Slashdot Mirror

Did you even read the second article? There's a decade of development difference there, and yes, information has and can be transmitted faster than light. It really only makes sense, if ANY signal can be made to travel FTL, it's only a problem to put information into the signal.

People have made the speed of light into some weird sacred thing, and the fact is it's just set value in certain conditions (specifically a vacuum) but under other circumstances light can both speed up or even be slowed down to the speed of your car. People further put too much stock into relativity and treat it like its infallible when the theory is known to be incomplete and irreconcilable with all observable (let alone theorized) phenomena.

Once again, I'm not a physicist, I don't understand these matters mathematically and I don't claim to, but there is a lot more room to maneuver and a lot more developments have been and will be made than people like you and the others I have responded to seem to want to think.

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

First off CSS isn't protected by the DMCA

The legal system disagrees with you. Seeing as they are y'know lawyers and judges, I hope you won't be offended that I believe them over you.

it fails to be effective

Incorrect. It may be ineffective from a technical perspective, but it clearly qualifies as effective under the definition in the DMCA.

or a copy protection measure.

Mu. It doesn't need to be a copy protection measure - it needs to "prevent access" - which it does.

Subsequently the anti-circumvention shouldn't apply in the first place.

Incorrect.

Secondly, it is neither reasonable nor non-discriminatory.

Which is pretty meaningless. Under the DMCA, technological measures have no such requirements. In fact, when addressing the issue of "I can't play these movies on my OS of choice", the Copyright office said that argument was the equivalent of demanding VHS systems play Betamax tapes.

First off CSS isn't protected by the DMCA

The legal system disagrees with you. Seeing as they are y'know lawyers and judges, I hope you won't be offended that I believe them over you.

it fails to be effective

Incorrect. It may be ineffective from a technical perspective, but it clearly qualifies as effective under the definition in the DMCA.

or a copy protection measure.

Mu. It doesn't need to be a copy protection measure - it needs to "prevent access" - which it does.

Subsequently the anti-circumvention shouldn't apply in the first place.

Incorrect.

Secondly, it is neither reasonable nor non-discriminatory.

Which is pretty meaningless. Under the DMCA, technological measures have no such requirements. In fact, when addressing the issue of "I can't play these movies on my OS of choice", the Copyright office said that argument was the equivalent of demanding VHS systems play Betamax tapes.

First off CSS isn't protected by the DMCA

The legal system disagrees with you. Seeing as they are y'know lawyers and judges, I hope you won't be offended that I believe them over you.

it fails to be effective

Incorrect. It may be ineffective from a technical perspective, but it clearly qualifies as effective under the definition in the DMCA.

or a copy protection measure.

Mu. It doesn't need to be a copy protection measure - it needs to "prevent access" - which it does.

Subsequently the anti-circumvention shouldn't apply in the first place.

Incorrect.

Secondly, it is neither reasonable nor non-discriminatory.

Which is pretty meaningless. Under the DMCA, technological measures have no such requirements. In fact, when addressing the issue of "I can't play these movies on my OS of choice", the Copyright office said that argument was the equivalent of demanding VHS systems play Betamax tapes.

Magnetic field is in large part about keeping the atmosphere from being blown away by stellar wind, not radiation per se - magnetosphere doesn't stop electromagnetic waves, and as for particle radiation - the atmosphere would stop most of it.

Anyway, it could be that Earht itself is a borderline planet for life, just big enough for plate tectonics (something which Venus lacks, and which probably contributed greatly to its conditions); maybe even slightly too small in itself, but was pushed into habitable range by the collision with Theia (the collision that spawned the Moon)

Ceres isn't an asteroid.

Depends on who you ask. It arguably is. And before someone leaps forward with links about Ceres being classified as a "dwarf planet", let me note that saying what Ceres is doesn't prove what it isn't, as things can answer to more than one description (you don't contradict someone claiming that a man is a father by noting that he's a brother -- he can be both). "Planet" has now received a much less ambiguous definition than it once had, and "dwarf planet" has be coined, but, as far as I know, "asteroid" has not be disambiguated in any way that would make Ceres inarguably no longer one. Indeed the IAU Minor Planet Center specifically notes that a number of objects on the "minor planet" (the technical term for an asteroid) list have dual designations (e.g. also being numbered and listed in cometary catalogues), and goes on to note that they inclusion of an object on the new dwarf planet list does not preclude its inclusion on minor planet or other lists.

