Slashdot Mirror
USAF Studies Teleportation
ArchAngel21x writes "Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation.
But scientists aren't so thrilled. The Air Force Research Lab's August 'Teleportation Physics Report', posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending."
Initially I thought this may have some relevance to encryption as there is a phenomenon of quantum teleportation that appears to have some scientific validity and would have significance in military and strategic planning and communication. However, when I actually started reading the article, at first I could not stop laughing until I reached this part:
.pdf :An experimental program similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program should be funded at $900,000 - 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration.
From the linked
What!!!!!???? I am thunderstruck that this recommendation could be made. 1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon. By the way, the CIA's program was ill conceived and full of it back then too amounting to a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
Other conclusions in the document are: "We will need a physics theory of consciousness and psychotronics, along with more experimental data, in order to test the hypothesis in Section 5.1.1 and discover the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter." What can I say? The status of basic science education among those who make funding decisions within certain areas of government are pitiful.
Even worse is this statement: "This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts! " which has got to be the work of someone with a marketing background and absolutely no self respect in the scientific community. A document like this would be laughed out of the NIH or any other respectable scientific funding agency, but the scary thing is funding like this has always been able to go forward under the guise of military funding in crisis situations where fear abounds. Combine that with no understanding of science and this is what you get. If any of my students came up with something like this, I think I would cry.
Hey, if the Air Force wants out of the box thinkers, I can come up with all sorts of biomemetic and bioencryption stuff for 1.5 Million that would be based in scientific fact with reliable peer review science behind it.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Maybe someone psychically teleported the article away?
on more effective kill ordinance.
Heh. I guess that's like during the good old Cold War. If you just got some sort of an idea of how to beat the enemy, you've got a blank check.
The owls are not what they seem
... in the military budget to criticize.
They will no longer have to by troop transport planes!
hehe, gypsies are the new secret weapon of the united states miltary
In a country in which a substantially larger portion of the population believes in the Virgin Birth than in evolution through natural selection, and which has just this week demonstrated that majority, why should anyone be surprised?
While highly implausible, the whole idea of science is to discover things that one wouldn't expect. If soundly gathered evidence suggests psychic powers or teleportation is real, then we should investigate it. If the facts fit, then no matter how much someone might not desire to accept an explanation (whether it be for or against any phenomena), it is most likely the truth.
I'd say this is a fast one they are trying to pull to funnel the money to some black project....hell it could just be for the AF general staff coffee and doughnut fund!
1. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
classically, the random slashdot quote at the bottom of this article was "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
Dan Tedrick
Osama said he wanted to bankrupt the US.
-
It's probably money procured for something they don't want to tell us they are using it for.
With the current, rather theocratic US administration, I'm surprised they don't try training field medics in faith healing...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If someone gave me money to study "psychic teleportation", I'd be like "Thank you, Allah!" and immediately begin researching liquor and hookers.
"Guys, you're not gonna believe this! Last night, I as at this strip club, I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was face down in the gutter a few blocks away!"
[o]_O
Stephen King wrote a nice short story about teleportation called The Jaunt. I'm not much of a King fan, but the story is very good. In The Jaunt people can teleport between different locations, but they have to be put to sleep first, otherwise something very bad happens. Most of the story is from the perspective of a father telling his family, all of whom are about to go "Jaunting", about the history of how it was invented and its side effects. Very interesting read.
...And just when I clicked on the "Read More..." link, the QOTD at the bottom said: "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd. "
someone transport me some mod points...
Just pay me a few million, and I'll do whatever research into fantasy physics that they want. I'll even throw in a few Powerpoint presentations for good measure.
If the choice is between spending billions on reserching quackery in the military, or spending the same money on bringing US education up to decent levels, I think the education would be money better spent. We might even end up with politicians who know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland.
But if they're determined to throw money away on absurdity, then the least they can do is throw some of it in my direction. I think I could find better uses for it than anyone the USAF could hire from the Psychic Hotline.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not to be outdone, someone else decided to approve a Star Trek Project. What next - someone's going to try to build Hal 9000 to decide who is placed on the do-not fly list?
Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation [...]
Please, this is an insult to Star Trek fans everywhere. The Star Trek vision, if anything, was about using science and technology to enhance people's lives. It was and is in no way about this pseudo-scientific nonsense. (BTW, "pseudo" in this context means "false, but masquerading as", NOT, "kinda" or "quasi".)
If anything, Star Trek fans would (and should) be appalled by this.
End of rant.
This is just the cover story. The money is really being funneled into the Stargate program.
What proof do I have? Just look at Sam Cassel.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
If the military dosent put money into this kinds of stuff then who will. Its never wasteful to attempt the almost impossible.
Maj. Ed Dames' astral body may come kick you in the nuts.
This is cool. Who cares about the budget that much anyways? It'll all go back to the people (some of us) anyways... maybe we'll learn something
This is probably just a cover justification. They are most likely using the money to study supersecret airplanes and such and needed a cover story. They just let the USAF spin doctors at it just to have some fun.
And we're in a deficit? Go figure...
The Air Force did NOT pay to study this. They commissioned a study and one of the recommendations was this, and they have already stated it will not be funded. Hurray for illiteracy!
Has to be a joke. Read the PDF. The name of the sub-contractor is "Warp Drive" and the end of the document contains discussions of "negative energy" and all kinds of totally bogus junk that looks like it was culled from a Star Trek script.
Seriously, this is some fan-boy trying to rile up the millitary conspiracy theorists (and apparently doing quite well).
Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
... because the more money the US military wastes on this kind of mumbo-jumbo, the safer the rest of the world will be. I'd far rather they have remote viewing specialists, psychic teleporters and experts in yogic flying than even more guns and bombs.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This research could cost a lot less if they just did some searches on dudes in comas after car wrecks who wake up and save nurses' children from burning houses, only to learn their ex married someone else and feigned the bastard child off as the new guy's:
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/thedeadzone/
Johnny Smith could really help save some money here.
IronChefMorimoto
No, I am not suggesting some kind of bizarre conspiracy, just some 'front project' to cover up something that may involve new laser assault/defense systems, sonic weaponry, or new methods of fighter control mechanisms or something that might be really cool, really plausible or equally 'cool' yet disturbingly vile that they would rather not explain to the American public or Congress.
So, seeing that most of the nation, albiet only by a small fraction in the larger scheme of things, would fall for such crap, they decided to trot out that story. One, to be able to push it past such science-blind people as the majority of this nation and secondly to thumb their noses at the rest of us that would know and understand such a thing is bollox, yet are unfortunately unable to do anything significant about it...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
random quote on the bottom of the screen is "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
...the earth being round, gravity, flying, going to the moon, going to mars (hopefully soon) and other things where considered 'crackpot' ideas. while psychic teleportation appears extremely unlikley, it could happen. in my humble opinion science has barely scratched the surface. why rule anything out?
always mosh clockwise
the pattern buffers? we all know what happens when they get screwed with, a la evil William Shatner *shivers*
I'm waiting for Bush's faith based defense system. They can hire a few dozen religious leaders to pray the missile defense system works. If it hits something then it can formally be considered a miracle.
Maybe praying can make the deficit go away? Electing Republican Presidents sure isn't working.
Although I'm all for investigative science, and although I'm willing to concede that we don't know everything, when I see how much money they're spending on this I have to suspect somebody's pulling somebody else's chain here. What is sad to me, however, is that if this sum of money was spent on the poor and the needy there would be an outcry about entitlements. There just isn't any balance out there. :/
Fun with Inkwell | www.coo
"While highly implausible, the whole idea of science is to discover things that one wouldn't expect. If soundly gathered evidence suggests psychic powers or teleportation is real, then we should investigate it. If the facts fit, then no matter how much someone might not desire to accept an explanation (whether it be for or against any phenomena), it is most likely the truth."
We're still having trouble dealing with UFO's. What makes you think we're going to handle psychic phenomenon any better?
/HarryPotter/
U muggles just love to waste money.
/HarryPotter_End/
The entire program is less than the price of an airplane, and about the price of a couple of smart bombs.
Despite all their reports that UFO's do not exist, the report lists references to UFO encounters as partial justification for this research. "There are also a small number of credible reports of individuals who reported being teleported to/from UFOs during a UFO close encounter, which were scientifically investigated (Vallee, 1988, 1990, 1997)." I think the key line, though, is the line above that one: "Most claimed instances of human teleportation of the body from one place to another have been unwitnessed." Gee, I wonder why?
http://glacierdragon.smugmug.com - Check out my photos. No need to buy, even though I do need the money!
I think some of the justification behind this research may be based on the fact that some researchers are starting to believe the brain is a quantum device. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
Quantum theory (at least mathematically) does allow for teleportation, and so capabilities such as "remote viewing" and so forth *might* be there. But who knows.
The fortune cookie at the bottom of this page read(s): "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd." How apt.
