I disagree strongly with the first suggestion. If anything I think that "TAS of the year" should also win "Platform TAS of the year".
I think the problem with that is that it kind of makes the second category redundant.
What exactly do you mean by "redundant" and what is so bad about it? Why is it bad for one TAS to win more than one award? I don't understand what is so bad about this that people want to change the awards to avoid it.
The redundancy is not about one TAS getting more than one award. The redundancy is that the "TAS of the year" award automatically grants the "platform TAS of the year" award for that platform as well. The former automatically implies the latter. It's not possible (currently) to have the former without the latter. You could as well just grant "TAS of the year" award and throw out the "platform TAS of the year" for that specific platform, and nothing would change. That's the redundancy.
If redundancy is bad, the two ways to resolve it seem even worse:
1. Remove the offending category for the year as said by Warp above -- but why? how is this better than before?
2. Award the offending platform TAS category to a different TAS -- but this removes redundancy by replacing it with inconsistency. Again, how is this better than before?
I also suggested unifying the two awards into one icon. (I don't know if it would make sense, but just an idea.)
As it is, I don't understand at all that there is any problem which needs fixing.
Perhaps the idea is that one TAS automatically hogging two awards may feel a bit unfair to the other fine nominated TASes.
Could we just link to the video instead of embedding it in the page? Odds are that the vast majority of page loads are only going to care about the last post in the thread anyway, so loading all the earlier videos is pointless.
Another possibility would be that the flash player is loaded only on demand, like with the movie info boxes.
I disagree strongly with the first suggestion. If anything I think that "TAS of the year" should also win "Platform TAS of the year".
I think the problem with that is that it kind of makes the second category redundant.
One alternative which comes to mind (I'm not really suggesting this, just throwing an idea) is that the "platform TAS of the year" award is not awarded for the platform which gets the "TAS of the year" award, the reasoning being that it's already assumed with the latter award. This would avoid the redundancy. Perhaps the "TAS of the year" award icon image could include a small platform symbol somewhere in a corner or something. (Although one could validly argue that the run getting both awards, and hence both icons, is already symbolizing this exact thing.)
I do see the point, though, that one could ask "how come the best TAS was not the best in its own platform category?"
Btw, I have always wondered why gamma radiation "sticks" to objects (although I think a more proper term is "contaminates"), making them radioactive as well. Whenever there's a nuclear accident, the surroundings will be highly radioactive for a long time (even decades).
But why? I thought gamma radiation is just high-frequency photons. If enough gamma radiation hits a surface, it will "contaminate" it and make it radioactive as well, thus making it emit those same high-frequency photons as well, for a rather long time. I don't really understand why. How can material that is naturally non-radioactive become radioactive?
[...] the game engine is so primitive that the entire level must be divided into a horizontal grid of large squares, each square consisting of two triangles, only the height of the corners being free [...]
This is still often the case, the squares just got smaller.
I'm not so sure of that. Basic collision detection against the scenery has advanced quite a lot in the past decade (plus now there's some orders of magnitude more processing power to calculate), so there's little need to restrict the shape of the scenery nowadays. Most games I have seen don't seem to have any such obvious game engine limitation. (If they do, the level designers are pretty good at hiding it. Not something impossible, mind you. Back in the era of Doom, if you didn't know the exact limitations of the rendering engine, some levels were designed surprisingly well to hide these limitations and one could get easily fooled into thinking the level of freedom in level design was higher than it really was.)
but strictly speaking, general relativity breaks down at that point exactly because of the singularity.
Moreover, as far as I understand, quantum mechanics breaks even sooner than GR when we go back in time towards the beginning. More precisely, it breaks when we go closer to the beginning than one Planck time. Describing what happened between time zero and one Planck time is not possible with QM (because it's like attempting to say things like "half of a photon", which AFAIK is nonsensical in current QM).
What this means is that if there was an initial singularity, current natural laws were not in effect in that initial moment. Current natural laws came into existence (or formed, or "stabilized", or whatever) later.
Btw, as you might have guessed, arguing with nfq is a futile endeavour, so it's better to just let it be.
I understand that General Relativy allows the distance between two points in space (and consequently the distance between two particles) to grow faster than c
Can someone explain how this works, in very simple language?
