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While I agree, I'm not sure how much of a transformation happened. If you look at the origins of the CIA, they were about making the world safe for American business pretty much from the beginning. That's not all they did, or do of course. But Allen and John Foster were Wall Street lawyers after all.

The CIA was about having an American intelligence agency suitable to face the challenge of the Cold War: the enormously powerful and dangerous Communist bloc lead by the nuclear armed Soviet Union which was further fortified by the Warsaw Pact nations, Communist China, and the growing number of Communist insurgencies across the world. Trying to explain the CIA as "making the world safe for American business" is silly.

The Communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last century in all manner of cruel tortures, executions, forced starvations, and many other crimes against humanity. Why wouldn't countries want to prevent that from befalling their people? Of course! The real danger is "Wall Street bankers and lawyers!" Please.

The Soviet Story - trailer

Well, you will notice I said they did things other than protect American business interests. That is not their only function, of course. They have a broad range of activities, I'm sure. I am aware of the Cold War, as well.

However, it is not in any way silly to suggest that the CIA does in fact try to make the world safe for American industry. If that were not the case, why did they assist a coup in Iran after President Mosaddegh moved to nationalize the oil industry, taking business away from Western oil companies? Why did they assist a coup in Guatemala when the government there wanted to reclaim land owned by United Fruit? Why did they assist a coup in Honduras when they tried to increase their minimum wage? Ever hear of John Perkins? He has some interesting things to say about what he did on behalf of the CIA and World Bank.

This is all a matter of record. I don't really think it is controversial to say that the CIA protects and advances US business interests. They could do that and fight Communism at the same time. It's not an either/or situation, as you portray it. In fact, from a certain point of view, they dovetail nicely.

And yes, the real danger is in fact Wall Street bankers and lawyers. But that's a different discussion.

While I agree, I'm not sure how much of a transformation happened. If you look at the origins of the CIA, they were about making the world safe for American business pretty much from the beginning. That's not all they did, or do of course. But Allen and John Foster were Wall Street lawyers after all.

The CIA was about having an American intelligence agency suitable to face the challenge of the Cold War: the enormously powerful and dangerous Communist bloc lead by the nuclear armed Soviet Union which was further fortified by the Warsaw Pact nations, Communist China, and the growing number of Communist insurgencies across the world. Trying to explain the CIA as "making the world safe for American business" is silly.

The Communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last century in all manner of cruel tortures, executions, forced starvations, and many other crimes against humanity. Why wouldn't countries want to prevent that from befalling their people? Of course! The real danger is "Wall Street bankers and lawyers!" Please.

The Soviet Story - trailer

Does HFCS count as a sugar substitute, or real sugar ?

It contains concentrated fruit sugar but there are a bunch of issues.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-fructose-bad-for-you-201104262425

I take it your "evidence" is watching the news:
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...

The key variable for FTO success is a tactical one: target selection. Terrorist groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumber attacks on military targets do not tend to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature. Contrary to the prevailing view that terrorism is an effective means of political coercion, the universe of cases suggests that, first, contemporary terrorist groups rarely achieve their policy objectives and, second, the poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself.

It's CS50. It's not even a 100-level classes. This is their way of saying, pay us $X for 3 course credits and see if you would even like to continue down this path.

You obviously haven't bothered to look into Harvard's course numbering system (or credit system). Like just about everything else at Harvard -- from their wacko GPA system that had 15 points (instead of the usual 4.0) until recent years to the fact that they have a "concentration" instead of a "major" -- their course numbers aren't like elsewhere.

If you want to see their CS offerings, look here.

Basically, in Harvard's numbering system (which varies a bit by department), 0-99 are often undergraduate offerings, 100-199 are courses that could be taken by both undergraduates and grads, and 200+ are graduate-only classes. (Some departments with a lot of courses change the numbering so that the undergrad/grad courses start at 1000 instead of 100, and graduate courses start at 2000.)

In many departments it's uncommon to take anything numbered 100 or above until your junior year (maybe earlier in CS, looking at their course offerings). So, saying this course is numbered 50 isn't saying much. In most departments, the generic courses for non-majors are often in the 1-10 or 1-20 range.

And as for credits -- notice the catalog lists this as a "half course," from the old system where most Harvard students would enroll in courses that would last a full year (two semesters = "full course"). Harvard doesn't charge by the credit hour like a community college or state university might. They basically have a set tuition rate per semester and you're expected to take "four half courses" per term, five if you're ambitious. (You can take more -- generally for the same tuition -- but I believe it requires special overrides.)

The title should be: 1 in 8 Harvard students hopelessly undecided about Computer Science.

I have no doubt that some students are in fact taking this class to "try out" computer stuff, but it's hard to tell what those stats mean. Also, Harvard has a "gen ed" distribution requirement, and CS50 satisfies one of those distribution requirements. So, I'd imagine the bigger draw is "learn something in computers" AND "satisfy some stupid requirement," rather than "hmm... maybe I'll try computer science..."

Anyhow, I know you (and most people here) didn't need to know that much about Harvard's wacko systems... but this post shouldn't be "+5 Informative" when it's based on wrong information.

I can shed some light on this.

This course is an introductory course for non-majors. That's why it's not like "Intro to Computer Science."

The big deal with Harvard's CS50 course isn't that everyone wants to enroll in computer science, but that it is being taught in a very unorthodox way. Students have the option of attending lectures or watching video lectures online. There is a great deal of supplementary online material. They have all night coding sessions with food and games which are sponsored by businesses such as Microsoft and Google.

