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Which is why the campaign against landmines.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1997/icbl-facts.html

Can't wait until the DHS no fly list gets integrated with the ok-kill software.

Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.

You obviously don't know anything about art history.

I took art history courses.

I learned about the Bauhaus, industrial design, architecture. I learned about the history of the motion picture and the birth of video. I learned how people figured out how to apply a new technology.

I learned about Leonardo da Vinci and the study of anatomy. For many centuries the study of art anatomy was the same as the study of medical anatomy. I learned about art and technology.

I learned about why they had the art that they did in Renaissance Italy, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, in 1960s New York.

It helped me understand the history of science.

Art history is simply a branch of history. Do you think the study of history is a waste of time? Do you think it's more important to study generals and battles than it is to study architects and industrial designers?

BTW, when undergraduates major in art history, they also take the same basic courses that everybody else takes, such as math, science, English, foreign languages, music, other history, etc. The idea is that you go to college and get a well-rounded education, that teaches you how to deal with anything. You don't know at age 19 what the world is going to be like for the next 40 years, so you have to be prepared for the unknown.

If you go to the Nobel prize web site http://www.nobelprize.org/ and read the biographies, you'll see that many of the most accomplished scientists studied the liberal arts as undergraduates. Harold Varmus, who is now head of the National Cancer Institute, after discovering the role of retroviruses in cancer, was an English major. Eric Kandel, who discovered the physiological basis of memory in neurons, studied German literature at Harvard.

The four-year undergraduate degree, where you let kids follow their curiosity, is the goose that lays the golden egg. It's the most valuable thing we've discovered -- throughout history, around the world. That's the way we turn out great minds, including scientists, including "producers". It's a system that works and you shouldn't mess with it if you don't understand it. If you start tossing out all the subjects that bored you, you'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg. You'll turn out technicians who don't know what to do when the world changes.

Let's look at the latest issue of the world's premier medical journal*, the New England Journal of Medicine. Where do their authors come from? The U.S., Korea, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Spain, France, the U.K.....

Gee, despite what the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America told you, lots of people all around the world do medical research.

For another way to look at it, count the Nobel laureates in medicine http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/

Bottom line: While the U.S. does a lot of medical research, we're actually not an island of civilization in a world of barbarian freeloaders. There are other societies around the world where scientists (and their governments) put a lot of effort into not only practical but basic scientific research, and come up with important medical developments, like, oh, uh, penicillin and, uh, the structure of DNA. Science is a worldwide enterprise, and everybody pulls their share. Imagine that, there are kids in Europe who are studying Darwin and Newton just like we do. And even in Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Endo_(biochemist) and China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemesinin#History

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306494
A Phase 2 Trial of Ponatinib in Philadelphia Chromosome–Positive Leukemias
J.E. Cortes and Others
Address reprint requests to Dr. Cortes at the Department of Leukemia, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, or at jcortes@mdanderson.org.
The authors' affiliations are as follows: the Department of Leukemia, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston (J.E.C., H.K.); Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, Seoul, South Korea (D.-W.K.); H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL (J.P.-I.); Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin (P.C.), III. Medizinische Klinik, Universitätsmedizin Mannheim, Mannheim (M.C.M.), and Abteilung Hämatologie und Onkologie, Universitätsklinikum Jena, Jena (A.H.) — all in Germany;

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1301064
Intrarenal Resistive Index after Renal Transplantation
M. Naesens and Others
From the Departments of Nephrology and Renal Transplantation (M.N., L.H., K.C., D.K., P.E., B.B., B.S., B.M., H.J., C.M., K.D.V., Y.V.), Pathology (E.L.), Radiology (L.D.W., F.C., R.O.), and Abdominal Transplant Surgery (J.P., D.M.), University Hospitals Leuven, and the Departments of Microbiology and Immunology (M.N., K.C., D.K., P.E., B.B., B.S., B.M., J.P., D.M., K.D.V., Y.V.) and Imaging and Pathology (E.L., L.D.W., F.C., R.O.), KU Leuven — both in Leuven, Belgium.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1215541
Dolutegravir plus Abacavir–Lamivudine for the Treatment of HIV-1 Infection
S.L. Walmsley and Others
From the University Health Network, Toronto (S.L.W.); Hospital Clinico Universitario, Santiago de Compostela (A.A.), and Hospital General de Elche and Universidad Miguel Hernández, Alicante (F.G.) — both in Spain; Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Saint-Pierre, Brussels (N.C.); Dr. Victor Babes Infectious and Tropical Diseases Hospital, Bucharest, Romania (D.D.); Medizinisches Versorgungszentrum Karlsplatz HIV Research and Clinical Care Center, Munich, Germany (A.E.); Centre Hospitalier Régional d'Orléans, Orléans, France (L.H.); Antiviral Therapy Unit, Ospedali Riuniti, Bergamo, Italy (F.M.); University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha (U.S.); GlaxoSmithKline, Stockley Park, United Kingdom (C.G.); and GlaxoSmithKline, Research Triangle Park, NC (K.P., B.W., S.M., G.N.).