Especially The NYT, WashPost, and LATimes all do not deserve our eyeballs. Young journalists, do yourselves a favor... and go elsewhere.

Research shows that you are better off just dumping NYT/WashPost/other similar players in the news market if you care at all about balanced and accurate reporting. By denying them our collective eyeballs, they might actually adjust their arrogance down a tad and revert to better journalistic standards.

Is it possible yet to filter out Slashdot stories sourced from certain press channels? That would be a great feature - I'd like to vote my disapproval for these kinds of dismal journalistic practices by filtering _any_ stories based on these rotten apples as a source.

Or perhaps the NASA Astrophysical Data Service http://adswww.harvard.edu/

Eh, you're being a little quick to dismiss things. A third author typically had, at the very least, some meaningful role in the research that was done, and is a full member of whatever collaboration did it. (And probably has a Ph.D., or is working on one.)

I'm an associate member of a collaboration, and as such I make it onto the authors list for various little announcements they put out, but although I take a lot of the data, I'm not as involved in analyzing what it all means (I'm still shy of a M.Sc) so I usually just wind up in the "thanks to..." part at the end of real papers. :)

Random late thoughts:

Society as a whole gains from having more people getting access to quality education, arts, tools, communication, etc...

The unlimited copies now made possible through the internet do change the game just like print did and allows us to elevate the society to a higher level.

I do want to see artists making a living if that helps them continuing to deliver great things for society.

But the gain from having culture cheaply available to all far out weights the lost to the artist.

I do think the network effect is also very much downplayed in this linked argument and that a lot of people I listen to and pay to see their concert would never be on my list if it wasn't for copying and the internet.

What it seems to be doing is spreading the wealth to smaller players, not destroying it, just like it was in the 50s before the big majors killed diversity.

I also don't think there is ever a direct link between artists being paid and the quality of their work.

Artists who are really passionate will still manage to produce their art form no matter what.

I'm hoping we'll find a way to encourage new talent, pay a decent wage to those well know who have contributed something worthwhile and still allow free copying of everything to everyone for the greater good...

I'd also suggest those books: Remix, Piracy and The Wealth of Networks.

Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. [...] Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.

While an ad hominem attack has no place in a legitimate debate, but as you point out there is no actual debate here, since no amount of evidence or logic is ever enough to convince the deniers. So it's pretty hypocritical to complain that someone making a throwaway (and by your assessment insightful) joke at the end.

Surely you realize that with all manufactured controversies, always responding to the allegations in a thoughtful and reasoned manner only further legitimizes the idea that there is a controversy, especially in a world where journalism has been replaced with stenography seeking out and presenting two sides (and only two sides) to every "issue" imaginable, in order to maintain access and foster an imagine of neutrality and respectability. They aren't liberal or conservative, they are aloof. We see it with climate change. We've also seen it with torture. From the 1930s to 2004, waterboarding was uniformly described as "torture" in the media, then it suddenly wasn't. What changed? The United States government started torturing people. Most damningly, waterboarding remained "torture" when done by non-Americans. When one's goal is simply to muddy the waters and sow confusion, being treated with respect is victory.

Global warming deniers are no different from creationists, homeopathic healers, psychics, UFOlogists, believers in moon landing hoaxes, 9/11 truthers, birthers, and the like. They are illegitimate because the do not wish to face up to facts and arguments, but rather paint themselves as as persecuted martyr that brings the "truth."

Sorry, I forgot to include the link to the 1RXS 1609 papers: the original "discovery" paper and the "confirmation" paper. So to answer your question, no this isn't the first publication about 1RXS 1609, the 2008 one did announce the discovery. And I don't think I'm changing my argument. Not sure exactly what the "boo" about published papers means but in my first post, when I talk about discoveries and findings I implicity (sorry if I didn't make it clear) refer to literature. Here, the point is simply that if someone noticed anything around Formalhaut before the 2008 paper, it hasn't been published or announced so then it's kind of irrelevant. Of course, it's irrelevant to the extent of what one considers a "first".