From the Air Force's point of view, this is probably not as crazy as it sounds to those of us with half a brain. I can imagine some general thinking that if there's even the slightest chance of psychic teleportation being real, $50,000 isn't much to pay for a report looking into it. The same goes for things like anti-gravity. These guys probably figure that what would be a waste would be dismissing it out of hand, especially if their enemies might look into it and get the upper hand.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Given the choice, 8 million that MIGHT have a radical payoff is a bargain. Billions spent on a specific application of physics is pointless. Even if the system works, the only application for a missile defense system is knocking out high-speed projectiles.
It won't help with knocking out asteroids (too much kinetic energy involved) nor will it help defend against more mondane forms of attack.
Considering that the Pentagon spend $600 million on air travel, this is cake, Cake.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
That is to say, there is not such thing as a "spirit realm" or "magic" or any way of controling the universe without a clear cause and effect. This is a compleatly logical assumption to make. If you don't make it, science becomes a guess work filled with "maybes." It is nessiary for the scientific method.
It is not nessisarly true. For all practical purposes it seems to be true. However, ask anyone who belives in a god, or who practices magik, and they will tell you it is falce.
You can not say a study is worthless based on an axiom. For instance, I give that all Jews are gready, therefore all people trying to deny anti-seminism are wasting time, because it's true. Likewise, I give that magical mater interactions are inpossible, therefore all people studying them are wasting time, because they don't exist.
Anyway, it probibly is a waste of time; people just need a valid argument for it being a waste. :-o
...as the 23 billion they spent on a crop circle-based anti-ballistic missile system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_SG-1
I have been patiently waiting for this technology to be developed so that I will finally have a chance to contact my home planet.
I will also be able to contact my planet's rental spaceship company to tell them where to pick up their stupid craft. Next time I go with a reputable rental agency.
I think the gov't needs to have these types of programs periodically to keep all the crackpots out there focused on something... instead of becoming a danger to the rest of society. I would rather have some psychopath sitting in the middle of his living room practicing psychic teleportation than practicing shooting out of the trunk of a car.
Has anybody ever listend to Art Bell? There are some SERIOUSLY delusional people out there.
Or to yank Haliburton execs out of Iraq in just the nick of time....
.sig
"There seems to have been an exponential growth in technology. Where did it all come from?"
Short answer: Science (along with) technology follows an exponential curve. That whole "Building upon the Shoulders of Giants" is a hint of how. You discover thing. Others discover thing. That leads to more discoveries, by a larger group of people. Get the point? You don't need UFO's or other absurd explanations.
Look, the military isn't crazy. Programs like these are used to find spies within the classified programs. There are certain scientists the military thinks are spies, so they put them into these crazy projects and watch them. If Russian intell all of a sudden starts getting word of the USAF doing psychic programs, then the US military knows they have a real spy.
Step 1. Use PSYCHIC spam in written pdf documents to confuse the executive with buzzwords and mixed up terms.
Step 2. Use taxpayers' money to demonstrate the effect.
Step 3: Now you see it, now you don't. IT WORKS!!!!
Isn't that why the Philidelphia Experiment happened? :|
The road to Abu Ghraib
I should declare my own bais here. I think the USA is finished; the only question is how much damage it will cause the rest of the world in it's death throes in the next few decades.
Don't believe me? OK, just keep an eye on the US dollar vs Euro. The invisible hand is voting...
--
Underneath the blue skies
Beautiful empty dying dolls...
Uh, when it comes to defense spending, 1.5 mil is nothing. . .
Can you picture how ridiculous studying Nuclear Fission would have seemed before WWII. Let me see, you want to spend a pile of money to bang two superdense rocks together to make them explode? NEXT!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Psychic Teleportation? How about physically teleporting some modern flak jackets to Iraq. I hear we have people in danger there without them.
Maybe you can push a string after all.
But only if it's a really tiny string and there's enough grant money.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Please, please, PLEASE, warn us that links go to PDFs!
Yeah, we could be together, and hold hands, and you would be my girlfriend, and... did I just say that out loud?
The only problem is that the random hot girl would probably just smack you back to reality, producing a failure rate of 100%.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Did this story remind anyone of the actions of the SS in Return to Castle Wolfenstein? Research into the paranormal to create super soldiers? They've probably already started the genetic mods behind closed doors; maybe they are making this public to imply that they aren't working in secret over there.
or a $1.5 million stapler. You pick.
"Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet."
DAMN! There goes Slashdot.
Well boss. I concentrated really really really hard today. Still not dematerializing. Although I felt a little extra light headed this time. Gimme another million bucks, mabye I'll figure it out tomorrow.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
remember, we have funded 'remote viewing' before. and when all the budgetting came back.... it was just a cover for radar technology and a nice laughable front that will make the soviets laugh and think us quaint while a bit of the budget goes to something real behind the scenes.
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
I'm quite frankly tired of the hypocrisy I see on ./. On the one hand you accuse the christian right of being bigoted or closed minded while in the same breath demonstrate how close minded and bigoted you are.
Want to see who you are complaining about? Look in the mirror.
Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery, not a religion like some of you make it out to be.
Is aids research a waste of money because no cure has been found yet? Are all studies that reach a dead end a waste of money or do they provide us with valuable insight?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
"If soundly gathered evidence suggests psychic powers or teleportation is real, then we should investigate it."
Sooo... That evidence is just going to come from thin air, or might they gave to -gasp!- fund research into such a project to see if it can be something useful? I'd say there has been enough unexplained phenomonom to warrent some sort of further research, and that research is going to cost money. Speciallized scientific equipment and scientific specialist don't exactly work for free you know. Detailed, scientific investigation amazingly enough costs money. Unless you're working for the SciFi channel and your scientists are plumbers by day. For any normal research, a million ain't that much given logistics, personnel equipment and other considerations.
I see where you're going and I'm not even saying your right or wrong, just the way you're there is horribly, horribly flawed.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
With all these new patent laws, I'm surprised no one has the patent for teleportation. Everything else that absolutely everyone has had an idea of/about is being patented now, why not teleportation or phase changing solid matter.
--
All this and more through Gene Splicing, Roddenberry or otherwise
Video Production Support
I don't know what the rest of you, but for me, the quote at the bottom of the page says "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
Hm...
[o]_O
It seems very appropriate, perhaps spooky, that the 'fortune' quote at the bottom of the slashdot page is: "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
...part of the scientific process is to explore a theory and try to accept it as fact or debunk it as false.
...get pissed when they use it to spy on you!
Studying this sort of stuff with a legit process isn't a bad thing. People will be laughing at our "science" 100 years from now, so don't get yer panties in a wad about curiosity and exploration of the unknown.
This kinda reminds me of the Time Machine scene in Napoleon Dynamite...he he
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
This is great! Now I have a document discussing how the technocracy handles teleportation! I have an official document of scientific mumbo-jumbo that describes techno-magic!
Thanks, USAF! You're making storytellers' lives better everywhere. More tax dollars for RPGs!
--LWM
Didn't people learn anything from Quake?
Read the Fine Yahoo Article:
"The views expressed in the report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Air Force, the Department of Defense (news - web sites) or the U.S. Government," says an Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) statement sent to USA TODAY. "There are no plans by the AFRL Propulsion Directorate for additional funding on this contract."
Maybe he meant Star Trek the Next Generation, you know the series where a couple of hours in paranormal training by native Americans allows Commander Riker to do weird shit like stopping time that 500 years of space age science hasn't achieved.
Google for Sam Cassel and u get the following website. This
The Army doesn't have enough flak vests or armor for the troops in Iraq but the Air Force has 7.5 million to sink into psychic teleportation research. Sure, I can see that. Just imagine being somewhere else when the roadside bomb goes off.
So, this is what it's like being the minority party. You know, it's not all bad. You get to sit back and throw rocks non-stop without accepting any of the responsibility. You can criticize every little mistake with a clear conscience. I like it! If you want unity, go fuck yourself. Ha! I'm going to enjoy this four years.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Aircraft that radar can't see? Impossible!!
Results from this research could potentialy show that the Q-Ray bracelet actually relieves backpain... so, it's not a total waste.
(Or maybe the idea simply hasn't gotten by peer-reviewed publications?)
(Sure... Isn't that what they all say?)
I guess it might be worthwhile in a very preliminary report to give all of the options equal consideration, but to suggest that they all deserve funding for further research makes the study kind of pointless. I wonder if they people who commissioned this report can actually take it seriously?
From what I heard on the Star Trek shows, it always seemed to me that the process was analog, not digital, and not duplicatable.
This gets you around that nasty #5, especially if the only known process of *creating* those analog signals that can be reconstructed involves the destruction of the molecules in the first place. That's what I always inferred from the occasional danger of sending things this way: lose the beam in the middle of transfer, and you've lost the person. Or at least a significant part of them.
