Topic: Episode #262

[Citizen Skeptic]

their point on using graphic chips that are basically dedicated polygon processor and shaders for medical imaging is where things are headed. they are quite handy imaging applications and more cost effective and higher performing than using gpu's. medical imaging is very data intensive today - lots of 3D high resolution stuff at the leading edge. FDA approval is really a manageable non-issue. There are other applications too. I have seen systems running multiple nvidia processors to do mask corrections for lithography. Much cheaper and faster than running clusters of intel gpu's. this is especially true for applications that can be multithreaded.

[Steven Novella]

jtetetng - so your point is that we were correct, except very recently the trends have changed, and therefore we are completely wrong?

Actually - I also disagree with you. It is too soon to proclaim a long term trend. And, City of Heroes just came out with an expansion that includes very high end 3D imaging that is very gpu demanding. Even slightly older cards cannot take full advantage of the new rendering.

Regarding hospital software - this has nothing to do with "flash" - I am talking about core functionality. I have used many medical systems for various purposes - EMR, ordering, data lookup, research, and running equipment. I have also implemented an EMR in my department, and spent a year with the programmers designing our interface. They are generally clunky, and years behind commercial software for broader use. It is way harder to do stuff then it has to be. It is catching up recently, but slowly and is still way behind.

[Caffiene]

jtetetng - so your point is that we were correct, except very recently the trends have changed, and therefore we are completely wrong?

Not to mention much of the reason for the change in software technology IMO isnt due to the hardware, but due to OS and API issues. The spread of gamers across Windows XP, Vista and W7, with the associated spread across DirectX 9c, 10 & 11, is a significant reason that games cant take full advantage of new hardware.

Just because games arent yet taking full advantage of the hardware doesnt mean they didnt drive the hardware development in the first place, because the limiting factor is coming from elsewhere.

[Hubbub]

It is way harder to do stuff then it has to be. It is catching up recently, but slowly and is still way behind.

Pfft!  Utterly wrong on every point*.  I don't even know why I listen to this podcast anymore.



*and by that I mean you typed "then" instead of "than"

[MountainManPan]

every damn podcast there has to be at least one person who has to come on the forum, create an account just to say "At such and such a time, Steve mispronounced a word!"

[Citizen Skeptic]

jtetetng - so your point is that we were correct, except very recently the trends have changed, and therefore we are completely wrong?

Not to mention much of the reason for the change in software technology IMO isnt due to the hardware, but due to OS and API issues. The spread of gamers across Windows XP, Vista and W7, with the associated spread across DirectX 9c, 10 & 11, is a significant reason that games cant take full advantage of new hardware.

Just because games arent yet taking full advantage of the hardware doesnt mean they didnt drive the hardware development in the first place, because the limiting factor is coming from elsewhere.

If I may add to your point, which is right on, the software and the hardware drive each other. Except for specialized applications, games are the most compute and resource intensive. Much more so than the typical office application. You guys probably don't remember but there used to be a key on spreadsheet programs to calculate. The reason is that your spreadsheet could take seconds, sometimes minutes, to refresh. That hasn't been a computing challenge for a very long time.

I used to work in the computer graphics industry when the apple and the pc came out and cad applications started to pop up. Then simple 3D, then fully rendered, shaded, lighted, spun, etc. until Tron. There were a lot of graphic card manufacturers that sprung up around pc cad which drove the industry initially. But you can imagine there are far more gamers than cad operators and that you need far more processing power to get a modern game experience.

Edit: finished last paragraph that was cut off from my phone. bad phone.

[craig]

There is a geological structure somewhere in the US Southwest named after breasts in Spanish or something.

Dollywood?

Or were you thinking the Grand Tetons?

Geological structures with boob-fixated names are common. There are two matching, appropriately-shaped mountains in Scotland called the Paps of Jura.

Nippletop Mountain in New York:

[Swagomatic]

Piestewa Peak, in the Phoenix Mountains, was formely known as Squaw Peak, and before that, the more offensive Squaw Tit Mountain.