Anyways, one would probably agree that arguing about it is a bit pointless because there is no clear answer and it just becomes circular after a while. I personally know many of the authors on both the Formalhaut and the 1RXS 1609 teams, and I can say that I've witnessed very good ethics from them. For instance, during a talk one of them would refer to the discovery as the "first" with quotation marks and mention the other one as also being the "first". One last remark is that fact that peer reviewed journals usually forbid the use of words like "first" and such. Science and Nature are very strict about it and it's certainly a good thing because it alleviates unneeded arguments ;-)

Sorry, I forgot to include the link to the 1RXS 1609 papers: the original "discovery" paper and the "confirmation" paper. So to answer your question, no this isn't the first publication about 1RXS 1609, the 2008 one did announce the discovery. And I don't think I'm changing my argument. Not sure exactly what the "boo" about published papers means but in my first post, when I talk about discoveries and findings I implicity (sorry if I didn't make it clear) refer to literature. Here, the point is simply that if someone noticed anything around Formalhaut before the 2008 paper, it hasn't been published or announced so then it's kind of irrelevant. Of course, it's irrelevant to the extent of what one considers a "first".

Anyways, one would probably agree that arguing about it is a bit pointless because there is no clear answer and it just becomes circular after a while. I personally know many of the authors on both the Formalhaut and the 1RXS 1609 teams, and I can say that I've witnessed very good ethics from them. For instance, during a talk one of them would refer to the discovery as the "first" with quotation marks and mention the other one as also being the "first". One last remark is that fact that peer reviewed journals usually forbid the use of words like "first" and such. Science and Nature are very strict about it and it's certainly a good thing because it alleviates unneeded arguments ;-)

Good point CheshireCatCO and I got stressed about talking too fast so I went and read the actual papers.

The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.

2004, according to Phil. And unless he's deliberately being misleading, they were in fact looking for the planet:

The 2004 actually refers to a 2005 Nature paper (A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt), presenting the modelling of the debris disk which strongly suggests that a planet has to be there. There is no mention of any candidate point source in the image.

(I, for one, can recall people identifying locations where a planet ought to be in that disk as early as Fall 2002. So it's credible to me that they'd be looking with HST in 2004.)

Granted, they didn't announce it right away. But, then, that's also the basis for you claim for priority of 1RXS 1609, so it seems like Phil is still right.

Of course, from the 2005 paper and strong prior evidence, they decided to follow up on the source and got images in 2006 and in 2008. Unless I missed the article there is not paper identifying a point source in the image as a candidate planet until the 2008 Science paper announcing the discovery of a planet around Formalhaut (Optical Images of an Exosolar Planet 25 Light-Years from Earth). If there was a peer-reviewed paper, it would be cited in the 2008 Science paper and, moreover, it is logical there is none since 1. they didn't want to be scooped, 2. they had to be cautious until the discovery was confirmed.

So even if people saw speckles in the debris disk of Formalhaut, it would have been difficult to claim them as planets unless spectroscopy would confirm or proper motion as it ended up being the case. In the case of 1RXS 1609, things are different since not only was there an optical detection but also a spectrum. The spectrum clearly showed it was a planet but could not unambiguously tell that it was gravitationally bounded to the star because of the lack of proper motion. So regardless of whether or not the planet was gravitationally bounded to the star (say, it could have been ejected from another system and just being running away), it still would have been, arguably, the first direct detection of an exoplanet.

Anyway, as everyone can see, the whole thing relies on what the definition of "first" is. Is it first published detection? First recorded image that shows it? etc. In any case, Phil does good work and I appreciate it. I just found that, ironically, the news about the news was being made a bit too spectacular.

Good point CheshireCatCO and I got stressed about talking too fast so I went and read the actual papers.

The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.

2004, according to Phil. And unless he's deliberately being misleading, they were in fact looking for the planet:

The 2004 actually refers to a 2005 Nature paper (A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt), presenting the modelling of the debris disk which strongly suggests that a planet has to be there. There is no mention of any candidate point source in the image.

(I, for one, can recall people identifying locations where a planet ought to be in that disk as early as Fall 2002. So it's credible to me that they'd be looking with HST in 2004.)

Granted, they didn't announce it right away. But, then, that's also the basis for you claim for priority of 1RXS 1609, so it seems like Phil is still right.

Of course, from the 2005 paper and strong prior evidence, they decided to follow up on the source and got images in 2006 and in 2008. Unless I missed the article there is not paper identifying a point source in the image as a candidate planet until the 2008 Science paper announcing the discovery of a planet around Formalhaut (Optical Images of an Exosolar Planet 25 Light-Years from Earth). If there was a peer-reviewed paper, it would be cited in the 2008 Science paper and, moreover, it is logical there is none since 1. they didn't want to be scooped, 2. they had to be cautious until the discovery was confirmed.