You're thinking of gravitational waves. Neutrinos have been (indirectly) detectable since 1956, and that detection won the Nobel prize.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/index.html

Cybernetics. Information Theory. Done. Everything else in the Universe can be mastered & described with these, even physics and quantum physics.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. May I see your plane ticket to Stockholm?

Read this and see if you think the people who award the prize would agree with that sentence.

Soviet dissidents were seeking asylum into the USA and the USSR government was not particularly amused when they got awards for reasons the USSR didn't like. Oh the ironies of life.

First of all, don't feed the trolls. Second, since the discussion is basically an ad hominem or a personal attack on the guy:

His name has been put up for the Nobel Peace Prize as of today

Which puts him in the same category as Adolf Hitler. Man, did he bring some peace, or what? (Sorry for Godwin'ing the conversation, but you have to admit that it's funny to point that out)

Nobel peace price (nomination) means nothing. Barack Obama has one, which was to be called premature at best, but undeserved would be more appropriate. Then again, at the time people were still expecting him to start walking on water in the coming weeks.

I personally don't care about Snowden and his Russian airport antics or "criminal status". I'm far more interested in the message and the consequences of the lid being blown off that whole thing. Hell, everyone seems more interested in his IRC logs, forum comments and pictures of his girlfriend. Bread and circuses, I guess...

Any assertions that so-and-so "has been nominated for a Nobel prize" are unverifiable. Anyone can claim to have nominated anyone, but there's not way to know if they're telling the truth, because nominations can be made only by nominators invited by the Nobel committee, and the identity of the nominators and their nominations are kept secret for fifty years. See Nomination FAQ:

"Q: Has X been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize?

A: Information about the nominations, investigations, and opinions concerning the award is kept secret for fifty years.

Q: What about the rumours circling around the world about certain people being nominated for the Nobel Prize this year?

A: Well, either it's just a rumour, or someone among the invited nominators has leaked information. Since the nominations are kept secret for 50 years, you'll have to wait until then to find out."

Just want to point out that most of the comments here are comparing this to Obama's award. Snowden has been NOMINATED but not awarded. It turns out a fairly large number of people have the ability to nominate recipients: http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/index.html

This really isn't news. It's more comment trolling by slashdot -- and they've been doing a very good job of it lately.

The very nature of the peace prize itself makes it inherently political. Here's the list of all the winners:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/

Can you find me someone on there whose actions don't constitute engaging in politics? Most of the winners are politicians or activists, but winners such as the EU, IPCC, UN Peace Keeping Forces, etc, aren't even people and shouldn't have been allowed to have it in the first place. They were clearly picked to make a political point.

In fact, you pretty much have to go back to the first winner in 1901, in which the founder of the International Red Cross was awarded the prize to find someone who didn't do something overtly political, and even then he had to share the prize with a politician.

Absent a large shareholder making a major move in position you can't know what is driving the market on any day.

You cannot (usually) know with absolute certainty but it is demonstrably incorrect to say a large shareholder move is the only thing that can be shown to drive stock price on a given day. Take earnings releases. There will (usually) be a consensus estimate of what earnings will be. If the company exceeds earnings expectations the stock price will reliably (though not always) go up. If it is lower than expectations the stock price will reliably (though not always) go down. This has been demonstrated time and again to happen and it makes sense because stock prices are fundamentally based on expectations. While the evidence is more of a strong correlation than certain causation, the evidence is strong enough and consistent enough to have confidence regarding what is influencing the market. If the earnings news had no effect we would see no correlation between the two but that is not what the evidence shows. Sometimes it is plainly obvious what is moving a given stock on a given day. Not always but often. Correlations with news are easier to demonstrate for big news or issues like earnings releases but they can be teased out for lesser events as well.

Now there is a LOT of what amounts to brownian motion in stock prices too. Not everything is predictable because there are so many moving parts and unknown motivations. Even people behaving perfectly rationally can seem like just random motion because we have incomplete information. Sometimes it is just Joe Random needing to sell some stock to make a car payment which will never become public information.

The market and what drives it is a black box of emotion, those news stories that claim that X event is driving Y change are complete speculation.

