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Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but no, I don't assume that. I'm objecting to the "OMG the sky will fall if somebody doesn't get vaccinated" pseudo-argument, and the misuse of the concept of herd immunity in that context.

Anti-vaxxers are trying to skate on herd immunity, yes. Their presence does weaken the herd, if by "weaken the herd" you mean they increase the size of an existing vulnerable population. But they do not cause plagues, they do not cause healthy individuals to stop producing antibodies, and they do not increase the mutation rate of organisms.

Careful, while mutation rate doesn't increase, having lots and lots more organisms at the same mutation rate dramatically increases the actual number of mutations, and thus increases the chances of successful and viable mutations occurring. 10 organisms with a .5% mutation rate is different from 10 trillion organisms with a .5% mutation rate. And in a partially vaccinated population each of those mutations will have more opportunities to spread and thrive and test their mutations against vaccinated individuals.

There are several large non-vaccinating communities in my area (Old-Order Amish, among others) and they do endure regular, preventable epidemics. Those epidemics do not cause chain reactions into the vaccinated population. They just plain don't. These unvaccinated people interact with the rest of us all the time, and it does not destroy the herd or compromise the herd immunity. That's independently verifiable fact.

Again, be careful with your phrasing here. Herd immunity is precisely what prevents one vulnerable population from infecting other vulnerable populations. And there are researched immunity rates required to achieve effective barriers between vulnerable populations and individuals. Wikipedia has some numbers and references.

Considering that the success of any particular immunization is largely unknowable and the immunity rate needed to achieve effective herd immunity barriers is very vague, every individual that doesn't get immunized does but their large community at a very real risk.

Also consider those populations you talk about, particularly the Amish, are often very isolated. They do interact with the outside world, but those interactions area rare, and the chance of encountering someone else who is un-vaccinated while being sick themselves is very small. That's the very concept the idea of Herd Immunity is meant to convey. Once overall immunity drops to a certain point, that chance of spread increases dramatically. There's a number of neat animations that illustrate this, this one isn't the best I've seen but it was easy to find and it does its job.

Remember that even people that have been successfully immunized can and will become temporary members of the vulnerable population under many circumstances. Sick from other diseases that weaken the immune system, pregnancies, medical treatments that weaken the immune system, etc. There are also those people that do not have a choice (too young, allergies, other medical condition). So those people are the ones that are being put at risk when someone chooses not to vaccinate their children. It's especially bad at a doctor's office since that's where people take their kids when they get sick, and if they bump into kids waiting to get vaccinated, or who's vaccination didn't take, they've suddenly endangered more than just their own child with your decision. I'd be more OK with people refusing vaccines if they would voluntarily quarantine themselves when sick and there were criminal negligence charges available if they're decision affected anyone else.

I think everyone wants the vax/antivax argument to be discretely binary, but it's really more of a nuanced continuum tha

For example, I don't even see latin mentioned in any of these...

http://hms.harvard.edu/admissions/default.asp?page=requirements

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcal/documents/TSS_NEJM_reading

http://www.hhmi.org/grants/pdf/08-209_AAMC-HHMI_report.pdf

You might impress a stogy old prof on an admissions committee with a latin class on your course transcript, but I doubt it will help you get a jump start on your medical degree more than learning conversational skills in a non-dead foreign language in preparation for patient care in our now increasingly multicultural society.

Apologies to Dr Sheldon Cooper of course, advanced biology courses are probably a better investment of time if one is aiming towards a jump start on a medical degree ;^) Physics, although important, hasn't changed much in it's application to medicine (other than perhaps radiology), but being on top of genetics and cell biology is becoming increasingly important. Getting the basics down early allow time to learn all the new stuff that is coming down the pipe.

The chemistry of the Earth's natural cycles and environs are identifiably altered under increased carbon dioxide uptake. Carbon dioxide forms acids with constituent components of the atmosphere, soil and water. Water is chemically neutral and oxygen readily balances out to the available reactions, contributing nothing to net chemical cycles on the Earth outside of return carbon that has been out of the cycles for thousands and millions of years (see Cretaceous Period vs the logic of biofuels and green chemistry).

However, I could be fair and ignore science and the world we currently live in, on the off chance your logic needs to be looked at for those circumstances. Actually, we don't have to, as if either of those were a current issue with similar consequences (and some of the conversation regarding the hydrogen economy suggests water could become some class of risk), we actually WOULD be having that conversation. That ISN'T our actual problem right now. Anything that had a similar long term consequence would cause the scientific community the SAME CONCERN.

