Slashdot Mirror

"Answer" http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

  by Fredrick Brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Brown

Fredric Brown has answered that controversy, http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

Very good question, because of the quite bad headline.

At the time of writing his original paper regarding light bending between two stars, Einstein was already sure that the light-bending effect occurs (it had been already observed during a solar eclipse in 1919). However, he assumed that it would never be observable with two stars, one in the background and other in the foreground (different to the sun) because the light of the two stars would merge and not be distinguishable. From his paper (full copy here): Of course, there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly. First, we shall scarcely ever approach closely enough to such a central line. Second, the angle b will defy the resolving power of our instruments [...]".

The relevant contribution is that current science (Hubble resolution) and appropriate search has managed to observe this effect. In particular, the linked overview clarifies it: Because the foreground star observed by Sahu et al. was about 400 times brighter than the background star, the brightening of their combined light was far too small to be detectable even with Hubble. However, the apparent displacement in the background star’s position, so-called “astrometric lensing,” was measurable. The interesting part is that by measuring the displacement of light, they have been also able to measure the mass of the star, and determine that it is not an exotic "iron core" white dwarf.

http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

I really do want digital albums, complete with very high resolution art, full lyrics, liner notes, and extras.

I'd actually like to have the ability to buy the "full album" that would include video files of each music video from the album, "B" sides from old 45 releases of songs from the album, backstage videos, interviews with the artist, whatever.

The old album covers from the 70's, the ones that were supposed to be on large vinyl record jackets... I want to be able to put those up on a large flatscreen TV while the album is playing. Preferably not just a scan from a CD printing, but the original image scanned in high resolution. I'd like to be able to see all the details in Hipgnosis images like the jacket art to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or Wish You Were Here. (Hmm, someone made an animated GIF for that last one... heck, I'd like it both ways in the digital album, original and new animated version.)

Of course, I want this all using open file formats (FLAC, JPEG, HTML). But since nobody else got around to doing this, Apple is doing it first, and of course with Apple it will be proprietary, opaque, and likely patented somehow for maximum lockin.

I don't think this will revolutionize music, but it really is something I want.

Note that this the second indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves, the first one was the orbital decay of a binary system that included a pulsar, discovered by Hulse and Taylor (Nobel Prize 1993). Today's result, if confirmed, seems pretty spectacular, and might be rewarded with a second Nobel Prize. For a first direct detection of gravitational waves, we have to wait for first detections by LIGO, Virgo and eLISA.

I was remembering an SF short-short that had someone asking the first intelligent computer, "Is there a God"? The computer, after checking that its power supply was secure, replied: "NOW there is".

Apparently, though, it was a second-hand misquote of this Frederic Brown story.

Contrast it with Google's approach: http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

Many people can, yes. "Comet or asteroid" is an open question in the field.

There's also his short-short story "Answer" (to the question "Is there a god?"). But my favorite (and one of the first Sci-Fi novels I ever read) is "Rogue In Space".

There was an Ig Nobel award in 2010 for a mathematical model showing that random promotion can actually be _better_ than carefully organized evaluations and gradual promotions. I'm having difficulty finding a copy of the original paper, since it was in a magazine and many of the links have expired, but there's an abstract here.

            http://oldweb.ct.infn.it/cactus/peter_principle_sup_material.html

No gravitational wave of any frequency has ever been observed.

Indeed - what i mentioned is an experiment to verify their existence. I've looked it up.

From the OPERA paper:

The point where the parent meson produces a neutrino in the decay tunnel is unknown. However, this introduces a negligible inaccuracy in the neutrino time of flight measurement, because the produced mesons are also travelling with nearly the speed of light. By a full LUKA based simulation of the CNGS beam [14] it was shown that the time difference computed assuming a particle moving at the speed of light from the neutrino production target down to LNGS, with respect to the value derived by taking into account the speed of the relativistic parent meson down to its decay point is less than 0.2 ns. ... More details on the muon identificationprocedure are given in [15].

