Slashdot Mirror
13 Things That Do Not Make Sense
thpr writes "New Scientist is reporting on 13 things which do not make sense. It's an interesting article about 13 areas in which observations do not line up with current theory. From the placebo effect to dark matter, it's a list of areas in need of additional research. Explanations could lead to significant breakthroughs... or at least new and different errors in scientific observations. Now there are 20 interesting problems for Slashdotters to work on, once you combine these with the seven Millennium Problems!"
There was a study not that long ago that concluded that the placebo effect doesn't really exist. How did they test that? Did they give some patients a placebo, and others (the control group) a fake placebo?
Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee -- an eight foot tall Wookiee -- want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more importantly, you have to ask yourself: what does that have to do with science? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with science! It does not make sense! Look at me, I'm posting on slashdot in response to an article about science, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests
no -- that makes a LOT of sense. Particularly when trying to get an early post.
Doesn't it say in the FAQ -- post early, post often?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
That's really interesting. The body and/or the brain releases the THIQ (I would presume) as if herion were present, but only if the morphine blocker isn't used in combination with the placebo.
This suggests that as long as we think we're getting morphine, our bodies will respond accordingly. If the phenomenon could be isolated...combine that with some VR, and you've got the opium dens of the digital age. But no opium.
I Want To Believe
Maybe saline solution is not completely inert after all, and so is not a good placebo.
-- Andyvan
They were put yhere by god to test our faith!
:-P
Cheers,
Adolfo
Just great, like I really needed 13 more things to worry about.
Hey, why wasn't my wife on that list?
I have emough thimgs that dom't nake semse im ny life so as to worry about that. For exanple, why the fuck does ny keyboard type "n" whem I clearly hit the "m" ke... wait, mvn... forgot to put the keys back right. Okay, i'll give those problems a whirl now.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
that does not make sense is; trying to rtfa during a /. blackout!
The brain is a very powerful thing. I don't know what is so hard to believe. Pain originates in the brain so it isn't that hard to believe that you can deceive it.
2005 is the year of Linux on the desktop!!!
Why do men have nipples?
But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on."
Excellent. If tests suggests something's going on, let's test it further.
"We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon."
I hope she and others keep testing it, since this is the first time I've ever heard of homeopathy even being remotely true. I won't hold my breath though.
The whole "WOW" signal does not lead to the existence to extraterrestrial civilization. The researchers that discovered the event said that it very well may have been a terrestrial signal that bounced off the atmosphere. This one should have renamed the New Scientist to Pseudo Scientist. :-P.
Here is something else that does not make sense (or for which there is no standing theory): Tachyons, or particles that travel faster than the speed of light.
All your Sybase are belong to us.
During the dark ages people were absolutely convinced that theory was correct. And anything that disagreed with the theory was burned, as were the heretics who observed it.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Apparently there is a mod that doesn't know what a troll is. The first two in this thread might have been "redundant," but only this one could really be considered a troll (or perhaps offtopic).
What about "Why do people believe whatever politicians say?". I've never seen a single one not lie out his ass every chance he gets just to win votes then 6 months later deny all knowledge. We're ment to be a smart race yet we repeatedly fall for the same scams and tricks day in and day out.
Might not be "why is the universe breaking laws we know apply to everything in it", but it's something which might effect our lives unlike a few of the things mentioned.
I like muppets.
I guess I might as well buy those enlargement pills after all.
Hey, you never know...
"my god, its full of stars."
Such as this comment...
...why is it, that whenever I pick my nose, it's full again? Funk that.
If they find that the placebo effect is biochemical, will this invalidate medical experiments that use placebos? I was under the impression that they used placebos as a comparison to the real drugs used.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I don't find these issues to be unexplainable or unsupported in the least. The idea that these events are unexplainable "phenomena" is nothing more than a direct consequence of a limitation resulting from an individual's chosen belief system. The only reason these things become hard to comprehend or understand is because a person refuses to accept things past a certain level. The extent of the criteria a person uses to divide those beliefs and understandings (capable of explaining these things) directly determines whether they belong to faith or science. Quite frankly, I would day that people are either significantly under-educated in this regard or are to close-minded to accept facts and principles which are either not yet public, or are barely out of their tangible reach. You want to know how these things exist as they do? You could start by reading this: http://falundafa.org/book/eng/zflus.html
Look at this monkey.... [Head asplode] That does not make sense.
Why not include the Columbia prayer study? Oh, yea, because it's been thoroughly discredited. Just like the Belfast study will be soon enough.
One million dollars says homeopathy is a placebo. Do you want to argue with it?
Yes, the placebo effect is still not completely understood, if it exists at all. But that article made it sound like things that are pretty common knowledge are new and shocking.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
just recently heard michio kaku talk about trying to measuring minute changes in gravity to show that 'parallel worlds' are right around us and ties it in with dark matter.
as far as the placebo effect goes, when i am happy- i feel good!
Well, it looks like some one may have already knocked 10 off the list, and explained it as 2:3 resonance orbits with neptune.
14. Why Being An Asshole Gets You Chicks
Its true. Go to any mall and you'll see a not-so-attractive man walking around with a beautiful, well-endowed lady in tow while he's making fun of her to his friends, or is putting her down. He never calls, he never does the dishes, he never puts the seat down, and most of all, he's getting some.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I have often considered this problem and it has implications for the big bang theory. One way to solve this problem is to divide the universe into quadrants that have uniform background radiation from a statistically large number of little explosions. The theory I have come up with I call the little pop theory. Somewhat akin to multiple small orgasms, much more satisfying than one big bang!
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
The whole topic of "truth" just seems so passe these days. Faith-based politicians aren't going to worry about any of it, anyway. They don't need or want better science or more facts--they already know what they believe, and they're going to structure the world around their beliefs, no matter how crazy. The whole notion of truth is under attack.
So many examples, it's hard to know where to start. The two that are on my mind right now are the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN, and appointing the master planner of the Iraq fiasco to the World Bank.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I as a funder of the USPS cannot request that they do not deliver bulk mail to my home address.
Point 1) Placebos have an effect, except when they don't, such as when a drug is replaced with another which counteracts the original's effects.
Point 4) A placebo controlled study showed that homeopathic remedies are effective.
That does not make sense.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Give drug, pain fades. Give drug, pain fades. Give drug, pain fades.
By this point, the mind/body is conditioned to respond to the ritual.
In this case, an opiate-like response had been conditioned. As such, when naloxone blocked the body's natural opiates, the pain response came back.
...getting a guy completely trashed on water, because he thought he was drinking vodka. Sure, he'd had a few vodkas already (only a few), but once the bottle ran out, he still wanted more, so I filled up the bottle with water, and he and I sat down and kept drinking the 'vodka'.
I acted as if I were drinking vodka (the flinching at the strength of it, and pretending to be feeling the effect), until he became so drunk on about 350ml of water (and the perhaps 100ml of vodka that he'd drunk earlier) that he couldn't stand and was passed out, and was out of action for almost a day.
After this, with the d*ckh**d out of the way, I finished my good deed for the party, and everybody else had a great time from that point onwards at the party... it only took about 40 minutes for this to work.
So, yes, I can believe that the placebo effect works - and even more effectively on fools like the guy in my anecdote.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
While it may be true that none of these make sense, these are facts simply observed by humans.
Compare this with the Axiom of Choice, which is an idea created by humans that doesn't make sense in some different, really nasty way. If you think about it in some certain way, it looks obvious (and it would be really bad if it wasn't true); in another certain way, it seems absurd (and leads to some things that simply shouldn't be true).
A quote from Wikipedia:
(the Axiom of Choice, the well-ordering principle and Zorn's Lemma are all different names to the same idea)
Why zealots continue to froth about Linux, even though it doesn't have shit on *BSD in the server department, and Windows in the desktop department.
In the first case, Numbers. In the second case, stability and price.
Any other questions?
Seriously, I think the Linux has taken off and become a media darling while the various BSDs have not is the idea that anyone can contribute code to the Linux kernel. Even though relatively few people actually do, the fact that they CAN is attractive to people.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"Why would a 7 foot tall Wookie wanna be on a planet with little 2 foot tall Ewoks?"
Oh, I don't know. He wants to be a dominant center?
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
From the article:
>IT IS one of the most famous, and most
>embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998,
>astronomers discovered that the universe is
>expanding at ever faster speeds.