Given that a huge amount of trading volume is done by computer algorithms the facts don't really back you up on this unless you can explain to me how a computer algorithm has emotion. Furthermore there is a HUGE amount of academic research on the topic of what caused markets and stocks to move and it demonstrably is not all random emotion. I'm not saying that emotion isn't a part of the equation (remember we're trading on expectations, not cold hard facts). There have been Nobel prizes given for work related to human psychology in economics. But it is easy to demonstrate that it isn't just a random mess of emotional decisions either.

That said, you are correct when you say that the news stories about what drove a stock on a certain day are generally speculation. The vast majority of the time they are just pundits looking for a sound bite and not basing what they are saying on data that they have analyzed with any academic rigor. It's well known how to check if there is a correlation between a bit of news and a stock movement but we both know that the talking heads on the news never bother to actually check. Sometimes they are right but it isn't because the did the detailed research.

You really want to read Feynman's Nobel Lecture. The highlight is:

Many different physical ideas can describe the same physical reality. Thus, classical electrodynamics can be described by a field view, or an action at a distance view, etc. Originally, Maxwell filled space with idler wheels, and Faraday with fields lines, but somehow the Maxwell equations themselves are pristine and independent of the elaboration of words attempting a physical description. The only true physical description is that describing the experimental meaning of the quantities in the equation - or better, the way the equations are to be used in describing experimental observations. This being the case perhaps the best way to proceed is to try to guess equations, and disregard physical models or descriptions. For example, McCullough guessed the correct equations for light propagation in a crystal long before his colleagues using elastic models could make head or tail of the phenomena, or again, Dirac obtained his equation for the description of the electron by an almost purely mathematical proposition. A simple physical view by which all the contents of this equation can be seen is still lacking.

The idea of the electron "moving around" the nucleus doesn't make much sense at all, just as the notion of the electron being "attracted" to a proton -- when you get down to a certain scale of things and certain systems. The fact that the electron is bound to a proton breaks the applicability of classical theories to both proton and electron. The best explanation we have at the moment for this is the theory of quantum electrodynamics. There, all of electrical interactions are modeled by photons, so that if you got an interaction, there's a photon involved. Photons are the carriers of all kinds of electromagnetic interactions, including what we'd classically call electrostatic attraction/repulsion.

In a way, what you're asking is why certain physical laws are one way and not the other -- we have zero clue about that. The natural law is somehow set up in such a way, that there no trick that will let you know the momentum and the position of a particle all at once. This is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. An electron "crashed" onto the proton would be such a trick: you know precisely where it is (stuck to the proton), and what momentum it has (non relative to the proton, it's stuck). We don't know what is that "something" that makes the nature work that way. No clue at all. There is, at the moment, nothing more fundamental that would explain this universal behavior of nature. Sorry about that.

Topological Superconductors - 300K and higher, but still not usable

The relevant google search.
A relevant result from Joint Quantum Institute

Ultraconductors got killed in the 2008 market crash. Had they not got killed, they were making superconductors out of plastic, they called it Ultraconductor. (Not to be confused with the speaker cables of the same name). This stuff conducted at room temperature a million times better than silver! I have no doubt they could have done it, had the economy not killed them. Here are the relevant patents.

US Patent 5,777,292 - Materials having high electrical conductivity at room teperatures and ...
US Patent 6,804,105 - Enriched macromolecular materials having temperature-independent high ...

Here's a 2005 interview (.pdf, sorry), which may give some insight about Ultraconductor.

The 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (pdf) offers some good info about conductive polymers.

US Patent 7,014,795 discusses the growth of crystalized electron pairs (otherwise referred to as polarons in other places), the diagrams are especially helpful.

I believe it is well within the capabilities of any non-chemistry adverse hackerspace to eventually create polymer cables which are 10 to 10 million times better than silver at conducting electricity.

True story: A kindergarten teacher took her children for a walk in the woods. They saw a woodpecker for the first time. One of the children said, "Oh, it's eating insects." That's learning science. They observed the world and formed a hypothesis.

Showing kids videos of AT and CG pairs, etc., isn't looking at the real world. They're learning about pictures of AT and CG pairs. Or maybe they see plastic AT and CG pairs, like a museum exhibit I saw. But they don't actually see AT and CG pairs. They have no way of knowing whether AT and CG pairs exist, except from authority. And learning from authority isn't science. Science is learning from observation of the real world.

I could show kids a video of Santa's elves making proteins inside tiny cells. How do they know that AT and CG pairs make proteins, rather than Santa's elves? Videos of AT and CG pairs aren't a testable hypothesis. They're not observations of the real world.

I thought that it should be pretty easy for kids to understand AT and CG pairs, too. They're just like video games, right? http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/dna_double_helix/ Kids come away using words like "DNA" so they must be learning something, right?