[14] FLUKA software package: http://www.fluka.org/ CNGS neutrino flux calculations:
http://www.mi.infn.it/~psala/Icarus/cngs.html ; G. Battistoni et al., AIP Conference Proceedings, 896m (2007) 31.
[15] OPERA Collaboration, N. Agafanova et al., New J. Phys. 13 (2011) 053051.

http://oldweb.ct.infn.it/cactus/peter_principle_sup_material.html

Actually, some serious works seem to indicate that when promotions are randomly distributed, an organization is more efficient than when promotions are distributed by regular managers. So we can now say with scientific proofs that comparing managers to monkeys is actually insulting for the monkeys.

If by "monitoring" they mean "reading publically-available websites", then I have no civil-liberties problem with this. It might not be a good use of law enforcement resources (they'd benefit me, the taxpayer, more by finding the people who steal cars and break into houses), but there's nothing wrong with the DHS using publically-available information to do their job.

This, of course, is contingent upon them only using that information in an ethical way. If they want to subpoena my ISP and send the police to hassle me because I said "Fuck the police", then that's a problem. But that isn't directly related to the DHS' monitoring of the web.

Monitoring of private communication (email, IM, which websites I read) is a whole different ball game. Ethical arguments aside it is simply not practical -- the real "bad guys" can hide so deep behind cryptography and steganography that the only people turned up by this monitoring will be people who are a little too ardent (for their tastes) in saying "Fuck the police".

I'm visiting Italy, and they really do make it hard to get an internet connection that they can't investigate. I had to give my passport information to the hotel before they'd give me a damn wifi account (and they have accounts, on an authentication server that's always grossly overloaded, where in the US there'd just be a public AP). But of course anybody really up to no good would do their dirty work over Tor or through an anonymising proxy, while these sorts of "security" measures instead just make it hard for a bunch of scientists to check their experiments.

We can have all the discussions we want about whether there is a fundamental right to private anonymous communication, but the technological reality is that anyone who wants it enough will have it regardless. Monitoring etc. is just going to make /b/ load slowly because everyone has to load it over Tor.

OK, now I feel guilty. And I've got 10 minutes before lunch.
A lot of the recent research on the Tunguska impact has come out of a university in Italy ... should be the most reliable source. Bologna university. Do they have a summary of "best evidence"? not that I can find.
"Closer to the site, windowpanes shattered, livestock were knocked off their feet and broken bones resulted when people were dashed to the ground."
"Yet, owing to the area's remoteness, only one nomad lost his life."
"Remarkably, there were only two reported human deaths." Oh, sorry, that's your link.

[SIGH] Pick a number, any number you want.

Great, the collision of these things is exactly the kind of event we need for detecting gravitational waves. These kind of 'inspirals' emit very distinct pattern, which can be retrieved very efficiently from the noise with matched filter banks. The higher the mass, the lower the frequency of this 'chirped' signal, so it is probable that these colliding super-massive black-holes cannot be detected with the ground-based kilometer long observatories, which are measuring right now. This is probably more something for the space-based LISA mission, which can probe much lower frequencies since it has a base-line of millions of kilometers.

Thanks for your comment :)

I hope you have read Richard Feynman on Cargo Cult Science and his experience in the textbook selection process.

It takes lots of work to come to real answers, which seems to be too much effort for most people.

What reasonable basis is there for believing that everyone who's highly educated is somehow trying to subvert society to some nefarious end??

You should read "Cargo Cult Science", by Richard Feynman. It's insightful, a great read, and will answer your question.

http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

Fredric Brown, "Answer", 1954:
http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

Before anyone repartitions their drive, it's worth reading about cargo cults:

http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

I had LASIK surgery - I'm pretty sure I couldn't see clearly more than a foot in front of my face before the procedure and I have better than 20/20 vision now. Are you seriously going to claim that a placebo cut could affect the refraction of light in my eyes in such a way as to give me 20/20 vision?