There were several unsuccessful attempts to rename the mountain until Piestewa Peak was selected to honor Lori Piestewa,  the first Native American woman to die in combat.

[Hubbub]

every damn podcast there has to be at least one person who has to come on the forum, create an account just to say "At such and such a time, Steve mispronounced a word!"

I'm sure it's a thin line to walk for the panel.  We know that policing and correcting each other is a critical aspect of our community.  However, I'm sure it's a bit frustrating to get 100 emails telling you that peanuts are legumes.  But that's just the nature of the beast.

I think there's only an actual problem when the error gets blown out of proportion.  I am reminded of when Brian Dunning accidentally said "east" instead of "west" in describing the location of a British town, and some listeners proclaimed "therefore, you don't know what you're talking about on the subject".

[zack kruse]

Listening to the episode now and just got to the news item about the Monkey Pants.

Rebecca slipping in a mention of Skidz completely made my day.  I seriously had to pause the episode because I was laughing so hard and couldn't hear the episode.

If there was one fashion trend I would bring back, it is the widespread wearing of Skidz and Zubaz. It'll be 5th grade all over again

[MagnusM]

What about the field line that continues the straight line between the two poles? Imagining a universe with no other magnetic fields to confuse the issue, of course.

This specific field line will go off into infinity in one direction, but will come back from infinity from the other direction. Gauss's law for magnetism in integral form pretty much states directly that the integral (sum) of the magnetic field through any closed surface is zero. So for any arbitrary closed surface you pick there has to be as many field lines coming in as there are going out.

Then I thought about this ... the inverse cube law calculation contains the distance between the poles as a parameter. If the electron is a point particle then the distance between then poles is zero, which means no external magnetic field ... so how does it work? I suspect quantum weirdness again.

Field equations for "pure" dipoles do exist for both electric and magnetic dipoles, but I don't know if they describe the field of a quantum mechanical point-like object. Distance between poles is a bigger issue in electric fields than magnetic ones. In magnetic dipoles the problem is the area of the current loop, but that should not even apply to a particle that derives its magnetic field from quantum mechanical properties.

EDIT: The magnetic field of something like a bar magnet was explained in an earlier podcast. It's the result of the alignment of atomic dipoles. The magnetic field of a bar magnet is probably closer to that of a finite solenoid than that of a single loop. In that case the length of the magnet would affect the field.

The electric dipole moment, however, does depend on how charge is distributed. I don't know why an electron would even have an electric dipole moment. Maybe the uncertainty of the particle leads to the charge being "smeared out." But that is just speculation on my part.

[MisterMarc]

Can someone tell me the name of the monkeys in the pants. I've tried to replay the part, but I can't get it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titi

That's funny, I thought those were usually smuggled under a shirt, not in your pants.

[Trinoc]

What about the field line that continues the straight line between the two poles? Imagining a universe with no other magnetic fields to confuse the issue, of course.

This specific field line will go off into infinity in one direction, but will come back from infinity from the other direction.

That supposes the universe has the geometry of the 3D analog of a projective plane. If this is true then there are some interesting other effects, such as that anything that goes off to infinity in one direction comes back from the other direction mirror-reversed (since the projective plane contains a Mobius strip all the way around it at infinity). In some versions of particle physics, mirror reversal amounts to a change from matter to antimatter and/or time reversal (CP and CPT symmetry), with all the things that would entail.

[stands2reason]

Can someone tell me the name of the monkeys in the pants. I've tried to replay the part, but I can't get it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titi

That's funny, I thought those were usually smuggled under a shirt, not in your pants.

Boo!

[mmackay40]

On the pants monkey story (which was awesome, by the way), it occurred to me that the monkeys were probably anesthetized. 

This opinion is based on my extensive knowledge of animal smuggling is derived solely from the Matthew Broderick/Marlon Brando comedy "The Freshman" and Atom Egoyan's move Exotica, where a bird smuggler opens his jacket to reveal a number of birds tucked into pockets sewn in the lining of his jacket.

I also think the phrase "My pants are full of monkeys" originally came from the Monty Python bad Hungarian phrasebook skit.