Unlike you, however, I've actually thrown in some genuine, peer reviewed research. Feel free to add and any ACTUAL research you might have. None of that meta-research by people with readily confirmed biases. After all, my research sources come from a variety of institutions and have been around long enough to go past peer review and enter into the realm of confirmability.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2486.1998.00164.x/full
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985cca..proc..546B
http://wwwzb.fz-juelich.de/contentenrichment/inhaltsverzeichnisse/bis2009/ISBN-0-471-72017-8.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GB001278.shtml
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2004.00864.x/full
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/03-5055
ftp://ftp.imarpe.pe/Curso_Modelos/Biblio%20Arnaud%202/MEPS2008-Acidification.pdf%23page=5
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/QwPqRGcRzQM5ffhPjAdT/full/10.1146/annurev.marine.010908.163834
http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/65/3/414.short

Well, there is, for example a three year old paper by Tamada describing the process in some detail. And besides, there was a paper published 48 years ago on the 8th place of the search result that I've shown before that described several methods for uranium extraction, including the predecessors of the approach pursued it Tamada's paper.

This casts some doubt on your ability to research the claims your are making. E.g.: "Nobody extracted anything they just suggested it might be possible", "That makes any cost estimates an exercise in wishful thinking since they don't have a clue what is needed"

the history of the Titius-Bode Law

Perhaps I 'm not the authority on planetary formation, but I got an idea or two about it- especially since I am apparently answering questions about it on a Friday evening. The 'law' (Titius-Bode) mentioned by AC below is for distances, not masses: but AFAIK there have been some attempts to make fits on all those new Kepler data, and it seems promising: knock yourself out here and here. Personally I wouldn't be very surprised to discover a power law distribution, as this is often the case.

I haven't heard anything on the Pascal triangle idea you are describing, though it sounds interesting; most mass "ending up" in the centre of the distribution, its concentration further accelerating accretion, but most minds in the field would argue that the formation of Jupiter was triggered by the presence of the so-called "iceline": that is the distance from the central (heating) object were there is not enough heat for water to remain in vapor, so it condences into ice. Then, the increased mass because of the enhanced ice abundance quickly accretes whatever is near even faster, forming a massive planet rather fast and depleting material around its neighborhood.

Though the iceline trigger theory sounds plausible, there are tens if not hundreds of other issues arising if you believe that story --perhaps a bit too technical to describe here. Nonentheless, it will be really interesting to see if there is indeed a powerlaw at play, and if there is a Jupiter-like planet to be expected to be orbiting (more-or-less) near a given star's iceline.

In the last 100 years, Communism killed about 100,000,000 people.

Hummm.. Cursory research reveals, not a piece of scholarly research from Harvard, but a catalogue entry for a translation of a French book written to deceive.

Basically it says that everybody who has died in a non-capitalist country for any reason other than old age was 'murdered by communism'. And then totals those deaths up; does some 'statistics' to bump that figure even higher and presents this as a 'indisputable fact' to be regurgitated by Glenn Beck and Co..

did you look at his sig before you replied to him ? he lives in 1950.

Don't worry, a fuller accounting has developed since the 1950s.

In the last 100 years, Communism killed about 100,000,000 people.

1. "Not everybody has a computer" - while still somewhat true, it's becoming pretty much a non-issue, when countries like India are putting linux-based tablets into every students hands by subsidizing them so that they only cost $30. (No, not XO-based devices - the XO is overpriced in comparison).

1.a - if you don't have access to a computer outside of school hours, you won't be able to do the rapid code/test/modify loop that is most conductive to learning anyway. The days of painstakingly figuring out what you want to do with flow-charts, writing it all down on 3x5 index cards, going through your card deck to make sure you had no bugs, then committing it to punch tape so you can run it and take the ensuing green-bar print-out to the cafeteria and pore over it to find your errors are long gone.

2. People learn by example, so cut-n-paste solutions definitely have their place. You can take a page to describe the difference between a function declaration and a function definition, and still leave someone scratching their head, or just SHOW them by example.

int foo(int a); // declaration - does nothing except declare that somewhere, we will sit down and define a function called foo();

int foo(int a) { // definition - it defines what foo actually does.
return a*42;
}

3. As for future "real-world" practicality, whatever you teach them today is probably going to be obsolete in 20 years anyway, unless you're teaching them c/c++ (which you don't want to do as a first language if they're kids).

Let them get the basics of reading, writing, math, biology, chemistry, and physics first. The schools are already failing at this, as evidenced by how half of all universities having to give remedial english and math courses. Lest you thing the US is better, 2/3 of students entering college are not ready for it, and only 1/3 actually take remedial classes to help fix the problem and only 3.4% of those tested were suited for taking college-level courses without a remedial course first, of which a large percentage rejected help (which helps explain the drop-out rate)..

Computer courses don't fix these basic problems in reading, writing, and arithmetic. No wonder that in one study 26% of all accountants who graduated failed the simple task of writing a 2-page memo ... and why it's become an increasingly ingrained problem over the years.