Would I bet that LASIK is more effective than a placebo operation? Yes. Is it a strongly known fact that it is better than a placebo? No, because the comparison hasn't been done. That fact that it's difficult to do such a comparison doesn't let us assume what the outcome would be.

Being a engineer or an M.D. doesn't let you make such assumptions, either. (Indeed, being a member of either profession says jack about one's knowledge of the scientific method.)

Could there be some non-specific aspect of pre- or post-surgical care that has an impact on the results? Could the belief in the effectiveness of the surgery cause visual data to be processed differently within the brain? Or cause you to use the intrinsic muscles of the eye in a different manner? Could social factors play a role such that your vision is actually unchanged, but you report it differently now? We don't know.

As Feynman put it in his Cargo Cult Science address, "if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results."

We know that non-specific or "placebo" factors play a role in surgical outcomes; therefore if they're not being taken into account, if those effects are not being ruled out, it's not good science.

It may be that we can't collect the data to do so, for ethical or practical reasons - fine. But that doesn't make it good science, it just means that a big blank spot remains in our knowledge.

If you want to prove that surgery is worthless, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I'll support your effort.

I have never asserted that all surgery is worthless. Hell, I just had cryosurgery to remove a wart.

I have stated that the evidence for any given surgery being more effective than a placebo in no case reaches the "gold standard" of double-blinded tests, and I have stated that in every case that has been tested versus a sham operation, the surgical treatment in question has proven no more effective than the sham.

And I have objected to the bias that holds that all surgery is "real" medicine with strong evidence, but "alternative" treatments with the same level of clinical evidence aren't.

Every single scientific article reporting "A linked with B" gets this ridiculous tag.

And rightly so.

Most science stories posted to Slashdot are junk science studies which use the law of large numbers and fuzzy statistics to promote the most dubious of arguments under the pretence of scientific inquiry. Many studies take correlation coefficients of 0.5 to be "significant". What a joke. How long is the scientific community going to continue to call this rigour?

Any reputable scientist and journal will report results of the form "Here is the data. A appears to be statistically linked with B. Here are several hypotheses as to why, however these are speculative and require further study."

Rubbish! Is that what the world construes from their results? Is that what they wish the world to construe from them? No. The vast majority of these studies are putting forward their correlation as proof of causation. That is what they want people to construe from the study. Look at any half baked studies on race, gender, abortion or any topic that sells newspapers. Why do you think people are performing such studies? Because they believe further inquiry is merited? No. It's because they have an opinion, and want to justify it. So they turn to science to legitimise their position. This constant and ongoing abuse of science is sickening.

Slashdotters are right to point out the Correlation is not, and never will be causation. Never, never, never, never, never. If you want to show causation, then you must have a model and you must subject it to experiment. Experiment! Not statistical mumbo-jumbo.

Listen to Zombie Feynman's wisdom. "Ideas are tested by experiment. Everything else is bookkeeping". This is bookkeeping, not science. Correlation is not causation, and this story deserves that tag. I don't know how many times I'm going to end up linking to this page, but here it is again. This study is Cargo Cult Science. The form is perfect, but it is only an empty imitation of real scientific inquiry. Stop giving it more credit and credence that it deserves.

Here's a braindump of a few of my thoughts from the graduate student viewpoint:

The typical way my supervisors determine how good a particular journal is is based on its Impact Factor, basically an indication of how many citations the average article gets within a particular time period (I think its 3 years). This suggests that the value of a published article is the number of citations you get in other papers.

Since about 4 years ago, pretty much the only papers I've been reading have been those available to me for free -- This includes those publications for which my university has a subscription. It's only when a paper is absolutely critical to my research, and no other free paper exists with similar research, that I fork out the couple of dollars required (and ~1 month wait) to get a copy of an article via the library's Interloan service. Researchers are expected to read the papers that they cite, so more generally, I would expect papers published in freely-accessible journals to have more citations (and therefore have more value) than those with a pay-per-view model.