So even if people saw speckles in the debris disk of Formalhaut, it would have been difficult to claim them as planets unless spectroscopy would confirm or proper motion as it ended up being the case. In the case of 1RXS 1609, things are different since not only was there an optical detection but also a spectrum. The spectrum clearly showed it was a planet but could not unambiguously tell that it was gravitationally bounded to the star because of the lack of proper motion. So regardless of whether or not the planet was gravitationally bounded to the star (say, it could have been ejected from another system and just being running away), it still would have been, arguably, the first direct detection of an exoplanet.

Anyway, as everyone can see, the whole thing relies on what the definition of "first" is. Is it first published detection? First recorded image that shows it? etc. In any case, Phil does good work and I appreciate it. I just found that, ironically, the news about the news was being made a bit too spectacular.

Astronomers caught a glimpse of a future star just as it is being born out of the surrounding gas and dust, in a star-forming region similar to the one pictured above

There are some pics of the actual L1448 here

Is google down in your area:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~epsas/dynamics/vortex/structure.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0404004
http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/A_self_organised_structure_for_the_tornado.html
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/21580.pdf
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/594363/19397/Tornadic-thunderstorm-The-rotating-updraft-that-produces-the-tornado-extends
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/edwards/hcr3may.htm

Sorry to burst the bubble, but automatic classification of galaxies from sky survey data using machine learning techniques was accomplished in the early '90s by the SKICAT system developed at JPL and Caltech. http://adsabs.harvard.edu//abs/1995PASP..107.1243W is a good overview of the system and its accomplishments as of 1995.

For those interested: This was published 2 months ago http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010PhRvL.104o8102L

It seems the human eye wasn't an 'evolutionary flaw' after all as some proclaimed. Quote: "The retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images."

Basically: The blood vessels can act as wave guides for the incoming light. Cool!

I remember reading about some references to it found years ago in older religious tomes, but can't find anything online; anyone have those readily available?

Here you go.

I am an astrophysicist/astronomer, and I can vouch for that as a field in which amateurs still play a major role. Hell, my first paper on which I was the first author was something that anyone with a decent set of programming skills and a mild knowledge of astronomy could do - the trick was knowing that it needed to be done. As far as how to get involved, I have several suggestions.

1. Go back to school, formally or informally. If you have a university with an astronomy or physics department, get involved there, perhaps by taking a class or two part time. This serves a threefold purpose. The most obvious is that it is a great opportunity to learn the basics. Second, it will give you access to university resources, such as library (including journals and databases online!) access, computer access, and sometimes telescope access. Finally, it will give you access to professionals. Many professors and researchers are in need of people to do their side project. These often get done by undergrads, and if you go back to school you can get involved. All you do is ask around the department if anyone needs free help, and then find someone you want to work with. You might get a coauthorship out of it. This is how I did my first paper as an undergrad.

2. Look online for topics that amateurs with a telescope can help with. Try variable stars, asteroids, comets, supernovae, gamma ray bursts, etc. Alternatively, if you are into programming, CS, or data methods and their applications to astronomy, this is a great area to make contributions with little-to-no startup cost. Rapid time series analysis and signal processing are big these days, among many other things.

3. Don't be ignorant. Read introductory textbooks. Refresh yourself on math, physics, and programming. Read wikipedia. Read arxiv astro-ph and use ADS.


There are other non-astro things I can think of too. I'm into paleontology as a hobby - its another field that amateurs routinely make contributions in, but that's decreasing with time. Fossil collecting can be really fun while also getting you outdoors. Unfortunately, this is highly dependent on your location, local laws, and other factors out of your control. Same with amateur archaeology - but this is even harder to do. In some parts of the US, for example, amateurs have found major native american archaeological sites, which they then call in professionals to help with. Another way to get involved in these fields is to volunteer at a natural history museum or a university, similar to how I described for astronomy, but it is usually easier because they need people to help on digs and things. There is less potential for a publication, though. Computer Science, mathematics, and software engineering also seem like fields an amateur could make contributions in.

So here, you are postulating some unidentified physical mechanism that will somehow "kick in" to keep global warming well below the range of plausible projections under scenarios of unrestrained CO2 output, as discussed in the AR4 report.