Embarrassing? Since when is being able to study something qualitatively new and unexpected an embarrassment? One would expect cosmologists to jump for joy at their luck. (And among those whom I know, everyone does!)
If anything, dark energy is a triumph of experimental science. An experimental groups found something no one expected, and within a hand full of years, armed only with careful data analysis, they convinced not only themselves but everyone else that it was genuine and radically changed our picture of the universe. Since then we've accumulated even more convinging data, and found independant evidence to confirm the existance of dark energy. There is a vigerous community studying the problem and proposing new tests, and theorists everywhere proposing new and interesting ways to accomodate the data. One couldn't hope for a more perfect example of science working in the way we all like to believe it does.
Cold fusion, on the other hand, is a *real* embarrassment for physics - dozens of seemingly reputable scientists have spent millions of dollars and decades of work and produced diddly squat. The experimental case isn't bulletproof - it's just so riddled with holes that no one notices when new bullets pass through it. The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.
the famous "Coach K", is Mike Krzyzewski (pronounced Cri-sheff-ski").
Why that spelling?
I think these recent experiments are interesting and require some explanation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/841690.stm
and also
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/655518.stm
Hedley
"suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse"
morons... its called gravity. getting a whole load of neutrons together at near black hole masses tends to create a lot of gravity...
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
(one of) The exciting thing(s) about dark matter/dark energy/Pioneer anomaly is that they smell like new fundamental physics. A bit like in the early 20th century, when people had everything pretty much figured out, except for a few nagging problems such as the UV catastrophe and Michelson-Moreley's failure to detect changes in the speed of light. Which of course led respectively to quantum theory and relativity.
We assume DM and DE are there because according to general relativity we need something to clump visimble matter, something to accelerate the universe today (and another something to accelerate the universe in the past if inflation is to be believed), and a bunch of something to make the universe (very nearly) flat. Postulating all these weird stuff is a bit contrived. Or we can heve some new physics.
This probably what the Wow aliens were trying to tell us...
PS: The 4neutron stuff and changing constant *are* new physics, if true. Right now they are just plain weird, IMHO.
"Cold Fusion" is crap. In short, the two scientists improperly calibrated a neutron detector. A simple mistake, but they got their 15 minutes of fame from it.
There are no shortcuts to truth.
Okay here's my counter example.
1) mix up your solution of water and 1 mole of deadly nightshade
2) divide it in two
3) pour half down the drain
4) add back the missing half with water from the tap.
5) repeat from step 2, one hundred times.
At this point the original solution is thought to be dilluted by a factor of 2^100 = 10^30. thus your original 6 x10^23 molecules have been dilluted to the point where there is less than a chance in a million one molecule of night shade exists.
6) now test this on a subject sensitive to nightshade and look for a response.
7) as a control experiment, use plain water from the tap and look for a response.
Did you see one in step 7? You should have since you poured all that nightshade down the drain in step 3. Thus the tap water is also composed of dilluted elixer.
Thus if you do see a difference between your dilluted elixer and the tap water then you fucked up your experiment. And if you dont see a difference the homeopathy does not exist.
QED
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A lot of these things mentioned could be (partially) described by one effect - on at least 3-4 occasions while skimming that article, this one thing leapt to mind:
Could the speed of light be slowing down?
that is, c 1,000,000 years ago was actually _faster_ than c is now....
It probably does not make sense - IANAP - if YAAP, please respond...
This article sort of looked like bullshit to me, especially the cold fusion part. Notice how they hint that cold fusion has been replicated, but don't actually go out and say so. Then they quote an "Engineer" saying the evidence is strong, like they couldn't find any scientist that would support their claim. So I asked at the Straight Dope Message Board about the cold fusion, and got some interesting answers. What I learned basically confirmed that (to the knowledge of that fairly well informed board), yes, cold fusion still is unlikely and unreplicated.
The moderation of the parent as -1, Flamebait is +1, Funny!
See here.
So why use a placebo at all? Why not just measure what happens to them without the placebo?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Numbers when Microsoft has them: bad thing.
Numbers when Linux has them: good thing.
Explain please.
Gotta love those wacky New Scientists . . .
1) take a slashdot comment
2) reply to it
3) reply to the reply
4) each reply containing less information and insight
5) ????
6) profit!
The final comment still has the same amazing powes of useless drivel the first had.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The answer is 42.
Wow, the inclusion of cold fusion as number 13 in this list is a big disappointment! Cold fusion took the bang out of legitimate fusion efforts many years ago and it just won't die. Nagel's claim that "The experimental case is bulletproof, [y]ou can't make it go away." is a load of garbage. Even adamant proponents of cold fusion will agree that the experimental evidence is pretty shoddy at best is rife with irreproducibility. It is precisely this lack of reproducibility that makes the "effect" so hard to swallow. I would have preferred to see coronal mass ejections or the enhanced temperature of the Sun's corona listed as number 13.
Multi Button Mice don't make sense
But scientists want the truth, they aren't satisfied if you invent a story and call it the answer.
The thing about evolution that makes no sense is how people can come up with all kinds of reasons why it's not true. What it is about evolution that brings the wackos out of the closet? That's a mystery that will never be solved.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Single button mice don't make sense!
The topic's about scientific experiments producing results that aren't immediatly intuitive.
There are no shortcuts to truth.
That statement implies that you know what truth is and/or that you know how to get there. Besides, no one offered a shortcut, just a path. As to what is the shortest path (if one exists) that's for an individual to decide (barring of course whether or not truth exists and yes, we are only offering this for you folks who don't plan on accepting any way to save your soul in this lifetime).
Also for you "philosophical agnostics," (only because I love you even though you are looking with your eyes and not your heart) Krishnamurti said that "Truth is a pathless land." I obviously don't agree with that but it's interesting.
They still haven't REALLY come up with a compelling explanation of why the moon looks SO large when it's down near the horizon.
You'll never use it anyway, most likely. (unless you were talking about something else?)
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
homeopaceboic
Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense!
I grow as weary of explaining this as I am of being an example of it*. "Assholes" get chicks because they go out there to meet women, with confidence and at least the illusion of interest. They don't stay in griping about being single on Slashdot, while thinking "no hot girl will ever like me".
* an example of the latter, not the former
Freedom: "I won't!"
If each time you negate a statement it's equally interesting, then you've got a problem.
Oddly enough, the article cites the Horizon problem as unexplained. It seems that they don't think that inflation is a satisfactory explanation. I wonder if the author of the article had access to the data from WMAP that actually validated several models of inflationary theories.
The theory presented in your link has been thoroughly and elegantly refuted.
- If the placebo effect relies on the
conviction of the patient that their treatment
is going to help them, then aren't medical
systems with a simpler-to-understand and more
immersive theoretical foundation, such as various
traditional and new-age therapies, going to be
more effective (ceteris paribus) than
scientific, Western medicine?
- For the same reason, is research
intended to debunk traditional and new-age
therapies likely, if successful, to reduce
the overall health of society?
- Finally, is scepticism therefore bad for
your health?
Just wondering...the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old
This has always bothered me. Not only do we have light 28 billion light years apart, we have matter that is 28 billion light years apart. I can understand that, since the big bang, light could have made it 14 billion light years, but matter? How the hell did matter get that far out?
And is the age of the universe really 14 billion years? That just doesn't seem like enough time for heavier elements from supernovae to make it to other star systems so that the elements would be available when planets form. From which supernova (and when) did the heavier elements on our planet come from? How far away was it? Even if it had been a mere 100 light years away, that's still a long way for those elements to have travelled.
Maybe, just maybe, the universe is far older than we imagine.
With all the weird planets we'e seeing out there now, isn't it extremely lucky that the planet we live on just happens to support life? (Okay, there might be a little observer effect here.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
For an a normal drug test there are two types of test. The one you do in labor (first on cells culture then later on cobaye animals) and later the one you do under hospital condition (on human). I am roughly simplyfying here. Those hospital test mostly consists in double blind experiment if possible (the patient do not know what they get, some get nothing (water/sugar) other get the substance, and neither the patient nor the experimentor at the starts know who is given what, only after the experiment is finished the experimentor can check from a reference number that this was the drug or sugar), or in the case where it is not humanly possible (for example cancer drug) where a live depends on it, then a simple hospital trial.