This value gets diluted by people who cite second-hand without reading the article (e.g. "X said Y said Z", so I'll say that "Y said Z"). Researchers can then get articles cited by simply getting a highly trusted researcher to cite their own paper, even if it is in a pay-per-view journal. This is the quicker way to get a paper done, but ends up with a chinese-whispers distortion of the original research.

If people respect your past research (which can be indicated by how many citations of your papers have been made), it is easier to get another paper published, with less checking carried out by the reviewers of the paper. And, with each new paper comes more citations, so a greater perceived respect for your research.

I believe that both open access and peer review are important. Doing this in such a way that the reviewers can't avoid a good critique of the article is difficult.

As an aside, funding is so driven by new/novel results that funding bodies often won't provide money for repeating experiments done by others. Richard Feynman has made some nice points on why this is a bad idea.

In certain fields, it is very easy to pass for a scientist without actually being one. See the cargo cult science speech for details of "fields" like Parapsychology populated by crackpots and true believers who play dress up in white lab coats an perform "experiments", yet no real science is going on.

Eugenics is just such a field. Populated as it is by closet racists, elitists and the like, who perform the most dubious of experiments and data analysis before proclaiming their profound conclusions. They no not rigor. To them, the law of large numbers is proof enough of anything. You know what the sad part is. People will listen to them before they listen to actual scientists.

Tragically, despite the excellent work done in the field in recent years, the field of genetics is being taken over by these cargo cultists. Or at least, its PR section is. And when you come right down to it, perception can become reality. If the public and prospective students see only crackpot geneticists, then sooner or later all the only geneticists left will be crackpots.

The onus is on the genetics community, and the scientific community in general, to stand up to and refute the claims of these charlatans.

Andy

Our constructs have no affect on reality, but reality had better affect our constructs.

The notion of "objective reality" - that things exist outside of our observations - is a construct. A useful construct, to be sure, but a construct all the same.

Our constructs affect the observations we choose to make, and even bias the observations themselve observations (like how Millikan's results for the charge of the election biased subsequent research). By biasing our observations, our constructs affect reality-as-we-know-it. (This is how the Law of Fives works.)

And reality-as-we-know-it is the only "reality" we can meaningfully talk about: "That's the very model of what a true scientific law must always be: a statement about how the human mind relates to the cosmos. We can never make a statement about the cosmos itself -- but only about how our senses (or our instruments) detect it, and about how our codes and languages symbolize it." - Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

All these "experiments" always remind me of one thing and one thing only: Cargo Cult Science (http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html).

Also, from reading the comments, the article ought to be tagged "/.ers also don't know math"

Every day now, and I really mean every single day, I read another news story about some psychological/biometric/neurological/... study from which some spurious result is obtained. These "studies" are often done on first year university student volunteers, under dubious conditions with little controls. The results are apparently "statistically significant", a quality which, nowadays, is not itself very statistically significant. Very often, a precisely conflicting "study" will be seen a few weeks later.

I'm concerned that these junk studies are doing real harm to science as a whole. It's becoming increasingly difficult to see quality studies amid all the noise, and even when you do, you may be too jaded to investigate further. This effect is I suspect, magnified enormously in the public at large, which may explain the modern public cynicism and even dismissal of scientists as a whole.

It's easy to blame the media, and in fact I do. But part of the blame lies with the scientific community. There are a lot of people running around calling themselves scientists, and their investigations experiments, when neither are anything of the kind. Scientists, and others, need to tackle theses people. Politeness be damned.

To conclude, I link once again to the Cargo Cult Science speech.

QUOTE (with minor editing for grammar): 98. December 19, 2007 There is a press-release [at] http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/asteroid.html on Sandia researcher Mark Boslough calculations of Tunguska. There are some computer graphics, but there is practically no info on physical models on which the calculations are based!

I can say that the graphics resembled [to] me the one in their calculations presented in 1995! And what I read (in his 1995 paper) on the sparse info about the models is not convincing.

Moreover one of the calculations' outcome was a proposal that satellites in orbits are in danger due to 'plumes' from rather small meteoroids ('meteorites')! (see the Boslough's abstract on Tunguska-96 conference here: http://www-th.bo.infn.it/tunguska/abstr3.html ).

