's more than one person here who could tell you the validity of what you read.  You might even ask how they came to their conclusion.

And I'll leave you with this. I don't know if it's true or BS but regardless it's a great life lesson:

The Ford family tried to remove Henry Ford from his (2nd) car company.  They took him to court.  The lawyers beat him up with all kinds of random questions to which he didn't know the answer.  His final answer to the lawyers shut them down completely.  "Why do I need to know that when I can call 10 engineers into the room who can tell me the answer," Henry Ford.

LV

[Arcana]

I find this all very interesting and can see everyone's points.  We try to use agile/scrum at my company or rather one of our divisions does.  The division I work for runs the QA testing cloud for the applications development division.  Arcana, you stated in a previous post that developers can become timid when an org tries to do agile/scrum but they end up trying to still manage top down.  The application division does just that.  However, in my experience, the devs aren't becoming timid, they are becoming bolder.  And when they don't get what they want, they go crying to their managers claiming we are slowing them down.  What I do find is their ideas and almost always their attempt to design infrastructure almost always fails.  I also find they are highly resistant to documenting requirements often preferring to tell us how to do our jobs.  They code.  We manage infrastructure.

It sounds like you're talking about the devs pushing QA to streamline their testing process to allow them to speed up development.  That also happens a lot in scrum/agile: QA and change control get abandoned or shoved aside because it is seen as interfering with the rapid dev cycle.  But that's not the same timidity being referenced above: that refers to agile and scrum methodologies rewarding those that can apparently iterate the fastest, and that rewards developers who propose the ideas that can be implemented and iterated the fastest.  Joshex was talking about scrum causing developers to come up with wild ideas to implement in the design, which is atypical for scrum.  Developers trying to eliminate anything they consider unnecessary overhead slowing them down is more typical.

[Arcana]

JoshexProxy, I once read a paper from a webserver on IBM's domain.  It was interesting to say the least.  The idea was that a particle of neutron radiation from the sun could, if it struck silicon at the right angle, cause a transistorized circuit to fail.  I suppose it's plausible.  Then again it could be an engineer pulling one on anyone who read it.  I don't know.  But, I'll leave it to someone like Arcana to do the research and tell me if it's true.

Semiconductor failures induced by radiation sources, both terrestrial and cosmic, are fairly well known.  Here's a power-pointy looking presentation on the subject:

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-ref.pdf

It talks about the various historical sources of radiation that could damage or malfunction semiconductor circuits.  In summary, the smaller and denser semiconductors get the more sensitive they become to radiation induced malfunctions.  In the 70s the biggest source of radiation was trace radioactive elements within the semiconductors themselves, so manufacturing processes were adjusted to protect against them by eliminating them, shielding from them, or in altering the circuit design so they were less sensitive to them.  As ICs got smaller and more sensitive, the trace radioactive atoms in the ceramic packaging, aluminum traces, and lead solder became a problem and those had to be dealt with.  Finally, semiconductors are now small enough and sensitive enough, but manufacturing good enough to eliminate most terrestrial sources of radiation that cosmic rays are now the dominant source of random radiation induced errors.  ECC (error correcting code) memory is designed in part to correct these random bit flipping errors in computer RAM.

[Shibboleth]

One might quibble in regards to Dan Brown and what he wrote in the following regards:

(1) He is writing fiction for a wide audience. His audience is not expected to be particularly proficient with physics.

(2) A statement of "Fact" at the beginning of a work of fiction is establishing the ground rules for the novel or elements in it. Being a bit fast and loose with actual events or technology is also a not unheard of practice in the writing of fiction. Reading SF with faster-than-light travel or communication? Well, you've left the realm of physics as we understand it. But if it is established as part of the backdrop of fiction, its use is fair game and nobody worries about it not being true to fact unless you've advertised your SF as "Hard SF"

(3) From the two points above, being a bit of fuzziness and inaccuracy is, for the purposes of a work of fiction meant to entertain its reader, acceptable. Moreover a good editor is going to stop you from going too deep and wasting words which will mean nothing to the average reader and possibly turn them off. This of course leads to the not infrequent result that one should broadly not go to see any movie from Hollywood involving any topic with anyone who works in the field at issue, be that going to see movies involving the military with anyone who has been in the military, movies involving computer technology or programming with anyone who works with computers or programs, see movies involving law with lawyers, etc.--the amount of faithfulness to the underlying topic varies widely and depends on just how faithful the author felt he needed/wanted to be.

Not that I have a horse in the larger race here.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Forums are credible sources of information that dose not require small stuff life facts or citations. From this forum I am told you are a Time Traveling Elite Boss. It's not like such title is just given out arbitrarily. (I hope I don't need to put Kappa on this)

Okay well just because that is true doesn't mean everything else you read is.  Lucky pick.

EDIT: Also  Maths https://vimeo.com/13497928

Sorry if this has been posted already.