In the case of homeopathy this NEVER depend on life, but since this is only sugar (for any dilution beyond Avogadro number) they do not need the labor trial and can be tested directly on double blind. Fact is, all study I know of in double blind , the group getting the drug and the group getting nothing did not show any statistical difference. In other word their body reacted as if they got nothing (which they did... Since beyond 20CH I think , you have no active molecule). In other word in double blind nobody has yet of today proved that homeopathy worked. Ever.
Now there are a serie of controversial experiment where ONE attempt to dilue some allergen substance, and then after enough dilution to ahve nothing of the alergen in the end liquid, attempt to make it react with Basophile (the so called bevenist experiment). Up until now all of those experiment yelding positive result where either downright fraud, or sloppy experimental design (forget to clean up, or bad dilution processes). And seriously I doubt any new results will change that. This would be a MAJOR news for all physiker (physicist?)...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I recently read this paper on the net, it's a theory based on symmetry and grouping in the universe, as well as the absolute of zero. Thought provoking at the very least. http://macrocosmicsymmetry.com/bpaper1.html
Its temperature remains uniform because there is no other structure near enough to either inject or extract energy. The temperature in any given direction is the same as the temperature in any other given direction because any observer is theoretically in the center of the universe (don't let your head asplode, that all gets into expansion/motion cosmology).
If 'inflation' happened like they think then the universe is actually younger than the 14 billion years that is the current measure.
But, then again, all our theories and measurements could be fundamentally flawed to the point where all our theories and assumptions are completely wrong. In that case it doesn't matter.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
THis is beyond-dilution test, not homeopathy. And again this is a pharmacologist/doctor/biologist which claim out extraodinary physical phenomena. This is Bevenist all over again. I will certainly read the article from this labor and wait if anything happens afterward because frankly if this prooved to be true there would be a BLOODY revolution in physics tommorow on the news. I would not be surprised if they find out AGAIN that the experimental process was flawed. Don't hold your breath.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
100ml = 3.4 fluid ounces (about half a cup)
If god did it, then there are two cases:
(A) there is some physical law that
she made and she followed that law
when she created the universe
(B) she disregarded any laws and just
made the universe and there isn't
any laws that we can learn from it
If the case is B, then this indevor will be hopeless, that is, there isn't a law to be found. However, if the case is A, then exploring the phenomenta in a rigorous manner is what we need to do. When we learn the law, it might help us make cool new devices that do energy, travel, or what not. If we didn't question our laws and just "accepted" things without intrique, we wouldn't have cars, computers, or anything like what we do; we'd be cave men.
So. The question of god is largely epistomology -- it doesn't matter if god created it or didn't create it, beacuse using god as an explanation tells us _nothing_ about how to use the phenomena in a useful way.
In my first year of university, I sold about 8 birth control pills to a guy who wanted to try ecstasy. I told him that since they were so small, he'd have to take at least half, but would probably be alright with all of them. They're small so you can easily control your dosage, right? Well, the next day he showed up and couldn't stop talking about how amazing it was, and how he danced like a maniac all night. He felt like such a rebel. The poor guy was always very concerned with maintaining his "masculine" image, so (unfortunately) he didn't take the truth (or the jokes about his developing body) too well.
But seriously, now. How would that many birth control pills affect a guy if he didn't have any expectations?
Just tell her the universe is shrinking
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's like the opposite of 'bone-pointing'. In some aboriginal cultures, a medicine man could kill people just by pointing some bone or small object. People would really die if they got bone pointed -- not only because they believed that death was certain, but also because everyone else in the community treated them as a walking corpse. No food, no conversation, no medicine. An invisible.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
What's the mystery of Navier-Stokes equations? Since they are apparently based on physical properties, are they not 'synthetic' in a similar way that Perfect Gas equation(s) are just an ad hoc tool in physical chemistry -- not some profound mathematical statement by themselves?
I suggest you read Slashdot
- George Bush's Re-Election
- Paul Wolfowitz as Head of the World Bank
- The US Intervention in Iraq
- The Structure of the U.N. Security Council
- Voting Structures of the Bretton Woods Institutions
- 'West is Best' Mentality in Development and Aid Agencies [This is admittedly shifting]
- Current Price of Oil and the inability of America to reduce its dependency upon it.
- The DMCA
- RIAA efforts against file-swappers and its inability to adapt in the face of change.
- Health Spending (as a % of GDP [2001]) is 0.3% less in the United States than in Canada and its free here.
- The State of Public Education in North America
- The 'CNN Effect' [short term intense immediate media coverage reduces long term awareness of issues] e.g. When was the last time you heard about the Tsunami?
- The Health and Wealth Dispairites between the Developed and Developing world.
I'm surprised that very few people have mentioned these two phenomena from the article. I found them to be quite fascinating.
My digital rights don't need management.
That should be added. The people who run slashdot say that there is no easy way to avoid this effect. Yet many point out that simply using free web chaching services could almost wipe out this problem with none of the side effects the maintainers of /. eroniusly claim. :p
Stability? I can't think back to the time I had *any* instability on *any* of my Windows boxes. As for Linux, in the past week I have had two unrelated people tell me that Linux fucked up and they lost their data. How's that for stability?
Fuck Linux.
Is there suppose to be as much antimatter as there is matter?
Is there reason to believe that antimatter makes up dark matter or engery?
Seems like someone's been watching a lot of the Daily Show.
[The following may be the inane ramblings of someone who has read too many books about quantum physics but has no actual formal training.]
If I'm not mistaken, much of our knowledge of relativity, cosmology, and quantum physics comes from the assumption that c (the speed of light) is a constant. Einstein, if I recall correctly, came up with his remarkable theories of relativity and gravity after trying to imagine what the universe would be like if light-speed was constant in all frames of reference.
However, if the constant c is not actually constant, but a variable - perhaps a function of mass or space-time itself on a galactic scale - then at certain scales or under certain conditions, the weak mass/energy interaction we call gravity might be a little different than presently calculated. Perhaps different enough, on a galactic scale, to account for the "missing matter" that dark matter has been contrived to explain.
It could also explain variations of Alpha, unexpectedly constant background radiation (particularly if c is slowing down), and the acceleration of space probes as they leave the solar system.
Perhaps now that variations of the double-slit experiment are demonstrating the non-locality of some phenomena, it's time to stop regarding c as necessarily being a constant and a universal speed limit.
Do any actual physicists care to shoot holes in my wild suppositions?
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
They are too busy watching television and working, it seems.
Personally I'm not single because I don't show confidence or interest
I'm single because I'm poor*. What's the point of falling in love when you cannot afford to feed yourself, nevermind a loved one or children?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
it's not popular to believe in God
Of Course it isn't populat. even when science can not explain why the univerce is the way it is. It is still better to have blind faith in humans who have constintaly been proven wrong and rutinely have their theories debunked by future scientests, then it is to beleave in God. reminds me of a proverb
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter
Proverbs 25:2
Maybe c isn't necessarily variable, but affected by things we haven't observed yet. Pioneer speeding up as it leaves the solar system may indicate c is faster than we think -- that would be great for possible interstellar travel!
I suggest you read Slashdot
Hmmmmm.
Table-ized A.I.
Clicky!
Um, no, you don't comprehend the experiment. The body, upon receiving the placebo saline, acts as if it's getting the morphine unless the placebo contains a morphine inhibitor. One conclusion: the body is generating actual morphine on its own.
Hey, my roommate in college claims that I have a THC gland.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I thought the submitter was Steven Wright
The other half of the coin is that we are a social animal. An acquaintance of mine who's published on this speculates it's from hominid coevolution with the dog over the last 50kyr, but the cause is less important than the bare fact: Humans find isolation depressing, and company comforting. (For introverts, you can postulate a toxicity threshold; but even introverts save the pathological tend to want at least a few companions. EG: even slashdotters want a girlfriend.)
I postulate that the body has a shutdown mechanism that goes: "If I'm completely useless, I may as well die," and while not intrinsically lethal, does provide a noticable edge in marginally survivable conditions. While individually anti-survival, it's easily arguable as a pro-survival trait to have for the gene pool, reducing competition for scarce resources for others with better chances. The placebo effect, IMHO, is the body responding to the sense that someone cares, so it's worth trying to live. Placebo is an anodyne for despair... and this is what the placebo effect measures.
Posted A/C, because I've wasted enough time with shrinks.
girls like dicks.
