Bay 12 Games Forum

Are you deadset on it being a wood-fired oven? Gas will get you a far more even cook, easier temperature control, and a faster set up time; in my own experience, a wood fired oven takes a good hour AT LEAST to get a decent coal base going (we used to kindle the fire 2-3 hours in advance).

If you want to sell at things like farmers' markets, that means either arriving ridiculously early, or missing a good chunk of the crowds.

Okay...let me start with the disclaimer that I've never taken a physics course in my life. Not even high school. That said...if I understand the conception of the Higgs boson as the particle mediator of the Higgs field, which in turn imbues particles with the property of mass, isn't that analogous to electrons acting as the mechanism of an electric field? Which would suggest that there would be ways to manipulate the Higgs field in a given region to increase or decrease mass, just as an electric field can be externally manipulated.

I guess what I'm asking is, is this going to make Mass Effect look really, really prescient or is there some key component I'm missing here that would essentially make it impossible to manipulate the Higgs field?

Alright, so, let's address this. To your first question mark; sort of. The mediator for the electromagnetic field is the photon, not the electron (think light/x-rays/microwaves/radiowaves/gamma radiation).

First, a little crash course in photons (I did quantum physics 301 and 401 as part of my undergrad degree in nanotech, but that was a few years back, so I'm a touch rusty). You can think of a photon as a little bunch of waves in the electric and magnetic field; it's sort of a wave, because it's made up of lots of waves that constructively and destructively interfere. But it's also sort of a particle, because most of those waves will cancel out except at one spot, so it has a discrete location. Because they have an energy then from e=mc^2 they have a mass and, with their velocity, a momentum.

Now, you can observe real photons; discrete wave-packets of light, that for example get sent from a lightbulb or a laser. They have actually been emitted, and can be intercepted in between targets for example, they exist for a long time.
However, there are also virtual photons, photons which exist on timescales so short that we can't specifically say they have existed at all. All we can see is that some interaction has taken place (for example, between two atoms bumping into each other), but we can't look close enough or fast enough to actually see what happened, we can only look at the aftermath. You can see the atoms have each changed energy and direction by the discrete amount, let's say that one atom has lost momentum k and energy e, while the other has gained that much.
So, if you wanted to write this out, you could explain what happened in terms of one atom emitting a photon of momentum k and energy e, that then was absorbed by the other atom. In that sense, a photon has mediated the interaction. Wiki has a good article on it, scroll down to the bit about Feynmann diagrams for probably the clearest visual.

(Now, that example was pretty much the simplest case, you can get all sorts of weird things like particles emitting virtual photons that interact with themselves, or particles appearing from nowhere. Annnyway...)

Now, photons and the Higg's aren't exactly the same. Photons can have any range of energy above the Planck energy, and have no rest energy as such. The Higg's is a little heftier; it actually has a rest energy/mass (thanks to e=mc^2, they're pretty well interchangeable in QM), so we have that value of 125 odd GeV (one eV = energy gained by an electron accelerating across 1 Volt of potential or ~ 1.6*10^-19 J. Thus, even 125 GeV isn't much energy on our macrosopic scale).
However, just as with photons, there are still interactions which are mediated by the Higg's, that happen very very fast. So fast, the particle may not actually have come into existence, but can still have an effect. Because quantum. These interactions are what give us mass. They are ripples in the Higg's field (which, since that is everywhere, is basically saying the the fabric of the universe). These interactions happen constantly.

Now, if we have a discrete boson, you could in theory produce an identical boson, which is shifted by exactly half a wavelength. Much as with destructive interference in sound, this would cancel out the original Higg's. HOWEVER, the problem is, we aren't dealing with real Higg's in everyday mass.
They flicker in and out (and don't, at the same time; like I said, quantum) constantly.
There is no way we could produce our own bosons to cancel them; we can't measure them, so we don't know their direction.
We can't produce them fast enough, or with enough control over the energies.
Even if we could (which we can't!), the apparatus that would do so would be generating it's own virtual Higg's constantly.

Basically, you'd need sensors and accelerators for every subatomic particle with mass.


Re; the light discussion. Light has no rest mass. It has got a momentum. However, if you calculate backwards using their known speed, and their momentum, you end up with zero mass if you use the correct equations. You can't go faster than light, as that would violate causality, irrespective of the energy required.

Not sure (not my field of expertise), but from what I've heard, the general consensus is if some other particle has no mass, it will automatically be travelling at light speed. Fine. Great. It will also be completely frozen in time from it's own perspective. As far as a photon is concerned, even if it travelled the entire length of the universe, no time has passed since it's creation. Zip. Nada.

Re: Blackholes, no-one says the whole hole is infintely small (the event horizon is the bit that grows, and is the limit of the observable universe). They refer instead to the singularity. Which actually still has some dimension, if the black hole has charge/spins.


Anyway, ninjas. Blargh. Will be back later.

And, of course, Dante Basco as Dave.

You know, I must admit I see him more as a Karkat than a Dave. Probably due to the almost tsundere(?) vibe of Zuko.

Now, Dave... find whoever it is that voices Mako in Legend of Korra.

I cant wait for the applications that this new understanding will give us. What if you can make a meta materiel that can interact with the higgs field in novel ways?

Not gonna lie; that isn't possible under any current interpretation of physics (not "we don't know how to do that", but rather like breaking light speed, "we're pretty sure you *can't* do that"). However, this could potentially explain the inflation period after the big bang, dark energy, and a whole host of other funky fundamental physics and astrophysics problems. Isn't that sexy enough?!

I dont know, a capture counts when you pass a point, and i nearly never play custom maps.
The i dont know is the most important part there tough, since i have not a single idea how it happened.


Also, on an endless 2fort, i would probably have been raped by sentries 1001 times before i even got CLOSE to 47 captures.

Captures tick over every 10s of pushing the cart, not just when you hit a point.

As for the 2fort, I dunno, maybe you played on a nooby server

52 with Pyro, followed by 48 with Heavy.

Pyro was thanks in large part to a pocket medic. Luck of the draw gave me a pretty lacklustre team on the pub that time, so I was making a lot of pushes to try and stave off the inevitable. A skilled medic joined then, took one luck at me as the only player with any points, and pocketed me. We promptly went on an out and out rampage and managed to roll the entire enemy team several times over. Also <3 random crits.

Heavy was a magic round on the 3rd stage of Dustbowl, way back when. Equal parts a good floating team medic, well placed dispensers, and people forgetting to look in the little health room above the windy corridor between the first and last cap.

I think a new minecraft update just came out.

Last update was 27/06/2012.

Also from Jeb's twitter, 18 hours ago;

First proper work day with @dinnerbone nearing its end! Got a lot of bugs squashed, planning for the actual 1.3 release.

Followed shortly after by

Ok, the plan is to get 1.3 out on August 1, with pre-releases a week prior to that. #ValveTime