novi

You run into fundamental limitations of the laws of physics on this one, namely optics and the nature of waves. We don't know of any way to perfectly focus a beam of energy, so real light beams spread out over distance. Current technology can only narrow a beam of microwaves down to about several kilometers wide from geosynchronus orbit. This puts it at similar to lower intensity than natural sunlight. Inefficiencies abound, but one of the reasons for using microwave beams is that an antenna opaque to microwaves can be ~99% transparent to visible light, so you can just put it over farmland to double up the land use. And while you are dumping energy into the system, it's presumably replacing a bunch of thermal power plants, so things approximately even out. The temperature situation is not about how much heat we make, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, which changes the equilibrium temperature of the planet. Humans make a bunch of heat, which can be local problems, but on the whole is mostly noise on the scale of the entire planet. At least for a few more centuries. I can see antimatter power as something happening someday. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but I don't know of any more efficient and compact source of energy allowed by the current laws of physics. In practice, it's likely to be more of an energy storage medium than anything else, as it requires a prohibitive amount of energy and infrastructure to create. And while I can foresee science developing more efficient ways to produce antimatter, I'm pretty sure that we're not getting around the conservation of energy/mass on this, so you will never have net energy from making antimatter. It's just ridiculously compact - an ounce of antimatter stores about a megaton of TNT worth of energy. As for zero-point energy, it is completely BS and pseudoscience. It is very literally the lowest possible energy state in the universe, a complete vacuum at absolute zero. Now, because of quantum physics, specifically the uncertainty principle, you can't actually reach that perfect zero. There's always going to be a little left over energy fluctuating around. It's actually possible to measure this, partly due to something called the Casimir effect, and partly because even if we can't do anything with it, it still counts as energy for the purposes of General Relativity. And those measurements give us a really, really tiny, but positive value. As for why people thought it might be a limitless source of energy, IIRC, is something Richard Feynman doodled on the back of an envelope in the 50s. Basically, it was a calculation of how much energy could be in the Zero Point state. Depending on the assumptions you make, you can get a stupidly, hugely big number, the "boil all the earth's oceans with the energy in a coffee cup" result. This is because Quantum mechanics doesn't care about the total amount of energy, just the differences between available energy states. There are reasons to expect the Zero Point energy is as big as it can be. The fact that it has been observed to be very small, a difference by a factor of over a googol, is regarded as something of a problem by physicists. In any case, if you still want to try to use Zero Point energy, you would somehow have to produce a vacuum with a lower energy state than the universe, so that energy could flow into it. Aside from all the other issues, that would destroy the universe, something called "False Vacuum Decay". Basically, your lower energy state would be more stable than the current vacuum, and would proceed to Ice-Nine the universe. Yup, and that's actually one of the big limitations on nuclear power, is that it's still technically steam power. Even more mindbogglingly, that was the grand plan for fusion power for a long time, that it would still be steam that makes the electricity. I'm not sure what the current state-of-speculation is, so somebody may have a better plan, but I don't know it.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten is having a weird year. Maryland has locked in a bowl game, and Rutgers isn't the worst team in the east division, somehow. In the west, Illinois is the best team, and Purdue has a decent shot at number 2. I'm disappointed, though not surprised, at the Badgers having a bad year. I'm not going to pretend I could do a better job at play calling than Paul Chryst, but even I have to wonder what he's been doing the last 4 years. In any case, I'm just hoping they can win at least 2 more games out of the next 4, so that they can keep their streak of bowl game appearances. They've got the 3rd longest active streak, behind Georgia and Oklahoma.

So, I find myself as a special education bus driver this year. I'm clearly not a teacher, but do I get any partial credit for having to drive student around? I do have to deal with the district bureaucracy telling me to ignore common sense and follow the rules. Especially when they're ones where who lost the paperwork causing the issue.

While this is true, it is also not complete. Inflation also answers 2 other problems with a relatively simple explanation. Being a hat trick is its strength. The other two problems being the flatness problem and the monopole problem. The flatness problem is that the universe is flat. Glib, but bear with me. General Relativity is an accurate description of the universe on large scales, as far as we can tell. If you make a few simplifying assumptions and play with the math, you get the Friedmann equations; they are much simpler than full GR, and provide a usable approximation of our universe at large scales. The variable of the equations relevant here is k, the curvature of space. In a very simplified sense, it describes whether parallel lines converge, diverge, or neither. As luck would have it, there are features in the Cosmic Microwave Background that we can predict the size of; measuring how large they appear will tell us how much the observable universe is curved. Surprisingly, they are exactly the size we expected, which means a flat universe, to within 1%. The problem comes from the fact that absolute value of k must increase with time, and should have increased by a factor of roughly 10^60 during the age of the universe. Either the universe is perfectly flat, or k was improbably small at the beginning of time. Inflation is an attractive third option here because it would have caused any initial value k to shrink to almost 0, and a locally flat universe. As to why this is preferably to just letting k be 0, it's that k can only be zero if there is a Cosmological Constant and it takes on one exact value. Not impossible, but none of our theories suggest a reason why that would that would be the case. At the moment, inflation is felt to be a more reasonable explanation than the others. As for the monopole problem, it specifically refers to magnetic monopoles, but also covers other cosmological oddities that may have been produced in the early universe. A magnetic monopole is an isolated north or south magnetic pole; every known source of magnetism in the universe is a dipole, having both poles. Many of the post-Standard Model theories predict that a bunch of magnetic monopoles should have formed in the very early universe. Enough that we should have seen one by now, or even enough to mess with the formation of elements in the early universe. Inflation would solve the issue by reducing the density of monopoles down to ~1 per observable universe. And thus make it unlikely we'd ever see one. Now, monopoles are completely speculative. It would not be surprising that we haven't found one if they don't exist. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to prove that they can't exist. And in quantum mechanics, everything not forbidden is compulsory. So either they must exist, or new physics will disprove them. I would say that some of the problem is that we've answered most of the hows in cosmology, and are left with the whys. And neither General Relativity or the Standard Model provide any compelling explanations for why the universe is as it is, nor any obvious direction as to where to look next. Well, there is one obvious direction, which is sadly inaccessible - the singularity of a black hole. Every other time a scientific theory has contained singularities, a better theory has come along that got rid of them. So we do know exactly where GR should break. But GR also says that all of those singularities are unobservable to the rest of the universe, hidden by event horizons. It's kinda frustrating, actually, that we can't poke the one glaring fault in GR to see how it reacts. Anyway, the whys of the universe. The Standard Model predicts how particles interact with each other to a ridiculous level of precision. The issue is that it has 25 independent variables that can not be predicted from theory, but must be measured by experiment. And GR has one itself. Some scientists take offense at having so many independent variables, finding it inelegant; more are just concerned with why those variables take the values they do. Because changing any of them even a little bit would result in vastly different universes, almost all of them incompatible with matter as we know it, much less life. And every theory to try and explain why has so far been hopelessly speculative. Again, it's frustrating.