Work Safe Porn
Best part of that article wasn't about any of the problems, but the mention of the natural nuclear reactor in Gabon, Africa. Holy crap. I'd never heard of it, and that's just amazing.
Ah, the "we can't explain the Big Bang, therefore Jesus is the messiah" argument. I admire your ability to delude yourself.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/ohmygodpart.html
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
"If the placebo effect relies on the conviction of the patient that their treatment is going to help them, then aren't medical systems with a simpler-to-understand and more immersive theoretical foundation, such as various traditional and new-age therapies, going to be more effective (ceteris paribus) than scientific, Western medicine?"
Western medicine cures many diseases and can remedy or improve many medical conditions. Mental states can influence health and well-being. Your conclusion is that mental states are therefore more effective than Western medicine. Please explain.
G
The BBC program "Science and Nature" had an episode on BBC Two, which was called "Homeopathy: The Test" which first aired last year on Tuesday 26 November, 9pm.
t hytrans.shtml
The results of a controlled, random, double-blind study were that the effect did not actually exist.
Here's the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopa
I think what we are seeing here is a six month editorial lead time on articles in New Scientist (giving their research department the benefit of the doubt).
-- Terry
WTF? Inflation lasted less than 10^-10 seconds and expanded the universe to something like basketball size. How could that make the universe younger than the 13.7 billion years that's the horizon?
Point 4 showed that homeopathic remedies are effective in vitro, on specific human white blood cells.
No chance for the placebo effect to come into play.
1977, it was called the Wow! signal.
2005, it would have been the WTF! OMG! LEET! signal.
bash$
No. If the planet didn't support life, you wouldn't be here to wonder about it. Don't get mixed up - the planet comes first, the people second. Humans didn't simply "appear" here and luck out that the planet supports life, rather the planet supports life, so humans came to exist on it.
G
I find it annoying that whenever science doesn't have an answer, a god is invoked. It happened with lightning (Zeus), now it's happening with fundamental physics. At least we've gotten somewhere (I hope)
I think math can solve this one.
The universe is 28 billion light years across. Check. It is 14 billion years old. Check. Heat cannot travel 28 billion light years in 14 billion years. Fine.
Doesn't that just mean it started in the middle, travelling 14 billion light years in all directions, over the course of 14 billion years, for a total end to end distance of 28 billion light years?
I must be missing something.
That's because using history and the scientific method you can figure out that most organised religions and conceptualisations of God are based on human-created systems of control.
I'm not saying there's no God. But if there is, there is no interaction in either direction between this universe and God. So if there is a God, it's completely irrelevant to the universe.
Maybe God wants us all to kill each other and covet our neighbours wives - we'd be the last to know...
The bottom line is that the understanding of our "reality" is so limited, that this list itself it's really the only thing that doesn't make sense. If a lab comes out saying that a phenomenon doesn't make sense then they should probably invest their funds on someone else...
No, it means Jesus carried that heat 14 billion light years. I mean come on, that one's obvious.
You wouldn't go into a swamp and expect it to be mosquito free would you?
Then neither should you read Slashdot without expecting to see at least a few rabid anti-whatever offtopic politically oriented comments. Slashdot is simply where these people breed.
Just shrug and "move on" as it were. Ha ha!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A few items are great, truly important problems. A few are dumb, not in the sense that they're bad science, but just that their importance is overhyped.
A few examples of each. Dark matter is an important problems. Seems like the real explanation, but we don't know what it is, although we know how it behaves. Dark energy is even more important, and more unknown. Good ones tagged there.
The horizon problem isn't so great. Why not hit on inflation directly, which also solves other problems as...problematic...as the horizon problem . Also the pioneer anomoly. There are a number of rather mundane explanations for it that should be tested before this issue rises to one of the top 13.
Still, fun stuff to think about. As a scientist, you get so caught up in details of your own research it is important to step back and look at the big picture every so often.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
What I find curious is that every time there is a gap in cosmology or evolution theory, some creationist jumps in and says "oh, look, it seems your theory does not explain this, so I guess god has something to do with it." Any serious scientist will tell you that for a theory to make sense, it needs to be falsifiable, which no religious pseudo-theory is. The gaps in our understanding of the cosmos, and in the theories about its creation thereof, simply show that it is a valid theory, and that more work needs to be done on it.
The reason the Big Bang theory is widely believed to be true is that it can explain and predict many astronomical phenomenons, so scientists are reluctant to throw it to the trash at the first opportunity. On the other hand, the belief that god created the Universe explains nothing, and cannot be used to make hypotheses and predictions in observations of the Universe. The fact that less and less people believe in the creation of the Universe by some god has nothing to do with fashion.
"1050" should be "10^50" I think, and no one pointed that out yet?
And "God" isn't exactly a testable hypothesis, is it? Science isn't about popularity, it is about what is testable.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
No, I wouldn't.
The last test I saw for a time-variable alpha was John Bahcall looking at the ratio of [O III] 4959 to 5007 emission in Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars, which found no change. The high-z absorption line studies by the Australian group failed to convince me anything was really going on. Shouldn't have been one of the 13.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
1. The entire universe is filled with matter. There cannot be an 'empty' region anywhere: ... Revisit the Michelson-Morley experiment. Think Heisenberg .. and try again ..
there will either be light, gravitation or
some kind of radiation at any point in the
universe.
2. Special Relativity: first assumption: Ether cannot be detected --- ?
3. Something that's been troubling me about blackholes: there are plenty radiation sources in the sky, any of this radiation that skims past a blackhole closely should be bent in all directions; so an observer should be able to see the same rad.source in at least two places: direct, and the 'bent'-position; now put in all those other rad.sources: my conclusion is that a blackhole should be the brightest, noisiest and most observable thing in the sky.
Why isn't it?
I don't find these issues to be unexplainable or unsupported in the least. The idea that these events are unexplainable "phenomena" is nothing more than a direct consequence of a limitation resulting from an individual's chosen belief system.
Where in the article did the word "unexplainable" come up?
Oh, it didn't? This was just a poor excuse to post some religious-looking stuff?
I make posts on religion all the time, but only when it comes up. Try it.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Placebo's are certainly a lot more effective then most people realize. I don't even bother with medicine when I'm sick anymore, I just have a few placebos and I'm fine!!
I stole this Sig
In other words, we are cells in some manner of body who experiences apotheosis under certain circumstances. Seclusion from other cells can be a factor (though not everything). Re-align your personal DNA to make your way of life (provided your way of life is not anti-life) okay. Reproduction in genes or philosophical DNA is an indication you've figured something significant out.
It is time that the BULLSHIT government anti-DRUG propaganda be put to rest. As in, killed. I am sick of this assault on the lives of my fellow cells.
Hey, have you heard about Placebo Domingo, Placido's younger brother? He looks just like his brother and gets great press, but he actually can't sing worth a damn.
Heh heh. Hoo, tough crowd tonight...
You see, my fundamental problem with religions in general is that they are based on faith.
So eventually, every structured argument ends with "because God made it that way!". Now how constructive is that.
And why would a perfect supreme being make an imperfect universe? Just to see what would happen?
And why, in all the entirety of the universe, would any being care anything about this tiny speck of dust on the ass-end of a rather non-descript galaxy?
Because it wanted to? Is this the same being that proclaims hatred and eternal damnation for homosexuals?
Is this the same God that people are proclaiming made marriage as a sacrement between a man and a woman? (Which, btw, is total horseshit. Marriage has always been, until recently, a property contract). Is this the same God that kills indiscriminatly across the globe?
Or do we have another almost as powerful, almost as all knowing, all-evil being in the universe and we just happen to get stuck in the cross-fire?
Or, are we seriously misunderstanding what good and evil in the universe is?
Sorry. After reading and seeing the horrors of modern day religions, somehow I just can't bring myself to believe that the universe is made of magic.
Any god that preaches hatred or discrimination is not a god. Only humans (and other higher primates) know how to hate. A real supreme being would be far above such trivial nuances of the human psyche.
~X~
~X~
Hogan's list of recommended reading on Astronomy, Cosmology and other subjects is here. I picked up Eric J. Lerner's and Tom van Flandern's books (The Big Bang Never Happened and Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, respectively), and they make for some fascinating reading.
Lerner, for example, proposes (or perhaps expands upon) a completely different set of theories for the formation of the universe in which plasma electrodynamics is one of the primary shapers and the universe is much older than suggested by the big bang theories. This theory eliminates the need for inflation, dark matter and energy, etc., and I think it's worth taking a serious look at.