Analog makes sense because it carries a near-infinite amount of information, to a point where you can't capture the data by sampling. Also, capture attempts of some aspects may disrupt the other aspects. The reconstruction process may well be different from the data-capture process. The reconstruction process could be yet another field-interaction effect, which doesn't generally serve to record data, for example.
Much of this I've made up as I went along, but I think for an explanation of a fictional device, it works well enough.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
back during the Cold War, there were a lot of Soviet programs in this sort of thing, and other pseudo-science fields.
you can find a lot by yahoo searching for Scalar Weapons which is a system suposedly developed in the 60s and 50s which the USSR can use to control the weather, and used to shoot down the Challenger space shuttle.
remote viewing in the CIA is something that's on the Discovery channel on cable all the time -- also shows about crop circles, UFOS, and "psychic profilers" solving murder mysteries
similar quackery was investigated by the Nazi scientists who were deeply into the occult and other "black arts" including the flat earth society and the hollow earthers (how do you reconcile those two groups? flat and hollow??)
In fact, a squad of Nazi troops took a super large cannon/gun out to an island in the middle of the ocean and tried shooting STRAIGHT UP trying to shoot across the "hollow earth" center to rain shells down on London. It didn't work.
I just hope they move their teleportation research to Mars under the understanding that there won't be a reinforcements fleet coming if anything goes wrong!
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
...and spend money on psy projects,
then why can't the USA get standardized, reliable, auditable voting procedures & infrastructure?
If telekinesis, ESP, etc. were biologically possible, it would have been evolved by some creatures already. Imagine the incredible advantage a predator would have if it could read the mind of the prey and know that the prey was hiding behind a tree or that the prey was about to jog to the right or left. Or what if a predator (or prey) could telekinetically cause a stick to trip its opponent. Yet, no animal (or plant) seems to have such powers.
It is unlikely that humanity is unique in have some never-before evolved power. The more scientists study animals, the more they find that humans are not qualitatively different from other creatures, only quantitatively different. Other creatures can count, create tools, have emotions, participate in social structures, practice deception, be aware of what others might think or do, etc. We exhibit these properties to a greater degree than do animals, but we are not unique. (In fact if humans did have psychic power, they would have little need for social systems, tools, etc. because psychic power would let them snare prey/beings with lesser powers.)
Finally, we find no "physical" basis for psychic power. The four forces of gravity, eletromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force do not provide a basis for psychic power. It is unlikely that some magic biologically created material could manifest and manipulate some unknown fifth force without either biologists, chemists, or physicists becoming aware of it..
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
How can any sane person call this a waste imagine an army that does not have to penetrate defense or break lines, but simply appears in the ememies capital building an wipes out all their officals. No more messy battle field campains. Someone Clearly out numbered? easy just beam the enitre division off the field to some safe location, or better yet right behind the enimes back.
Oh wait this is reality you say? shoot so much for all my big plans then,.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The report cost $25,000 and recommended $7.5 million, but I see no evidence the Air Force authorized spending the $7.5 million.
I guess you could argue that it's worth spending $25,000 to have a report on the subject on file, just so it's out there for reference. If only so you know it's something you don't want to spend any more money on. It's a little silly, but it's not insanely ridiculous or anything.
As long as they don't actually fund the $7.5 million, that is.
Even Timothy would have shaken his head in despair and clicked on the 'reject' button.
Slashdot will not have any relevance or respect until it starts kicking the clowns out of its so-called editorial department.
Nope, they wouldn't need to do this. A lot of things that the military and CIA and FBI spend money on aren't on the public budget. Sometimes, even congresscritters can't get a hold of it. The way it works is the military asks for a ton of money for research and development on projects. They don't even explain what they project is, except to say that it is in the interests of national security, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Congress and the president are willing to set aside a few percent of the total military budget for this kind of research. Sure, it may not have great oversight at the time, but eventually they have to publicize what they did with the money.
This is probably just one of those instances.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
In the report, author Eric Davis says psychic teleportation, moving yourself from location to location through mind powers, is "quite real and can be controlled."
Yeah. It's called 'walking.' Or am I looking at it totally wrong?
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
Might be a clever hoax. Uri Geller (mentioned on page 56) has already been debunked by James Randi
If for real, should be great fodder for CSICOP (Commitee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) which once boasted Carl Sagan, etc.
But the way they press all the 'psychic' buttons suggests an elaborate hoax.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Did anyone else catch the location of the study? Las Vegas, Edwards AFB? Just next door to supersecret Area 51. I'm not exactly a tin-foil hat guy, but I think that's a bit interesting... Definitely some odd stuff going on out there.
Will they also tell you anything about spelling, or literacy?
/., but pretty embarassing all the same. Ever think about getting some education? Or at least a spellchecker? Kudos on "axiom" and "deterministic", I guess, but maybe you want to start on "completely"?
It never fails to amaze me how people who read all day fail to pick up basic english skills. I guess if you're just the doorman at the symphony, you don't automatically get a better ear for music. It's probably your fault if you don't, though.
You averaged 2.4 misspellings per paragraph. Not a record on
Your listing, sir:
redundent = redundant
controling = controlling
compleatly = completely (which you took the time to bold)
nessiary = necissary
nessisarly = necissarily
belives = believes
falce = false
gready = greedy
anti-seminism = anti-semitism
mater = matter
inpossible = impossible
probibly = probably
If only they could teleport some brains into Dubya's head ....
From an article I once read:
The power consumption of the human brain is around 20 watts, while the power consumption of the human body is 100 watts. As there are 100 billion neurons in the brain, power consumption for a single neuron is around 0.5 - 4 nanoWatts. Compare this to the peak power output of a mobile phone, which is around 1-2 watts.
It's already possible to detect a heartbeat remotely using a electric sensor sensitive enough to detect a heartbeat from 1 metre away.
If this can work with the electric field contained within the heart, then perhaps it is also possible to detect the electric field caused by the neurons of the visual system, although you'd need some really complex signal processing.
Interestingly, most of the cases of "remote viewing" claimed by people close to death, always involve having the brain being cooled down to hypothermia levels. Perhaps this reduces the "thermal noise" and sensory noise in the brain.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The fact that this research will prove or disprove this phenomenon is scientific progress if of itself. It may be bogus at first glance. But what IF they do find something. Such a notion would be both anoying to our current thinking of the universe and how it works. But, it also allows for the possibilities of much grander research projectst that would yield yet more data.
Life is not for the lazy.
Well, considering that most military spending is destined to end up in some rather nasty technologies, I welcome that they throw away their money into a dead end path.
Somebody once pointed out the date the militaries took charge of ARPA, as the turning point of U.S. technological leadership in the world. News like this seem to confirm this theory.
My other OS is the MCP!
This is what happens when you have a president that believe that god talks to him.
you get a guy who believes in the supernatural, psychic phenomena, evil spirits, demons, gods, heaven and hell.
All of this is fine if you believe, I have no quarrel, but you run a government without the aid and guidance of religion.
Your arguments are very convincing.
It must be the liberal (*grin*) use of capitalization and the excessive exclamation marks following evil and bitch.
Changing the 'of' to 'a' was also a good move. In fact the whole random and unnecessary first line is great.
I don't know how anyone could fail to take you seriously.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
--Chag
I will give you credit for saying "please" in your first post however.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
I know of a guy who spent the last 4 months working full time for free on the Bush campaign.
Now he's starting a software company which will make "national security" software and use connections to get the gov't to pay for it.
It's a risk-- if Kerry won he would have wasted that time. But he's expecting at least a $100G buyout now.
Ahh, the complex world of money we live in....
That's exactly how it doesn't work.
The energy from the original is delivered to the destination, soul intact, or whathaveyou.
Remember, most of the time there's no receiving station.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
First, the pdf is posted on the FAS website. The Federation of American Scientist is *not* a joke organization. Second, this is based on a USA Today story here:
l ep ortation_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-05-te
Now, USA Today is not exactly a paragon of reliable news, but the reporter seems to have contacted the Air Force Research Lab and gotten a reply.
So no, it's not a joke.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Frank B. Mead, Jr.
(661) 275-5929
That's OK, King ripped off Alfred Bester and JMS ripped off "Alfred Bester".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
On the other hand, maybe they're going to upgrade the faith-based missile defense system with a quantum tunneling approach.
Just arm the kinetic energy kill vehicle, and wait for it to *tunnel* into the launched warhead which is flying to North America.
Or maybe they could produce trillions of nano-scale KE kill vehicles. And wait for one of those to quantum tunnel its way into the oncoming warhead. The odds would be better that way.
Having worked at AFRL, I can tell you that this is probably a real report. However, it is a study done by a small business, probably what is commonly called an SBIR. The study itself cost somewhere around $100k, and the results will be used to determine if further study is justified.