More info can be found here: https://cs50.harvard.edu/

Of course. I read about this quite a few years ago in a book called Global Warming and Other Bollocks. It has a chapter on salt. I'm still recovering from being told that egg yolks are as bad for me as smoking, though I don't eat 20 eggs a day (or smoke any more), it turns out that actually they're probably only bad for people with heart disease or diabetes.

Anyone losing the will to live yet? I could go on...

Let me put it another way.

On one side you have the intermittant supplies:
Wind, solar, wave, tidal.

On the other side you have matching supplies which you ramp up as necessary:
Geothermal, Solar thermal, Hydro, Biogas.

And for short term peaking demand, you also use storage such as Pumped Hydro, battery, compressed air, flywheel, etc.

I think pumped hydro is a hugely underused resource, all you need is a (small) lake next to a hill, the rest is engineering, see:
Dinorwig Power Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Whilst some of these technologies are not cheap, this would change if we invested a fraction of what we have put into nuclear and fossil fuels

Solar PV has gone from $76 per w to $0.74 per watt of capacity and that price will continue to fall.

Some countries are already proving that 100% renewable is possible, it simply requires effort.

Uranium is finite, nuclear reprocessing is prohibitively expensive:
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...

So if Uranium is 10% of TCO and reprocessed Uranium costs over 10x as much then nuclear would end up costing well over 20c per kWh would it not.

Sooner or later we will have to go 100% renewable, why wait, why not invest in renewables whilst is easy to do, if we leave it until it's too late the shit will hit the fan.

Nuclear power is a short term solution which causes long term problems.

If humans were capable of handling nuclear power without cocking it up regularly then I would support it, but they are not.

All so wrong, the cost of solar panels has dropped 80% since 2008, the Wikipedia page is irrelevant due to the numbers being completely out of date and hence wrong.

The cost of solar panels has been dropping by about 40% per annum, that is set to continue.

Solar is cheaper than nuclear RIGHT NOW, any increase in the cost of uranium puts nuclear power further out of reach.

Just the generating cost of nuclear is 4.4c per kWh, the construction and decommissioning costs are a huge amount on top of that. There is also the storage cost of nuclear waste that has been spiraling upwards.

And the cost of nuclear reprocessing? Very expensive:
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...

operating costs for 61 nuclear sites in 2012. The average came to $44/MWh

Add to that construction costs, decommissioning costs and nuclear fuel reprocessing / storage costs and you've got one very expensive method of producing electricity.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Why aren't there more nuclear fuel reprocessing plants? Because it's horrendously expensive.
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...

Cost of building maintaining, removing new Wind farms?
Less than $36.5 per MWh
Wind Technologies Market Report

With the numerous ways of matching and storing wind energy,nuclear can not compete

Wind power is continuously getting cheaper, solar power is continuously getting cheaper and there is good reason for that to continue. Storage technologies are also getting cheaper. Solar is set to become the 2nd cheapest form of energy, after Wind.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...

http://i1.wp.com/cleantechnica...

... you KNOW Latour was correct. And it isn't just him. TEXTBOOKS about practical applications of thermodynamics say so. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-08-30]

Again, I already showed you that MIT's equation reduces to my Eq. 1 for blackbodies, and is consistent with these equations and Eq. 1 in Goodman 1957. I've stressed that this thought experiment has been tested for decades in the real world. Radiation shields allow for more accurate measurements of gas temperatures using thermocouples:

"The greatest problem with measuring gas temperatures is combatting radiation loss. ... surround the probe with a radiation shield ... The thermocouple bead radiates to the shield which is much hotter than the surrounding walls. Thus the radiative loss and hence temperature error is significantly reduced. The shield itself radiates to the walls."

These radiation shields have been used since at least Daniels 1968 (PDF), and they work like Dr. Spencer's insulating plate. They slow radiative heat loss from the hotter thermocouple. If Jane and Dr. Latour's Sky Dragon Slayer misinformation is correct, why have accurate thermocouples used radiation shields since at least 1968? Isn't that an example of a "real world" situation that's ultimately what we're talking about?

But its inner temperature ISN'T 149.6F [Jane Q. Public, 2014-08-30]

After twice pretending that I'd claimed the inner temperature wasn't equal to its outer temperature of 149.6F... now you make that incorrect claim yourself? Bizarrely, I have to point out that a thermal superconductor enclosing shell will have an inner temperature equal to its outer temperature, exactly as I originally said.

This reminds me of your other similar mistake that you haven't acknowledged:

A plate near the heat source is NOT even remotely the same as closing the drain on a bathtub, because the total power out of the system (it's a closed system with heat being removed, remember?) remains constant, as you have so conveniently observed. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-08-28]

Completely backwards, as usual. I've never observed any such ridiculous nonsense. That's actually Jane's ridiculous "observation" which I've already tried to correct:

"... Hopefully it's also clear that Jane's also wrong to claim that the power used by the cooler is required to be constant. The chamber wall temperature is held constant, so the power used by the cooler temporarily decreases after the enclosing plate is added, until it reaches equilibrium."

I've repeat

It's silly to expect sanctions to accomplish much.

After WWII, the US should have had Patton march east and take care of uncle Stalin.

