All your science in here

As long as it does it go Ullah when they unscrew the lid.

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later article, with pics

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Was about to post the same from the BBC.

It seems we’re missing something in all of the theories we’ve got so far.

I do love it when that happens! :star_struck:

Albeit, the only real discovery is the sheer numbers in one region - ‘rogue planets’ are already known to exist in some considerable numbers.

Crunch!

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Coin toss not actually 50:50 🫨

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-coin-tosses-slight-bias.amp

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Interesting, that didn’t quite go the way I was expecting before I clicked. I was assuming a slight imbalance in the weight, as the etchings are different on each side.

Edit: I’m not sure I’m understanding the mechanism they are suggesting either - it sounds a bit like a chunk of their sampled subjects simply don’t flip the coin well, given they highlight that some people seemed to be much closer to the expected 50:50, and some much further away. As long as the coin is getting a decent rpm in the flip, I’d be surprised that it wouldn’t be 50:50 (assuming coins are actually perfectly weighted, not sure that’s something mints actually check for).

Yes, I think this is one where theory (statistically, if the flipping is done consistently and correctly, the outcome will be 50:50) but in practice, because people don’t do it well, there is an imbalance in practice.

I thought that too - it’s not the coins that are unbalanced but the flipping process.

They do point out that what they’re measuring is the randomising effect of the flipping process. They look at the coin orientation on the person’s hand, before the flip, and check whether the orientation after the flip has been completely randomised relative to that. And they’ve found out that it hasn’t quite. But if the flipper starts out with no preference when she initially places the coin on her hand then the result will be 50:50, not only because there’s a lot of randomising in the flip but also because the situation was 50:50 before the flip happened.

Puts me in mind of this

I fear the matter/antimatter asymmetry is a good deal more complex than the coin flip one. We can think of a mechanism (some mechanical detail of the flipping process) to explain the former. But the efforts made to explain the latter have included those very expensive and carefully carried out CERN experiments and yet, to quote from the linked article,

the few known cases of asymmetry can’t explain why the universe contains so much matter. The charm discovery alone will not be sufficient to fill this gap

The experiments were worth doing. They have quantified some possible explanations. But they’ve shown that none of them is big enough to be the actual one. To be fair, a lot of people have been working on this for a very long time (it was an issue when I was an undergraduate) so I suspect we’re beyond the point where the answer is going to turn out to be easy.

All that celebrates is China’s ability to steal IP.

It’s already comical that China is just doing a find/replace on SpaceX advertising videos for their own.

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Vast areas of this unique island remain unexplored, what else could be (and almost certainly is) lurking out there?

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Nasa’s work on DSOC is an attempt to use optical communications through lasers instead. The technology could improve data rates by as much as 100 times, the space agency says.

or in PFM terms “not as good as my $10 chinese audiophile fibre converter”

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Lots of inky blacks to be had in space.

I mean the noise floor of my flat is at least 25db! I’m not sure how inky my blacks need to be