These contracts produce wildly varied output quality. Some is amazing, some is crap, but the program is part pork (funding small startups) and part science, so you get what you pay for. The amounts presented in the paper are recommendations by the contractor based on their opinions. It is not necessarily what AFRL is going to put their money into. Actually, AFRL has not nearly enough money to pay for further research into this risky a field at those dollars. Groups like AFOSR, DARPA, perhaps. But AFRL funded $1M programs are reserved for stuff that is closer to reality and the warfighter.
AFRL _is_ a reputable funding agency, but this document is not representative of their work. And the marketing speak is an inherent part of this kind of paper, since it is a pitch by the contractor to continue funding them for further investigation.
If telekinesis, ESP, etc. were biologically possible, it would have been evolved by some creatures already.
Geez, don't you ever get out to the movies?
Actually, as I understand it, spiders have fast nerve signaling - fast enough that their reactions are faster than your perception, so they look prescient.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
.... From recent polls it seems that more people believe in the Virgin Birth than in evolution.
The same people think that having un-auditable electronic voting machines sold by, operated and maintained by private corporations whoes only obligation is to share holders, would provide clean and honest vote returns!
Belief is a powerful thing.
Some would say that there really is not such thing is chaos in the universe. But rather, the notion of chaos is nothing more then order beyond comprehension. That said, maybe consciousness has some form of predictable order to it and thus we really don't have free will. If this is the case, the being psychic is nothing more then a higher level of thought for the sub-conscious process more of the chaos around us.
;)
Just a thought
Life is not for the lazy.
moving yourself from location to location through mind powers -- well to the point I dare say. Where can I pick up the cheque?
Have you even looked?
I'm inclined to believe there is a miriad of stuff we don't know about but is *very* important to our future. There may be good reasons the general populous isn't briefed... but we can only guess really. Check out this link here that goes through reponses that Military Generals and Presidents have given in response to questions asking them about being briefed on UFO's. http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=819&cat egory=Science
I am Jack's HTTP Server
It's possible and has been done.. on atomic level. Now go get read some propaganda..
Hell, it MUST work; they successfully sent Bush's brain to a jar in a biology lab at Texas A&M
Actually, I read about this in a book by someone at Janes.
CIA and KGB have both used remote viewing for decades and CIA cut the program in the early 90s, then hired back everyone and renamed the program as something Black.
Basicly the end of the Cold War allowed folks at CIA to see for themselves what the Soviets did and they were shocked at how accurate the remote viewing was.
I think it's whacky, but those are the facts as I've read them from no whacky sources.
It still hasn't been tested you know. Its an interesting mathematical model of how our universe *might* work. Its very cool and very interesting but no one really knows if it describes reality.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
From what I understand she ballooned up to like 190 lbs like a lot of hot goth babes. They don't typically stay hot for long.
Farting Cow.
Does this really suprise anyone, anymore?
To study psychic teleportation, the scientists should study those tricky displacement beasts, although they may want to have a few fighters and a cleric with them, because those bastards hurt. but seriously, possibly electron tunneling effect has some sort of toll on the whole instantaneous travel because electrons are the only known particals that can be anywhere at a single instant, although with an extremely low (rounding to 0%) possibility of where you want that electron to be.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
The date on this report says august 2004, but on page 31 it says "The largest commercially available computers can store 40 gigabytes on a single hard drive."
Well, the section on wormholes is 90% kosher. He even goes so far as to calculate the amount of exotic matter needed to create such a wormhole, and seems to have read most of Visser's (excellent) book on the physics of them.
It might have helped had the authors of this report read the rest of Visser, however. Such as the calculations showing that exotic matter is intrinsically quantum-mechanically unstable, to the extent that such a wormhole will collapse within a time strictly less than the time it takes for a light signal to get through said wormhole.
Which is good, because teleportation by wormhole lets information travel faster than light and is therefore equivalent to building a time machine.
I really hope that we don't have our government funding research into time machines. Because then this is going to start sounding like a very bad movie plot.
I must be the only slashdotter that listened to the Art Bell show, and frequent guest Ed Dames. "Psychic teleportation" sounds like nothing more and nothing less than astral projection.
Is this November, or April? (April would explain Tuesday pretty well, but I digress.)
They made two Rikers. Both were obnoxious.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The U.S. response to Soviet psychotronics R&D programs was the Remote Viewing program. In addition, the U.S. Army began the JEDI Project in 1983, which sought to increase human potential using teachable models of behavioral/physical excellent by unconventional means (Alexander et al., 1990). The JEDI Project was essentially a human-performance modeling experiment based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) skills, whereby advanced influence technologies to model excellence in human performance was used. The program ran under the auspices of the Army INSCOM and the Organizational Effectiveness School, and was sponsored by a U.S. government interagency task force. Finally, it should be pointed out that the program had successfully trained several hundred people, including members of Congress (such as Al Gore, Jr. and Tom Downey), before being terminated.
why is this modded -1?? did you people read the article?? its smash on topic.
... just by wanting the goat's heart to stop. He did it at least once."
"Joseph said that the MPs had basically gone straight from McDonald's to Abu Ghraib. They knew nothing. And now they were getting scapegoated because they happened to be identifiable in the photographs. They just did what the Military Intelligence people, Joseph's people, told them to do. PsyOps were just a phone call away, Joseph said. And the Military Intelligence people all had PsyOps training anyway. The thing I had to remember about Military Intelligence was that they were the "nerdy-type guys at school. You know. The outcasts. Couple all that with ego, and a poster on the wall saying 'By CG Approval' - Commanding General Approval - and suddenly you have guys who think they govern the world. That's what one of them said to me. 'We govern the world.' ""
and more importantly
"He told me how in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create super soldiers - soldiers with super powers. One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.
Level two, he said, was intuition - making correct decisions. "Somebody runs up to you and says, 'There's a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?' And you go" - Glenn snapped his fingers - "We go right!"
"What was the level above that?" I asked.
"Invisibility," said Glenn. "After a while we adapted it to just finding a way of not being seen."
"What was the level above invisibility?" I asked.
"Uh," said Glenn. He paused for a moment. "We had a master sergeant who could stop the heart of a goat
"Where did this happen?" I asked.
"Down in Fort Bragg," he said, "at a place called Goat Lab." "
seriously, its a really good read that has everything to do with "psychic warfare" and outlines some other aspects of military intelligence you might not be familiar with.
the story about the guy trying to walk through the wall is so bizare i cant see how someone could make all that up.
Teleport yourself to http://skepdic.com/ bjd
The *august* report, eh?
Are you sure it wasn't the *april* report?
... of the same name.
The character was the Psi Corp leader, hunting down (other) telepaths. Played by Walter Koenig of the original Star Trek.
http://www.oinc.net/B5/Enc/pcd/bester.htmlNo, what he got wrong was Step 5, which actually occurs at the same time as Step 1.
Still, it is the contentious bit.
+++ATH0
And don't forget Telekinesis!
Many people are not aware, but we all use it to some degree everyday! In fact, I'm using it right now to write this message!
For example: when I want to press the "W" key, my mind concentrates on that action, sends an electrical pulse to the muscles in my arms, which in turn make one of my fingers hit that key... and voila! Telekinesis! Moving a key with your mind is easy!
shut your trap, you dirty democrat!
The people who coughed up the money for
/. poster is correct --
these dubious "projects" should be put up
against a wall and shot. (That is one tax-
payer expense I would be happy to cover.)
But the previous
really, really assinine projects are often
a cover to fund other "black" projects.
The "Iran Hostage/Exchanged For/Military
Spare Parts" quickly morphed into covert
funding for the Contras. Once a big chunk
of money is "off the books", it becomes much
easier to hide from the US Congress and the
taxpayer. In the past, our "government-
within-a-government" has used such methods
to fund the assassination of Latin American
leaders, the overthrow of governments, and
even an invasion or two (Bay of Pigs?).
Considering how money earmarked for the war
against terror in Afghanistan was siphoned
off for the run-up to the war in Iraq, one might
ask exactly where has the huge sum of money
earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq gone?
It sure hasn't gone to where the US Congress
earmarked it. Consider all the internet
"background chatter" from neo-cons regarding
Venezuela, the "oil worker revolt" there, and
the recall election that Chavez won. The over-
throw of a left-of-center regime that has had
the temerity to support Castro's Cuba with
cheap oil sounds like a bonafide Bush/Cheney
operation.
Between the veil of secrecy (post 9-11) and the
USA Patriot Act (I), not much info slips into
the press to cause public blowback. If you
try to begome a "whistleblower" on some of these
shennanigans, you are likely to disappear into
Gitmo Bay (not unlike the "vanished" in
Argentina).
The first thing they should have spent some money on was a server that couldn't be slash dotted!
Squirrel!
if (!person.name.equals("George W Bush"))
{
1) Scan you down to the atomic level
2) Transmit the billions of petabytes of data to the receiving station
3) Rebuild you from the atomic level-up from the transmitted data
4) Confirm you'd been built correctly
}
5) Vaporize or otherwise annihilate the source person
... But we can fund crap like this.