Well, it would definitely be interesting to determine the exact physical mechanism which has created the sawtooth saturation pattern in the ice core records - it's most likely a matter of the physical properties of CO2 and the limits of its transference of heat to other gases, and the reaction of water to increase temperatures (evaporation), causing a maximum heat level possible. Here's are some interesting pieces on that:

http://nov55.com/gbwm.html

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/limitations-on-anthropogenic-global-warming/

If you have reasonable grounds for taking issue with the AR4 summary, feel free to state them (although I've yet to see any indication that you've even read it).

Sure, how about this opinion, stated very clearly by Andrew Lacis:

http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7798293?n=17

"There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted."

This was pretty clear from the outset, and two separate inquiries have reached the conslusion that the stolen correspondence provides no evidence of falsification.

Bull pucky. Both of the whitewash inquiries specifically avoided addressing the real issues, and you're a man enough to admit that.

Have you read the Climategate emails? Or the HARRY_README.TXT? Be honest :)

Just as the various climate models provide predictions that are very similar at a large scale, but differ in the fine details, the gravitational theories make similar large-scale predictions, but diverge at small scales

Whoa, unjustified generalization alert! The scales at which gravitational theories diverge are orders upon orders upon orders of magnitude greater than the scales that climate predictions (i'm sorry, "projections") are made on. If you were going to measure earth's climate change the same way you're comparing gravitation, you'd be talking in geologic time scales versus human time scales, and FWIW, none of the models have any way of reconciling with the geologic time scale history of the planet, much less give us any ability to predict future geologic time scale events.

Look, it's obvious you're a smart guy, but how is it you've got such a blind spot on this? Is it just an emotional attachment to the idea of environmentalism? Was it just that the warmists got to you first? You're not the only obviously intelligent person I've seen taken in by this, but it drives me bonkers to see an otherwise rational person making the same kind of arguments creationists do

The result isn't actually that surprising. A similar result was mentioned in the book Blink that was popular a while ago. The study mentioned in Blink showed that juries were very sensitive to the race of the accused, and that black defendants had a much higher conviction rate, even with very similar evidence.

For a beautiful example of how it works subconsciously, have a look at the Implicit Association Tests from Harvard.

Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for.

About the GALA solution, I saw that mentioned on this page -- an unrelated story, but it mentioned Helmant Thatte. Apparently GALA is also his work. You could probably find a link to a research paper from his profile page about it.

Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for.

About the GALA solution, I saw that mentioned on this page -- an unrelated story, but it mentioned Helmant Thatte. Apparently GALA is also his work. You could probably find a link to a research paper from his profile page about it.

Harvard is about thirty thousand dollars for an undergraduate degree

try about $200,000+

The total package (tuition, plus room, board and student services fee) will be $48,868, a 3.5 percent increase over last year.

But, when you get out, you'll have a degree from Harvard. You'll have opportunities that folks from a state school will never get just because you have a Harvard degree.

Back in my Fortune 500 days, all the 20 year olds in the "fast track" management programs were from Ivy League schools. Meaning, they were the ones being groomed for CEO. They spent 2 years working in all the departments around the company - a few months here...a few months there and then they're in management at the age of 24 - 25. Directors by the time they were 30. VPs by the time they were 40.

In the meantime, us state school peons were lucky to get into management by the time were 45.

I'm fairly sure they can put the software on a CD and let a committee of computer scientists verify the content of the disc prior to installing it into the system so it's also a matter of proper procedure and trust in the elections committee.

But I don't have to make any such assumption with paper ballots. I can let anyone provide the transparent election box on election day, even a crook or my worst enemy. All I need is confidence that there will be opposing party representatives verifying that the transparent box is indeed empty at election start and who will oversee the whole process up until the ballots are counted. And if I don't trust the party representatives I can come and oversee everything myself if I want, it's just one day after all.

But with voting computers it does not matter that there are opposing party representatives on election day or that I can watch them start the voting computers and that the computers claim their 'virtual ballot box' is empty. Nobody in that room, even the best computer scientist, would not be able to detect fraud. So now I need to worry about who could have tampered with the computers when bringing them to the voting place, who had access to them while in storage, who programmed them, who checked the programs, etc. And obviously for most of those neither I nor party representatives were present: you cannot have 5 opposing party representatives watching the computers 24/7 all year round while they are in storage.

That's the fundamental difference: with paper ballots all that matters is what happens in the voting place on election day. With voting computers everything that happened since their conception is relevant.

Only problem is any time you can check your vote someone can force you to prove you voted 'right', so it's a bit of a conflict there...