Actually the Communists probably killed the most - about 100,000,000.

Communist countries tend(ed) to be militantly atheistic and commonly harass, imprison, or otherwise interfere with religious institutions, including seizing or destroying their property.... until they think they need them, as occurred in the Soviet's Great Patriotic War.

Hmmm.... let's see....

Militantly atheist communist governments killed about 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years.

The birth rate of native Europeans is so far below replacement rate that they risk serious social problems in the next 30 years.

Gallium Arsenide is an interesting III-V semiconductor material for a number of reasons.

Engineers in the Soviet Union continued to perfect and use vacuum tubes long after they were abandoned in the West.

Well, bad luck, your suspicion turns out to be false. Of course what is interesting about that is that I was simply responding to your statements that were, to use your phrase, "linked to superstitions that have been passed down for millenia."

I looked outside and it looked like there was a huge nuclear reactor in the sky spewing radiation towards the earth. I wonder if that could have anything to do with it. I also heard that Mars, Pluto, the moon and other solar bodies are warming up as well. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1997/11.06/BrighteningSuni.html

The slashot summary isn't terribly accurate, and even if you violate the social norms of /. and click through to read the article, the article is pretty sketchy as well. We're already getting comments from people who think this is about substituting video lectures for live lectures, and that's totally inaccurate.

This method is not new. I teach physics at a community college (not at Hahvahd like Mazur, alas), and I've been using methods similar to his for about 15 years. I learned about them from Mazur's book, which was published in 1996.

It's also not just some guy's opinion about how to teach. It's solidly backed up by research.

Let's start from the evidence. There is very strong evidence that lecturing is a terrible way to teach physics. The classic studies work like this. You give students a multiple-choice test at the beginning of the semester on very simple, basic concepts of physics. What hits the ground first, a larger rock or a smaller rock? What forces act on a book that's lying on a table? They do badly, but you expect that, because most of them haven't had high school physics. Then you teach a semester's worth of physics to them and give them the test again to measure how much they've improved. The usual statistic used to measure their improvement is the gain, G, defined as G=(final score-initial score)/(100%-initial score). In other words, if they haven't improved at all, G=0, and if they've improved as much as it was possible for them to improve, G=1. With classes that use traditional lecturing -- even by experienced, award-winning teachers who get glowing reviews from their students, are enthusiastic, and put a great deal of effort into their lectures -- you get about G=0.25. In other words, the students have developed very little conceptual understanding beyond what they came in with. On the other hand, if you use interactive teaching techniques that force students to participate actively and talk about concepts, you can usually get much higher G's.

The evidence is that it doesn't really matter very much what specific interactive technique you use, as long as it's interactive and deals with concepts. Mazur pioneered a technique called peer instruction. Just to be concrete, I'll describe his specific technique. You require the students to read the book *before* they come to class. You enforce this with reading quizzes given when they walk into lecture. The class consists basically of a bunch of multiple-choice conceptual questions. You pop up one of the questions on the screen and ask students to show you their initial opinion about which answer is right. This can be done with expensive electornic "clickers" or with cheap pieces of cardboard marked A, B, C, and D. If you see that almost everyone got it right, you briefly confirm that, and then move on. If they didn't, you have them break up into small groups and discuss the question. You walk around and listen a lot without saying much. Then you have them vote again again. The theory is that the right answer is supposed to win out over the wrong answers in the discussion. When it's time to give a test, you make sure that the test includes some purely conceptual questions, because otherwise students will tend to resist dropping the "plug and chug" approach they're used to and switching to focusing on concepts.

Mazur's book shows data where he got G~0.5 with this method. Nobody has ever gotten a G that high with traditional lecturing. Over the years since 1996, many of us who use interactive techniques have refined what we do, and it's not uncommon to significantly higher G's. The average for three of us who teach freshman calc-based physics at my school last semester was 0.7.

A common concern is that if the teacher d

I hasten to add that you can better - or at least personally - employ your fervor at http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/

Copyright should only be 3-5 years anyway. Afterall, if you're not making money on something after that point, it's time to reconsider your career.

The argument for long copyright expressed in an amicus brief by Dr. Seuss Enterprises is that the author of a work should have the privilege of sharing in the profit from an adaptation of the work to a medium invented after the work was published.

Seeing as this breakthrough is as yet not even on the NREL RSS feed... http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/rss/rss.xml I reckon either somebody is "talking out of school" which likely means this technology will indeed show up in production in some other country other than NREL's source of funding first or it does not, indeed, exist.

Still, one can always hope that Big Carbon's throttling grip may one day be broken...or even act upon that desire: http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/

Religion supports terrorism, it needs to be banned.

