- This is it: Health Care For America Right NOW!
- Getting Dirty: Dirt! The Movie Comes to Philadelphia
- Soda Exposes the Festering Toothache of our Politics
- SRC outrage: Cartoons but not violence?
- Lewis Thomas III for State Representative Website Launch
- National Coming Out Day for Undocumented Youth
- Gambling's real winners and losers
- VoicesWeb Interview with Joe Hoeffel, Democrat for Governor
- Health care activists are planning a rally near Arcadia
- From Warren Bloom, Candidate for the PA House of Representatives 195th District, 2010.
Happy winter solstice everybody!
Submitted by Hannah Miller on Sat, 12/20/2008 - 8:37pm.
So tonight, around midnight, our part of the earth starts tilting on its axis back towards the sun. Even the days may get colder, there will be more light. That's what the solstice means. It's a kind of celestial tipping point.
Tonight is also the party thrown by Philadelphia's amazing photographer JJ Tiziou for Casino-Free Philadelphia on the second anniversary of the Gaming Board awarding the licenses to Foxhouse. I remember where I was that day (it did get real dark real early) and I remember what it felt like for a lot of people. It seems like ages ago. But the light came back.
----
This is a picture of the entrance of the Carnegie library in West Philadelphia:
Andrew Carnegie gave away most of his money to the causes of education and peace. He stipulated that any of the libraries he helped build would have a light or a lamp above the door, as the symbol of learning.
It's kind of terrifying to watch 3 newspapers closing and the threat of 11 libraries shut down and writers stopping writing and editors getting hit by cars and readers stopping reading and everyone iz writng txt msgs.
It feels like we are headed for a new dark age (with apologies to lolcats.)
But it's not true. We get to choose how all this goes down.
Many of these libraries survived the Great Depression. There is no reason that, at this most crucial point in our civilization, we should flush everything we have built down the toilet in a panic. That would be foolish.
----
This is a picture of fiber-optic cable:
This is what Verizon wants to come and put in the ground, all over our city. It is very powerful because, as opposed to old copper wire, it transmits information by light.
Because light is faster than anything else, it can therefore move tremendous amounts of information.
I cannot stress enough how tremendous of an infrastructure investment this would be. It would be very very good for Philadelphia over the long term. Except that we have to make sure that they don't just put it in the rich parts of the city.
----
And last but most definitely not least:
How the hell can we survive without the Mummers?
This is wrong;
You write:
This is a small issue, but that statement is horribly wrongheaded. Wikipedia is your friend.
Did you actually read that article?
What part of that statement was wrong - the part about light being faster than anything else, or the fact that fiber-optic cable moves a lot of information? : )
The part that said
You seem to be confusing a few things. First, although the drift velocity of electrons in an electric cable is rather small, the relevant issue for data transmission is the velocity of propagation of the electric field, which carries the signal. In coaxial cables the velocity of propagation is usually about 70-80% the speed of light in a vacuum.
Fiber optic cables use light, of course, but not in a vacuum. The refractive index of the core is usually ~1.5, so the speed of light in a fiber optic cable is only about 66% of the speed of light in a vacuum, and thus actually slower than the speed of propagation of electric fields in a coaxial cable.
The reason that fiber optic cables can transmit large amounts of information quickly, compared to electric cables, is a function of their low losses and unsusceptiblity to electromagnetic interference.
So, to answer your question "What part of that statement was wrong," I'd say the "Because." If you had instead written "The speed of light in a vacuum is greater than any other attainable speed, and fiber optic cables transmit information at high rates." it would have been correct. But you didn't, and it wasn't ;-)