There was a second chance much more recently to decisively deal with the Russian problem. A bit less than ten years ago, this paper http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar... identified the US as having achieved nuclear primacy (a shorter version can be found printed in Foreign Affairs of that year). It would have been possible at the time for the US to get away with a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia. With most silos and mobile launchers on Russian territory located, a counterforce preemptive nuclear attack by the US would have resulted in the only real retaliation to be from submarine launches, which would have been few enough not to overwhelm missile defense.

The paper generated controversy and there were counterpoints from other academics and some in the military, but there was also a lot of support expressed. In any case, it's at least plausible that the US could have taken the first shot and saved an order of magnitude more pain, suffering, and deaths in the future than it would have generated. No doubt Russia's military build-up in the last decade takes this scenario out of the realm of possibility, and given the evil the russkies are doing and the tons more they've yet to perpetrate, it's a damn shame.

I expect to be modded down, as many here won't understand a sentiment generated by having survived the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. No, things haven't changed. The bear's beastly character is immutable, a fundamental aspect of it that can't be tamed or cured by diplomacy, education, or civilization.

I think you've got it: after pair-creation suddenly decreases the pressure, the outer layers of gas acquire considerable momentum, falling in towards the centre of the star, before the fusion rate starts dramatically increasing. That momentum keeps the core compressed long enough for fusion to release a lot of energy, before that energy eventually reverses the momentum and blows the outer layers of the star away.

The article that another replier linked seems to mostly take this implicitly rather than stating it outright, but the following passage makes it fairly clear:

More massive stars with higher entropies become unstable at lower temperatures. During the collapse they acquire a greater inward momentum, and reach a higher temperature at the reversal of collapse. There is a greater energy release from the oxygen burning, and so the explosion following the collapse is of greater intensity.

(In this case, "oxygen burning" means the nuclear reaction that occurs is oxygen-oxygen fusion.)

As you pointed out, this is analogous to what happens in a nuclear bomb: the inward momentum of the fissile material (and sometimes also a heavy "tamper" designed for this purpose), driven in this case by explosives rather than by gravity, keeps the fissile material confined long enough for a lot of fission to take place.

This may help: http://articles.adsabs.harvard...

I appreciate your explanation, but honestly, what you say makes no sense. To be blunt, I don't think you know what you are talking about. You say that the Universe was the size of the Milky Way, and expanding by a light year per second. Since the Milky Way is only 120,000 light years across, if the Universe was really expanding that quickly, it would be bigger than the Milky Way in ONE DAY. You also say that hydrogen fusion was occurring, but according to this graph, fusion stopped three minutes after the big bang. There is nothing that you say that would only apply to H-He-Li and would not apply to heavier elements.

I found the following explanation here:

Hydrogen and helium are, by far, the most abundant elements in interstellar clouds. However, these elements are very poor coolants because they cannot be collisionally induced to emit photons at the low gas temperatures characteristic of molecular clouds. Two decades of theoretical studies have consistently predicted that a large fraction of the total cooling is borne by a few other atoms and molecules, notably gaseous water (HO), carbon monoxide (CO), molecular oxygen (O), and atomic carbon (C).

And Unix is defined by being simple. Which Linux, it no longer is.

They should worry less about authenticating who contributes, and then finding the scapegoat to blame for the mess ups, but instead they should try to go back to core principles, and clear up the mess and establish a system where mess ups are impossible. It's not the individual programmers who are messing up, but the leadership at the top who fails to implement core principles, who have allowed themselves to stray far from them, under the pressure of features, and patching the patches that patch the patches that patched we don't even remember what anymore. The herd simply just follows the command of the shepherd through his dogs. You can't blame the ewe. You can't blame the dogs. If both the ewe and the dogs each follow command as they are supposed to. That's how a military works. Chain of command. Battle of Jutland is a good read on military and controlling chaos into musical and dance-like order. Jellicoe's formation of the ships, where they almost hit each other while assuming positions, "flying" by each other at only a few miles per hour. Battle about turn to starboard, by Scheer, a motion by complete mess-prone chaotic-prone beings executing it in unison, from prior practice. That is the way to beat down chaos, in middle of a messy battle, which by definition is chaos itself. Top down chain of command, following orders, everyone moving in unison.

The basic problem with Linux is complexity. I've stopped using Linux ever since kernel 2.6.26 or so, anything new that boots does just way way too much. It's obvious what a hopeless mess it is just from the boot up messages. Damn Small Linux is trying to get back to core principles, but it's hopeless with the present code size of the kernel. The basic principle of Unix is the KISS principle. Quoting from the Wikipedia page:

The principle most likely finds its origins in similar concepts, such as Occam's razor, Leonardo da Vinci's "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", Mies Van Der Rohe's "Less is more", or Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, urged his designers to "Simplify, and add lightness". Rube Goldberg's machines, intentionally overly-complex solutions to simple tasks or problems, are humorous examples of "non-KISS" solutions.

An alternative view - "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - is attributed to Albert Einstein.
That is a warning that even the KISS principle should not be abused, though maximized as much as possible.

I did a google search on "core principles of unix," and I came up with this:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/...
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action...
http://people.fas.harvard.edu/...
etc, etc.

In all of them the basic principle of Unix is simplicity, clarity, modularity, human readability, beating complexity down with a club anywhere you can, if you can find clever ways to get something accomplish, forget about it, it's too complex, do it cleanly, neatly, simply, and even brute force. Don't be clever, be stupid, and expect everyone to be stupid. In Unix, every program does one thing, and does it extremely well. If you need features, you write a different program. Then these programs come together and interact through extremely simple interfaces, and this soup of experts interacting simply to accomplish any needed complex task in the world is what you call Unix. The swiss army knife of software. Which also goes for C, as C and Unix are the same thing.