I'm not versed enough in general relativity to fully understand or explain exactly why and how it allows the distance between two points (and hence two particles) to grow faster than c, but I know that there not only isn't such a limitation imposed or assumed by GR equations, but in fact there are at least two concrete situations where it's predicted to happen: the expansion of the universe, and the ergosphere around a rotating black hole.
The only thing that GR forbids is for a particle to travel between two points faster than c, which is a different thing.
btw, i don't think the orbits have anything to do with ID.
Yeah, right. I know that this cannot be really true because of this:
nfq wrote:
not really, because like i said earlier there had to be something that moved them apart in the first place, right? so how could they be unmoved movers?
Busted. I was going to reply to the rest of your post, until I reached this. This alone shows that you are not really sincere about wanting to learn anything, and should be regarded in this thread as just a troll.
Either that or you are pulling a Poe. Either way, further replying to you is a waste of time.
I don't know how much you have read nfq's past posts, but at least previously he has clearly expressed his "open-minded" philosophy, meaning that he has a strong belief in many of the purported extraterrestrial and supernatural phenomena that are so popular among pseudoscientists, ufologists, paranormalists and many other "new age" movement representatives. Knowing this, it's not surprising for him to express doubt on established science, because that's one of the key tenets of that kind of people.
Anyways, this argument about the solar system (and galaxies) being somehow paranormal (in the sense that they "couldn't" remain in orbit by natural means) is IMO unusually dense. There's nothing unclear about orbital trajectories and how they work. The math may be slightly complex, but in principle anybody should be able to corroborate it.
As for how these eight planets and the big bunch of smaller rocks have got the "precise fine-tuned orbits" needed to remain stable, the answer is pretty simple: In the beginning there were millions and even billions of small rocks, with more or less randomized orbits. From these billions of rocks the majority had unstable orbits and ended up colliding with each other (forming planets) or the Sun, or were flung out of the system. Only a few of them happened to have stable orbits, and they remained. You could say it's natural selection: From the billions of objects the ones which by chance had stable orbits were naturally selected to remain, while all the others went away (mostly by collisions). It's like you put a big bunch of rocks of different sizes in a bucket full of holes and started shaking it: Only the rocks which are larger than the holes will "get selected" to remain, while the smaller ones will drop out. The exact same principle of why antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a really big problem nowadays. There's nothing strange about this.
A general n-body system is unstable. The solar system is not, because the attractive forces between the planets is negligible compared to the attractive force between the sun and the planets. The planetary orbits are not fragile.
They may be negligible in the short term. However, they are not negligible in the long run, during the billions of years that the solar system has existed. Any "tug" a planet experiences, no matter how small, will start accumulating when it happens enough times.
Isaac Newton solved the 2-body problem, and it was completely clear to him why it's a stable system. However, when he tried to solve a 3-body problem (eg. the Sun-Earth-Moon system) he was unable to find a stable solution, and could not understand how the solar system can maintain stability. (He attributed it to supernatural forces.) Later work in astrophysics solved the problem and it's now clearer how an n-body system can be stable.
IOW, the planet's orbits are not so delicate as you seem to think.
The fragility of planetary orbits is not caused by a planet requiring a precise orbital speed to maintain orbit (because as noted, a change in speed would simply change the shape of the orbit and seldom a collision or flinging the planet out of the system).
The fragility of planetary orbits comes from the fact that the solar system is an n-body system, which is quite unpredictable and easily unstable. A 2-body system is quite stable, but an n-body system isn't quite so. The reason why we only have 8 planets and a bunch of smaller rocks, and the solar system being relatively "empty" (rather than being littered with small rocks all over) is because only the objects which happened to have stable orbits in this n-body system remained, the rest collided with them or were flung out of the system.
The major problem with any "Top 1000"-list is this: Nostalgia is a wonderful thing until we actually go back and experience it.
This is certainly true. For example, I bought Tomb Raider 3 back when it was released, and it was back then and for a long time one of the best and most exciting games I had ever played, and I fondly remember those times. (It was also still a time when I played the same game more than once through, the second time trying to find all the secrets and whatever else the game had to offer.) Back then the graphics, level design and gameplay were absolutely marvelous. Some of the levels were simply astounding and thrilling.