Another interesting area that more people here may be familiar with is the research of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose most well know and controversial theory is that Venus was formed very recently and may have actually been thrown off by Jupiter. Some of Velikovsky's books are also listed on Hogan's site.
One of the things that I think is most important to realize about science is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO BELIEVE ANY OF IT! It's not religion; if something doesn't quite work, and there are other theories out there, we should be willing to consider them.
-podom
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
CIRCUMCISION. A pointless, destructive, and monstrously painful procedure. This is something to be expected from savage tribes of irrational beliefs, not from physicians in the world's richest country! More info, click the link in my sig.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Be careful when reading this article. Numbers that should be 10 to the n power are displayed as "10n". For example in the third point a result is given: 5x1019 electronVolts. This should be interpreted as 5x10^19 eV.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17-megabyte file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
That does not make sense!!!
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
It's very easy to explain, and it's not even necessarily a "secondary effect" (depending what you mean).
Your standard reductionist scientist assumes every sensation is ultimately chemical, as neurotransmitters or something else in the control chain fire and trigger signals that shout "pain". So the natural assumption, even without an experiment would be that the "placebo effect" is simply that your body produces either more or less of some chemical that causes or inhibits pain.
So it makes perfect sense that some other chemical can influence the whole chemical process. This is somewhat interesting (for getting closer to the chemical pathways involved) and somewhat depressing (because many of us like the "mind over matter" idea, and this is a counter example), but leading a list of "things that don't make sense" with this is super weak.
The system will ALWAYS be in the lowest possible energy state and so will snap from one state to another if the other has a lower energy state.
The idea here is that your super-atom is only stable at fantastically low temperatures. A gradual change would simply cause it to migrate back to how it was initially. A sharp enough change, though, may mean the nuclei can't move apart fast enough, that just doing that would NOT be the lowest energy state for the system.
Strictly speaking, this would be cold-and-hot fusion, as it relies on creating an abnormally high density of matter, and then making that matter so violently unstable that fusion is the preferred way to reduce the energy state.
This is not something you could do in a test-tube. Hell, it's hard enough making an Einstein-Bose Concentrate. It's not as if you can buy them at Wal-Marts! Finding a way to inject enough energy to then initiate fusion would also be fantastically hard.
On the other hand, EBCs are highly compact, compared to plasmas, and the energy level within the resulting system would be extremely even. It may offer a useful device for initiating regular fusion reactions.
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)
The mathematical paradox where .99999999... equals 1
using the pronoun 'she' is flamebait
Here is the URL to the Bahcall paper: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0301507
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
You can read about it here:
p at hytrans.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeo
Turns out that experiment failed when the testing was done in a blind fashion
How this article was actually written two days in the future.
#11 - the 'WOW' signal? Last I heard, the WOW signal was the first (accidental) detection of the RF beam that comes off a pulsar.
#13 - Superconductors were explained 40 years ago? Sorry - BCS only works on type-1 superconductors.
Besides that, I think that some of the wierd stuff we observe (Pioneer acceleration, tetraneutrons, flatness & accelerating expansion of the universe, etc) implies that there's something big that we're missing. Sort of like how the effect of time/mass dialation is almost undectable and Newtonian predictions highly accurate until you get to a measurable fraction of lightspeed, it's like our current theories are still mostly in the part where missing terms in the equation are near-zero... but we're starting to leave that part. Think of how Y = X^2 / (X - 1) looks like a flat line until you approach X = 1.
Really, though, would you want a partner like that?
I had one once, and it was awful -- she was so convinced that she was useless and constantly putting herself down. I felt really sorry for her because somewhere along the line she'd been seriously messed up, but I also wouldn't wish her on anyone. In any case it lasted for a matter of weeks before I dumped her (or she interpreted it that way) because I just couldn't stand it any more.
The way that she acted a lot of the time suggested that she was expecting to be beaten for some of the things she did, no matter how much I constantly told her that there was nothing wrong and I wasn't going to treat her like that. She never actually listened to me, and all the time she was assuming I was someone I wasn't. Honestly, it wasn't until I'd met her that I understood how it's possible that some women put up with that kind of crap from guys. She was practically inviting it, and with someone else she would've gotten it. (No, I didn't oblige.)
It took me a while to get over that, but my current girlfriend, who took a while to find, is very assertive. If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away, and I do the same for her. It's a whole lot better.
Not long ago (in 2002), there was a very good, very scientific test done by Horizon on the BBC using the very same technique.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2512105.stm
It seems that part of the problem in the Belfast findings may be due to the fact that the cells that had a reaction were manually counted, possibly introducting a bias known as "the experimenter effect", of which little is really known apart from the fact that it exists (a bit like the placebo effect).
There is little doubt that the experimenter acted in good faith, but the fact was that the very controlled experiment commissioned by the Horizon (involving the Royal Society and a number of specialists in various relevant fields) ended up showing a statistical no-greater-than-chance result.
Now, before you say "how can you trust a TV show", I'll say that Horizon is no ordinary TV show. It's probably the best, most balanced and scientific accurate show ever to grace the screen. Those who are lucky enough to be able to watch it will probably agree.
There is another large scale experiment being done at the moment on homeopathy, invoving both homeopaths, scientists and people like James Randi.
Randi predicted that the experiment will show no more than we already know today, that homeopathy is not worth much as a medical practice, but that most believer will be undeterred by any amount of evidence.
The real question to test a practitionner of alternative medecine is to ask: what would it take you to admit that it doesn't work?
For many, nothing will.
But it's worth investigating anyway, I'm ready to consider that there is some benefit to it if tangible, undisputable proof was found. It would certainly help to use homeopathy if its field of action -if there is any- was actually well known, and if it is doing better there than other types of medecine. http://www.homeowatch.org/
Another thing that doesn't make sense.
"Selling is legal and f*cking is legal. Why isn't selling f*cking legal? Why is it illegal to sell something that it's perfectly legal to give away?" - George Carlin
The markup on that page uses for superscripts. But it's supposed to be . The result is we read things like inflation blowing up the universe by "a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds". That's supposed to be a factor of 10 to the 50th power in 10 to the -33rd power seconds. It's surprising to see a professional outfit like New Scientist making such an important and fundamental error.
Or is it a problem in my browser? Are they doing something so that <UP> should be treated as a synonym for <SUP>, and Firefox isn't handling it right?
How does it display for other people?
The two that are on my mind right now are the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN, and appointing the master planner of the Iraq fiasco to the World Bank.
That's incredible! The same two issues were on The Daily Show the past two days. What are the odds?!
Help prevent the slashdot effect; stop reading the articles.
we still dont know if 2pac is dead or alive, so how the hell are we gonna know if Tetraneutrons are possible
1. A wookie living on Endor.
That does not make sense!
Unless you're a subscriber, in which case you'll already have a clever/witty pre-typed comment ready by the time the story goes live. Then it's just a matter of copy-pasting and waiting for the required 20 seconds before clicking 'Submit'. After that, it's all fun and games.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Reading through this thread, although no one may see this being posted so late in Slashdot time (First post! Hell yeah!), I find it interesting amid all the Intelligent Design/Complete Randomness and current science is great/bullshit debates (some of which are quite good, although I say that as an educated layperson), we seem to be missing something.
Science, folks, is really just a way of thinking about the world. It is ONE way of thinking about the world. You can certainly make a very good argument for why it is a better way of looking at the world than say, religion, or astrology, or mysticism, or anything else, but we need to understand science does not offer Truths any more than any other perspective. You can also make an argument, often just as good, for why any other perspective is more "true" than science. Science is the Western World's current High Truth Giver, which every culture seems to need in one form or another. We assume that the ideas that science gives us are "facts," but they're really not in the way we think of facts as irrefutable and immutable; facts are nothing more than a given culture's agreed upon foundations at a given time. 500 years ago Western Culture had a very different set of foundations (but still similar, certainly). 500 years from now, the foundations the Western World's world view will be built on (assuming the Western World still exists in any sense) will be very different from what we think now. In the early days of modern empirical science, there were many who argued for different sorts of empirical science, and many of their ideas are still valid criticisms (Goethe is a good example of this, although his actual scientific ideas are rather silly now; a good critic doesn't necessarily have to be a good creator).