The first thing the Linux developers have to accomplish is to beat down the complexity mess they've created, to gut the whole thing to bare bones, throw awa

Of the top ten States in terms of strictest gun laws, 7 have the lowest number of gun deaths.

Got a source? I can cite plenty to show the opposite:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/states...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10...

International:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Transport of guns across state lines hamper efforts.

That's the talking-point advocates use to defend their failures. But it really doesn't explain why crime rates show a relative increase, and these facts don't stop them from advocating those stronger restrictions, that don't work and keep killing people. It's insanity. They refuse to live in the real world.

Most if not all illegal guns in Canada, guns in the hands of criminals, come from America.

I'm sure plenty of Canadians buy guns from the US, and never use them to commit crimes, too.

I'm betting criminals in Canada buy US-made cars pretty often, too.

but how could they possible determine how much mass in each galaxy wouldn't be seen by using light within the bounds of the visible spectrum?

Such "dark matter" would show up on Xrays infrared or radio, so that's not a problem. If, however, the "dark matter" does not interact with electromagnetism, but only with gravity and the weak force, (which would be an extremely odd, and frankly, a not very believable aspect of cosmology) things would get a bit tricky.

You should probably read that a little closer. In fact, read this:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/p...

See, it doesn't apply here because the express intent of the device n the car is to record music.

However, this part may apply:
"Because no additional copies can be made from the Rio, the Rio makes less copies than the SCMS would permit."
Can you copy music from the Cars device? If not, they got nothing. If you can, then you may have an issue.

Have you ever actually tried to examine your own biases? Because it sure sounds like you are refusing to admit the possibility that they exist.

I used to hold an attitude very much like yours, but I took some tests on this site: https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...

It's a very fair and objective measurement of your basic, gut reactions to things. I always assumed that I held no bias against black people - that turned out to be mostly true. I also felt like I had no bias against women in science/tech. Turned out that I was pretty wrong.

The fact is, things are not currently equal between men and women. Women are physically weaker, it's a simple fact, which means that they live in a constant state of heightened awareness compared to men. When was the last time you asked another guy to walk with you out to your car at night? Women are acutely aware of that physical power imbalance and rearrange their lives to try to avoid vulnerable situations. And we as a culture are perfectly fine with that and expect them to accommodate this violent reality - any time there's a rape story people instantly ask if she was dressed provocatively, or drinking, or in the wrong part of town, etc. It doesn't really matter where the hell I am, or how much I drink, or who I'm with, I'm pretty much never worried that I'm going to get in a compromising situation and get raped for it.

Have you ever had to work in a department where everybody else is a woman? Take that environment, where even if people aren't purposely excluding you they regularly talk about periods and tampons and things that you are fundamentally unable to relate to. Now imagine that every single one of those co-workers is physically more powerful than you are - whether that coworker is confrontational or not. Oh, and your supervisor, their supervisor, and on and on up to the top are all not your gender. On top of it, make it so that everywhere else in the industry is the same way, any person answering a topic online, most of the authorities in the field - 90%+ are the opposite gender to you. An unknown but nonzero percentage of those people believe you to be inferior immediately, regardless of your performance. To top it off make sure to embed lots of industry humor and institutional inertia that is subtly or not-so-subtly catered to people of the opposite sex (does that get your panties in a twist? Man up).

Things are not fucking equal, and your diatribe demonstrates that you either have put very little thought into how the experience of others might differ from your own, or you are willfully ignorant. If you opened your eyes, you'd see that being a straight white male confers way more advantages than any other demographic enjoys and means that you honestly never have to think about a huge swath of problems that are daily realities for everybody else. Pretending that bias doesn't exist doesn't make it so. Women aren't really asking for much - just the ability to participate in an industry on equal terms, and since things are ALREADY INEQUAL, an extra level of protection wouldn't be unreasonable. But to be fair, that little bit of hasty generalization is entirely unjust, how dare they speculate about our motivations and privilege...

The IRS most certainly *can* bring suit against them in a US court, and demand that they turn over records for their tax-haven bank accounts.

But they aren't asking for *records*. They are demanding the actual artifacts stored in that foreign country, which they CANNOT do.

we can't fly a team of cops over to the Bahamas and raid the offices of the bank to produce the data

Why not? Might makes right, doesn't it? That seems to be what you're implying.

This is *completely normal*, all over the goddamn world.

No, it's not.

You can argue if you like that a ~ 27.3% increase is large but I disagree, since climate sensitivity to CO2... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-07]

Ocean acidification is independent of climate sensitivity, and it's another reason to be concerned about the unprecedented rapidity of our CO2 emissions.

I would also like to point out again that even if acidification is happening, the RESULTS of that acidification are probably less than alarmists have claimed. Example (2010 article): http://www.rationaloptimist.co... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-06-10]

Lonny Eachus also linked to that misinformation from Matt Ridley, a journalist with a long history of distorting climate science.

In contrast, I quoted from Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF), Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF), and Ken Caldeira’s 2012 AGU lecture. That last link was from my videos section which also includes:

• Andrew Dickson gave a technical 2009 presentation called “Acidic Oceans: Why Should We Care?”
• A series of panels at the 2011 AGU discussed declining reef health and tipping points.