Interesting that several groups of researchers using 'the most advanced' computer calculations obtain rather different results! :) But there is one point [on] which I could agree with Boslough -- the strength of the forest [destruction] used to be overestimated indeed, but in reality it should be incorporated into calculations in much more complicated form than Boslough has done. In my opinion this would alter the results of the calculations completely. :UNQUOTE

So, why are we getting this rehash of a 12-year-old study now? Could it be the upcoming Centennial?

Eta Carinae - a large blue variable star in the Carina constelation, more than 100 times as massive and 5 million times as radiant as the Sun ... If pointing in our direction a GRB from Eta Carinae, ... would devistate life on Earth.

Currently, Physics Today has an article about the swarming of birds. The studies from the group in Rome are expected to complement current models since currently there is little experimental evidence to back up the models. Using several cameras they take time-lapse pictures of the swarms and then reconstruct the complex trajectories on the computer (a tour de force...).

Uni of Bologna have a site on Tunguska, including a whole section on this new, possible crater - with pictures.

Uni of Bologna have a site on Tunguska, including a whole section on this new, possible crater - with pictures.

I think this article fits perfectly into Feynman's definition of "Cargo Cult Science" http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html.

http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

The rats and maze stuff is in the bottom third or so.

From the man page of kshell (link):

kwrapper tries to make the application look like it was actually started directly and not via kdeinit. Like kshell it passes application name, arguments, complete environment and current working directory to kdeinit.

The signal passing allows you to use Ctrl-C to break the started application or Ctrl-Z to stop it.

Note: With the use of kwrapper you will have one more process running and also the signal passing and output redirection may not work properly.

Yes and no. Astronomers have been wondering about Eta Carinae for awhile. It appears that it can produce "gamma ray bursts" that are powerful enough to wipe out life even here, 7500 light years away, but current thinking is that GRBs are focused events, gamma rays streaming along the magnetic axis of the exploding star and fortunately Eta Carinae's axes are not pointed in our direction.

I'm not endorsing this link http://people.roma2.infn.it/~aldo/dar01.pdf but it does corroborate what I've heard on TV science shows.

That bit about Feynman is paraphrased from this most excellent & mostly non-facetious speech by the great man himself.

Using LASER cooling to bring a macroscopic object o 0.8K is pretty darn neat. But cooling big things in general to sub-Kelvin temperatures is not that unusual (the article only gives a nod to this idea). For example, in our bolometry experiment, we cool 40 kg of TeO2 crystals down to just 10 milliKelvin using an ancient Oxford (brand) dilution refrigerator.

He has a list, you have a list. How very equanimous! Your list is random trash, but comprising his are a great many arguments that he has heard made emphatically.

Here's one that I've heard: science is not a vote.

It sounds good, right? You'd like that argument - if you hadn't heard of scientific consensus.

But anyway, you were just joking, since you know what scientific honesty means.

Psychology is a pseudo-science. They do not do well controlled experiments. They do not try repeat things. Once in a while someone does a good scientific experiment in psychology, but that is ignored. So while Psychology could be, and should be a science, it is not in the real world.

