Video

Video: The race to Absolute Zero

This is the story of Dewar and Kamerlingh Onnes race to liquify gases.  The ultimate challenge was helium.  Dewar gavce up after hydrogen as he found it difficult to get helium and had all along gone light on equipment whilst Onnes used a more industrial approach,.  Onnes received the Nobel prize for doing this. 

The unfortunate thing is that later superconductivity and superfluidity was found by Onnes.  Had Dewar persisted he might have found superconductivity and got the prize anyway!

The ultimate acheivement detailed is the creation of an Bose Einstein condensate in 1995.

If you like science / physics this one is for you!

By Fudgy McFarlen, ago

How to get paid to write open source software

— Video Went AWOL —

Val Henson describes her career in open source

  1.  Linux system programmers are in short supply
  2.  If you are vaguely competent and get some experience you become employed for life
  3.  Not all Linux programmers are idealists.  Now days it is a for profit motivation.
  4.  her pay profile progressed very well. Started at 150,000 per year in 1999 and doubled after 10ish years.
  5.  Telecommuting seems to be the end of the evolutionary progression
  6.  She travels all over the world to visit other programmers. 
  7. She thinks San Diego has the best weather in the world.  ( she obviously has not considered South America in that calculation )
  8. What would Val do?  If you will not get fired then why not do it ? 
  9. She knows developers who never leave the house
  10. Hours are flexible
  11. its not a 9-5 job.  She does not know anyone who does not care.  Hard to make it on 40 hours per week.
  12. Side effect is you only end up dealing with positive motivated people
  13. Open source is an enabling technology – good way to think about how and why a company would hire a person to help with open source from their point of view
  14. You have to be able to admit you do not know something.  ( duh!)   Linuxchix
  15. There are some famously rude people in the Linux community
  16. Careful with email!
  17. Some people get into open source by working on patches but much better to get a framework such as a job that gets you in contact with other people doing open source.
  18. Should be able to fairly quickly get into a position where you can telecommute 

Val Henson on LinkedIn

Vals blog

By Fudgy McFarlen, ago

Quantum Mechanics Entanglement and Spooky Action at a distance

Very interesting and experimental approach to entanglement and Bells inequality.
    

Interesting points of note in the video

  • pop bottle bottom glasses on 70's guy!
  • Eigenvalues of a quantum mechanical solution are what you can observe.  You never observe solutions that are combinations of eigenvalues.
  • StarTrek looking test apparatus mock up.  Scotty would have felt at home fixing this bugger!
  • Einstein did not like ghostly action at a distance.  EPR
  • Assume quantum theory is incomplete: Look for a hidden variable. Photon pairs are emitted with a shared equal hidden parameter.
  • Theories using hidden variables have been created that preserve locality and realism
  • Experiments that only test perfect correlations do not force us to choose between quantum explanation and hidden variable method
  • John Bell was the first person to show how to bring the two theories into conflict so they could be tested
  • Testing perfect correlations are tantamount to looking at one sock and seeing it is blue and concluding the sock on the other foot is blue
  • Imperfect correlations: set the target polarizers at unequal angles.
  • Alain Aspect and company tested Bell's Theorem
  • Tunable lasers were required for this test setup

More …….

By Fudgy McFarlen, ago