Of course that was in 1998.
If I played Tomb Raider 3 today for the first time, I would consider it quite crappy. The graphics are horrible even compared to contemporary games (such as Quake2), the level geometry is horrible and limited (the game engine is so primitive that the entire level must be divided into a horizontal grid of large squares, each square consisting of two triangles, only the height of the corners being free), and the story is quite simplistic by today's standards.
I have had this exact experience with other games. There are certain old games which are considered some of the best in existence, but I haven't played them until quite recently. When I do, it often happens that the game looks and feels like crap, and even the story isn't all that compelling, so I really can't understand what people are talking about. It must be a nostalgia filter thing. It might have been cool at the time, but these certain games have not withstood the test of time very well. (One quintessential example of this would be Psychonauts.)
Of course there are other games which are today as good as they were back when they were released, and have lost nothing of their charm. In most cases they are 2D games (in my case usually JRPG ones). Good 2D games certainly have a tendency to survive the pass of time much better than their 3D counterparts.
How is this working for you? How much is apple taking from your bottom line? Is this a hobby or a job?
Well, I am working for our company as my payjob. These iPhone games are a bit like small side projects (ie. not expected keep a whole company afloat all by themselves). You can read Apple's conditions on their website; IIRC they take 30% of the sales profits. (One could argue how fair it is for Apple to have a monopoly in selling iPhone applications. It's not like they haven't got in trouble for similar monopolies in the past, eg. with the iPod and its DRM scheme.)
Is the competition to get noticed pretty fierce?
It certainly is. Last time I checked, about 50 new game apps are published in the appstore every single day. I haven't checked lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number wasn't even higher nowadays. Standing out in the crowd is pretty tough. The only way to achieve that is to either be a known brand (such as eg. PopCap or one of the "big" game companies such as UbiSoft) or to get extremely lucky (there have been cases where someone had made some small but addictive/funny app, and without any special advertisement or any other promotion work, but by pure chance, it got so noticed that it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies; needless to say, the vast majority of apps don't get that lucky). You could try an advertisement/promotion campaign, but that's always a huge economical risk, because advertising is always costly, but it might not improve sales significantly nevertheless.
It looks like your dev team is 5 people, which is really cool. It's nice to see a return to the Atari days, where dev teams can be very small numbers of people.
Many people are developing such apps alone. Of course it requires a multi-talented person to do that (iow. you need to be good at programming, graphics and music, and depending on the game, also storywriting and level design), except in the cases where a laughably simple game (which looks like it was designed with MS Paint) gets immensely popular for whatever reason (as said, that sometimes just happens). Many games are made by two people (one programmer and one graphics artist).
This all happens because curvature isn't uniform, as rhebus said.
I think that "curvature isn't uniform" is a confusing statement when nobody has defined what "uniform curvature" means.
In classical physics you can think of a gravity well as if it was a funnel whose "slope" depends on the distance squared from the celestial body (iow. the farther you get away, the more "horizontal" the surface of this funnel gets, and the exact slope of this surface is the distance squared). In a way, if the "slope" of the gravity well is strictly defined by the distance squared, one could define that as "uniform curvature" (similarly as one could argue that the surface of a parabolic antenna is "uniformly parabolic").
If you think you had a physical funnel shaped like that and you put a small ball on it and give it an initial velocity, unless this velocity is just perfectly right and its direction perfectly perpendicular to the central depression, it will make an elliptical path on the surface of the funnel (assuming no friction, as is the case in empty space). Thus it's not all that strange that planets have elliptical orbits.
5)At the end of the day, general relativity is still the best theory we have for gravity. Since it predicts gravity to be the curvature of space-time, than that is what gravity is -- until a better theory arrives.
Also note that there exists numerous experimental evidence for spacetime curvature which corroborate the predictions of GR. Einstein himself made several predictions based on GR which were later corroborated by measurements. General relativity is not purely theoretical, as it has concrete practical applications (the most famous one of them being probably GPS, which would show systematic errors if they were calibrated according to newtonian mechanics or even special relativity, but which work very precisely when calibrated according to GR equations).