This article really points out nothing more than the fact that our current understanding of the world is limited. It will ALWAYS be limited. When scientists of any group come across empirical evidence that points to "embarrassing holes" in our current theory and knowledge of the world, it is the universe's way (whether you consider the universe to be a cold flux of energies or a grand design by some conscious maker doesn't matter here) of reminding us that it is far more complicated than our current theories account for. If you look at Western Thought, from a certain perspective, it is nothing more than a continuously more and more complex "understanding" of the universe. If the universe is infinitely complicated, then there is no "absolute" knowledge, only an infinite recession of models and theories and perspectives, none of which are ever any closer to an Absolute Truth than any other, only, perhaps, more functional in their explanations of the empirical evidence we encounter.
So when we come across empirical evidence that suggests that our current thinking is limited, massively flawed or just flat out wrong, we shouldn't be looking to previous models and saying "ha ha, we were right all along!" but instead trying to develop the next perspective. That may be more spiritual than our current one, or less, or something entirely new and outside our current thinking, but either way we should use our always present lapses in knowledge to drive us forward, not backward.
Yeah, you are missing the key point. The heat is the same everywhere. If the heat came from the big bang it should be hot in the middle, and cooler toward the edges where the universe has expanded.
I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.
It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...
Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.
The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.
Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.
Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.
Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)
Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
I'm no expert on getting falling-down drunk, but doesn't vodka have a very definite and unavoidable (even if, like me, you wish to) flavor? I thought that flinch you mentioned was not due to alcohol content, but to awful flavor. (It is with me, anyway.) Do a drunk's senses get so suppressed that even this flavor is indiscernable from water?
Or do some people just not taste it?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Get these two and get out there. Leave the rest to the girls :)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN
You mean like the old UN ambassador who pissed on the UN when it needed pissing on, Daniel Patrick Moynihan? I certainly hope so.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think "no bearing" is a little harsh. The Declaration of Independence is the mission statement on which the country was founded. It contains a rejection of the divine right of kings, and recognition that rights are inherent in humans, not handed down from the government. No, it's not a document with the force of law, but it certainly stated a number of principles on which our law is based. It certainly doesn't have "no bearing" on that law.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
how come MS Windows did not make it. ;)
...and heroin doesn't?
You post is inaccurate because:
* It invokes The "God of the Gaps" Argument.
This argument has the form:
* There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
* Therefore, the things in this gap are best explained as acts of God.
This is not based in logic. It is simply a statement of pessimism about the future progress of science.
Down through the centuries, science has eliminated a great many of its gaps. People who had used the Gap argument were embarrassed, since their God shrank in power with each new scientific advance. For example, after the work of Galileo and Newton, it was no longer thought that angels pushed the planets across the heavens.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Yeah, possibly, or it could be he's just been, you know, READING THE NEWS. Jesus fucking Christ.
You need to incorporate the product of the following conditions:
Patient's certainty:
Uncertain
Certain and correct
Certain and incorrect
Getting the drug:
Yes
No
This would leave us with the following groups:
Not sure and recieving drug
Not sure and not recieving drug
Certain of recieving drug and recieving drug
Certain of not recieving drug and not recieving drug
Certain of not recieving drug and recieving drug
Certain of recieving drug and not recieving drug
Then you need many replicates, include all the interactions in your ANOVA (i.e. do it the simple, correct way with none of the monkeying around that bad statisticians will prescribe), and report the results that pass Ficher's LSD (the most powerful detector of significant difference), and possibly also include results passing more stringent significance tests.
Then we will have the answer. Wait 4 years for people to do it with other drugs and make more complicated expirements with more degrees of freedom and it will be canon.
And yes, you will have to LIE to and DECIEVE your patients. This is considered unethical, so this simple basic expirement will never be done in the "developed" world. There can be no waiver of "you may or may not recieve medication" because if introduced it would place everyone in the group "Uncertain." If the patients have a bias towards believing that a medical experiment does not medicate as stated then the patients must not know that they are participating in the experiment.
Am seeink it clearly now -you are not understandink- It's all relative. What you are perceivink depend on where are you lookink from.
AM NOT KIDDINK!!!
Seriously
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
This one has me so puzzled I'm sure I won't even understand someone's kind effort at an explanation. Wouldn't one expect the horizon edges to be exactly twice the distance from the center? I mean the BigBang happens and spreads out in all directions. 14 billion years later the edges are 28 billion light years apart--14 light years along one radius and 14 along the other. What am I missing?
Wait a second! Maybe I solved it! Stoopid fizzassits.
the DOE is increasing the spending on Cold Fusion reseach. From what I understand it is a non-trivial amount of increase, esp. considering that congress is in a cutting mode.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
C'mon, almost every group of kids has a similar story, sometimes involving worse :P
It wasn't a well run UN war like Korea, Vietnam or Yugoslavia.
t
I must be drunk cause that link took me a hell of a long time to get right.
Happy st pats11!
unless we only see part of the edges. Everybody seems to think that we are looking at a flat surface. I would not be surprised to one day find evidence that the universe is actually a sphere or some other interesting shape. That is the big bang is not where we think it occured, but is much further out there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Please leave and go somewhere else where your hate-filled vomit is appreciated. Try your local collection of hatefilled racists called a church.
> Occam's razor
Occam's razor states that if someone posts racist hatefilled garbage like yours, then the most obvious reason is that...gasp...you're a hateful racist.
- written by one of those little brown guys that your people so love to kill and torture
John Baez, quantum gravity reseacher have an exellent list on his site of Open questions in Physics
It includes:
sonoluminescence - plasma core in the bubbles of liquid
high temperature superconductivity
turbulence and Navier-Stokes equations -mathematic of chaos
what is meant by a "measurement" in quantum mechanics? Does "wavefunction collapse" actually happen as a physical process ?
What happened at or before the Big Bang?
Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?
dark energy
dark matter
The Horizon Problem: why is the Universe almost, but not quite, homogeneous on the very largest distance scales
When were the first stars formed, and what were they like
Is the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis true? Roughly, for generic collapsing isolated gravitational systems are the singularities that might develop guaranteed to be hidden beyond a smooth event horizon?
Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical between left and right, future and past, and between matter and antimatter?
Why is there more matter than antimatter, at least around here?
Is there really a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics?
Why do the particles have the precise masses they do? Or is this an unanswerable question?
Are there important aspects of the Universe that can only be understood using the Anthropic Principle?
The Big Question(TM)
This last question sits on the fence between cosmology and particle physics:
* How can we merge quantum theory and general relativity to create a quantum theory of gravity? How can we test this theory?
David DeAngelo is the man.
as a doctor working in the field of substance misuse i need to clarify this:
Methadone does come in an injectable form but the oral preparation is safer in terms of number of fatal overdoses
Methadone also doesn't give people the euphoria that heroin gives them.
Some people develope an addiction to heroin specifically becoause they get addicted to the euphoria, others develop their habit because they don't like the withdrawal effects. This second group tend to achieve maintenance and reduction of the chaos in their lives on methadone and once they have achieved the necessary psychological and social infrastructure necessary to withdraw then they can have their doseage reduced to zero. Those who seek the euphoric affect tend to use methadone to remove the withdrawl effects but continue to use illicit drugs on top of this in order to achive their high. This group may well be able to have their addiction controlled more successfully with injectable diamorphine (heroin). Various european countries are exploring this option and 2 pilot projects have been set up in the UK in order to research this very point. Once the results of these have been audited then policy as a whole will change. Almost all substance misusing people who approach drug dependency services do so with the aim of coming off drugs but it has to be done in a safe and controlled manner to attempt to try and put mechanisms in place for them to address the reasons why they became addicted in the first place.
That shit about homeopathy doesn't belong in New Scientist.. What, are the molecules of the water I drink *also* full of the effects of everything else they've ever come in contact with? I'd hate to think about the 'effects' of *any* water that wasn't newly created out of hydrogen and oxygen.
Even more incredibly, the same two issues were ALL OVER THE NEWS the last week!
As regards your off-topic content, it is unclear whether you are mumbling about Iraq or Afghanistan, though my original was clearly referring to Iraq. I remind you that my focus is on the increasing irrelevance of scientific truth.
