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Dude. I've read several of your posts on this article and I can't tell whether you're a) trolling or b) on crack.

Average age of Nobel Prize winners for economics is 67, for physics, 52, and for literature, it's 63 years old.

People do not get Nobel prizes to impress women. Are you a researcher? Until the age of at least 25 the average young researcher, aka student, aka fresh meat, is doing whatever makework their lab PI tells them to do, and possibly attempting to make notes for the odd bit of PhD research on the side. There is no glamour to that sort of work at all. After that is a postdoc, and that's not exactly Contact by Carl Sagan either. The student who is looking to impress women is better advised under most economic circumstances to go and get a job in industry that comes with perks and a company car.

Actually I don't doubt that your heart is in the right place on this discussion, and that you're arguing honestly from your own experiences, but much of what you are saying just doesn't fit very well with the realities of academia. Which, by the by, has academic standards, not male or female ones. Specific departments impose very gendered standards; academia itself, especially those areas that use blind peer review, are much better about these things...

Once your average Scientist hits 30, their mind will slow down, and it's likely you won't see much groundbreaking research from them.

      There is research that contradicts your theory. In fact if anything the average age at which earth-shattering discoveries are made is INCREASING.

      However since you've proven you're not a scientist at all, we won't be expecting much from you.

Actually, there is a good reason no computer scientist ever won a Nobel prize in Mathematics - there is no such prize. For speculation about the reasons you might want to read this.

It does have its dupes too.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then?

Some speculations as to the reason behind there not being a Nobel Prize for math are here.

> What "very large percentage"? For a winner to be counted
> as an American, he has to be a US citizen.

I started digging through www.nobel.se to do some checking, but it's quite a pain to get all the details of place of birth, citizenship, etc, too much in fact for winning an argument on /. Still, "large percentage" leaves quite some room for interpretation, and looking just at the Physics laureates of the last ten years, quite a few were born and educated abroad and received the award while at a US institution. You can bet those universities still claim those awards as "theirs". In fact you can find links to the most popular alma maters at http://almaz.com/nobel/alma.html.

> The fact is, if anything, Americans are over educated.

Indeed, particularly linguistically. The extent to which you elaborated (i.e. needing a degree for data entry) is quite flimsy and doesn't prove anything. I finished high school in Australia and did the final 2.5 years of my CS degree in the US, and frankly the only math above and beyond what I learned in high school were differential equations and a teensey bit of extra linear algebra. In English I was regressed back to grade 11 level or so, and in the sciences I can't say I learned significantly much beyond high school level in Australia. What does that mean? Mostly that Americans are futzing around in high school doing who knows what, deferring a lot of vital learning till college. Too bad for those who never end up going to college, I guess they can make up the idiot masses. So especially for someone with a "liberal arts" degree, requiring a college degree essentially means requiring the equivalent of a high school degree of many other countries. Your "over education" mileage may vary depending on the frame of reference.

...after which this is kind of like asking "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

He did actually invent MRI; Paul Lauterbur made a refinement in imaging technique and Peter Mansfield made improvements to the analysis of the raw data, so the absence of his name is indeed singular. More so because Damadian actually built the first working scanner, holds the patent on MRI (and 39 other patents too), and built the first commercial MRI scanner.

Perhaps even more striking and demonstrating that he was no flash in the pan, Damadian's company (FONAR) currently builds the most advanced MRI scanners available including a full 360-degree scanner with enough room in it for a full medical team (presumably using plastic and ceramic instruments).

So, yeah, you'd have to figure that something underhanded was going on.

Rosalind Franklin passed away by the time they got the idea of giving Nobel prize for DNA structure. The rules of Noble prize forbid awarding it posthumously.

its a REWARD you nit wit! Set up by the trust fund from the sale of Dynamite! Arafat got one... that alone is laughable.

http://almaz.com/nobel/nobel.html

http://www.nobel.se/index.html

There are no such things as "rights." If there were, they wouldn't need to be stated or enforced. Rights are something that can't be taken away by someone else.

That's an argument over which words to use ("rights" or "privileges"), rather than their meaning (our degree of freedom to speak, etc).

The meanings of Jefferson (in the Declaration of Independence) and Utah Phillips (in this quote) are, to me:

1) You always have the right, whether or not someone stops you from excercising it. Do people with advanced ALS still have the right to speak? Does Stephen Hawking suddenly gain it when he turns on his speech synthesiser? Similarly, if someone gags you, you retain your right even if you lose the physical ability. That's what I think Jefferson means by inalienable.

2) For someone to repress this freedom, the repressed must acquiesce. It's not strictly true -- the repressor could lock you up and procede to ignore you -- but practically it works. A repressor can tell you not to speak and not to practice your religion. If you acquiesce, then you indeed give away that freedom. If you continue to speak or to practice, then you are still free. Millions of peaceful dissidents have excercised their rights despite the legal authorities The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free

The problem is that so few resist, especially on others' behalf. We (myself included) all talk, but why aren't we writing our elected representatives and meeting with them. Why aren't we involved in organized politics? We can do it perfectly legally, at little risk or cost to ourselves. No risk of jail, no risk of life and limb, but we're all reading Slashdot instead.