Then I read the science teaching literature, including the National Science Education Standards http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4962 Actually, according to the science teachers who worked on the standards, even the concept of molecules are difficult for most high school students. That's what they say, and they have the experience.

You can get kids to repeat phrases -- and the way a lot of tests are designed, you can get kids to give the "right" answer to test questions without understanding what the words mean. The textbooks say, "surface tension is caused by molecular attraction.", Then the test says, "What causes surface tension?" and the kids answer, "Molecular attraction." But they don't understand molecular attraction. They're just repeating the words (which kids are very good at, since their minds are programmed to learn language). The proof is, you could just as easily write textbooks that say, "Surface tension is caused by Jesus," and the kids would answer, "Jesus." You could say, "Surface tension is caused by asdfj." Kids will repeat it. But they won't understand it.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 was awarded to Barack H. Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

Dr. Steven Chu brought authority and evidence-based science to the US Cabinet. Former professor of physics at Stanford, he shared a Nobel prize for physics in 1997 for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. he continued to publish science while serving as Secretary of Energy.

His very expertise and lifelong, professional interest were very lamely attacked by the right wing machine, typically accusing him of avocating raising oil prices and gas prices.

Having Dr. Chu there did more to forward the cause of science in the US Government in generations. How many administrations could walk down a hallway and access a scientist at the top of his game? He should be held and paraded around on slashdot's shoulders for his hard work.

And there's Kary Mullis. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-autobio.html

I don't know whether Mullis is an argument for or against drugs.

Please be advised that I have Mexicans in my close family.

There are a great variety of Mexicans, ranging from great scientists http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1995/molina.html to criminal mobs.

Immigration is a tricky balance and is usually unfair. I know a lot of immigrants. I don't mind if they come to this country, contribute to it and benefit from it. But some immigrant groups have strong lobbies, and are showered with government handouts as soon as they get here. I don't mind that too much, because that's what it took for every immigrant group to succeed. I want to see that same safety net for people in general.

I do mind when they turn around and create a myth that they did it all themselves -- and use that myth to destroy the social safety net that has given the same benefits to other Americans. I don't hate the 1%. I do hate the 1% who got rich and are trying to make it worse for the rest of us.

1)Although the official prize name is ."Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". Its listed on the nobel prize website http://www.nobelprize.org/ That is not propagada, just common sense shortening of the name.

2) No, he did not

"“I agree with Milton Friedman that once the [1929] Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation. So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression.”

F. A. Hayek, interviewed in 1979, from Conversations with Great Economists: Friedrich A. Hayek, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Leonid V. Kantorovich, Joan Robinson, Paul A.Samuelson, Jan Tinbergen by Diego Pizano.

“I think it is certainly true that ending an inflation need not lead to that long-lasting period of unemployment like the 1930s, because then the monetary policy was not only wrong during the boom but equally wrong during the Depression. First, they prolonged the boom and caused a worse depression, and then they allowed a deflation to go on and prolonged the Depression.”

F. A. Hayek, interviewed in 1977

http://hayekcenter.org/

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/

Saying Mann won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize is itself a bit of a stretch: His name is not listed anywhere on the award. In fact, the ONLY people mentioned individually are Al Gore and Rajendra K. Pachauri . . .

Don't complain. Rutherford won the Chemistry prize for basically discovering nuclear physics. He was annoyed that he would forever be labeled a chemist.

When the fields overlap the Nobel Committee can basically pick whichever one is more convenient for the year.

Nuclear physics or nuclear chemistry?. It can be hard to apply the labels of modern scientific disciplines to past research. Faraday was a chemist by today's definition, but was probably just considered a "scientist" in his day because he was really discovering some of the underpinnings of what would become modern chemistry. Linus Pauling studied under Schrodinger and Bohr and much of his work is easily classifiable as physics (but he considered himself a chemist). Much of the evolution of Chemistry into a core science completely separate from Physics was the result of people like Rutherford, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Pauling. The 2012 chemistry prize, I think, exemplifies the same evolution in biochemistry, which started as more of an outgrowth of physical organic chemistry. But, as you say, the Nobel committee has to stuff them into either Chemistry or Medicine/Physiology because Biochemistry isn't an option.

It's Physiology or Medicine (there aren't separate categories for Medicine and Physiology)...

Also, in 1994, the winners for Physiology or Medicine got their award for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells (as opposed to studies of G-protein-coupled receptors for the 2012 winners). That's a pretty subtle difference for categorization if you ask me...