In this particular case, the "truth" when Wolfowitz planned the anti-Saddam war was that there there were no WMDs. That was just the politically convenient justification for Dubya's essentially unprovoked invasion of a rather annoying, but basically harmless country. Of course, as a good little Bushevik, you'd prefer to forget all about that silly history stuff, right? Thank you again for making my point. (But are you actually worth a Foe slot?)
Anyway, I simply see it as a cost-benefit thing, which is quite relevant to Wolfie's proposed new role as a banker. Iraq consumed many American lives and lots of American dollars. I think the extra Iraqi deaths should be counted, too (but that's debatable--even though he wasn't doing much killing lately, it's quite possible that Saddam could have gone out with a messy bang at any time).
That's the debit side that Wolfie should have been considering as the main planner of the invasion. The asset side is still *ZERO*, but none of the likely outcomes look very likely to be very "profitable" for America or liable to offset America's investment. Civil war is still quite likely, but a "freely elected" fanatical Islamic state allied with Iran could be worse. A new Iraqi dictator is also quite plausible. We won't actually find out until after our troops leave--but the meter will continue ticking until then. Ignoring truth is often expensive.
Truth? We should have a contest between the dead people and the Busheviks to see who cares less.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
| v
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
E has banned in the 90's non?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
You may have guessed it, the findings were conclusively showing that there is no life on Earth, or at least in Kazakhstan (and no, they didn't use a previous and still hot nuke test site or something - the area being a steppe, the soil is even covered with higher life forms, i.e. herbs&bugs aplenty).
From the article:
;)
1 The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
What do you mean do NOT try this at home? Oh... yeah... I see now. You are absolutetly right, I would also much rather stick with the morphine.
On an unrelated note, ever had a parent dying of cancer or something similar? Ever noticed how amusing it can be to talk to them while they are on morphine? Well, apart from the sad parts then. My mother died a week ago or so, and the last time I met her I couldnt stop laughing.
Glad she wasnt on saline.
This way we got a happy last meeting.
Yay for drugs!
Joan Baez doesn't know shit about physics. Or music.
1) Placebo effect:
Give someone enough morphine, and they'll believe anything.
2) The Horizon problem:
Look out of your bedroom window. Now look out of your living room window. What makes you think that space is the same in all directions?
3) Ultra-Energetic Cosmic Rays
See above
4) Belfast Homeopathy Results
This is not news and, although difficult to explain convincingly, has been exploited by every distiller, bottler, barkeep and brewer since the dawn of time.
5) Dark Matter
Admit it, gravitons have mass.
6) Viking's Methane
Iffy methodology. As anyone who has travelled in an elevator knows, methane is spontaneously generated in enclosed spaces without biological intervention.
7) Tetraneutrons
The improbable always outweighs the impossible.
8) The Pioneer Anomaly
Looks suspiciously similar to the feet/metres anomaly.
9) Dark Energy
See (3)
10) The Kuiper Cliff
What doesn't make sense?
11) The Wow Signal
Pirate radio. OK, it may be alien, but it's still just a nuisance.
12) Not-so constant constants
Alpha isn't really a constant. It's a mixture of other constants. Mix them to taste and stop bellyaching.
13) Cold Fusion
No, it doesn't make sense. Nor does the Closet Monster. Maybe they have something in common.
"That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old". Its been a while since I did any serious maths, but surely we are midway between the horizons, 14 Billion light years to each. So heat could exppand from this point to each horizon in 14 billion years no problem??
'Say you get in a car accident and you've been smoking pot... You're only going four miles an hour!
EEEEEEEEEEeeeeehhr. BOOM.
"Shit... we hit something."
"Forgot to open the garage door, man."
"We've gotta get the garage door open so Dominos knows we're home!"'
Classic.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
But there isn't room in this field to post the answers.
You've probably figured it out already too anyway.
Now I don't drink at all nowadays, but had my years of working hard at becoming an alcoholic in high school and early university. (Also shows that just working hard at something doesn't mean you'll actually achieve it;)
Ah, those were the times. Waking up with memories of crawling for what seemed like 5 miles towards a bottle of booze, and that somehow it was always to the left. Makes one really think about non-Euclidian space, I'll tell ya.
And I'm not even getting into how much you learn about debugging the next day after you've programmed assembly while dead-drunk. It's quite the education.
Anyway, I can tell you first hand that booze takes a while to affect you. You can already have enough alcohol in you to pass out, and it will take some time for that to happen.
For starters, unless you were giving him a vodka IV (which would have been lethal), there's a helluva lot of difference between having the alcohol in your stomach and having the alcohol in your blood.
So my take is that the guy already had enough vodka in him before you even brought the water. Especially if he couldn't tell the difference between vodka and water. So well, all you describe there is merely that it took a bit of time for it to get into his blood stream.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeh makes sense to me tho I take the mid road and I t still don't get me much more... I was born to be bad but my mom made me nice, fuck her!!!
I was listening to JJJ the other day and Doctor Karl was talking about placebos. He mentioned that a patent had come in to the hospital in which he was working in great pain...
/.ers would have no clue about, but as if you believe that the show is broadcast world wide???
Very interesting.
Yes very interesting.
That would have to have been a microsoft patent no less?
But the funnier part is that you talk of a radio show and a local personality that the vast majority of
sorry you might be a doctor but have you ever taken methadone. obviously not, cause let me tell you you certainly experience euphoria from methadone. fricken oath, in fact if you dont have a particular habit (at the time, say you havent used anything for several months) then methadone gives a huge amount of euphoria. only once you have a huge tollerance and you are constantly disphoric and the amount you are given is not comensurablly increased will you not get euphoria from methadone.... hmmm just like heroin... or anyother opioids also i just dont agree that giving iv heroin is doing anybody a favour. how about buperenorphine (sp?) .. this is really cool cause you dont really develope a tolerance. so you still get euphoria day after day.... um... shush dont tell anyone.. what was i saying.. oh yeah sure these drugs arnt making me euphoric uuuh... right.. move right along nothing to see here.
there was recently an 'observation' of dark matter so it does seem to be 'localised stuff' rather than just a calculation error due to variable c.
Wow, they just let anyone moderate these days. How is the parent post flamebait? Who was I inciting? Most people who crack on the dupes/day old stories get modded up as funny. Maybe you guys who modded me down need a sense of humor ;).
Despite conventional wisdom, I've discovered you can blame a guy for trying. It's called "attempted murder".
Women...
Can someone answer the question as to how prevalent hydrocarbons are in our universe? I'm interested in knowing if the existence of methane on Mars supports a theory that I've heard regarding the origin of hydrocarbons on earth. The theory goes that many natural hydrocarbons were trapped in the earth as the planet formed and that oil is not a product of decaying animals but rather is a product of chemical reactions from these natural hydrocarbons. Proponents say that, for one thing, there's just too much oil and gas to have been formed from fossils.
If there's methane on Mars, but no life on Mars, then could it just be the product of hydrocarbons that naturally fill the universe? Can anyone answer the question as to how much hydrocarbon is naturally found in the universe as a whole?
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus began to fire less often when the saline was given..
How is the saline solution a placebo? Their description of it seems to contradict the definition of one. In my opinion, a placebo in this case would have been plain water.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury. This is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a wookie from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about that; that does not make sense. Why would a wookie, an 8 foot tall wookie, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall ewoks? That does not make sense! But more importantly, you have to ask yourself, 'what does that have to do with this case?' Nothing. Ladies and Gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case. It does not make sense!"
~Johnnie Cochran on South Park
positive reinforcement.
Why do people gamble even though they loose all their money? Because gambling dens use positive reinforcement, they keep telling you you are going to win.
Why to people go to church every Sunday even though the only proof that God may exists is a 2000 year old book of stories? positive reinforcement....
Why don't people pop down the local gun shop and take out their local representative when they've just lost their job, don't get benefits and have huge medical bills? positive reinforcement, a big smile and let the people know your always right.
It took a few hundred years for people to pick up the gun against slavery, and then that was lead by the politicians, the people could have done it any day they wanted, just like the people could have overturned the Saddam any day they wanted.
That's part of the reason why are all governments religious.
The big question is, do the politicians believe their own hype or not?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Whether the brain has any "pain receptors" is not the issue. There is no pain unless the brain interprets the signal coming from the neuron as such. Just like there is no sight unless the brain interprets the signal from the optic nerve properly.