Exactly. It removes the anonymity of the vote so it's a big change with huge implications, and is the problem what makes electronic voting so hard (and different from everything else we do in computer science).

Just wait a couple more years, and get a full genome sequence for the same price. We've already got SNPchips that can do almost 2 million genetic tests for about $500. Admittedly, that's for high-volume (96 individuals at least) research-based analysis, but I'm sure it will enter the general public arena in due time.

Don't tell me you've never heard about the Untouchables.

Seriously tho, is the underground market the only reason you'd oppose the criminalization of drugs? Why, here are some new targets:

- Pedophilia? Underground market: check.
- Slavery? Underground market: check.
- Killing? Underground market: check.

We currently have a flawed system which relies on perfect cooperation of thousands of individuals each one of which can influence the voting process without us knowing it.
This has lead to voting fraud not only in third world countries with 'broken election laws'

but in all western nations (at least on some local level).

In the US you are right, votes can be tampered during transport, probably by a single individual (blame the 'broken election laws'). In France (where we have transparent ballot boxes and where ballots are counted on the spot when the election closes) no single individual can tamper with the voting process. But yes, tell me how to commit fraud in France and not get caught.

There is a single point of failure, and if that fails you should to be able to detect it.

How will you know that there has been fraud if candidate A wins with 52% of the votes instead of losing with 49%? Do you pretend to know the results in advance?

Massive fraud can never occur without detection.

With voting computers it can. You only need to corrupt a handful of people to get your hack into the voting machine's software or hardware. Then you have control of how every single vote is counted.

And face it, a guy who would be coerced by his wife at home would also vote 'her' party in the polling booth, don't act like shit does not happen.

The lack of ballot secrecy has real impacts. See the impact on Chile's election results when they switched in 1958.

You say 99,9% of the people won't know if they can trust the system, but you need to trust some people's intention to honestly host a democratic election.

With any computer voting system you specifically need to trust the people who organize the elections, that is the people with the most at stake if they lose. With paper ballots you only need to be confident that any fraud that will impact the result will have to involve thousand of people and will thus be detected. Even better, you can make sure that no fraud takes place at your voting place.

You now have a technical solution for the problem, but you still need to trust the people that organize the election, this is a basic premise for any election.

With paper ballots I don't need to trust the people manning the polling place or counting the ballots because I can verify myself that they are not cheating. With voting computers I would not be able to detect cheating even if I was in the same room. With Internet voting it's even worse.

P.S. you wrote: 'can the online server write to the disk or not? If it can, then it can mess with all its content, that's all'... This is overly simplistic. If you create a standalone machine

If *I* create such a machine then *I* may be confident it will behave the way I decided. Would you trust me to have designed the machine according to specifications? Would you trust the government to use the machine as I designed it and not with some modifications that allow cheating? Do you also trust the lowly employee who installed it? The one who transported it? You have to trust *all* of them because *any one* of them could have tampered with it (or substituted it).

This can even be enforced physically with WORM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_Once_Read_Many

Of the WORM devices (CD-R, DVD-R, PROM and punch cards) only punch cards could provide the kind of physical guarantee you want, and only because it would be easy to verify the lack of a punching mechanism in the read-only columns (and here I assume there's a way to prevent feeding a card in reverse).

There are plenty of techniques to create a one-time code that isn't linked to you personally and can't be traced back

Except all the proposals I have seen call for the unique key being generated by the government (and generally snail mailed to you). So you have no proof that such techniques have been used by the government.

But you can't honestly tell me you're so paranoid about this that you now vote with gloves on because they might trace the fingerprints on the ballot?

I don't wear gloves because I help count the votes so my fingerprints are on all the ballots!

All jokes aside, they don't know which ballot is yours. So they would have to scan the fingerprints on a substantial percentage of the ballots to find out and they would have a hard time doing that in secret. In contrast installing a small 'security' patch that records either the votes or matches the unique keys with your identity would be pretty easy. Much easier than bugging the phone of Greece's prime minister along with those of a hundred other high ranking officials for months without getting caught for instance.

Only problem there is the unique key needs to be disposed for you to remain anonymous... but I guess you could instruct people to do so after casting their vote (if they wish to remain anonymous).

Forcing the voters to take action for their vote to remain anonymous is equivalent to making their votes public. If they erased the proof that they voted right, then they will get get their knees broken all the same. Note that this is not just a theoretical issue, it has real world effects on votes as proven by Chile's switch to secret ballots in 1958.