The full details are here: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2012/advanced-physicsprize2012.pdf

The prize covers a range of work by groups lead by Wineland and Haroche including: sideband cooling of an ion in a trap, transfer of a quantum superposition of electronic states to a quantum superposition of vibrational modes of a trap, measuring the number of photons in the cavity in a quantum non-demolition measurement, and creation of a superposition of microwave field states and monitoring their evolution to decoherence.

How about going straight to the source instead? http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2012/press.html

I know very little about farming and organic food. I only recently started researching the matter more when I ran across the article while researching why my own 'organic' gardens (I just started last year). I actually originally submitted the same story a week ago where it sat in the queue for a week in limbo not quite making it before being rejected.

I accept correction on conventional farming, it's not something I know much about. My concerns are more ecological with green-washing. People spend a lot of money - $30 billion a year in the US alone on organic food for no health benefit. The perceived environmental benefits on a commercial scale are far outweighed by the environmental harms.

I would argue your point on the farming revolution, I think it actually had a lot to do a guy by the name of Norman Borlaug. He is the person who really turned breeding of plants into a science and researched how to make plants survive in different kinds of harsh environments. His research ideas led to the development of pretty much all modern farming breeds and even GMO foods. The nobel prize he earned for his accomplishments cites him as A central figure in the "green revolution".

I agree with your point on population, we have too many people. However since we have no politically correct way to adjust the population, we have to figure out ways to feed the ones we have or were back to politically incorrect ways that make the news again. That means getting real about things like crop yields and so on.

Well there was Nobel Prize awarded for the production of liquid helium so I guess one could call it a Nobel gas.

> the photons emitted by cell phones are way too low in energy to do damage to molecules.
> Some guy named Einstein got a Noble Prize for that. For a brief explanation see
> http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/press.html .

Quoting:
"Our present exposure to man-made microwaves is about a m10^18 times greater than our nature exposure to these frequencies

"The main reaction why microwaves are especially damaging is probably because of the ease with which the current that they generate penetrate cell membranes. Cell membranes have a high resistance to DC, but, because they are so thin (about 10 nm), they behave like capacitors so that AC pass through them easily. Since the effective resistance of a capacitor is inversely proportional to its frequency, [currents induced by] microwave radiation pass through the membranes of cells and tissues more easily, than [currents induced by] lower frequency radio waves, and therefore they can do more damage to the cell contents.

"Since it has been known since the work of Bawin et al (1975) that weak electromagnetic fields could remove calcium ions from the surfaces of brain cells, it seems likely that both the conditioned water and the eletromagmentic fields were working in the same way, i.e., by removing structurally important calcium ions from cell membranes, which then made them leak.

"EM effects on the Endocrine System and Obesity ... after three months exposure to power-line frequencies, the thyroid glands of rats showed visible signs of deterioration.

[ More at http://tinyurl.com/2nfujj ]

Andrew Goldsworthy BSc, PhD
"Andrew Goldsworthy is an Honorary Lecturer in Biology at Imperial College London. He retired from full time teaching in 2004 but still gives occasional lectures there in specialist subjects such as food irradiation and the (exorbitant) energy cost of modern food production.

[http://www.radiationresearch.org/pdfs/cv/andrew_goldsworthy.pdf]

Another thing to consider with people who lack social skills, is that it could be the lack of social skills that leads them to focus on, say, science, as a compensation or a way to pass the time, rather, than their concentration on science leading to underdeveloped social skills. I'm not saying that's the way it is, just that when seeing a correlation, to be careful about which is the cart and which is the horse.

As a scientist and a person who has worked, for years, around incredibly gifted and incredibly successful people, my observation is that there are two flavors of gifted scientist; one that lacks social skills and one that does not. It has been my experience that the most gifted scientists often lack social skills. Some are assholes, some are recluses, and some are just weird. But they all approach research as a solitary activity for them to focus on--often on a borderline nocturnal schedule--to the exclusion of normal human interaction. Tragically, many of these people fight a constant uphill battle in their careers (particularly the weird recluses) despite publishing creative and insightful Science. The second flavor are, in my opinion, not quite as gifted as the first, but have the social skills to network, land good academic positions, and--most importantly--find funding. They produce a larger volume of publications and do excellent research, but generally focusing on open questions, staying more in the main stream of thought in a particular topic. They also inhabit ivy league departments, make it into panels and boards, win awards, and are generally recognized as incredibly successful. Meanwhile the socially inept scientists pushing boundaries and posing new questions bifurcate between moderate success and winning a Nobel Prize. I think Dan Shechtman is an example of the latter. He also is illustrative of the difference between a crazy person on the fringes of science who is marginalized by consensus thought and a ground-breaking, tenacious scientist--i.e., a Noble Prize.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying. - Woody Allen

I have to say that I agree with this sentiment. I'd much rather be me living now, than The Buddha himself, as I still get to breathe, etc.