Martin Luther King, and many others in his position, complained that the complacent good-willed multitudes (you and me) are more at fault than the ill-willed few. We can always stop it if we act. He wrote, while in jail for resisting and excercising his freedoms,

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate ... Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Actually, economists have demonstrated time and time again that the alternatives will be developed long before needed. Prices for transportation will continue to drop [juliansimon.com] unless government intervention comes to "help us", in which case prices rise. Thanks, gov't., for the "help".

This statement is quite a misleading simplification of a very complex reality. For more information on the not so perfect free market, perhaps you should read some of Amartya Sen's work.

Or just drink willow bark tea, which contains salicylic acid. Aspirin was created by isolating part of this compound. In fact, it's better for you -- doesn't cause intestinal bleeding.

If I happen to break a law, like the DMCA, tough. The civil rights activists were breaking a law when they sat at the front of the bus and refused to get up. They said the law was unjust, they went to jail for it, and they won. I plan to do the same.

Except that's not the scenario you should anticipate. If you provoke the ire of the media monopolies, they won't have you arrested. They'll sic their lawyers on you. Which will tie up all your assets in litigation until you relent.

Nor should you expect society to respond to your actions the way it did to the Civil Rights movment. That was about fundamental matters of human dignity, like being able to sit down while riding the bus, or use a public bathroom, or buy a house, or do a thousand other things most of us take for granted.

Many people might think you also have the right to listen to a song without buying the whole album, or watch Sex and the City without subscribing to HBO. But let's get real: these issues will never inspire the same level of outrage and activism.

The Maths equivalent of the Nobel prize is the Fields medal.

My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician ... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting :-)

In fact I recall I think it was 20/20 or 60 minutes which had an article where researchers were being paid high salaries to test the flow of ketchup (catsup/ketsup) and if it was thick enough for the American market.

What is it with luddites on Slashdot? NIST is a vitally important hi-tech facility that does far more than simply measure the viscosity of ketchup. I live 5 minutes away from it and have been there many times and I never knew this. Taking one *minor* area of research and blanketly saying they aren't necesary is a disservice to NIST and the country (USA). BTW the reason I *don't* work there now is because I can make more money in the private sector. My dad worked at NIST (not on this alleged ketchup project) and I have surpassed his salary.

Surely someone can regulate what constitutes a neccessity, but why not branch some of these things to academia, where things are always revolutionary changing constantly to keep up to date, as opposed to following standards set eons ago.

You don't understand what they mean by standards. They can very accurately measure flow rates (like at your gas pump), weights (for commerce), lengths (for better manufacturing), etc. They aren't about establishing standards (though they do sometimes) so much as QA of current standards like the meter, the US pound, etc.

Government can cut budgets by passing some of these tasks to colleges, then pay the universities to keep track of this at the fraction of a cost, keep students excited about helping government, and saving us all some money.

Um how? You mean by giving them more money? The government already gives state Universities money. What proof do you have that a bunch of students often more concerned about getting drunk can do what phDs at NIST do better and for less money? They serve different purposes and handle things that University research can't do.

NIST is one of the reasons that America is at the leading edge of technology. NIST and research labs like it employ *many* phDs from all over the world. Believe me, there are far more intelligent people at NIST than any of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked for. If we cut funding to NIST then many people will not have a reason to get a phD because there will be no jobs for them (outside of Universities). Guess what? Many smart people will leave the country and go to other places with hi-tech research and we will become an insigificant country.

Here is a *small* list of the many important things that NIST does:

• Better fire detectors
• Bomb sniffing
• Nanotechnology
• 1997 Nobel prize winner in physics for using lasers to cool atoms. This was a Slashdot topic BTW
• Advanced Robotics
• Advanced Manufacturing - This is really cool stuff.
• Semiconductor Fab - i.e. making faster computer chips
• ...

No, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect. It was awarded in 1921, six years after he published "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" and its corollary, which deduced from the results of the first paper that light must carry away inertia. Later this turned into the E=mc formula. Here is a good bunch of links to follow for details on the Nobel.

The guy who wrote that link is fscking clueless. He shows his ignorance by saying that the guy who LBL and LLNL is named after is "Orlando Lawrence".

Yeah, right. It's Ernest Lawrence. (OK, it was Ernest Orlando Lawrence.

Hey, Kissinger's won the Nobel Peace Prize.

And in re the societal and cultural ideas in Heinlein's books: they blow chunks too. He's far too much up the arse of the survivalist type: the lone hero who's self sufficient and just needs a gun to shoot those durn tax collectors. This means he tends to present a weird view of society, where power becomes the main focus of individual-societal interaction. This at times borders on the fascist.

You might note that Alfred Nobel was never married!
Though he did have a mistress named Sophie Hess. It seems to be something of an urban legend that Nobel held a grudge against mathematicians because one supposedly screwed around with his wife on the side. Go here to hear it from the horses' mouth(taken from the sci.math newsgroup).

• manned flight - allows people to cheaply travel vast distances in a short time.
  production line - Henry ford changed the way goods are manufactured. Instead of using craftsmen he harnessed the power of machines to mass produce cars.
  penicillin - flory's(forget flemming) discovery revolutionised healthcare, saving millions during the war and after.
  electronic computer - enabled for the first time grunt calculations to be undertaken accurately
  atomic power (mentioned) - changed the way wars are fought and power can be generated, opened up nuclear medicine.
  transisitor - birth of electronics.
  manned space flight - forever changed mans view of earth.
  personal computer - birth of home computing and brought computing power to everday mans desktop.