The militant atheist Communists of Russia and China actively suppressed religion through arrest, imprisonment, seizure of church property, and other measures*, and along the way managed kill around 100,000,000 people (far more than actual terrorists), set off arms races and wars around the world, and threaten to return again in many parts of the world. Maybe we can start off by banning them.

Another troubling development: [The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace

*Such as the League of Militant Atheists

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2005/05/23/why-you-should-not-go-to-medical-school-a-gleefully-biased-rant/

It is a mistake to think that all Israeli Jews agree with Israeli or even Jewish policies. For example: Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews 'harass' 8-year-old girl over dress. Quote: "... 50 people involved in the abuse of an 8-year-old." Also see Israel braced for protests against treatment of women after girl, 8, is spat on by Jewish extremists.

Here are only some of the reasons many Israelis disagree with the typical policies of the Israeli government:

Some Israelis think that further violence toward Iran will cause trouble for Israel. Partly that is because there is the idea that encouraging violence against 1.6 billion Muslims is self-defeating. There are only an estimated 14 million (not billion) practicing Jews in the entire world.

Some of those who control the U.S. government want to build an oil pipeline through Iran to get oil from the "Stan" countries to the ocean where it can be shipped easily. That idea would be financially profitable only if U.S. taxpayers paid for security. The U.S. government is, in some ways, VERY corrupt.

Remember that the U.S. government supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's war with Iran so that U.S. companies could sell weapons to Iraq, and with the idea of the enormous profits that would come from building the pipeline through Iran.

Also, remember that the U.S. government has interfered with the politics in Iran since before before 1953, when the U.S. agency known as the CIA arranged the removal of a democratically elected president, President Mossadegh. The U.S. government arranged that the Shah have complete power. See for example, Politics, Power, and US Policy in Iran, 1950-1953 (PDF file, Harvard University). Quote: ... the August 1953 coup was not an isolated incident, but an outgrowth of decisions and policies made by the Truman administration largely as a result of a truly remarkable U.S. military buildup that really began to come on line in mid-1952. Such aggressiveness would have been impossible in 1950 or 1951, even if Eisenhower had been president.

Opposition in Iran to the violent regime of the Shah caused support for Muslim clerics who took over management of the government. Iranians say that clerics have usually not been good business and government managers. The unthinking violence of the U.S. government toward Iran has caused Iranians to be very afraid of what the U.S. government might do in the future.

One reason for the Iranian government to develop nuclear materials is to try to protect Iran against U.S. government violence. Another reason is that all governments need to give attention to sources of energy that do not cause global warming.

Some with influence in the U.S. government wanted to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. That is one of the reasons the U.S. government spends taxpayer money there, but it seems that getting control of Afghanistan will not happen soon, so there is renewed interest in violence toward Iran.

The U.S. government's support for violence toward Arab and Muslim nations, partly as a way for a few to make money, is seen by some as caused by Jewish manipulation of the U.S. government. There is support by some Jews in the U.S. to get U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security of Israel.

There are only 5,874,300 Jews in Israel. There are approximately 5,275,000 Jews in the United States. In some ways, the U.S. is as much o

Communism killed around 100,000,000 people in the last century.

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism (Translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer) (Review) / (book review)
Author: Daniel J. Mahoney

The Black Book of Communism is one of those rare books that really matters. It is the first systematic and comparative analysis of the "crimes, terror and repression" that accompanied Communism everywhere and that seemed to define its "genetic code." The book's centerpiece is a relentlessly documented narrative of political violence and repression in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, drawing on extensive archival materials made available to researchers since the collapse of Communist rule in 1991. But The Black Book also contains absorbing accounts of Communist repression in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World. . . . .

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically--inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union. Despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 20 million people between 1918 and 1956, and for the imprisonment in camps of millions more. He demolishes the notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. And he concludes that there is no basis for the claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous Party and police officials acting independently of orders.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and a denial of the humanity of political or class "enemies." Margolin demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history, and damaged the nation in everything from economics to ethics. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule: 65 million lost lives. Perhaps the deepest reason The Black Book has sparked controversy is that it argues Communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Editor Stephane Courtois argues that Communist crimes, like Nazi ones, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that Communism's crimes have any right to be excused or qualified because they were committed in the name of egalitarian principles. Courtois shows that Communism is an exterminationist ideology which selects its enemies on the basis of class...

Communism killed around 100,000,000 people in the last century.

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism (Translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer) (Review) / (book review)
Author: Daniel J. Mahoney

The Black Book of Communism is one of those rare books that really matters. It is the first systematic and comparative analysis of the "crimes, terror and repression" that accompanied Communism everywhere and that seemed to define its "genetic code." The book's centerpiece is a relentlessly documented narrative of political violence and repression in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, drawing on extensive archival materials made available to researchers since the collapse of Communist rule in 1991. But The Black Book also contains absorbing accounts of Communist repression in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World. . . . .