The Woody Allens who donñt want to die, and many other billionaires in a similar situation.

How much worty their millions (or billions) have for them, when they die?

Why they dont invest more heavily in PROVEN research?

What could be more proving that financing in a more heavy way to guys like these? http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2009/

More and better assistants, better equipments, maids, chauffeurs, cooks, vacations (to recharge batteries) whatever is needed to keep people like these FOCUSED on research and at the top of their productivity and creativity?

Even if it's not 100% sure the billionaires are going to be saved, at least it's better than accepting death without doing anything, isn't it? And they're paving the road for their children and grandchildren at least (perhaps if frozen, their immortal children and grandchildren could try to bring them back, as a way to say thanks.

Al Gore won one for giving a powerpoint about Global Warming... the hundred plus scientists who have dedicated their lives to collecting, analyzing, and releasing the data haven't gotten anything.

Your talking about the 'peace prize' which is has always been contraversial, even more so when people don't bother to check the facts. Gore was jointly awarded the peace prize along with the thousands of scientists who have also DONATED their time to the IPCC reports over the last couple of decades. Gore is not a member of the IPCC but his 'slide show' put AGW into the venacular of the US public, so much so that many Americans still think it didn't exists before Gore started banging on about it in movie theaters,

Gore, Thatcher, and Reagan were among the first political leaders who paid any attention to AGW, Reagan was probably influenced by Thatcher who was orginally trained in Chemistry at Oxford, he personally spearheaded the push for the very successfull international 'cap and trade' treaty on sulphur emmissions that effectively stopped the acid rain problem in it's tracks. Gore always has, and always will be more of a nerd than a politician, but to middle America sucking on a steady diet of Murdoch's propoganda he is just another has-been politician trying to make a buck.

Second.. it's a bit early to congratulate them... they've published a paper, not cured a patient.

If they were to win a Nobel prize for this it would be for the discovery in their paper that has stumped others for decades, not for 'curing cancer'.

Any relation to Neils and Aagie? No wonder Intel's headed for the atomic realm.

Any relation to Neils and Aagie? No wonder Intel's headed for the atomic realm.

1. Then maybe they should plant some trees?? The problem is not as much deforestation as stupidity. And yes, I do mean stupidity.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-bio.html

Here's is someone that actually tries to reverse this stupidity of burning everything down and then bitching that there are no trees around. Heck, there are still people that believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans cannot plant trees. That it is only "god" that can make trees grow.

2. There is a known solution to indoor fires. That solution is known as a chimney.

Solar stoves are great. But realistically, they are only useful at or near noon hours.

If you want to cook overnight, plant some trees. Not only will they provide you with wood, but they will provide you with *food* and shade. And if you plant enough, they will even change your local climate. Trees, and especially fruit trees, are the most important economic improvement poor people can make in their lives.

Bait and switch. Your original argument against him winning the prize was "nobody has ever heard of him", which now miraculously transformed to "I don't read foreign litterature, and influencing nationalism should not be a Nobel Prize winning move". Not only is you personal choice of languages highly irrelevant to the Swedish Academy (as it should be), but it his nationalistic tendencies is not the reason he won the prize. He won "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country".

On top of this, Tolkien never had the prize in his grasp. He was nominated, yes, by someone outside the Academy. It appears they never really seriously considered giving the prize to him.

Of course, it was ~30 years later after Shechtman had been ridiculed for his 'quasicrystal' discovery.

So even if 99.9% of the time, the 'odd, irregular result' is worthless ... there's also the chance that it's revolutionary, and we want to make sure that those get preserved. It might be that 5 people have similar 'odd, irregular' results, but they can then compare notes amongst themselves and figure out what might be the significant factor and make it reproducable.

You are obviously not much of a Star Trek fan nor have a good grip on what it takes to run a country and defend yourself. Capt Kirk spent much of his career circumnavigating the prime directive, but, more importantly, the Federation, and it's military arm, Star Fleet, didn't go about opening their doors or even leaving them unlocked so that a third world with hostile intent could steal the crown jewels. The US does not generally go around "squelching" scientific advancement unless it is expressly for the development of weapons of mass destruction by countries who outwardly support terrorist regimes and whose expressed goal is the destruction of the US. Even Alfred Nobel http://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/biographical/articles/life-work/index.html would agree with me that stopping the spread of some weapons is a good thing. (I apologize in advance for my poor formatting, first time poster)

No, this is a different research group experimenting with some of the same stuff another research group tossed an article out about a few years back. That other group is known for doing weird Friday afternoon studies that have caught the attention of the fun scientists and boring scientists alike.