At least part of the problem is the intersection between the insatiable demand for more content by the 'news' and scientists seeking notice of any kind, whether for ego or to increase their chances of funding. It also really doesn't help that most scientist speak a different language at work, and that every field has its own different language. As for theoretical physicist bouncing untested hypotheses off each other, it's a net positive overall. All science is built on the work of other scientists; no scientific theory emerges ex nihilo. Even Einstein had to work off existing science. And sometimes insights into science come from unexpected sources. Max Planck accidentally invented quantum mechanics while trying to make better light bulbs, for instance. So scientists should consider anything and everything. The problem is when individual scientists try to misrepresent the significance or truth of their theories. Some of that is just old fashioned human fallibility and the investment fallacy, some is caused faulty communications, or big egos, but there are some who essentially lie, saying things aren't really true just for attention. Though I will admit that string theory, quantum multiverses, and eternal inflation are worrying in their inability to be satisfactorily proven or disproved. And that it's unknown whether they can be developed into solid theories, or forever remain speculative.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-should-the-big-ten-expand-next-we-crunched-the-numbers/ I thought this was an interesting analysis of how various schools stand as candidates for future Big Ten expansion. Not that I'm particularly enthused at further expansion, but at this point, it seems almost inevitable that the Big Ten and SEC are looking to expand to 20-24 teams each before they leave the NCAA. It'll be interesting to see how accurate this article is in 10 years time. Along those lines, does the Pac-X manage to recover to to be a member of the Power 5? Or is the future going to be the Power 4 and the Group of 6?

Yes, but he is working with a non-standard version of cosmology and general relativity, so don't put too much confidence in those results (yet). He is part of a camp that is trying to find alternatives to dark energy. Their hypothesis is that instead of dark energy, massive structures (or lack thereof) warp time more than conventional models assume, and can account for the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe. It's not an unreasonable concept - the equations of General Relativity are notoriously complex, and cosmologists often use approximations that would make an engineer blush to simplify them to a level that can be computed. As I understand it, more work is necessary to determine if this new approach to GR is compatible with the rest of our universe. A few more words in explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology

To be fair, by that logic, only football and basketball at a fraction of the universities should be allowed to continue. No other sport pays for itself. Is that what you want? No, seriously, what is your stance here? I want to argue, but I don't want to put words in your mouth here.

Depends where in the country you are. The Big 10 saves rivalry week for the last week of the season. That really depends on how you define "need". Is it essential to their mission of educating people? No. But that way lies the argument that there should be no college sports at all. And ignores the reality that the majority of college football players don't receive a scholarship. These guys want to play the sport they love. And in that sense, having the school organize a play area, equipment, and staff so that students don't have to makes sense. But this is where the issue gets muddled by talking about Alabama in the same breath as Ripon (D.III, enrollment 807). They both are and aren't playing the same sport.

Ditto. There is much schadenfreude to be had in an Ohio State loss.

Oddly enough, this is the only cupcake Wisconsin will get this year. In addition to only playing 3 non-conference games this year, they've been working on improving the strength of their schedule. So their other two ncg's this year are Notre Dame and Army. Admittedly, the game against Illinois is also a freebie, but it's not a cupcake. They're a real Big 10 team! Though, to be fair, these cupcake games do have a purpose beyond free wins. Each one represents a sizable payday for the athletics department of the smaller schools. For example, Eastern Michigan is getting $1.4 million for this game, against a budget of about $16 million for their entire athletics department of 17 sports. I understand that their are similar, if smaller numbers, involved when Division II schools play FCS teams. Which is just another example of the awful governance of the NCAA. We shouldn't need such ridiculous workarounds to support the smaller schools.

Once had a player play Fromage, master of cheese magic. Based on a very silly GURPS article. http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=510

I have no idea where it's from either. But it is old. The similar image posted below was downloaded in 2005 or earlier. And it wasn't from the original source, either. Sadly, it's not much bigger than the other pic. Then again, at that point, most people were still on dial-up internet, and I'm pretty sure that most people only had 1024x768 screens at the time. Wow, I feel old now.

As a Badger, I'm generally of the opinion that the Buckeyes can go die in a fire. OTOH, Alabama? I guess I can root for Ohio. The lesser of two evils, I guess. @55holes they may be, but they are my @55holes. Making me look all tsundere here...

.500 sounds better than a 3-3 team playing a 4-4 team. I know it's a strange year, but there was a time when making a bowl game meant something.