I'm not a chemist or a marine biologist/ecologist, so I read peer-reviewed papers and go to conferences like the AGU to watch lectures by scientists who do specialize and publish in those fields. For instance, consider that 2011 AGU panel on declining reef health. Nina Keul observed one species of foramanifera Glas et al. 2012 (PDF) growing faster as carbonate ion concentration decreases (which happens when CO2 increases). She provided context by noting that this is one species from one experiment, noting that this is like looking at one puzzle piece of a big puzzle.

Then Adina Paytan provides further context by noting that most species aren't like this. She shows Fig. 2 from Crook et al. 2012 (PDF) which shows that only ~3 out of 9 species of coral are present in locations with naturally low pH and notes that "Because these three species are rarely major contributors to Caribbean reef framework, these data may indicate that today’s more complex frame-building species may be replaced by smaller, possibly patchy, colonies of only a few species along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef."

Finally, Robert Ridin

You assume the dynamics is that of a simple exponential decay, which it is not. If you had a perfectly circular orbit in complete isolation, you could have a decay in the rotational energy of the moon that would take infinite time to decay. However, even with the perfectly circular orbit, if it were not in isolation so that there were any perturbations in the system, it would switch from rotation to libration and never rotate again. A very slowly rotating body is an unstable equilibrium, as it would take a very small perturbation to make the tidal bulge switch to acting like a pendulum. When there is non-zero eccentricity, you get a more complicated tidal braking that has a positive minimal braking rate no matter how slow the rotation goes, so it will transition into libration on its own and quite quickly. Early papers like this one cover the basic dynamics of this, although later ones do a better job of handling things like changing eccentricity that account for what the last line of that abstract speculates about. These papers typically don't have nice specific examples though, although the really simplified numeric model in this one shows in figure 2a a very clear and sudden stopping of rotation as it switches to libration.

Even if you want to completely ignore all that, and treat it as a simple case of exponential decay, you still won't have anything close to motion remaining after this long. A single proton from the solar wind hitting the edge of the moon would impart enough angular momentum to give it a rotation period of ~10^40 years. There are many far larger effects on the moon that would wipe any sort of residual rotation in the sense you tried to talk about. As stated in the previous comment, there are other cyclic effects that would wipe out any such residual long before it came down to random collisions with solar wind...

M dwarfs are very interesting because they are the most common kind of star, and they have a very high potential of hosting planets able to support DNA-based life as we know it. M dwarfs are also expected to exhibit strong magnetic activity (star spots are magnetic features) as they are highly convective. Star spots appear darker in the optical wavelength, and can easily be mistaken for planets.

There is active research going on that tries to filter out this interference caused by the magnetic effects, and as most public-funded science is unfortunately (and audaciously) paywalled

Neonicotinoids can cause problems for pollinators by concealing their metabolism.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...

I think you're conflating wave and particle mechanics here. I was mostly talking about the quantum mechanics of "photons", perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned "waves". Both the wave and particle perspective seem to be correct, it's simply a different way of looking at the same phenomenon, which makes it sometimes easier to describe light as wave and other times easier to describe it as a photon.
Unfortunately I don't even remember who wrote that paper because stupid me didn't care much back then. It was a question one of the students asked our professor during the physics lectures, something like "When the speed of light is a universal constant, how can it be influenced by medium like glass?". In the next lecture he showed up with a paper that was published on that topic and showed us some of the math behind it. Back then it was way over my head and didn't seem to be relevant, so I only remembered the out-lines.
But there is other research into that direction. Other than that googling the term "speed of light constant slowing down absorption" should bring up some results.

When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.

The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.

All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.

- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star)
- formation of a quark star (from the neutron star)
- the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).

So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.

When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.

The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.

All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.

- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star)
- formation of a quark star (from the neutron star)
- the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).

So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.

When 1987A happened, it is fair to say that an enormous amount of attention was placed on those neutrinos - >> 1 paper per neutrino. The report of an earlier neutrino burst from the Mt Blanc LSD was discussed at length - see Arnett 1987 Table 1 for the time line.

The facts are these - the optical supernova could not be accurately timed, it wasn't bright at Feb 23.10 and it was at 2 / 23.443. The Mt Blanc LSD burst was at 2 / 23.12, while the other two detectors had a mutual burst at 2 / 23.316. Note that both neutrino bursts occurred before the optical SN was detected, and also that none of the other detected picked up the Mt Blanc LSD burst.

All of this has been known a long time, and numerous theories have been introduced to explain it.

- formation of a nlack hole (from the neutron star)
- formation of a quark star (from the neutron star)
- the Mt Blanc data were unrelated to the SN (that appears to be Arnett's viewpoint).

So, this is another explanation, and not a super compelling one to me. It will clearly never be proven from the SN 1987A data - the next such close supernova should have a lot of neutrino data, and maybe will resolve the issue.

many estimates place it much closer in time, 17 to 22 billion years from now. The universe is already half past time splan to blow! OMG!

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...

I also sat down when considering colleges and looked at my choices. Due to income levels, Ivy Leagues were out for me, as was any private school. That left state schools.

I don't know when you went to school, but this is actually not true nowadays for very talented students. Most of the Ivy League schools have exceptional financial aid available for poor or even middle-class, sometimes making them even cheaper than state schools. For example, Harvard has a policy that students with family incomes below $65,000 pay NOTHING for tuition, and those with family incomes up to $150,000 are not expected to contribute more than 10% of that income. Other top schools may not be quite as generous, but they will often offer significant aid to those who really can't afford to go there.