Actually, a liberal arts education is a good preparation for doing practical things.

Look at the biographies of the Nobel laureates in medicine or chemistry. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/ A lot of them were liberal arts majors, before they switched to science. For example, Eric Kandel. The old European scientists knew the value of a broad education. When things weren't going according to the textbook, they knew how to think it out.

They knew how to think.

(BTW, Steve Jobs took a course in calligraphy during his dropout days, and it turned out to be damn useful in designing the first Macintosh. That's why he put all those typefaces in.)

I see a lot of talk about technical solutions, not using free email, et cetera. If you think things through, you will see that none of that matters at all. Firstly, it's a safe bet that someone in the US Government not hampered by even the pretense of following the law already had all Jacob's official correspondence, encrypted or not. As I've posted multiple times already (see my previous posts), AUSCANNZUKUS has had access to a production quantum computer system capable of cracking PKI for many years, running as a virtual quantum machine on a winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network based on a physical system composed of non-abelian anyons (e.g. solitons) in a two-dimensional electron gas (e.g. in a HEMT, now present in most computers). For insight into this little-known factoid, digest this published research. Presumably, someone tipped off DOJ that there was something in Jacob's correspondence worth looking at. For those of you not yet willing to believe that PKI was cracked long ago, it's also rather trivial to inject a key logger onto most anyone's system, which is just as good as cracking PKI and ALSO defeats synchronous shared-secret cryptography. Personally, I'm disinclined to believe in such things, but I saw indirect evidence of it and figured out (after years of monomaniacal research) exactly what it must be and how it must work. Email me for details, or wait for the book.

Second, to the silly posters who wish to teach Jacob security fundamentals, you should be aware that he MAINTAINS THE TOR PROJECT, and is a member of the cDc. He certainly knows more than you or I about security fundamentals, and I've been a CISSP for years, wrote banking software, and was a security lead for Symantec. Do you really think that the MAINTAINER OF THE TOR PROJECT does not know how to become anonymous online? Hacktivismo is a spin-off of the cDc, and Wikileaks is a Hacktivismo project. That detail still has not been in the media, as far as I can tell, but it is obvious to anyone who looks into the topic, and is certainly known to three-letter agencies. Just google for "disruptive compliance" and their mission statement floats right to the top (this is a Google hack, from the people who wrote Goolag). Consider Wikileaks, and then answer this question posed by that document in 2003 (the year the Wikileaks project began), "But what disruptively compliant, hacktivist applications shall we write?"

Third, in case this hasn't been pointed out before, Wikileaks did not break any laws. If they had, you can bet the US DOJ would have ALREADY charged someone with something, rather than trumping up a sex offense at just the right time. FYI, the Swedish attorney who charged Julian Assange with a sex offense is the SAME Swedish attorney who represented the CIA for the Extraordinary Rendition trials, which makes him a CIA asset by definition. What Jacob Applebaum did was travel to Iceland and meet with other Wikileaks people for a few weeks. It's safe to say there was online correspondence, too. It's also safe to say, unless someone was downright stupid, that any truly sensitive communication was done anonymously. The ENTIRE POINT of Wikileaks was to set up the document submission policy to keep submitters anonymous, to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pressure the Wikileaks journalists into revealing sources (as governments have done to so many journalists recently). You can't tell what you don't know! If a source (e.g. Private Manning) is foolish enough to REVEAL THEMSELF then they are going to get in trouble. Even then, one can make a VERY STRONG argument that the documents he leaked (assuming he did it) reveal WAR CRIMES, in which case he was morally AND LEGALLY required to leak them, given that the usual chain of command was CLEARLY n

Sorry, Coren22, for my somewhat general link; it does take a bit of clicking around.

Amounts are here. For 2011, the full Prize amount is 10.000.000,00 SEK (Swedish Kronor); this amounts (hahah, pun intended) to Eur 1.246.401,02 or USD 1.541.050,22. I'm sure a small mansion is a possibility.

Other facts, such as the age of winners over the years, are here.

Sorry, Coren22, for my somewhat general link; it does take a bit of clicking around.

Amounts are here. For 2011, the full Prize amount is 10.000.000,00 SEK (Swedish Kronor); this amounts (hahah, pun intended) to Eur 1.246.401,02 or USD 1.541.050,22. I'm sure a small mansion is a possibility.

Other facts, such as the age of winners over the years, are here.

I get that this is the Nobel prize - but these people appear to have already accomplished something. Indeed, the noteworthy achievement for which they are receiving the prize is over a decade in the past. I thought the Nobel prize was awarded to encourage responsible action?

As noted, this is the Nobel Prize in Physics, which is to be awarded to "the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics"

Look at the photo at the linked article - three white males.