There is, in fact, so much overwhelming evidence of the accuracy of GR that whenever something seems to contradict it, it's usually assumed that there's a secondary factor being at play which is not being accounted for. The famous Pioneer anomaly and flyby anomaly are examples. (Also the dark matter hypothesis is an example of this.)
The principle of general relativity is the ultimate form of the principle of relativity: it says that the laws of Physics are the same for all observers. Contrast earlier versions which stated that only for inertial observers. This principle basically states that the laws of Physics must be written in tensorial form, as tensor equations are valid for any coordinate system you pick (this latter form was explicitly stated by Einstein as the "principle of general covariance", but most authors nowadays consider it redundant).
I once read a wonderful introduction to special relativity (IIRC from a book) which was surprisingly easy to understand. It started with the simple assumption that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all (intertial) observers (which I think is a fair assumption to make because it's a measurement result rather than a mere hypothesis), and from that single assumption it deduced the Lorentz transformations in a logical and easy-to-follow way. It was rather illuminating. (Of course this was many, many years ago, and damned if I remember any of it now.)
I'm assuming from your explanation that the general relativity equations can likewise be deduced by making the further assumption that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers regardless of their state (ie. inertial or accelerating) and that gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same thing. I'm assuming this naturally leads to the result of curved spacetime. Is that about correct?
I hope I managed to clear it up a bit, instead of further muddying the issue...
Yes, it was a bit clearer, but it didn't really answer the question of how a black hole can have an electric charge (which can be measured from the outside).
To be quite frank, I think that this answer is terrible and should never be used. Ever.
Black holes, such as the Reissner-Nordström, are a feature of general relativity; virtual photons (and virtual particles in general) are a feature of quantum field theory. Trying to explain how general relativity black holes interact by using a different theory which is completely and thoroughly incompatible with general relativity at a fundamental level is not an explanation at all.
Why is Hawking radiation a well-accepted hypothesis even though it heavily mixes GR and QM?
Moreover, the very idea of the eletromagnetic field (and other fields) being "mediated by photons" is alien to general relativity -- this idea also has its origins in quantum field theory. While the idea might be useful when doing "semi-quantum" gravity analysis, there is no need to use this when talking about general relativity proper. And who knows, the very notion of particle-mediated fields may turn out be wrong when an actual theory of quantum gravity is found.
The actual answer for the question is conservation of stress-energy-momentum: given the expression for electromagnetic energy in terms of the potential fields, you can deduce Maxwell's equations from the contracted Bianchi identities (see this for some information on these identities) on all but a few hyper-surfaces in which the electric and magnetic fields are orthogonal; and if you have Maxwell's equations, the Lorentz force can be deduced from those very same contracted Bianchi identities, regardless of the geometry of the situation.
This happens because electromagnetic fields warp space-time in very specific ways in general relativity, and the gravitational field itself is responsible for coupling the charges to the electromagnetic fields; this is easier to see in action in the Hilbert-Palatini variational principle formulation of general relativity.
I have to confess that all this goes well over my head.
While I had heard of virtual particles numerous times before, I had never actually studied any details, so this was new information to me.
I suppose the next question would be: Why aren't virtual particles bound to the same laws and limitations as regular particles? Why is a virtual photon able to interact from the inside of a black hole's event horizon with the outside, seemingly unhindered by the geometry of spacetime?
It seems that black holes can be characterized by three (and only three) quantities: its mass, angular momentum and electric charge. For example the Reissner-Nordström metric is a solution to the general relativity equations for a charged, non-rotating black hole.
I don't understand. Electric charge is mediated by photons. Photons cannot escape a black hole. How can they mediate anything in this case? A black hole swallows photons, it doesn't exchange them with anything.
That was a new genre for me. Never heard anything like that before.
Perhaps because I don't listen to music almost at all. Although if I had to choose a modern genre to like, I'd probably choose trance. An example of something I like.
Someone mentioned the idea of playing around to the last second then racing to the end of the level just in time. I think this would have improved the entertainment value of the movie (not enough for me to not vote no, but still, it is a good idea).
I'm not completely sure of that. It could make the waiting for the timer to go down even more boring because the author would have to waste time somewhere at the beginning of the level instead of distributing the "playaround" evenly throughout (hence giving more variation).