I was aware of the using-diffraction-to-compute-Fourier-transforms idea; in fact, I was under the impression that it was somewhat popular before the advent of digital computers. A really good comparison.

Still, I think that maybe "cheating" is exactly what we should be doing more of. We can use obscenely-sophisticated multigrid PDE solvers to solve Navier Stokes... or we can build a wind tunnel and instrument it with sensors. What I'm wondering is whether there are other physical processes that are good analogues for different important problems.

One which is particularly important is the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation -- the PDE whose solution is essentially the holy grail in Optimal Control. If we had hardware to solve that quickly, it'd really do wonderful things for robotics and AI. One can even imagine solving it in 2d by varying the index of refraction in a material. However, in 2d it's not that hard to solve on digital computers either. The problem is that the complexity of solving it grows exponentially with the dimensionality of the state space (Bellman's "curse of dimensionality"), and I think it's very non-obvious how one might go about building an analog computer to solve it in dimensions higher than three.

Another (which is often a "good enough" approximation to HJB) is Laplace's equation. Physical analogues for that are extremely common... RC networks, thermal systems, global illumination... so this could be a good way to e.g. generate robot navigation functions (see e.g. [1]). IIRC there are even people building analog circuits to do exactly this; I find that rather cool (anybody know who it is that's doing this?).

A third example -- this one an ODE rather than a PDE -- which is quite cool (though it doesn't seem super useful) is [2], which can among other things sort lists (for this purpose a bitonic comparator network seems more practical though). Still, very cool.

Of course, you also get all the problems that go along with analog computation: component drift, noise, etc. I wonder if these can be alleviated by (1) controlling the environment (e.g., temperature control), and (2) using some slower digital systems in adaptive control loops to counteract drift. I'm sure that the analog electronics guys have considered both of these ideas, and there are probably papers on them! (I'm aware of e.g. transistor matching, which is standard practice...)

I guess my basic point is just that I think it might be fruitful to continue looking to the physical world for systems that naturally do the computations we care about. It might not be as general-purpose as a Turing Machine, but if it's a problem that matters enough it can become a coprocessor.

[1] C.I Connolly, J. B. Burns, and R. Weiss. Path Planning Using Laplace's Equation. ICRA, 1990. (PDF.)

[2] R. W. Brockett. Dynamical systems that sort lists, diagonalize matrices, and solve linear programming problems. Linear Algebra and its Applications, 1991. (PDF.)

First, there is no proof there's a conspiracy to deny publication of dissenting papers. Several investigations have decided that there is no conspiracy. There is an outside chance that one little corner of science may have slipped into pseudoscience, but that's hardly justification for your statements about science in general.

The nondisclosure of data is a serious issue, but it's also not universal and even in this case it sounds like it's more due to the CRU not having the legal right to disclose the data in question, NOT to their unwillingness to do so. That's a problem with the law or with the commercial right-holders, not science. Again, even in the worst case scenario, it's not a justification for your statements about science in general.

Following are a few examples of large, publicly available scientific datasets that were assembled at considerable cost, entirely voluntarily (a small selection, several that I have personal experience with and others that I've included to try to give some breadth to the list):

http://physionet.org/
http://mouldy.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/
http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html
http://archive.eso.org/skycat/servers/usnoa
http://www.astrometry.net/data.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/GenbankOverview.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/data-software/

And some publicly available code:

http://noodles.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/HomePage (the MINC tools are apparently available from Debian as well)
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/~ilana/diffusion/diffusion_tools.html
http://www.vlfeat.org/~vedaldi/code/sift.html
http://www.itk.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/v-source.html
http://iraf.noao.edu/

There's hardly an overwhelming culture of closed and proprietary secret keeping in science as you suggest. Quite the opposite. Sure, some of the non-scientific appendages to science do have issues in that area (journals, for example) but scientists are usually all too willing to do end runs around such things. If you want to read a paper, e-mail the author and he's likely to send you a PDF despite that often being technically a violation of copyright. Failing that, go to a library and they'll let you read it, free.

I think one of the bigger issues is that Mars doesn't have a molten core,

Mars does have a molten core, which was shown by the combination of Viking and Pathfinder tracking data.

I am pleased to say that I helped get make those finding possible, by going to various people at JPL with a colleague (Bruce Bills) and pressing all and sundry to get the DSN to range to Pathfinder after landing, specifically to improve the precession constant and determine this.