Richard Feynman explains it better than I can

• The vacuum tubes are 3km long, and must be perfectly linear (since a laser is traveling in them): due to earth curvature, at the middle point they are ~1meter lower w.r.t. to the ground than at the end ! (and you can see this!)
• the laser light travels back and forth ~40 times; suppose you would use a normal mirror, reflecting 99% of the light: summing up, you would only get 60% of the light . To avoid this problem, they built a special mirror reflecting 99.999% of the light; this mirror is made of successive layers of semiconductors, each with appropriate reflective index, each ~1 wavelenght in depth. This mirror is so advanced that they had to build a special facility in France to build it (no existing company could manufacture it!)
• presence of the air in tubes would diffract light, so these tubes are more vacuum than the vacuum in outer space (solar system type). This is very difficult to achieve: tubes are made of stainless steel; steel usually entraps hydrogen, that then evaporates for years; to keep good vacuum, they would have needed a huge number of vacuum traps to capture these atoms of hydrogen, and that would boost the cost of the project. They instead chose to "cook the tubes" to evaporate the hydrogen; to this end, they connected power transformators to achieve a power of ~40MW and connected it to the tubes, so that they heated up by electrical resistence (and kept cooking for some days). This was costly but it saved them a lot of money overall. If you could peek below the blue roofing, you would indeed see that the inner tube is red.
• the VIRGO facility was a strange place: it was perfectly clean and at the same it looked dirty. I explain the oximoron: while building that project, free dust was an enemy; for this reason, there were a lot of dust traps around, that is, glueish carpets; those were of course all dirty! For the same reason, we had to wear overalls and shoe coverings, and there were a lot of air pumps that were filtrating air and keeping positive pressure in the compound.
• that reminds me: they had to build a company to build the tube pieces, (and the compay "precooked" the pieces before shipping). They also built a robot that would solder them; this robot "chews" what it does not need, since "chewing" does not create dust.
• if you ever fly above Pisa, look down: you can easily spot VIRGO from the airplane

• The vacuum tubes are 3km long, and must be perfectly linear (since a laser is traveling in them): due to earth curvature, at the middle point they are ~1meter lower w.r.t. to the ground than at the end ! (and you can see this!)
• the laser light travels back and forth ~40 times; suppose you would use a normal mirror, reflecting 99% of the light: summing up, you would only get 60% of the light . To avoid this problem, they built a special mirror reflecting 99.999% of the light; this mirror is made of successive layers of semiconductors, each with appropriate reflective index, each ~1 wavelenght in depth. This mirror is so advanced that they had to build a special facility in France to build it (no existing company could manufacture it!)
• presence of the air in tubes would diffract light, so these tubes are more vacuum than the vacuum in outer space (solar system type). This is very difficult to achieve: tubes are made of stainless steel; steel usually entraps hydrogen, that then evaporates for years; to keep good vacuum, they would have needed a huge number of vacuum traps to capture these atoms of hydrogen, and that would boost the cost of the project. They instead chose to "cook the tubes" to evaporate the hydrogen; to this end, they connected power transformators to achieve a power of ~40MW and connected it to the tubes, so that they heated up by electrical resistence (and kept cooking for some days). This was costly but it saved them a lot of money overall. If you could peek below the blue roofing, you would indeed see that the inner tube is red.
• the VIRGO facility was a strange place: it was perfectly clean and at the same it looked dirty. I explain the oximoron: while building that project, free dust was an enemy; for this reason, there were a lot of dust traps around, that is, glueish carpets; those were of course all dirty! For the same reason, we had to wear overalls and shoe coverings, and there were a lot of air pumps that were filtrating air and keeping positive pressure in the compound.
• that reminds me: they had to build a company to build the tube pieces, (and the compay "precooked" the pieces before shipping). They also built a robot that would solder them; this robot "chews" what it does not need, since "chewing" does not create dust.
• if you ever fly above Pisa, look down: you can easily spot VIRGO from the airplane

the french-italian project VIRGO has two arms , each 3000 METERS long.
BTW, whenever you here someone speaking of physics and using feets , you should doubt that s/he knows anything about the subject.

To do serious damage, we'll need a rock at least a few hundred meters across.

It depends on what you call "serious damage". The Tunguska event blasted thousands of square kilometers of Siberian forest and it is estimated that it was a meteor just 60 meters wide.

A similar impactor hitting a populated area would decimate a whole metropolis or even a small US state. I would call that "serious damage".

The U.S. official said the cloud could be the result of a forest fire.

Perhaps it was a meteorite?

East Russia of course has Tunguska, a rumored alien-site...

This is from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

Number theory
Trolls are usually thought to be so stupid they can count only up to 4. [...]
In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three... many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don't realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.

[from: "Men at arms"]