OK, fine. Yeah, the physics prize has mostly gone to white males, but there's C. V. Raman (if "Indian" counts as "non-white"), Hideki Yukawa, Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen Ning Yang, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Leo Esaki, Samuel C. C. Ting, Abdus Salam (if "Pakistani" counts as "non-white"), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (see previous comments), Steven Chu, Daniel C. Tsui, Masatoshi Koshiba, Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa, Yoichiro Nambu, and Charles K. Kao. Oh, yeah, and Marie Skodowska Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

By the way, what the hell is up with "dividing" a Nobel prize like it's some sort of peach pie? Half for one white male, while the other two share the other half?

Not all "most important [discoveries] or [inventions] within the field of physics" - or any of the other fields for which there are Nobel prizes - can be uniquely credited to one individual. (And sometimes it's split between Asians, or between an Asian and a white guy, or.... :-))

Who comes up with this stuff?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Hint: you may think that as a random geek with a /. account and an opinion, you're smarter than they all are. That is not necessarily the case. HTH.)

"The superluminous speed obtained with a laser (acting upon rubies in series previously charged) has demolished the Einsteinian myth of the maximum speed (300.000 Km/sec) reaching up to 2,700.000Km/sec, that is, exceeding the "limit" nine times. These experiences were accomplished in 1967 in the laboratory of quantum radiophysics, the Lebedev Institute of Physics of the Academy of Science of the USSR by N. Basov (Lenin and Nobel Prizes), I. Zubarev, V. Efinkov and A. Grasik. This 'jump in octave' of the speed of l. will surely revolutionise the concepts of today's Physics." http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1964/basov-bio.html

It's an amazingly useful protein for scientific research... Because of its research utility it's become a ubiquitous tool for molecular and cell biology. Indeed, in October of 2008 Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their brilliant contributions to our modern scientific use of GFP, with The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences calling GFP a "guiding star" and likening its research development to the invention of the microscope.

Scientist code is usually a giant JUST-SO story, sufficient to derive the results they need for the task at hand.
They either don't have, or avoid putting in data that will crash the program so limit checking is not necessary.
Crashes are fine if they do nothing more than leave a trail of breadcrumbs sufficient to find the offending line of code.

Funny — this could as easily describe how physicists often write mathematics.

In this paper (the paper itself is here), Feynman notes that

The mathematics is not completely satisfactory. No attempt has been made to maintain mathematical rigor. The excuse is not that it is expected that rigorous demonstrations can be easily supplied. Quite the contrary, it is believed that to put the present methods on a rigorous basis may be quite a difficult task, beyond the abilities of the author.

Feynman's "exoskeleton" nevertheless led him to some reasonably well-respected work in quantum electrodynamics. But my point is simply that the problem isn't with "scientists," it's with intelligent people confusing 'ability, in principle to understand X' with 'actually understanding X in practice' —a fallacy that is very common in IT, and one Feynman quite consciously worked to avoid. Life is short, "all one surveys," quite long. Besides, it cuts both ways: it's not at all clear that developers who don't understand the underlying science would do a better job with scrupulous documentation, because even if they bothered to RTFM, they wouldn't have the necessary background to understand it. The net result might be a loss stemming from a "false sense of comprehension."

Finally, it is not unusual for engineers to "understand how hard it [will be] to turn [a given] exoskeleton into [the required] self-sufficient robot" only in retrospect, thus it seems quite silly to expect anyone else to understand this at the outset —here I did not say "believe one understands."

For "turning an exoskeleton into a robot," write "double-entry bookkeeping," "plumbing," "formal mathematical proof," "horseback archery," or "dating," and nothing much changes— it's hard to have a good working knowledge of something one has no experience doing.

And I'll wager that, even though there are 85,000 unemployed engineers, there are probably a tens of thousands of open engineering positions searching for someone to hire. Even during boom times, the unemployment rate across all industries never even gets close to zero: a few percent is the best you'll get. Consider it a residual inefficiency of the labor market. This year's Nobel in economics was granted for this very subject: why can't the market do a better job of matching the unemployed with open positions? It is not unusual for someone to spend 5% of their professional careers unemployed if, for example, they across the country so a spouse can follow their career, or they switch careers entirely.

On the Nobel site they have the following to say:

The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 was awarded to Barack H. Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/

Yeah, it's difficult to come away without feeling that he won it for not being Bush. It'd be a different story if they'd awarded it on completion of a successful term in office. He has some pretty notable achievements prior to becoming president, but the above quoted rationale is so hopelessly vague that it does appear to be a bodge.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2007/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1991/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1973/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1964/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1956/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1909/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1905/