This is fraud. Someone needs to be doing time in federal prison for this.
Actually, as I understand it, spiders have fast nerve signaling - fast enough that their reactions are faster than your perception, so they look prescient.
;) I see most of my movies on the airplane. But I do find that reality is often much stranger than fiction, that scientists discover stuff that is more outrageous that anything Hollywood can dream up.
Very good point, many creatures do have "super-human" senses. The spider nerves are a great quantitative tweak on neuronal engineering - bigger diameter axons carry signals faster and the small size of spiders means the latencies are extremely low.
Other creatures have abilities that seem near-psychic but are not when you study the creature further. Cockroaches have sensitive hairs on their tails that pick up the air pressure wave that precedes any subsonic moving object. Because the pressure wave travels at about 700 miles per hour (the speed of sound), the cockroach feels the swatter approaching long before it reaches the roach. As a double advantage the hairs are wired directly to the legs so the roach flees the instant something starts moving its way without "thinking."
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Electric fish use an active electric field to map their surroundings in muddy water. Dolphins and bats use ultrasound. Mantis shrimp see 6 color bands and 4 polarizations. Pit vipers see far IR. Etc. All of these amazing examples rely on well know physics to let the animal sense what a human cannot.
Geez, don't you ever get out to the movies?
Unfortunately no!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It looks like Warp Drive Metrics has succeeded in teleporting $25,000 into their bank account from the taxpayers wallets; we shall see if future expirements are as successful.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Wasn't this what they tried to do in Doom3?
Lie, cheat, steal, and kill. Then use religion to control your populace.
On the Art Bell Show, Major Ed Dames, a reknowed remote viewer, (you can spend a few $100 and take his class) used remote viewing to determine that the world will end in 2 years when a massive solar flare scorches everything. So don't worry about the wasted money. it doesn't matter anyway.
Well, if there's a competent psychic predator out there, what evidence would you expect?
... about 846
Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence.
Particularly when it's a body gone missing.
Google for "unsolved disappearances":
Results
Nope, I didn't see anything either.
_gulp_ _munch_
I don't get it, if they manage to discover how teleportation works, they will lose their jobs, as G. W. B. wont need airplanes anymore to bomb whoever he wants...
"Someday, if someone does discover psychic or telekinetic abilities and they can reproduce them under controlled conditions, scientists will be lining up to study them and try to learn more about how it works."
Oh joy. Lab rat. You guys have cold hands.
I think I might be able to find Bin Laden with my tarot cards and trusty ouija board. I just need a $500K/year 10 year research grant. Hey, you never know right?
Damn, I want a ticket on that gravy train.
My rights don't need management.
Well, if there's a competent psychic predator out there, what evidence would you expect?
Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence.
You allude to an important counterargument here. What if some predator evolved psychic powers. Why couldn't the prey evolve countermeasures. Perhaps encrypted/scrambled neural energies might confuse a predator, a psychic blast might stun the predator, or a psychic damping field might suppress local telekinetic abilities. Of course, if an evolutionary psychic power arms race were to occur, then biologists would see evidence of that. Strange hyper-developed organs or specialized tissues would leave scientists scratching their heads until they discovered that animals with bigger mystery organs could read minds and animals that lacked the organs became easy prey.
The point is that evolution has had a very long time to uncover what can be done with carbon-based life and electrochemical systems. Were psychic powers possible, it seems unlikely that they would only appear in people and only appear at such a tenuous level that repeatable studies are hard to do. Psychic powers confer a strong evolutionary advantage and evolution is very very good at amplifying any advantage. Were it possible, it should be much more widespread and much more obvious.
Nope, I didn't see anything either.
On the other-hand (with tinfoil hat on head), perhaps our psychic overlords don't want us to be aware of psychic powers. Any human that seems to show psychic abilities becomes tormented and marginalized until the mainstream ignores them and their evidence.
We shall see.... Or perhaps we won't........
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
That was one of the best posts I've ever seen on Slashdot. Fascinating. Thanks for the info. (marksG4from128k as a friend).
This guy is way out there
Look at the bottom of your google link:
i te mNo=310788&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContr assID=0&listSrc=Y
a political unit governed by a deity (or by officials thought to be divinely guided)
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn
Look at these links:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0317-10.htm
and look at the last paragraph of this article,
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?
Now you tell me if the definition fits or not
Perhaps we will get some cool movies out of the effort, similar to all of those psychic sci-fi/horror movies of 70's, peaking with Ghostbusters in the early 80's.
This is exactly how Department of Defense funding works; any funds left over from the previous fiscal year are lost. August and September are the months that normally tight-fisted government types suddenly start dumping money into pencils, reams of paper, electric shoe-shiners, hatracks...anything that will bring their remaining funds down to $0.00 for October 1 (the first day of the U.S. Government fiscal year).
(And I say this as an Electrical Engineer). Established, respected experts in a field are among the most reluctant to consider radically new ideas. Major shifts in science have occurred when some young oddball found a new way to look at an old problem, or an outsider to the field found a new link that was never considered before. Consider the significant (albeit slow) revolution in medicine that is increasingly acknowledging the mind/body connection. Placebo treatments that actually have physiological healing effects; patients that exert conscious control over the failing processes in their bodies.
Now I'm not saying that necessarily this teleportation stuff has any merit. I just want to point out that if you're quick to say "what crap" then you might have fallen into the trap that leads minds to stagnate; that is, to believe that existing human knowledge is complete.
If there's one thing we can bet on, it's that human knowledge is far from complete and we are far from understanding the true nature of things. We are naive creatures with limited understandings of things. Perhaps the military is more willing to gamble funding in new directions, because unlike academics their main goal isn't to protect their researching asses for the rest of their lives. Their goal is to develop new tools that the enemy doesn't have.
First they plan to go to Mars, then they research teleportation...
UAC here we come!
Are you out of your mind?!?
This is the American Physical Society's "What's New" newsletter from Bob Parks for October 29th, 2004
Check out Item 1.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
His proposal to amend the constitution to make sure no state allows gay people to marry is purely driven by his warped reading of the bible. Never mind that Jesus never mentions homosexuality one way or the other.
If that's not theocratic I don't know what is.
I have tried to keep this a secret for as long as I have been able, but I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Just a few minutes ago, I was standing on the other side of the room from where I am now typing. With my mind, I told my body to move over to the other side of the room and immediately it happened! My body does whatever I tell it to! It is completely under my psychic control!
For a while it was cool being the only one with this power, but now everyone is going to start doing it. Suxx azz.
ga
To heck with the Stargate. Without dylithium we are never going to go anywhere. We need warp capability!
Eighty-three percent of American adults believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus Christ
I resent the fact that you imply my beliefs are backwards and illogical. I think it makes perfect sense to believe that Jesus Christ was a virgin when he was born.
STOP MOCKING ME!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Okay, Psychic Teleportation trainees, here are the rules.
Anybody want a peanut?
Worked out real great for them last time. Why bother?
But lets consider it..
Just think of all the creative benefit we could get from ending military/weapons R&D. People who'd spent their entire lives developing weapons could, instead, devote effort to improving human lives.
You know, things like industrial tech that doesn't deplete national resources, or pollute. Silent cars. A legitimate replacement for internal combustion.
But wait! If they developed this, we'd never need cars again!
On the other hand, would any non-demonic supernatural spirit help the military out with magical stuff like that? Or are they going to use physicists to legitimize it?
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Although it is not really fair to taint someone with the type of people who find a hypothesis interesting, you might find this interview with the author ( http://www.stardrive.org/davis.shtml ) revealing, as is the whole site.
o sting&mode=quote&p=5173 ) short comment from Robert Park at the International Thermoelectric Society is also worth noting
This ( http://www.its.org/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=p
[snip]
WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 29 Oct 04 Washington, DC
1. WARPED SCIENCE: BEAM ME UP SCOTTY, THEY'RE CRAZY DOWN HERE.
Making the rounds in Washington this week is a 75-page Air Force Research Laboratory report, Teleportation Physics Study (my spell checker balks on "teleportation," and well it should). This is not the IBM entangled photon stuff; this is transporting people across space. The subway does that, but it's not included in the report. Instead it describes "conveyance of persons by psychic means," and "transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes." The contractor for the study was Warp Drive Metrics in Las Vegas, and the author was Eric W. Davis, PhD, FBIS. We couldn't find Dr. Davis in American Men and Women of Science, so we googled him and Warp Drive Metrics. Warp Drive Metrics has no website. We did find an article by Dr. Davis, Wormhole Induction Propulsion, prepared for the 1997 NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop, which NASA had refused to allow me to attend http://www.aps.org/WN/WN97/wn081597.cfm . His affiliation then was the National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas. The NIDS website displays an Oct 15, 04 notice from its president that the Institute is on an "inactive status." Desperate for information, we contacted the Project Manager of the study, Dr. Franklin Mead, Senior Scientist of the Advanced Concepts Office. He's not listed in American Men and Women of Science either, but he has a 1996 Patent (5,590,031) for a system to convert zero point energy to electrical energy. Apparently it's not available yet. He could not give me the exact cost of the teleportation report, but said the subcontractor, ERC Inc., would know. We called ERC, but teleportation is just one small part of a huge contract. Two weeks ago we learned of the Air Force positron bomb (WN 15 Oct 04). How many fantasy weapons are taxpayers buying?