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically--inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union. Despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 20 million people between 1918 and 1956, and for the imprisonment in camps of millions more. He demolishes the notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. And he concludes that there is no basis for the claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous Party and police officials acting independently of orders.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and a denial of the humanity of political or class "enemies." Margolin demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history, and damaged the nation in everything from economics to ethics. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule: 65 million lost lives. Perhaps the deepest reason The Black Book has sparked controversy is that it argues Communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Editor Stephane Courtois argues that Communist crimes, like Nazi ones, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that Communism's crimes have any right to be excused or qualified because they were committed in the name of egalitarian principles. Courtois shows that Communism is an exterminationist ideology which selects its enemies on the basis of class...

This has been done before with a different knockout gene. Alexandra McPherron and Su Jin-Lee created "mighty mice" by knocking out the MSTN gene back in 1997. Same sorts of effects - doubled muscle mass, increased endurance and the like. There is a lot of hope in the muscular dystrophy arena that these types of knockout effects can be replicated via drug delivery mechanisms.

These sorts of mutations also occur naturally. I have a whippet and a naturally occurring mutation occasionally results in a bully whippet, which looks like the Incredible Hulk of whippets. In this case, the muscles don't just double - these dogs can pack on a whole other dog's worth of weight in added muscle. They are absolute freaks of nature - but with the same docile temperament that normal whippets have.

It's a result of a myostatin mutation. If a dog has one copy of the gene, they are incredibly fast runners with just a slight increase in muscle mass - these are the best racing whippets. If a dog is born with two copies of the mutated myostatin gene, they become "bullies". Forget six-pack abs - these guys have an entire case...

Yeah...is why I put systems on line crunchin' to find new materials for solar alternatives.. The carbonaceous industry has too much wealth...too much power...too much distaste for the many of humankind (I extrapolate that last assertion from their behavior).

So I figure if you can't beat 'em, obsolete 'em.

Zittrain and the rest of the Berkman Center are just shills for Google. The FSF isn't far behind. Open source should be about programmers freely sharing knowledge, not about controlling people.

The link to the PDF in the summary is a borked link ... this one is accurate: http://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1135.pdf

Yes! The trip to Kitt Peak is worth it just for the fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. And if you're in the neighborhood, you could also visit the nearby Whipple Observatory, about an hour south of Tucson. You'll need an appointment to take the tour at Whipple. Whipple Observatory Visitor's Center While in Tucson, you can spend a lot of time at the Pima Air and Space Museum if you're in to that kind of thing.

And I'm serious. While not as versatile towards own-hosted solutions as the old Windows Mobiles, it's still light years beyond Android and iOS. You can easily use your own Exchange server to sync and share your contacts, calendar and other stuff, which gives you true privacy.

Is it really that easy to set up your own Exchange server? Does everyone around here keep a Windows server in a coloc somewhere so they can run Exchange?

The reason for this is simple too. Microsoft may be many things, but they have always respected privacy.

Really? Always?

http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/02/08/08/0923231.shtml
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/users-outraged-over-windows-live-privacy-violations
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/microsft-investigates-hotmail-privacy-breach.ars

And that's just what I found in a quick google search.

Actually, Scalia was found to be the most activist with Thomas running a close second. Conservative judges were also found to me more activist (willing to strike down rulings that lean towards a liberal bias). There's an interesting study on judicial partisanship that was done over 20 years of cases. The old conservative class of 'Liberal Activists Judges" turns out to not be entirely true after all, but rather leaning more towards a conservative trend towards begin activist.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/08/04_sunstein.html

No drug is without harm.

No government should endorse harmful behavior.

Intoxicants, legal or not, bring with them negative behaviors. If you don't agree, feel free to move next to the drug users of your choice, including downtown bars. When you get tired of having your car broken into and your front stoop urinated upon, maybe you'll see my point of view.

Having experienced drug culture inside and out, I am very skeptical of its benefit. It encourages people to not apply themselves to life, and instead to take lots of drugs/alcohol as a substitute for honestly feeling good about life.

What we need in this modern world is not more distractions, but fewer. Given that even marijuana -- the "gentlest drug" -- seems to have negative effects on its users, such as a higher rate of mental health problems and a variety of health problems, it's unwise to legalize.

Let Mexico solve its own problems. And if the world loses a few bloggers, who really cares? We have seven billion people and all of them can tweet about what they're eating or write "poignant" blogs about being alone in the rain.

