Recent content by WendyE

Stephen! Thank you very much for your reply. I get pretty busy during the week, but I will be replying in detail soon. Chi-square test! Of course! That shook the dust off an ancient unused neuron in my brain, and I've been studying up on it.

Hi Stephen, Ok, I feel like we're getting to the heart of matter now. This is new territory for my brain... I do a lot of regression and curve fitting and such in my work, but this is different. So I'm trying to get my head around this: So let me just think out loud for a minute, and if you...

Hi Stephen! I really appreciate your attention to this problem! I know we haven't actually talked about whether my methods are correct yet, but the first step is of course determining whether the question makes sense in the first place. Yes, you are absolutely correct about the winds needing...

Hi Stephen, I just reread your last post, and I forgot to answer your question about what "retreat" and "advance" are referenced to. It is referenced to the perpendicular direction of the ice edge. And I think I made a small mistake in my description earlier. It has to do with WHEN to...

Hi Stephen, You make some great points, and you are definitely understanding my problem. The ice pack can generally be pictured as a circle, so that you are right to picture "retreat" as the edge moving toward the center, which means the circle is getting smaller. You can picture the center...

Hi Stephen, Thanks for your reply! Here's some more details about how I assembled the data I'm analyzing: 1. The daily ice field data (acquired via satellite) is ice concentration data. Values range from 0 (no ice) to 1 (100% ice). It's on a grid, so the concentrations describe the conditions...

E(X) = expectation of X Let X = {-1, 0, 1} E(X) = (-1+0+1)/3 = 0 E|X| = ( |-1|+|0|+|1| )/3 = (1+0+1)/3 = 2/3 So, I think no, it's not true that E|X| = E(X) if I understand the question correctly.

I'm working on a project studying sea ice in the Arctic ocean. A brief overview of the essentials: The ice pack over the Arctic begins shrinking every summer beginning around June 1st, and begins to recover around Sep 15th. I'm interested in the movement of the ice edge as the pack shrinks...

Oh, right, of course. The entangled state shares a wavefunction. The pilot wave interpretation, ok. I have no idea what that is, but thanks for the lead! I'm watching a great video series of lectures from iTunesU that introduces entanglement very well. It's from Standford, and is taught by...

I have to take issue with the "... independent of human consciousness" part. What about other creatures? Chimps can't be observers? You have to have a certain intelligence, or something? Seems far fetched. If this statement has any truth to it then IMO it must have more to do with whatever it is...

My description isn't very accurate, I know. I'm still working on figuring out the specifics. I think I have the right general idea. My description doesn't seem all that different than JesseM's, except I actually said some wrong things by putting it in terms of actual spins. So, let me see if...

I kind of understand the reasoning why entanglement is weird now. To explain, I'll start by assuming it's NOT weird, and explain what we expect to find in this scenario: Say we've got a bucket load of entangled electrons (a bucket can hold quite a few). We separate the pairs and keep them...

Ok, I see what's weird now. When you measure the spin of one particle, the other automatically collapses into the corresponding negative spin. But this can't be explained by saying that both particles came out predisposed to behave that way. Bell's theorem proves otherwise. (I'm still trying to...

"... 100% probabilities of spins, NEVER real spins." -- point taken I know I'm missing something, because I don't see what is so weird about entanglement yet. When two electrons are put together, they automatically align themselves so that their spins are opposite. Why is it weird that each...

I'm only just beginning to really learn about entanglement, and I just have some questions about what entanglement actually means. Let's say we have one electron and put it in a magnet field. We find out what it's spin was along one axis based on whether a photon is emitted. But now we know...