[/snip]
One further thing, Quantum Entanglement is not the instantaneous transmission of matter. It is the instantaneous transmission of state (spin) *information* - a very different animal with promising applications in data communications.
http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleporta
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/8/6/10
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
You make a big assumption. Reletivity applies only to objects with mass. If you try to set M = 0 in the equasions, the zero causes the math to blow up. That an object will have mass seem like a pretty fair assumption at this point in time. There is nothing to prevent you from traveling at infinite speed if you have no mass. Travel at infinite speed sounds to me like teleportation.
More to the point though, this is a huge waste of time and money. Solve a few simpler problems first, like say, the grand unification theory. It would probably be a better first step.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Truth IS stranger than meta-fiction!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
intriguing. while I don't have much background in quantum anything, I do have some background in chaos theory. So, I kinda get the idea.
Still, my mind kept turning to the Star Wars plot device of mideoclorines (or whatever they are).
I can't help but think it would be just a bit mind blowing to discover that George Lucas was kinda on the right track...
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What kind of laser beam weapon could be so ridiculously preposterous that it would be harder to explain to Congress than the fact that we're wasting money on teleportation??
Okay, so I can understand that Slashdot editors don't read past posts to ensure that they don't re-invent the wheel.
t p://www.crystalinks.com/montauk.htmle denseve.net/montauk_experiment_project .htm
t tp://www.navalships.org/eldridge.html. spiritual-endeavors.org/abilities/phila .htm
But, apprarently, DoD doesn't either. Experiments into this kind of thing have been done before...and long ago to, though DoD strictly denies it.
http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/montauk.html
ht
http://www.
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq21-1.htm
h
http://www
[move
that doesn't mean we should investigate every hair brained scheme to the tune of millions of dollars.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
The first part of the article deals with all the legitimate ways to move particles from point A to point B without going through the intervening space. These methods (while very, VERY far off in the future) are scientifically plausible even if they sound like they were lifted from a bad Star Trek script. The second part, of course, is full of the worst kind of pseudo-science, like telekenisis and psychic abilities. But, really, the first half of the proposal is only a waste of money because the technology involved is too far off to be useful in any reasonably timeframe.
For example, negative energy is a real phenomenon in quantum physics. It is most commonly discussed in the context of the Casimir effect. Here's an article that discusses the Casimir effect. Basically, the negative energy arises because empty space itself has a certain amount of vacuum energy, and the Casimir effect reduces these fluctuations inside two metal plates (which have to be spaced absurdly closely together and manufactured to extremely exact precision for the effect to be measureable). Because we generally say that empty space has zero energy and the space between the plates has less energy than that, the Casimir effect is regarded as a source of "negative energy". This could actually be useful (one day in the far FAR future) for opening up space-time wormholes. And, no, I'm not joking either.
Also, while "warp drive" may be an overused Trek term, it's also a (semi) legitimate topic of discussion in physics. In 1994, Dr. Miguel Alcubierre found a solution to General Relativity that seemed to allow for faster than light travel while obeying special and general relativity. What followed was a lively debate on the plausibility of the "Alcubierre Warp Drive". One of the most recent objections argued that Alcubierre's warp drive would never be able to cross lightspeed but might allow for non-Newtonion sublight travel.
There are a few points which scientists have to use to concentrate attention on those things that are actually worthwhile:
- Untestable claims are worthless; they cannot lead to further discoveries.
- Claims which have been tested and failed are complete wastes of time. (This is not the same as having been tested and found ambiguous, such as effects below the threshold of current systems of measurement, e.g. gravity waves.)
- Any and all evidence must be examined closely to be certain that it is not due to confounding effects or merely experimental error.
Without that you wind up going nowhere. Science is a mechanism for uncovering new knowledge by generating hypotheses for test, testing them, and refining hypotheses based on the results. A hypothesis such as "psychic teleportation" which has no known physical mechanism and no existence proof (which would prove that there are unknown mechanisms at work) is of no further interest to science; these claims have been raised, examined, found wanting and dismissed. There is no point in repeating research which has reached negative conclusions just because some people wish that reality was not as it is. This goes double for leeches who just want to suck at the public teat.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If one can instigate a mass into a quantum form and transmit via a virtual waveguide (containment field), then collapse the probabilistic waveform at a particular space-time volume. Maybe an embedded mathmatical function that after intitial value, interates to a known "collapsing" value.
BTW One ST Book suggested that transporters had more to do with the Warp effect that drove the ship, than anything else.
With a country that is going back to the middle
ages, this seems only like the tip of the
iceberg.
With Bush in office, I expect the next couple of
years to be packed with amusement from your witch
hunts to your basic alchemy courses taught in
schools and maybe some sacrifices made to the
gods if the stock market goes up.
miguel.
It is simply amazing the stuff that came up.
UFO reporting
Warp Drive Technology
Parapsychology
Tons of crackpot stuff. The guy must be running five or six different research centers out of the same residential postal address. Yes, it is residential and no where near UNLV or a commercial area. I understand some of us are midnight engineers that work from our garages, but I find it suspect given the plethora of offcial sounding research center names residing at the Nevada address.
The faith-based presidency was such a success, why not expand the concept to a faith-based military that funds faith-based science?
We're not letting ourselves be limited by those ivory tower intellectuals. Peer review? Pfft! They are no peers of ours. We create our own reality!
They must've been reading some "Power of Silence" or my personal favorite "Tales of Power".
This immediately made me think of how they did long distance space travel in the Dune series.
/. should already know that.
The pilots of huge spacing guild ships bent space and time with their minds, effectively teleporting the ship across the galaxy. Although anyone on
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
Australian National University press release.
"Explaining why the lab sponsored the study, AFRL spokesman Ranney Adams said, "If we don't turn over stones, we don't know if we have missed something."
Why limit spending the taxpayer's money on this alone? The possibilities are limitless if you're going to turn over every stone.
May I suggest a study of the destructive power of orgazmic energy? Just get a whole bunch of guys to form a big circle and think evil thoughts while jerking off...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
To all those who posted repeatedly to bash King for borrowing from others: get over it.
One would think "geeks," of all people, would understand the principle of building on the work of others. Stephen King makes extensive use of this principle, as do others who are now generally thought of as great authors.
Stephen King very openly makes references to older literature all over the place. My favorite is his Dark Tower series, which he says was inspired by a line of poetry from Shakespeare (As I recall, it was one of the random lines produced by Edgar in King Lear). This line in turn seems to have been borrowed from some still older source and as far as I know the actual origin is unknown.
Much of what is now considered great classic literature is full of borrowings from and references to other classics. Tolkien borrows heavily from some very old norse literature such as the Volsunga Saga. Almost every line of Shakespeare's work contains a reference to something older. Romeo and Juliette itself, for example, is an obvious adaptation of the story of Pyramus and "Thisne" (hehe). Hamlet was inspired by a ghost who... oh.. wait.. that was a cheesy movie, not real life.
When Bush won he sent a thought to Europe and they thought "Right back at you!"
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"If telekinesis, ESP, etc. were biologically possible, it would have been evolved by some creatures already." ... "Yet, no animal (or plant) seems to have such powers. "
It is unlikely that humanity is unique in have some never-before evolved power. The more scientists study animals, the more they find that humans are not qualitatively different from other creatures, only quantitatively different. Other creatures can count, create tools, have emotions, participate in social structures, practice deception, be aware of what others might think or do, etc. We exhibit these properties to a greater degree than do animals, but we are not unique."
And yet no predator has developed the gun (except man). Just think of all the advantages of wolves with guns? Or birds with radar? How about whales with torpedoes? Or dogs with a built in pooper-scooper?
Gee, I guess evolution can't solve everything. Seriously until you can answer what it means to be human? You're going to be handicapped as far as what we can and can't do.
1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon.
The DIA ran a remote viewing program until the mid-90s and it did have some successes.
The goal of every academic is to be on the leading edge of a new wave of discovery. Where are you getting your stereotypes from?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Actually, the report was only $25,000. They paid it to a guy with a company named "Warp Drive Metrics" in Vegas.
His report recommended the $7.5m. Not the USAF.
What did the AFRL say? "There are no plans by the AFRL Propulsion Directorate for additional funding on this contract."