Send me your resume, come work on Open Source projects ! Always hiring. Always open source. Always patient oriented. https://open.med.harvard.edu/display/~amcmurry/

Yeah, the definition of equality pursued by the government by this kind of affirmative action is about creating a future where every group is equally represented. No, it is not strictly fair, and it sure as hell is not colorblind. But it is necessary to create a future that is not dominated by one ethnic group, which could lead to more conflict or oppression.

This is a neat test about biases: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Spoiler alert: pretty much the take-away from this exercise is that we do have unconscious biases, and really the only practical way to neutralize them is to acknowledge that the bias exists, and actively counteract it in ways that aren't strictly fair. Also, as an added bonus, this test REALLY seems to piss off people who regard themselves as totally unbiased :-P

Two bodies? Not four?

On a side note, I think there is also a fifth unnamed object, but that doesn't matter. The difference between Charon and a moon is that Charon is not much smaller than Pluto, in fact it doesn't orbit Pluto. Rather, the two bodies orbit their common centre of mass outside of Pluto.

That the barycentre of the system lays outside either body is a fair point, but begs the next question : when you have 2 stars (say Alpha Centauri and it's secondary) which orbit their system's barycentre outside either star, do they cease to be stars? If they don't, what is your reason for considering the location of the barycentre to be of fundamental importance? If it's not of fundamental importance to a star, is it of fundamental importance to a brown dwarf? To a gas giant? By introducing that criterion, you've introduced the need for another arbitrary line in the sand.

A fifth body in the Pluto-Charon-Nix-Hydra system? Rings a bell ; doesn't change anything much. (Doesn't seem to have been formally published? ... Found it!)

I forgot about Mercury. But Pluto's orbit is such that there are times when it gets closer to the Sun then Neptune, which would make it hard to class it as the "ninth" planet.

When was Pluto the ninth planet? Oh yes, before the discovery of 2060 Chiron in 1977. So, in 1976 it was the ninth planet, in 1977 it was the tenth planet, then in February 1979 it became the ninth planet again until 1999 when it again became the tenth planet. It's difficult defining a planet when the definition includes other things that may or may not be planets.

That "clears it's orbit" criterion is really logically dirty, because for so long you're not going to have any real confidence that a particular system has "cleared it's orbit" for planet "X".

You make a qualitative argument not a quantitative one.

All of these at the moment are qualitative arguments, not quantitative ones.

Your definition proposal is interesting, but I wish you have detailed the stability part instead of the spherical part. The n-body problem is not an easy one, how do you guarantee that a planet will stay in orbit for a long time?

You don't. Ever. For any planet.

There is nothing fundamentally impossible about some neutron star coming barrelling through the Solar system tomorrow, smacking into and swallowing Jupiter (bar a few meteorite candidates), and barrelling out the other side leaving the rest of the Solar system to sort it's dynamical stuff out without Jupiter.

Equally, there is around a 1% probability of one of the terrestrial planets being ejected form the Solar system in the next couple of billion years, just through interactions with Jupiter, then mutual interactions.

But odds are, that if it's been around for a billion years, it's unlikely to not be here in another billion. So getting a lower bound on the age of the star is an important point.

Because the 3-body problem itself (let alone 'n'-body problems for large 'n') is insoluble analytically, no general 'n'-body situation can be considered stable in the mathematical sense. (Lagrangian points being the exception, but they have a constraint that at most two of the particles in the system have significant mass. Which isn't very general.)

Sphericity, on the other hand, is assessable, and if it's gravitationally-induced, then it is permanent outside large collisions.

Also, a couple of orbits of the candidate is not an easy thing to wait for with Pluto.

So? Get on with the waiting!

The ability to extend it to extrasolar celestial bodies is a huge advantage. I admit most of my arguments are based on the Solar system. With

This is about as rigorous as the Zeitgeist movies *rolleyes*
If lazy slashdotters insist on videos rather than a rigorous description, a place to start would be http://pragcap.com/resources/media-section
Also, a summary by one of the core experts on modern monetary theory in an interview: http://hir.harvard.edu/debt-deficits-and-modern-monetary-theory
And how to fix things: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=5098 and http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=4656
Note that MMT is pretty much the only rational approach and is derived mathematically.

If this gets you in a pickle, you should really spend a moment reading some of the funnier astronomy acronyms for names although be warned. If you feel strongly about this title, you should be seated for the link.

The dark matter in the universe started with a random fluctuation field - see the pictures of the cosmic background radiation. The random distribution gives a tidal torque on matter, giving it angular momentum. As the dark matter collapses into smaller and smaller regions, the angular momentum is conserved. When smaller sub-units of matter collide together the momentum will also build up. See Peebles 1969 for one of the first papers.