It's really the "mid-level" private schools and smaller private colleges that charge the ridiculous tuitions to just about all students. I agree that most people can't really afford them (and end up with ridiculous loans if they try).

So -- if you're a talented student and have a chance at an Ivy or other top-tier school, I'd seriously suggest you check into their aid policies before deciding it's "unaffordable."

Continuing with the Harvard theme, if you google Benjamin Pierce assistant professor, the first page of Google results links to the following former BPs: Lauren Williams, Pavel Etingof, Danny Calegari, Nathan Dunfield, and Xinwen Zhu. These people, obviously, landed on their feet and got hired in other universities, quite prestigious universities in fact. And I am sure if you did a comprehensive survey of all former BPs, you'd find the majority working in R1 universities and on the tenure-track. Similar remarks would apply to the untenured named instructorships at any other elite math department, e.g. Dickson Instructor, C.L.E. Moore Instructor, Veblen Research Instructorship, and so on. They're all slightly underpaid. They're all hugely prestigious. And few people have trouble landing a job afterwards.

If you get denied tenure at a lower-ranked school, then yes, that is a disaster. Those schools are set up to give you every opportunity to pass the tenure review. If you fail to do so, then that's on you, and as you say, you'll be an outcast.

LOL, oh you're serious, let me laugh harder. If you think skipped courses due to AP credits reduce the number of hours needed to graduate at the vast, vast majority of schools you're mistaken. No, it will just let you skip an intro course and fill the hours requirement for your major for something a little less dull.

False.

Heck, it's even on the official AP exam website:

You can save money and get a head start on your degree when you enter college with credit youâ(TM)ve already earned through AP.

But if you're not convinced, let's look at some of the top schools in the U.S., and what they will do for a person with AP credit. Harvard says the following:

Students may be allowed to use an AP exam score (or appropriate international credential) to meet certain requirements (foreign language, introductory departmental course, etc.).

Students with a full yearâ(TM)s worth of advanced workâ"documented by AP exams, an IB diploma, or certain other international credentialsâ"may be eligible to petition for Advanced Standing. The College grants four Harvard full-course credits, the equivalent of a year of study, to those students who activate Advanced Standing.

In other words, you not only can pass out of a number of requirements, but you can also skip an entire year of college... at one of the top colleges in the U.S.

Even MIT, which is notorious for having one of the most restrictive AP policies in the U.S., will still give you credit for and let you pass out of the first semester of calculus or physics (both required of all MIT graduates) with sufficient AP scores. And you'll get unrestricted credit that can count toward miscellaneous electives you need for your degree or whatever for some other AP tests (e.g., humanities).

Bottom line: At the "vast, vast majority of schools," many AP courses WILL reduce the number of credits you need for graduation, as well as allowing you to skip intro classes.

You're right that many schools will still require you to take something else within your major to fulfill a minimum set of required credit hours. But you'll often still be able to use miscellaneous AP credits toward random electives.

Seriously -- do at least a minimum of research before you show your ignorance while wrongly making fun of somebody.

I'd like to direct your attention to this paper, viz:

In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban of all handguns and many types of long guns.

Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those owners lawabiding enough to turn them in to authorities.

Without suggesting this caused violence, the ban’s ineffectiveness was such that by the year 2000 violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe’s highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States.19 Today, English news media headline violence in terms redolent of the doleful, melodramatic language that for so long characterized American news reports.

A more salient point, also from that article:

To conserve the resources of the inundated criminal justice system, English police no longer investigate burglary and “minor assaults.”23 As of 2006, if the police catch a mugger, robber, or burglar, or other “minor” criminal in the act, the policy is to release them with a warning rather than to arrest and prosecute them.24

Bruce, you are neither a scientist nor well-versed in statistics. As a well-regarded public figure, people listen to what you have to say.

Like a doctor, people will assume that since you're an expert in one field, you are an expert in other fields and can be trusted - they follow your advice and agree with your opinions. Your stance on gun ownership is founded on false information, and indirectly contributes to suffering and misery by promoting rampant crime.

I really wish people like you would restrict yourselves to topics on which you are an actual expert.

Here's another article for you to consider: http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Armed teachers in every classroom WOULD have prevented Sandy Hook, quite naturally. That punk would have been stopped before he got into the first classroom if all the teachers had been armed. TWO of those women have been lauded for bravery, UNARMED. Just think what they could have done with a weapon!

Gun laws effectively declaw the females of the species, but fail to pull the teeth from the deranged, or from predatory males.

Gun laws are actually pretty damned sexist, when you think about it. Empower the women in your life - give them a 9mm for their birthdays!

Of course the statistics on this indicate that actual self-defense cases like this essentially never happen - and disproportionately involve cases where mysteriously both parties have been previously convicted of crimes.

Queue being linked to some article about some guy who totally defended his home with his gun, but then be told that we should just consider that (vanishingly rare instance) as being totally worth the hundreds of victims of mass shootings per year.

Further, the most dangerous cities to live in today, are precisely those cities with the strictest gun control.