The fact is, though, that making giant tin-cans in the sky is more expensive than finding viable hunks of rock with usable resourses already present. ... It really all comes down to value. The value of a cylinder, more or less, is just habitable space. The value of a planet includes large volumes of otherwise rare elements or chemicals, biological materials, etc... all conveniently sitting there for the taking, and all of which would be needed to make cylinders anyway.

Rare elements on planets aren't conveniently placed; they're at the bottom of a gravity well. For this reason, elements in asteroids are more easily exploited by any civilization with sufficient experience in spaceflight. It's cheaper for us to mine the dirt under our feet because our space program is in its infancy (so just getting to an asteroid is hard), and because ~99.999% of mined minerals are used to build devices for use at the bottom of this gravity well anyway. But any civilization with a "mature" spaceflight capability would mine asteroids in order to construct spacecraft. In addition to not being trapped in a gravity well, asteroids are already in a zero-g vacuum which is a superior environment for fabricating devices with nanometer-scale features.

Mining a planet only seems cost-effective if you're building items to be used on that planet, or unless it has elements which aren't found in asteroids. Planets are useful heat sinks, though. Industrial processes that generate a lot of heat would benefit from being able to dump that heat into a planet rather than building liquid droplet radiators which seem like the most efficient theoretical radiators at the moment.

There is at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/australia/. No idea if its any good though.

This is a really cool on-line rather objective test for determining what racial color biases you have:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/

This really really pisses off people who think they have no prejudice.

*** Spoiler Alert *** To do well on the test (and get a neutral rating), you really have to accept the racial bias you have and actively prompt yourself to counter it.

Or, it could be that this test starts you off with groups combined one way, and then reverses it halfway through after training you in one direction. Combine that with the strong encouragement to move as fast as possible and it's no surprise a lot of people are scoring the way they are.

This is a really cool on-line rather objective test for determining what racial color biases you have:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/

This really really pisses off people who think they have no prejudice.

*** Spoiler Alert ***
To do well on the test (and get a neutral rating), you really have to accept the racial bias you have and actively prompt yourself to counter it.

Gettng Started in Electronics . It takes you through everything from basic soldering to building logic circuits, oscillators, amplifiers. His "mini notebooks" are great too.

Once you have the basics down you will probably want to get into microcontrollers. There are a lot of ways to go here depending on how much time you want to spend wiring things up yourself, and your comfort level with software. You might start with the very popular PIC. Although the architecture is a bit long in the tooth and is a poor target for C, there loads of example projects for it so it's easy to learn. There are also many high-level building blocks (Basic stamp etc) that can get you up and running quickly. If you have sophisticated software needs, you'll want a more modern micro with better tools - check out Atmel or TI.

Eventually you will need a more formal treatment if you want to design your own circuits. I consider The Art of Electronics to be the bible here - it is thorough but also very practical and you will find it has specific solutions for many everyday engineering problems. It has been a great investment, and one of the better worn books on my shelf. Have fun!

----------------- Ya definitely, "The Art Of Electronics" is The Bible of Electronics for ALL enthusiasts.

Start with a kit, like these or these. See if you enjoy the practical end of putting something together. You'll need some basic tools - a soldering iron, sidecutters, solder.

If you enjoy that, then there's a bunch of different ways you can go, depending on what you're interested in. Microcontroller based systems, if you like software too, are easy enough to start working with. Or if you prefer analogue electronics, old school audio and radio, then you'll want to learn some more about the theory and practice and there are lots of good books there - I like The Art of Electronics but choose something that suits your style and covers the areas you want to start with.

But first see if you enjoy the mechanical end of putting a circuit board together.

Once you have the basics down you will probably want to get into microcontrollers. There are a lot of ways to go here depending on how much time you want to spend wiring things up yourself, and your comfort level with software. You might start with the very popular PIC. Although the architecture is a bit long in the tooth and is a poor target for C, there loads of example projects for it so it's easy to learn. There are also many high-level building blocks (Basic stamp etc) that can get you up and running quickly. If you have sophisticated software needs, you'll want a more modern micro with better tools - check out Atmel or TI.

Eventually you will need a more formal treatment if you want to design your own circuits. I consider The Art of Electronics to be the bible here - it is thorough but also very practical and you will find it has specific solutions for many everyday engineering problems. It has been a great investment, and one of the better worn books on my shelf. Have fun!