/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6477370
While Dartmouth's a very prestigious school and its offer was extremely generous, being able to spend 4+ years doing research that genuinely interests and excites me, being able to work with faculty that I can see myself getting along with, and being in a city that I'm comfortable living in are much more important than a school's prestige to me.


>>6477471
As >>6477493 said - going to someplace like Dartmouth or Harvard or Yale can open up a lot of doors and introduce you to a lot of people, opportunities, and experiences you might not normally have access to, but if it's a choice between a prestigious school that isn't a good fit (research you like, people you like, a location and culture you like), and a less prestigious school that is, you should go with the latter.

>>6348171
>feet
>science
It's like you don't even want people to take you seriously

>hey raja wanna blaze it, faggot?

>>5930616
Been doing plasma research over the Summer, so far we've mostly been focusing on how neutral gas collisions affect EIC waves. Just finished the poster for it and I'm meeting with my prof tomorrow to go over it before we send it off to be printed (if anyone's interested I'll see about posting a copy of it here tomorrow).

After the conference this week we're moving onto our next project - testing whether or not we can produce a CO2 plasma via electron attachment (theoretically we shouldn't be able to but there's some experimental evidence suggesting otherwise so we're following up on it).

We'll probably just barely finish that by the end of the Summer so most of the Fall will probably be doing publications on those two projects but if we have time we're also planning to develop an experiment to test another plasma wave theory to determine whether shear effects can also drive the kinds of waves we're seeing.

>>5732710
1. Most off-the-shelf filters aren't designed to be able to filter out sodium fluoride from tap water. I'm not terribly well read on other types of water filtration systems (reverse osmosis, etc) but if memory serves nothing short of distillation will remove those kinds of compounds.

2. Concentrations of sodium fluoride in US tap water are safe. The EPA sets a limit of 4 ppm in tap water as being safe for human consumption. Typical concentration in US tap water is 0.7 ppm and few cities have concentrations higher than 1 ppm. To put this into context. Most toothpastes have concentrations on the order of 1000 ppm, and 'fluoride enriched' toothpastes like Fluoridex have concentrations as high as 5000 ppm.

3. The only real negative side effect that develops as a result from ingesting sodium fluoride at these concentrations is dental fluorosis which is most mild cases presents as a faint discoloration of the teeth. Sodium fluoride isn't toxic until you get to doses on the order of a gram, which would correspond to about 1400 L of water.

4. Sodium fluoride is not retained in excess in the human body (see 'Excretion of retained fluoride in man', Spencer, Kramer, et al. Journal of Applied Physiology, 1975) when ingested in the kind of doses we encounter on a regular basis (or even an order of magnitude greater than that).

>>5732793
5. Calcification of the Pineal Gland is a naturally occurring process that typically begins in your late teens/early twenties. I have yet to see a study which has shown that ingestion of sodium fluoride increases or decreases the rate of calcification by any measurable amount.

Look at that suave mother fucker.

The nearest known exoplanet candidate is believed to be orbiting Alpha Centauri B. The three Centauri stars are the closest to our solar system, just a little over 4 light years away... but they may as well be on the other side of the Universe.


Even if we could improve cutting edge forms of propulsion like ion thrusters many times over, a trip to the nearest star would still take tens of thousands of years. And even if we can find a means of conventionally reaching relativistic velocities, it's still only practical for trips to the nearest stars. (incidentally there are only 7 star systems within ten lightyears of Earth, one of which (Sirius) is not going to be habitable)


This basically leaves us with two options - find a way to work around relativity (there are some theorized ways this could be accomplished... none of them easy), or forgetting about trying to get anywhere fast and focusing instead on preserving ships and crews long enough to survive the long long long journey to their destination (generational ships, stasis).

The fact that they've confirmed the particle (or at least something similar to what they were looking for) exists means that they now have a physical particle on which to experiment - they can measure its properties, study how it interacts with other particles, see how well everything they observe matches with the theory and maybe even discover things that the theory doesn't predict, etc.

To use an analogy - suppose you've got a person in a room who's never seen a cat before and they ask you to explain what a cat is.

Having a model of the Higgs versus finding the actual particle is like trying to describe what a cat is, what it looks like, how it behaves, etc versus having an actual cat in the room you can point to and say "that's a cat", "that's what it looks like", "that's how it behaves" etc.

Fun facts about HAARP:
>Disclaimer, one or less of the following facts may not, in fact, be facts.

Most research conducted at the HAARP facility is civilian research of the Earth's ionosphere, magnetosphere, as well as some radio astronomy. These research projects are unclassified.

Military research conducted at the HAARP facility deals with radio communication and RADAR surveillance, studying which frequencies can most effectively transmit and reflect off of the upper atmosphere, allowing (for example) communication signals to be transmitted beyond the line of sight without the need for a satellite or tower relay, or for RADAR imaging to produce a clearer images of objects in space or the upper atmosphere - the latter is particularly useful for the imagining of Near Earth Objects. Many of these projects are also unclassified.

The HAARP facility frequently publishes information on completed or ongoing studies on its website, includes a live stream of measurements from instrumentation on the site, and even holds regular public open houses of the facility.

HAARP is also the location of a device called 'The Weather Dominator', commissioned by the international terrorist organization known as Cobra Command (Hail Cobra) during the Spring of 1983.

Best tip for naked eye stargazing is learning to identify bright stars and constellations. If you can learn how to easily spot things like the stars of Orion, the Dippers, the Summer Triangle, etc - finding things in the night sky is all about using 'landmarks'.

Getting a planetarium program like Starry Night or Stellarium (the latter is free and open source) is handy for learning how to identify certain features or plan observations.


The Leonids peak this weekend and the constellation Leo rises in the Northeast a little before midnight on the East Coast, should make for quite a night.


If you want to do more than naked eye observations you could look at getting yourself a small telescope or binoculars for looking at solar system objects.

>>5176505

Thanks OP

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

I just watched this for the first time (yeah slowpoke i know)
and holy shit carl sagan is a god (pun intended)

What kind of course is this? Are we talking first year physics major? Advanced major? Non-major general education fulfillment?

>>5028411
>Scientific progress and achievement?
Those aren't specifics, those are buzzwords.

>>5016100
To put it into context - the specific situation involved here involved an output signal from a series of 555-timers set up to produce desired frequencies and send them out through a joined rail output to a speaker.

The individual connections from the keypad to each corresponding timer also connected to a logic hierarchy which worked as the 'lock' portion of the circuit. The problem was that the unpowered timers would allow the signal from the active timers to backtrack through them and interfere with the logic hierarchy. The addition of diodes to each of the timer outputs solved this problem and allowed the circuit to function as intended.

I wasn't meaning to imply that diodes are 'always' the best solution for a problem, but they do come in handy and can be a cheap, simple fix for some issues.

>>4287980
>implying its not magnets

Extraordinary claims require what?

Extraordinary claims require what?

>>3140765
OP's pic made me think of Carl. The building stole his colour scheme.

>>2970081
A man can dream...