Those cities enacted gun control laws because they were already the most dangerous cities. The effectiveness of those gun control laws is up for debate, but you got the cause and effect completely backwards. And you're modded up +5 Insightful. God, what's happening to Slashdot these days?

empirical evidence weighs in on my side

Sure, some of it does. But there is at least an equal amount of evidence supporting the opposing side of view, unless you ignore Japan, Hawaii, and articles like this and (yes, you read that right, The American Conservative) this and this.

My hunch is that there is probably little to no correlation between gun control and crime rates. So gun control is probably not a good way of curbing crime. But claiming that the evidence is irrefutable that more guns equals more safety is patently absurd. It's just as bad as the NRA claiming that armed teachers in every school would have prevented Sandytown. (Maybe it would've, but we'd have four or five instances each year of clueless teachers injuring a coworker with an accidental discharge or killing a student they "swore had a knife.")

"Ocean Acidification” is an up-and-coming buzz phrase used by global warming alarmists. They say it will harm sea life like coral. [Lonny Eachus]

Caused by CO2, of course. The problem with that theory is that coral evolved when CO2 concentration was *70 TIMES* what it is now. [Lonny Eachus]

"Warmists" like to scare over things like death of coral due to ocean acidification from CO2. Coral evolved at a time of 70x today’s CO2. [Lonny Eachus]

The degree of "doomedness" is highly questionable. I don't dispute that human activities have harmed coral in many cases. But coral evolved when it was both warmer than it is now, AND the concentration of CO2 was many times what it is today. ... [Jane Q. Public]

If atmospheric CO2 increases slowly, ocean pH doesn't change significantly because it's buffered by carbonates and land weathering on long time scales. See Fig. 2 in Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF):

"When CO2 dissolves in seawater, it reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which then dissociates to bicarbonate, carbonate, and hydrogen ions. The higher concentration of hydrogen ions makes seawater acidic, but this process is buffered on long time scales by the interplay of seawater, seafloor carbonate sediments, and weathering on land."

It's incredibly ironic that Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus both point to paleoclimate evidence to support their dismissal of ocean acidification. Honisch et al. 2012 also discusses the observed consequences of releasing CO2 more quickly, such as during the end-Permian and PETM.

Paleoclimate evidence shows that ocean acidification depends on the rate of CO2 emissions, not the amount in the atmosphere.

Further, it has been shown that DAILY VARIATION of ocean pH at a given location is greater than any change attributable to CO2. [Lonny Eachus]

Also, studies have shown that the pH in a given location of the ocean typically varies every day far more than any amount that can be attributed to CO2. [Jane Q. Public]

Daily variations can be ~10C or more, but during the end-Permian a ~10C rise in the long term global average temperature coincidentally happened when ~90% of all species went extinct. Furthermore, the marine extinction pattern has ocean acidification's fingerprints on it. Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF) showed that during the end-Permian extinction, ~85% of genuses like coral with aragonite (CaCO3) skeletons went extinct, but only ~5% of genuses like fish with other skeletons went extinct. The rapid CO2 increase during the PETM also led to a similar albeit less severe marine extinction pattern. Again by coincidence?

Corals evolved during the Cambrian Era with CO2 7-20X higher than today. "Ocean acidificiation" is just another scam. pic.twitter.com/AufWkV57hR ["Steve Goddard" retweeted by Lonny Eachus]

No Lonny, it's not a scam. Extremely ra

A fool, huh? Really? Then, why does guerilla warfare work so well? How many set-piece battles has our army won in recent years? Perhaps it is your own grasp of reality that should be questioned. In Viet Nam, we had EVERYTHING going for us, except that we had a much longer logistics train than the enemy had. We lost. Pretty much the same in Afghanistan - and we have failed to win. We haven't really "lost" as badly as in Viet Nam, but the Taliban are coming out of the wood work, to take over again when we abandon the stage. Iraq? Hmmm - we won, I guess. Of course, the Iraqi people are still paying one hellaciously expensive bill for our "victory". And, we didn't even get the oil! Study some history. http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Ask yourself, "What is the ultimate weapon?"

The Marines have always known the answer to that question.

You do make something of a point though. If you rely on WalMart for your weapons, then you are left seriously lacking.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Those secret courts, 24/7 surveillance, and detention without trial are the things that most justify arming the populace. The government is out of control. If it cannot be brought under control peacefully, then it must be brought under control by force of arms. Give EVERYONE a weapon, I say. Actually, that's rather socialistic, don't give them weapons, SELL THEM WEAPONS!!

I'll give that guy his due - he did some digging and came up with some more meaningful answers than I have read. But - burglary and auto theft are "violent" offenses? I'm afraid that he missed the point. Violence is often dished out for little or no reason, other than the desire to hurt someone. Unless the domicile is actually occupied during a burglary, then burglary isn't a violent crime. Likewise with an auto theft - it would only count as a violent crime if the car were taken at gunpoint - or knifepoint, or at least while in possession of a dangerous blunt instrument.

On this, however, he and I agree:
"In sum, it becomes clear that an objective comparison between any two countries types of offenses is a difficult and time consuming endeavour. In order for it to be done properly, matching definitions need to be found, and umbrella terms that group large numbers of what one country may class as offenses and the other not, must be avoided. Statistics must be broken down to their bare bones and compared accurately and objectively if any meaningful parallels are to be found. I hope that above,"

So - my own summary would have to be something like this: Seems like a lot of people who are full of feces have been spreading half-truths, and I believed some of them. I'm not real sure what to think about our comparative crime rates. But, I am real sure of the contents of this PDF, if you care to read it:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...

Quote: "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor."