Orion is such an obsolete concept, I don't know why people keep citing it. At least cite something like Medusa. It's superior to Orion in every way -- captures more energy, weighs less, exposes the crew to less radiation, has a gentler pusher stroke, scales down better, etc. Basically, you invert the paradigm; the explosions occur *ahead* of the spacecraft, which is *towed*, not pushed, by a large "parachute" that catches the explosive force.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008MNRAS.388.1686L They measured the spin of a few 100000 galaxies in both hemispheres. At first they found the _same_ preferred spin in any direction, then they started mirroring half of the galaxies before showing them to people and the effect vanished. They found no dipole.

Gleick has done some highly regarded work. I waded through some material on his web site many years ago, and felt a strong respect.

From my old notes, here's an audio interview about a previous book. A Miracle Made Lyrical: Jim Gleick's Isaac Newton

Also high praise for Chaos from I Missed the Complexity Revolution

I don't understand how this reviewer has never heard of Chaitin, but finds this book vastly too elementary. Oddly, I mentioned Chaitin in an earlier post this very day. Perhaps reviewer should tear a page out of the Roger Ebert school of criticism:

When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher. And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two. In the same way, if American Beauty gets four stars, then The United States of Leland clocks in at about two.

That's a lot of words to pour out without defining expectations or genre. And there are many sub-genres within science writing.

A copy of a good lecture is worth much more than the live presentation of a bad one.

True, but a live presentation of a good lecture is worth much more than a copy of a good lecture. In addition you gain a lot of benefit from interacting with fellow students. It is amazing how much better your understanding can become when confronted by trying to explain a concept to a peer. In fact it is called peer instruction and does have scientific data (in as much as you can get good data) to support it.

According to Cornell, yes. It's getting expensive to keep up with hiring better, more educated faculty, to maintain more expensive equipment to further their research and academic programs.

Neutron microscopes aren't something you can buy in Wal*Mart. Computer labs require a lob of energy and time to maintain. Updating buildings built decades ago is not cheap.

Whether their arguments are bullshit or not, I cannot speak to. Even still, is it really so shocking that modern society costs a lot? Progress costs money.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov06/tuition.so.much.sl.html

Wait, computer labs? Your kidding right? Because for 150K of debt, you think that a school could afford 1/100th of it to get each student a very nice 1000 laptop. Neuton microscope? Ha, I'm sure universities are buying dozens. Can't actually find one (they are still experimental), but you can get a scanning electron microscope for 350K http://www.technicalsalessolutions.com/item_description.php?IID=155. That would take a whole 10 students at Harvard to fund. http://www.gse.harvard.edu/admissions/financial_aid/tuition/

Meanwhile, how many undergrad students actually benefit from a Neuton microscope? Has to be close to zero, unless they are doing very advanced grad research. So the university is making students take out the equivalent of a house mortgage for something that has absolutely no benefit for them. This higher-ed bubble is about to bust, and I'm glad because my kids won't be subjected to these inflated prices.

The stimulation of demand through advertising and marketing has been driving Western economies since the Second World War, and it works just as well for intangible as tangible goods. So while I agree with your criticism, I don't think you should limit it to the "creative industries" - I think it applies to any industry that would vanish in a puff of smoke without its advertising department.

Look, I don't know if this is a scam. However, its not Ni52-CU53 that is supposed to create energy. It is Cu53's instability and the idea of a positron decay that leads to Ni 53. Then a proton accretion by muon superposition (its just a theory out there) yielding Cu54. then decaying to Ni 54 by positron decay, then a proton accretion again to Cu55 and so on... each decay destroys matter -> energy. Proton accretion? Well it has been proposed that there is a probability that a muon can appear over a hydrogen atom changing the proton by removing its charge. Without the charge, the coulomb barrier can be far more easily breached. Like the Pd+dt experiments, Nickle has a similar lattice structure that absorbs hydrogen. (Pd and Ni are unique metals because they absorb H + dt. ) The nickle lattice structure is proposed to enable the muon'd proton to approach the Ni nucleus and appear inside the coulomb barrier, where the strong nuclear force takes over. Hey this isn't my theory but its one of several bouncing around. It was published in the journal of nature here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1986Natur.321..127J

This is just the first step. "Oh, hey, something must exist."

Step two is figuring out what that something is, and/or how it works. That's what we're* working on now.

Then comes application of that knowledge.

Einstein's Field Equations back around the first World War might have seemed awfully cryptic, but they led to quantum physics, which led to semiconductors, which led to Slashdot. (Okay, I may have skipped a step or two.)

So maybe in another 100 years, this dark energy stuff will actually lead to something.

*As a GradCert surrounded by PhD's, I'm probably Saul Perlmutter's least educated collaborator.

One option worth consideration is the Harvard Extension School. While they do not offer a degree entirely online, the residency requirement is limited (I believe the undergrad degrees generally require four courses on campus). While the degree is a Bachelors of Liberal Arts, you are given a great deal of latitude in selecting courses, including delving into graduate level courses to delve deeper into selected CS/IT areas if you so choose.