All they spent was $25k. My truck cost more than that. Its a bargain if they actually find a 'recommendation' worth following up. Just one of the costs of having the most technologically advanced military in the known universe.
Wake up.
Every time a strange idea makes its way toward the light, "real" scientists jump on their feet to reject those ideas as un-scientifical. Much in the same way catholic priests frowned at Copernicus, laughed at Kepler, & jailed Galilei. Because rotation of earth around the sun "just didn't fit" the well admited theory. Then came Newton ; and modern science was born, a very religion on its own, spreading its dogma on the world. Trouble is : nobody yet knows what "gravitation" is. Sure, anybody can now calculate its effect, but as to why it exists in the first place... the very nature of it remains to be discovered. So why not leave a room to dreams ? Hey, they can even turn into something useful someday. And reread the last book of Kepler, the celestial messenger [certainly a poor translation of the title]. Before Newton, in that book, Kepler forsaw a travel from earth to the moon, and said that bodies would appear weightless in the ether. Pretty accurate, no ?
I am an EE as well, and I don't consider any falsifiable hypothesis "quackery", just very improbable until tested by an experiment. I find it very amusing that more scientists have a very closed mind .. isn't the whole idea to question everything?
Anyway, the above book covers a lot of studies headed up real scientists, and there is a lot of interesting data out there; the effects they find are not huge, but they are statistically signifigant and worthy of investigation.
If someone has an odd idea, fine - ask them for a repeatable experiment anyone can do to replicate said hypothesis. That's what science is about, and that's why we don't automatically assume the world is flat and we are the center of the universe anymore.
..don't panic
As a successful businessman who has handled many ticklish employee issues, let me explain how you should actually deal with this.
First, you fire them using the normal politically correct "here are your final paychecks, and the Human Resources department's collective foot in your collective asses" procedure.
But you inform them that if they can teleport back in, they can have their jobs back.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As far as I'm concerned, the more psychics that are teleported the better. Or whatever the Air Force wants to call it, as long as they vanish.
Would it be too much to ask that the story poster NOT blatently plagiarise his article summary directly from the article itself? It would be different if he said "from the USA Today article: '...'". Instead he takes the first three paragraphs and pathetically attempts to pass it off as his own writing.
This happens a lot on slashdot. Am I the only one that gets angry about either the total ignorance or total disrespect on the part of the poster?
Think about it; the studies into this kind of thing which are serious are probably not going to make it into general water-cooler circulation. Hire a kook, let the media play it out, let the Slashdotters carve him up so that they can sit back reassured once again that the material reality sold to them in high school is sound and safe and without rival when nothing could be further from the truth.
This is done all the time. Auto manufacturers call it, "After Market Advertising", and it's designed to reassure Americans that they made the right choice when they bought their car, and by extension, bought into the lunatic sham of the credit-based manufacturing economy which keeps them enslaved. (How many car owners are locked into stupid jobs they need to drive to in order to keep up debt payments? How many of them could drop everything and decide to explore the unique passions each of us was born to explore? This is a powerful and effective form of social control.)
And for goodness sake. . ! --Teleportation?
Could they be any more camp? I think military science has probably moved beyond Halloween ideas at this point. There are much, much bigger fish to fry.
-FL
I mean if you're going to waste money, why not do it really big!
"However, new ultrahighintensity lasers became available in the 1990s that have achieved extreme physical conditions in the lab that are comparable to the extreme astrophysical conditions expected to be found in stellar cores and on black hole event horizons (Perry, 1996; Mourou et al., 1998; Perry, 2000). The power intensity of these lasers has reached the point to where they actually probe QED vacuum physics and general relativistic physics, and they have even modified the vacuum itself. The lasers were originally called petaWatt lasers (operating range of 10^14 - 10^18 Watts/cm2 at femtosecond pulses), but they have now reached power intensity levels in the 10^25 - 10^30 Watts/cm2 range. The lasers were made possible by a novel breakthrough called chirped pulse amplification whereby the initial low energy/low power intensity laser beam is stretched, amplified and then compressed without experiencing any beam distortions or amplifier damage. This laser system was initially designed as a large-optics beam-line power booster for the NOVA laser fusion experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But researchers found a way to shrink the optics down to tabletop scale, and one can now own and operate a tabletop ultrahighintensity laser for $500,000."
Tabletop-sized optics that produce the sun's core temperature!! I want one. Make that two. First of course, I'll produce a quantum singularity to power my warp drive. Then, I'll use the other one to power my transporter! Are there any used spaceships on ebay right now?
Teleportation my shiny metal rear.
What we really need is a physics theory of parallel universes, for the purpose of transporting beer, pop and pizza from their hapless inhabitants. We really do need more experimental data.. I mean the 6-pack and the medium Papa John's was not even close to enough this friday night. And that's even without mentioning the kinds of "resources", like crack cocain, necessary for weekly discovering the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter.
I remember a bunch of experts that looked into gas turbine engines in the early 1930s for use as aircraft propulsion. The worked out that a 500 HP gas turbine would weigh 10,000 lbs and burn 30 times the fuel of a piston engine of the same power. A brilliant nut named Frank Whittle did not believe it and went on to build the first practical jet aka Gas turbine engine. While this seems nutty. Trying something that is off beat and wacked out every now and again is a good thing.
Just make sure that it is not too wacked out/
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember an Outer Limits episode (newer series) where aliens (strangely looked like Raptors) gave humanity the ability to teleport between their world and ours. The engineer at the space station running the teleporter ran into quite a dilema when the machine malfunctioned, revealing to him that the source data was destroyed (killed) when the copy materialized in the other place. It further complicated things when he was ordered to murder the girl (whom he fell in love with) to balance things out.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Phychic powers have been studied for centuries. No one has made any convincing argument or presented any substantial evidence in this area.
I suggest you read the evidence first, and then comment. You can start here.
Allow me to quote from the first article there:
"Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted."
And:
"It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data."
Is the Army going to pay the scientologits to study SooPeR SeKRit Operating-Tetan PowerZZ?
As a taxpayer, I find this simply outrageous. Anyone in the chain of command that authorized paying for this tripe needs to be taken off the public payroll, right this bloody minute.
Does the USAF have a procedure to dishonorably discharge an officer for being a blithering idiot?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The article link is here.
The James Randi Educational Foundation has been offering a $1 Million prize for some time now to anyone who can repeat such phenomena under agreed-upon viewing conditions.
There's one-eighth of the budget right there -- if you can deliver the "desktop demo".
I already knew they were going to do that......
Psychokinesis, or psychic teleportation. In support of the idea, the report cites UFO reports, Soviet and Chinese studies of psychics and U.S. military studies of spoon-bending phenomena.
How non-7337, these guys haven't even figured out that there is no spoon...
That's totally wrong. For quantum teleportation to work you STILL need to be able to pass information from A to B say via a wire or other classical information route. What teleportation does that say a fax does not is it is supposed to make a *perfect* (well theoretically anyway) copy of the information. What is teleported is NOT the photon or the atom but information on the quantum state of the atom or photon which is reproduced in an atom or photon at the other end. I've heard quantum teleportation described as a "perfect fax machine". Regardless, the atom/photon does NOT suddenly disappear from A and appear at B.
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Why do Americans always assume the rest of the world goes by their standards?
The human visual system, as we Europeans all know very well, runs on 50 Hz here. But this is more than well compensated for by our higher count of rods and staffs.
The really bad part about Lysenkoism was the guy's ability to send representatives of competing scientific ideas to GULAG -- through the universal accusations of treason.
:-)
As long as that ability is nowhere to be seen around here (and it is not), bringing up the scumbag's name is no better than mentioning Nazis
Please stop trying to limit discussion.
More and more, certain people use Godwin's "Law" as a bludgeon to keep other people from using a verbal/written shorthand to point out parallels with that which is oppressing them, and to discount their statements and ideas. Now they are trying to expand it to include any mention of any oppressive system, not just Nazis. Taking anologies away from people is just another way of verbally hamstringing them. And that, like personal attacks and verbal abuse, is not a valid form of argument.
It's funny, when you see someone do this is sticks with you, and you pass it on to other people by doing it when they are watching. It reminds me of the experiments with tool use in apes. Only we humans have the internet...
A quote from that part of the paper: "The skeptical reader should not be so quick to dismiss the subject matter in this chapter, because one must remain open-minded about this subject and consider p-Teleportation as worthy of further scientific exploration. The psychotronics topic is controversial within the western scientific community. The debate among scientists and scientific philosophers is highly charged at times, and becomes acrimonious to the point where reputable skeptical scientists cease being impartial by refusing to examine the experimental data or theories, and they prefer to bypass rational discourse by engaging in ad hominem attacks and irrational "armchair" arguments."
The problem with all this psi stuff is that even if it's real, the evidence is extremely scare given its importance. I mean, I've never seen it demonstrated, even on video. Why is it so unpublicized?