Skimming the actual Harvard report, I see no data nor any claims talking about the performance of students in the United States broken down by minority group, socio-economic status or if they live in an urban or suburban setting.

How can we draw a conclusion when there is no data presented?

And I haven't even touched the apparent inverse correlation between those who go off and become successful starting new businesses and their grade point average. How many million-dollar and billion-dollar American corporations were founded by college drop-outs?

Light was already turned into matter back in 2001 by Lene Hau at Harvard.
When the light pulse disappeared, the mass of the sodium increased.

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/ha...

Lol? Going with a ketogenic diet actually causes your body do become more sensitive to insulin.. Ie less prone to become diabetic.

Going with a diet with a high sugary diet will cause your body to become less insulin sensitive and that is not good. A high-sugar diet also increases the risk of diabetes.. http://www.medicalnewstoday.co...

If you look into the history of the recommended diet we have to day this all goes back to a few studies made around 50-60 years ago, and most of the assumptions in them have actually been proven to be false..

A good diet is a mixed diet of both carbs and fat, but carbs should come from things likes apples/potatoes etc, not from processed sugar like corn-syrup. There are so many addetives in todays food that are just bad for us.. And the "low-carb" diets does help with this to a large degree by making you skip allot of them.

I have myself lost around ~17Kg during the last 6 months by going on a low-carb diet and there are a number of factors that comes into play with this.
- You become more aware of what's in the food you eat.
- You become more aware of what things you can/cannot eat without breaking the ketosis.
- You become more insulin sensitive (a good thing!)
- You become less hungry and get more energy. This is a huge benefit when you are trying to lose weight..
    You only eat when you are hungry and you only eat until you are full. If you eat food with high-carb content you will eat more.

I believe the biggest gain i have got from this is that i feel less hungry causing me to eat less. It also have removed lots of the nasty stuff that's put into our foods today.. And the second part is that my cholesterol values have improved quite a bit and have been sick alot less during this time.
I do not say that this is for everyone and you really should study a bit on how it works and so on because if done incorrectly, or if you have a previous medical condition, it can be dangerous.

But to sum it up... I would say that a perfect diet would be switching between foods that are high fat/high carb, but they should never be high-fat and high carb at the same time. And get rid of all the processed sugars an go back to the basics. And skip drinking juice, have a fruit instead ( http://www.health.harvard.edu/... )

No, recalling memories cause decay and changes in the memory. This is a well know neurological fact.
The more you recall memory, the more likely it will change.
http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/st...

That is stupid anit-gun logic. By that logic, you would be happier to have no police force than to have a bunch of cops gang raping you. Or you would be happier to have no job at all than be stuck in your office while the building burns down. Or, you would rather that a grocery store not exist in your neighborhood than to get botulismfrom one of their products.

That makes absolutely no sense. How does having a gun that only shoots for you but has a small chance of failing equate to any of those things? That's some asinine pro-gun logic right there.

On the other hand, if your son is depressed enough to shoot himself, having a length of rop and rafters, or even kitchen knives is just about as dangerous.

That's simply not true. Gun suicide attempts are vastly more successful than other methods.

If someone is entering your house with a gun, they are doing it to do you bodily harm. If you happen to be a huge man well versed in martial arts, then you likely don't want anyone armed.

Having a gun in your home makes you statistically less safe.

And in the context of smart guns suicides are one of the most important statistics, because they account for the vast majority of deaths and they are often carried out by other members of a gun owner's family.

A gun in the home raises the suicide risk for everyone: gun owner, spouse and children alike.

So smart guns are an easy win to prevent suicides in a gun owning households. Oh, sorry, did logic ruin your talking point?

Depends on how local you are referring to. A poster further up mentioned that it probably put out about about 100kw or about the same power as a small car. While cool I would probably put it in the same category as the natural laser on Mars as just an interesting natural phenomenon that won't affect me.

I would agree. Also statistically, driving with a passanger and talking to them is about as dangerous as talking on the cellphone while driving. So since that isn't practical to ban... the cell phone issue is more of an older generation whining about the next new thing.

I'm sorry if that offends but it is accurate.

[citation needed]

It doesn't offend, it simply isn't based on facts.

Here's a counter:

"One study using a driving simulator found that drivers conversing by cell phone were more likely than those talking to passengers to drift between lanes and to miss an exit they were instructed in advance to take."

From this article, linked about 4 posts above yours. I know your "statistic" was garnered from the "University of pulled it out of my ass" but this has been an area with quite a bit of study. If what you are saying has any basis in fact you should be able to cite some researchers who found that to be the case.

Also (cited later in the thread)

"It seems counterintuitive: why is talking on a cell phone while driving any more distracting than talking to a passenger? The reasons have to do with the way our brains process information, reports the Harvard Mental Health Letter."

"One study using a driving simulator found that drivers conversing by cell phone were more likely than those talking to passengers to drift between lanes and to miss an exit they were instructed in advance to take. When the researchers analyzed the complexity of the conversations in this study, they found that drivers and passengers tended to modulate their speech in response to external traffic cues. For example, they stopped talking when a traffic problem developed, or the passenger would offer advice to help the driver navigate. "

Ship AN. "The Most Primary of Care — Talking about Driving and Distraction," New England Journal of Medicine (June 10, 2010): Vol. 362, No. 23, pp. 2145–47.

Strayer DL, et al. "A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver," Human Factors (Summer 2006): Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 381–91.

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