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/

One student I know who completed his Bachelors at the Extension School while focusing on CS courses wrote about his experience:

http://www.cluehq.com/blog/

The resolution of a reconstituted neural image is higher if you directly wire electrodes to the brain; see Looking through cats' eyes and the PDF Reconstruction of natural scenes from ensemble responses in the lateral geniculate nucleus.

It depends on the conditions.

The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.

Why remember that X is caused by Y when you can just input Y into a computer and it gives X?

While I know little of ITT Long Beach (I'm half planet away from California right now) you have, in the US, one of most interesting opportunities ever aimed at adult learners. This opportunity is called the Harvard Extension School.

Don't let the Harvard name put you off :)

Harvard Extension School is a distance learning school of Harvard University. You can take both online classes and on campus classes (in Cambridge, MA). It has a very simple - and meritocratic - admission system:

You must take (and get at least B grades in) three pre admission courses. One of them is expository writing, which all prospective students must take. Two from a list of courses which varies from "concentration area" to "concentration area". One of the concentration areas is science, which is your interest. Before the expository writing course, you must take a placement test ("test of critical reading and writing skills", more about it here.

Rest assured the classes are going to be as interesting (and hard :)) as if you're admitted to any other undergraduate Harvard school. You will have a instructor (and fellow students) to help.

Harvard offers some options of financial aid for the pre admission courses (read more about it here - I'm assuming you're an American citizen, there is very limited support for international students). After admission there are way more financial aid options. Also, HES can be surprisingly cheap.

Willingness and motivation to learn are a rare characteristic in students and should be nourished. Do something about it :) I promise you it will be way more interesting than school ever was.

If I can help you in some way, just let me know.

While I know little of ITT Long Beach (I'm half planet away from California right now) you have, in the US, one of most interesting opportunities ever aimed at adult learners. This opportunity is called the Harvard Extension School.

Don't let the Harvard name put you off :)

Harvard Extension School is a distance learning school of Harvard University. You can take both online classes and on campus classes (in Cambridge, MA). It has a very simple - and meritocratic - admission system:

You must take (and get at least B grades in) three pre admission courses. One of them is expository writing, which all prospective students must take. Two from a list of courses which varies from "concentration area" to "concentration area". One of the concentration areas is science, which is your interest. Before the expository writing course, you must take a placement test ("test of critical reading and writing skills", more about it here.

Rest assured the classes are going to be as interesting (and hard :)) as if you're admitted to any other undergraduate Harvard school. You will have a instructor (and fellow students) to help.

Harvard offers some options of financial aid for the pre admission courses (read more about it here - I'm assuming you're an American citizen, there is very limited support for international students). After admission there are way more financial aid options. Also, HES can be surprisingly cheap.

Willingness and motivation to learn are a rare characteristic in students and should be nourished. Do something about it :) I promise you it will be way more interesting than school ever was.

If I can help you in some way, just let me know.

Here's my citation.

It's your post.

Simply pointing out that some of the data used as the basis for the AGW conclusions is not as reliable as was believed when those conclusions were formed was enough for you to paint me as "one of them", was enough for your hackles to stand on-end and for you to personally attack me.

I'm not saying the conclusions are wrong. I'm saying they may be less right than initially believed. That's how things FUCKING WORK, dude. Get off your high horse, you're every bit as devoted to not changing your views as any other fundamentalist whacko.

Based on what was known, the AGW conclusions were not incorrect. New things become known. Conclusions must be revisited and the impact that the newly-discovered data uncertainty has on those conclusions must be evaluated.

Oh, and here you go, asshole.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005E%26PSL.229..183I
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1331.full
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GC000146.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/science/02obtree.html

None of that necessarily means AGW conclusions are wrong, but it does mean that the assumptions that were made to establish historical data points were not as reliable as was believed at the time they were made. I do not recall hearing about anyone revisiting their AGW conclusions to determine what effect this new uncertainty may have on those conclusions -- because any suggestion that they need to do so is taken as an attack on the AGW conclusions. It is not. It's simply good fucking science.

If tomorrow we discover that assumptions that we made and believed to be true which were used in calculating the speed of light may not have been as true as we believed them to be at the time, that does not mean we have the speed of light *wrong* but it DOES mean that we need to re-determine if our calculations of the speed of light are still correct. To simply assume so and attack any suggestion otherwise is not science, it's blind faith. Lashing out just like any other religious fundamentalist. It's embarrassing, and frustrating to be painted as some sort of monstrous denier of reason when your goal is to not destroy but IMPROVE knowledge and understanding and to evolve conclusions and ideas as new evidence presents itself.