downer98 | 12 years ago | on: Poll: Does the name of a startup matter?
downer98's comments
downer98 | 12 years ago | on: How many megapixels do you need?
Why would anyone qualify the necessity of a hiven resolution, based on the practicality of its usefulness on the phone that takes the picture?
Having larger resolutions provides leniency for poor camera work, so that you can crop, but still have good resolution in the cropped image.
downer98 | 12 years ago | on: Crap to stop doing on startup websites
The worst part is when the mobile version is unusable, but I can't change my phone's user agent string, to gain access to a website that has a desktop version that would very obviously work perfectly fine on my phone.
downer98 | 12 years ago | on: What is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?
Alpha particles are two protons and two neutrons emitted
by some heavy nuclei, such as uranium-238. Usually these
are bound inside the heavy nucleus and would need lots of
energy to break the bonds keeping them in place. But,
because an alpha particle inside a nucleus has a very
well-defined velocity, its position is not so well-
defined. That means there is a small, but non-zero, chance
that the particle could, at some point, find itself
outside the nucleus, even though it technically does not
have enough energy to escape. When this happens – a
process metaphorically known as "quantum tunneling"
because the escaping particle has to somehow dig its way
through an energy barrier that it cannot leap over – the
alpha particle escapes and we see radioactivity.
They're just making things up and declaring it science. The temperatures at the core of the sun are not high
enough for the protons to have enough energy to overcome
their mutual electric repulsion. But, thanks to the
uncertainty principle, they can tunnel their way through
the energy barrier.
Magic! We know it must happen, so let's make up an idea to explain it, and worry about its plausibility and accuracy later. These "virtual particles" appear in pairs – an electron
and its antimatter pair, the positron, say – for a short
while and then annihilate each other. This is well within
the laws of quantum physics, as long as the particles only
exist fleetingly and disappear when their time is up.
Uncertainty, then, is nothing to worry about in quantum
physics and, in fact, we wouldn't be here if this
principle didn't exist.
Translation: Due to the premise that we are terrestrial beings bound to this planet, who can never know a true vacuum, and regardless of our efforts to shield our experiments, are at the mercy of randomly occurring cosmic rays, let's just repurpose the word "vacuum" to suit our needs, rather than chase an unattainable set of conditions.downer98 | 12 years ago | on: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
"The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog."
Foxes are red.
Dogs are brown.
The addition of the word "red" doesn't harm the complete use of the alphabet.
Please stop using the lybian country code TLD. It sounds stupid.