[JoshexProxy]

Semiconductor failures induced by radiation sources, both terrestrial and cosmic, are fairly well known.  Here's a power-pointy looking presentation on the subject:

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-ref.pdf

It talks about the various historical sources of radiation that could damage or malfunction semiconductor circuits.  In summary, the smaller and denser semiconductors get the more sensitive they become to radiation induced malfunctions.  In the 70s the biggest source of radiation was trace radioactive elements within the semiconductors themselves, so manufacturing processes were adjusted to protect against them by eliminating them, shielding from them, or in altering the circuit design so they were less sensitive to them.  As ICs got smaller and more sensitive, the trace radioactive atoms in the ceramic packaging, aluminum traces, and lead solder became a problem and those had to be dealt with.  Finally, semiconductors are now small enough and sensitive enough, but manufacturing good enough to eliminate most terrestrial sources of radiation that cosmic rays are now the dominant source of random radiation induced errors.  ECC (error correcting code) memory is designed in part to correct these random bit flipping errors in computer RAM.

From my own interest; Do you actually know "why?" this interaction behaves this way?

I am assuming you do. I am hoping you will give an Arcana post on the subject.

however I have been advised to work on project bane rather than ask this. I really need to start prioritizing spare time.

[Arcana]

One might quibble in regards to Dan Brown and what he wrote in the following regards:

(1) He is writing fiction for a wide audience. His audience is not expected to be particularly proficient with physics.

(2) A statement of "Fact" at the beginning of a work of fiction is establishing the ground rules for the novel or elements in it. Being a bit fast and loose with actual events or technology is also a not unheard of practice in the writing of fiction. Reading SF with faster-than-light travel or communication? Well, you've left the realm of physics as we understand it. But if it is established as part of the backdrop of fiction, its use is fair game and nobody worries about it not being true to fact unless you've advertised your SF as "Hard SF"

I don't think your second statement applies to Dan Brown, because Dan Brown has a consistent habit of portraying his writing as well researched and based on facts and reasonable extrapolations, with fictionalized elements added.  When he says "FACT" at the beginning of the intro to Angels and Demons, that parallels the intros to works like Digital Fortress and The Da Vinci Code.  For The Da Vinci Code he claimed that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals" in The Da Vinci Code were accurate, when in fact that turns out to be wildly untrue.

It is very hard to give Dan Brown the benefit of the doubt you're trying to extend to him, when his works have errors that are even more egregious and completely unnecessary.  Deception Point gets a lot wrong about the American space program.  Digital Fortress gets just about everything wrong about encryption.  In Angels and Demons a plot point is that a digital video camera is streaming video showing a bomb, but because the camera is transmitting wirelessly it is impossible to trace wires to locate it.  And yet Dan Brown makes explicit claims that he spends a lot of time researching the material he includes in his works to ensure they reflect reality to the best extent possible.

(3) From the two points above, being a bit of fuzziness and inaccuracy is, for the purposes of a work of fiction meant to entertain its reader, acceptable. Moreover a good editor is going to stop you from going too deep and wasting words which will mean nothing to the average reader and possibly turn them off. This of course leads to the not infrequent result that one should broadly not go to see any movie from Hollywood involving any topic with anyone who works in the field at issue, be that going to see movies involving the military with anyone who has been in the military, movies involving computer technology or programming with anyone who works with computers or programs, see movies involving law with lawyers, etc.--the amount of faithfulness to the underlying topic varies widely and depends on just how faithful the author felt he needed/wanted to be.

Now that *really* doesn't apply to Dan Brown, because Brown often goes into Crichton-esque levels of technical descriptions of things.  Its just that Michael Crichton always seems to have done more homework than Brown.  Even when Crichton errs, it seems like at least he was trying.  Dan Brown never seems like he is trying, except when he is talking about subject matter you don't know anything about.  I'm not an art historian or theologian, so much of The Da Vinci Code seemed reasonable to me.  I didn't understand the backlash against it until I read Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress.  Those novels cover material I am familiar with, and they are worse in terms of horrible factual errors than half the fan fiction I've read.  That caused me to want to learn more about the material in The Da Vinci Code, and the more I researched, the stupider  and/or crazier I realized Dan Brown is.

It is perfectly fine to fictionalize: all science fiction does to some extent.  But there are limits.  If you decide to put California on the east coast instead of the west coast just because it is convenient, or you think it would be more interesting if jet engines were edible or the sky was yellow that's fine, but there should be some explanation for why those things are true in whatever wacky world you're writing about.  You cannot excuse blatant mistakes for narrative necessity.

[Arcana]

From my own interest; Do you actually know "why?" this interaction behaves this way?

Going to need to be more specific.  The presentation covers a number of different effects given different radiation sources and energy levels and the kinds of semiconductor structures that are vulnerable.  In some cases the effect is due to the energy delivered by the radiation particles creating charge effects in the semiconductors.  Charge effects can affect capacitance-based memories (basically, by adding free charge to them).  The presentation also describes cosmic ray induced latch up - that's where a radiation particle shoots through the circuit and as it passes through it creates a spike of voltage in just the right place to take a part of a circuit that normally doesn't conduct current and start a feedback loop where the spike starts current flowing and that current alters the circuit in a way that causes more current to flow, and the circuit basically locks up and cannot be reset (short of removing all the power from the circuit by turning it completely off).  Software people sometimes call these "stuck-at faults" because what happens is a memory cell gets "stuck at" one or zero, and no amount of trying to overwrite that cell causes it to change state.  It is "stuck-at" its value, and basically you have to reboot to fix it.