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster..."
*POOF*
"Sweet!"
Then we won't have to worry about it!
Y'know, critics of wasteful military spending can go find a million things money is wasted on, but research? Obviously there are a lot of kids out there wanting to believe "I saw teleporting in a video game, so moving instantly from one place to another r impossible!" and most ironically, they're using computers to say this.
This is the first worthwhile military study I've heard of in years, what with all the usual variations of atomic bomb design, and honestly, where would they be if they listened to every clueless nut job who couldn't comprehend the number of sides on a triangle? There are quite a few countries out there who, unlike the dumb hicks we're surrounded by here, aren't told that nothing exists outside their local mall and supermarket. If we just concentrated on blowing more things up from helicopters, what do we get? More useless deaths by soldiers with no clue what their cameras are looking at, while someone in a more intelligent foreign military or even a group of thugs could go straight to our leaders and take them out.
But I guess, over here, we're just supposed to think everything under the sun is a big fake conspiracy lie unless some company has been advertising and selling it for many years. It's not a written law or anything; just something upheld by a few raving lunatics. But, should we really tend to a bunch of idiots who want to claim 'instant movement is impossible because I can't comprehend physics!' I really don't know. Thing is, those idiots are technically paying for it, but then the military is there for security. I mean if we were to wrap military standards around the 'nothing exists!!' ideas of a few... not-so-intelligent people, then what about the rest? The people who aren't a bunch of uneducated sheep would be in danger because of the thought-free ideas of just a few.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
That's impossible! This big hunk of crap is going to sail through the air like a bird. Fools!!!
My point is that not because we cannot conceive of something with our current mental capacity means it's impossible. Why not give it a try? The only discussion should be the amount of money being spent. Besides, there are plenty of other areas where money is being squandered and could be saved.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight... If I had the ability to teleport myself, my old job that fired me would be the last place I would want to teleport to. Unless of course it was to plant some illegal substances in their office with an anonymous tip to the police. :)
The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you. - Tom Bradley
Strong dollar also makes it cheap to purchase overseas assets. This seldom gets mentioned.
When dollar is strong, buy overseas assets, reinvest all overseas non-dollar income into expansion. When dollar is weak, repatriate profits into dollars at a favorable exchange rate.
Rinse and repeat until the people on the other side wisen up enough to peg their currency into the dollar. Then it's a different game what I don't know how to play.
Argentine collapsed because of the peg, but on the other hand Malaysia doesn't seem to have any problems with the ringgit pegged to the dollar, even with their leftist policies and all.
If there is a systematic distortion within the very structure of science, how can we expect scientists to be trusted to address it? Certainly, I think that we need to hold to the scientific method, but funding decisions are most certainly biased by pre-existing prejudice. Such funding is absolutely fine for the bulk of "normal science", but to insist that non-scientific bodies apply the same criteria is what Paul Feyerabend would call "scientific imperialism". Apologies for the link to Marxists.org; I could not find a better reference.
*Possible mechanism for synchonicity: similarity of structure in complex waveforms could be a low-energy, high-entropy state (although a particular structure would be low-entropy), much as photons seek to be in a similar state when trapped in a small cavity (which is how the LASER works).
Wikileaks, no DNS
"It is in large part crackpot physics," says physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, author of The Physics of Star Trek, a book detailing the physical limits that prevent teleportation. He describes the Air Force report as "some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones."
"It is in large part crackpot heresy", says Geronimo Boccia, advisor to the Pope, author of "The Joys of Belief", a book detailing the divine limits set for mankind. He describes the heretic heliocentric teachings of Galileo Galilei that as "some things adapted from scripture and other things are clearly inspired by the devil".
Nothing personal about Mr. Krauss here but we need more people to work on developing all the cool star treky stuff such as teleportation, the warp drive, the phasers, the universal translator, subspace communications, force fields, synterol, a society without money, holographic doctors. What we need less of is unimaginative people that will flip open a dusty five-year old textbook and tell us it can't be done becasuse of physics theories back in the days of the book was written.
I think you miss the point here.
Funding for applied psychic phenomona is consistent with the administration's Faith Based Initiative.
Personally, I am glad that the Faith Based Inititive is now being applied to hard, physical sciences instead of just the fruity social sciences. Imagine the progress we can make now that we are not confined by the moldy paradigms, theories and "laws" of scientists. It's high time for spirtualists to take a turn!
The problem with you liberal intelligentia elite is that you think that just because something is not scientific (testable, reproducible) that it is inherantly without merit. Can your science prove a negative? I thought not!
Get with the program, bub.
Faith == reality is the new science.
Now click your heels together 3 times and pray this has all been a bad dream.
.
"You have liberated me from thought."
Teleportation sounds very un-Christian to me.
No - actually Philip was transported in Acts 8:39-40, so this concept is not un-Christian.
However, I suppose trying to duplicate the process with man-made tools might be considered "witchcraft."
(quotes intended to differentiate witchcraft from "witchcraft." I hope that helps).
Please try witty post again.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
It would be funny, but it's rods and cones.
This is exactly my point! You take for granted that American standards applies everywhere else!
Once you've dissected an European eye and compared our 50 Hz color-correcting 64 bit staffs to your inferior 60 Hz cones, you'll want a pair yourself!
:)
Give me a couple millions dollar and I can prove that it doesn't work.
It sounds more than reasonable to me to spend that sort of money on an initial analysis of whether the claims are bullshit or not. Now just imagine if your country was at war and you were "second to market" in some 'way out' technology? Hiroshima for instance.
For the record, yes IAAP (I Am A Physicist).
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
In other news:
Greenland: Denmark has officially protested against a recently revealed operation by US Air Force at a secret base north of Thule. "We are appalled at the abuse suffered by the reindeer", said Danish environmental minister Connie Hedegaard. The USAF spokesperson George W. Santa declined to comment on questions about the nature of the research. It is suspected however, that the Air Force is investigating the use of reindeer power for strategic bombing.
Egypt: The United States Salvation Army has begun excavations in the desert. Colonel George W. Lucas, who is overseeing the progress states: "If we are lucky, we may be able to march the ark of the covenant around Falluja some time next year." The colonel is well known for is role in the upstart of the US Force Force, which is supposed to result in a lightsaber-equipped strike force before the end of this millenium.
Texas: A commission under the U.S. secretary of health is investigating a large number of teenage pregnancies. Mr. George W. Irgin gave this statement to the press: "As we all know, Texas teenagers know nothing about sex and are pledging abstinence, so the only scientific explanation is parthenogenesis. Our numerology experts are suggesting that the offspring of virgins by the name of Mary may be of interest to the US Navy and US Marine Corps, as their well-known waterwalking skills are perfect for amphibic operations."
-Lasse
You sir, are wiser than me.
I totally agree with you that the market isn't truly free.
A company or industry that's doing well can try to extract concessions from politicians (DMCA, antitrust wrist-slaps, telcom regulation, etc) and a company that's not doing well can generate political pressure to save jobs. And the former annoys me greatly, as I can tell it annoys you.
But I find it hard to dismiss the sense that there is a "mostly free" market out there, having watched closely billion-dollar companies fall (SGI), and from a distance seen others just get lost (Kodak) or shift their core activity to avoid a lingering death (IBM). The market may not be truly free, but it is a harsh mistress.
I can't find a full list of companies kicked off the Dow Jones (just 1999, 2004, 1895), but big companies even with their vast political influence cannot succeed when the market says "no thanks" to paying the hoped-for-nicely-profitable amount for their products.
--LP
haha, known universe. We don't even know our own oceans, let alone our solar system!
Actually, for something like bullets, you could want something which spreads the force, rather than something which absorbs the energy. This is only true if you don't mind the bullet reflecting/ricocheting, which can be a problem under some circumstances... ;)
;).
The reason why you want an energy absorber with a bike helmet or a car is that it is presumed that the object you will be making a collision with will likely be more massive than yourself (such as a tree or the road). In such a case, the object which will be reflecting is you, and human bodies don't change velocity suddenly very well. However, with a bullet the object has a much smaller mass, so if the force is spread over a large area, it is very possible to reflect the bullet with minimal effect on the body. If you don't think this is true, then how is the bullet accelerated in the first place? Reflecting a bullet only requires twice the impulse of accelerating it, and many people's shoulders can handle the kick of a rifle. Of course, a rifle has additional mass to help with the kick, but spreading the impact over a larger area than the shoulder can help compensate for this. If a material were to become entirely rigid AND had enough strength to resist penetration AND the body behind it retains its shape (i.e. the rigid material ought to entirely surround the body), then the majority of the energy will be reflected back into the bullet. Of course, absorbing the energy works too, but is not the only way. Either way, you do not want the energy to be absorbed by your body when it hits you.
This is why I have had myself encased entirely in steel. Except, of course, for my fingers which I use for typing on Slashdot. Alas, my only weakness