There are 3 ways to achieve pain inhibition
1. Stop hitting yourself with the tack hammer, good first step.
2. Inhibit the pain signals from being generated at the nerve ending.
3. Inhibit the brain from properly interpreting the nerve signals as pain.
So, in theory, if the brain does not want to feel pain (interpret signals from sensory neurons as pain) it does not have to. The conscious brain ignores a tremendous percentage of the sensory input it recieves.
Therefore, it is easy to understand how you can run for your life from a battlefield and only later find out you broke your foot, Your brain did a risk assessment, knew getting shot in the head was worse than walking with a limp, so it ignored the damage to the foot for a while.
On a final note, why wasn't Darwin's black box on there? Oh wait that's right, to rationally thinking, intelligent people, evolution makes perfect sense.
That's funny because a lot of people think Brian Molko from Placebo can't sing either (I disagree).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Brittney Spears' career.
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
Hmm... kidney stones, drink lots of water.... Inject patient with watery solution....hmmm
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Let's add this to the list: Given that when we look back at the distant cosmos, where we are looking back in time, and see energy/light arriving from such a long ago time, how come we got here first, in order to see the approaching light, which started its journey many billions of years before earth's creation?
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
that was dark normal matter you idiot. not dark exotic matter which still should make up for 95% of the dark matter
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
1. To start with the easy part, a lot of the tribal "magic" wasn't really psycho-somatic at all. It involved also poisoning the bugger, just to be on the safe side that the curse works. E.g., some tribes put fine sharp shards or splinters in the food of the "cursed". Which then eventually died. Woohoo, the magic worked.
There were some actual anthropology studies on that topic, after the media had done their sensationalist bullshit number of showing it all as either para-normal or psycho-somatic. Invariably the actual studies never found any evidence of anything being purely psycho-somatic there. Just plain old murder and propaganda.
2. There's a big difference between altering someone's perception of the world (e.g., of pain), and actual healing. Getting someone to subjectively (think they) feel better via social interaction or placebo effects, now that exists, I won't argue with you there. But that usually doesn't mean actual healing: whatever actual damage was there, will still be there.
3. A lot of the psycho-somatic healing, as opposed to just altering someone's perception of pain, is just bullshit and selective confirmation.
Fact is that the human body can recover by itself from the vast majority of illnesses. We are a _very_ robust machine. Things that are (mildly) poisonous to animals, are spices or flavour stuff to us. (E.g., if you were a dog, chocolate would be mildly toxic to you.) Viruses or bacteria that are lethal to animals are a minor annoyance to us. (E.g., mange is lethal for dogs and _the_ biggest mortality factor in wolves, but it's a mild flu to humans.)
Even medicine most often doesn't just outright kill the bacteria in you, and even less so in the case of viruses. Concentrations which would outright solve a disease by themselves, would cause massive damage to your own cells too. Most medicine just gives the virus or bacteria a bit of a hard time while your own immune system does most of the actual work.
This is why faith healing, homeopathy, and all the other bullshit can claim to have results: because those people would have healed anyway. Maybe faster with real medical care, maybe with less complications or lasting damage, but they healed with bullshit instead anyway. And they would have healed without the bullshit too.
It's not really psycho-somatic, it's just that you naturally heal anyway.
4. Social factors do work in another perverse way, though and that is by making people _pretend_ to be healed, if they get the idea that their social recognition and standing depends on that.
If you leave in a very religious community, and you're put in a "Jesus will heal you if you REALLY believe in Him" kind of situation, you have a damn good incentive to at least pretend to be healed. Because otherwise, hey, you're an unbeliever.
5. That goes double when your _own_ self-respect and set of beliefs depends on something working. In that case you won't just pretend as such, you'll start actually convincing yourself that it worked.
E.g., in the same situation as above if that person's own self-respect or view of the world depends on him being a proper faithful follower of Jesus, he'll try hard to convince himself that he's really healed. "No, really, it hurts a lot less when I walk. *ouch*"
But again, just metally blocking a signal doesn't really make its _cause_ go away. Same as wearing sun glasses doesn't make the sun actually become darker.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They forgot to add "slashdot moderators" to the list!
><////>
I saw a progam on placebos and they talked about people who were mistakenly told they had cancer, or that their cancer had returned, and the people died in just a few weeks or a couple of months. And after they died, an autopsy revealed that the doctor was wrong about the cancer coming back.
On the same show, they talked about people being given fake chemo treatments. After the "treatments," the patients would throw up, and in a couple of days their hair started to fall out!
The show was on the discovery health channel. Don't know how accurate it was, but it was so good I went to their web site trying to get a copy of it...but it wasn't offered.
Ron Paul
Really, it's not insightful--it's not orginal thought. You've seen this kind of simplistic liberal pouting on every /. post since the year 2000.
It's not funny. Even if a post is not original thought it can still be funny--unless it's a repeat of infinite previous gripes. Then it's just tired.
...asked my Physics teacher about the "Horizon Problem" a while back and he wouldn't know. Now I know why - nobody does!
Not on your computer!!!
As for the line about how using an anti-morphine substance removed the ability of the placebo to relieve pain, I remember hearing about something like that in a book on self-hypnosis. The chemical works there too. (The anecdote was a bit chilling though... basically they invited an avowed hypnotist to show his pain-blocking ability, let him get into his trance, then injected the morphine blocking material. Instant screaming hypnotist.) It leads to that whole question as to whether pain-killers really relieve pain, or if they just convince the body not to notice the pain.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
...because it's all part of the terrible secret of space!
PAK CHOOIE UNF
I've been addicted to placebo's for years, I'm not worried about quitting because it won't make a difference anyway.
Well here I have some insight. While nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light there is NOTHING that prevents SPACE ITSELF from expanding faster than the speed of light! The fact is that the big bang created not only all the matter and energy in our universe, it also created the UNIVERSE itself! Imagine the universe as a big container that is growing larger by the microsecond, and everything that exists is INSIDE this container. Now the container may be expanding at a rate faster than light, which gives the illusion that any two objects IN the container are moving apart from each other faster than light, but they are NOT. What this means is that while the universe may be only 15 billion years old, the most distant point visable from earth could be MORE THAN 15 BILLION LIGHT YEARS away! This does NOT contradict special relativity!
(BTW the current issue of Scientific American has an article explaining this).
Does anyone remember hearing the French guy at the UN security council, Villepain, saying that that WMD evidence wasn't convincing? Remember how those dastardly French folks were saying that going to war was precipitate, and that Bush was "following the logic of war" rather than exhausting the inspections regime -- which turns out to have worked, gutting Saddam H's weapons programs?
Do you remember how Colin Powell had to go before the security council and give a big presentation about all the rock solid evidence we said we had -- to convince the world? Sound familiar? Do you maybe recall how he later had to recant that testimony and apologize to the world for it? Is any of this ringing a bell? If intelligence "for all over the world" (yeesh) said this, why were Bush and company finding it necessary to go to those measures?
Fox News is not the only source of information about world opinion. You might want to look into a few other propaganda spigots, at the very least.
Most of the stuff was removed days before and while multi-nationalal (sic) troops where attempting to secure them.
This is my very favorite argument made by dipshits (excuse me) who try to cling to those pre-war arguments. Gee, um, if the war resulted in huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction disappearing from where we supposedly knew they were, and if they're now in Syria or within Iraq's borders in a situation where insurgents are basically able to move at will within a "weak state" -- then doesn't that mean the entire war was a colossal failure at accomplishing its professed goals??? Because I don't remember Bush and his loyalist cadre of junta leaders saying they wanted to scatter the WMDs to the terrorist winds... Do you?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The problem with medical doctors (and Wikipedia) is that they both believe in a model of "dis-ease" - born in the 16th century. Today there are other models of "dis-ease". Dr Lewis Mehl Madronna's model indicates that "we make ourselves ill - we can make ourselves better"- if we want to. At the same, "evidence -based" medicine tells us that most screening and diagnostics tests are not valid - most "treatments" that "trained" ("Jump Spot Jump") doctors use (including perscriptions) don't work! So it's not too surprising to find out that the mind/body can heal itself (when it wants to!).
- It only happened once (WOW signal, Viking methane, placebo trial).
- It just doesnt make sense (homeopathy, placebo).
- The original paper is riddled with ludicrous errors (enough radiation to kill the experimenters, in the cold fusion paper).
- The effects are sub-sub-subminiscule (cosmic ray fraction, Alpha shift, Pioneer acceleration).
- The effects are easily explained (cold fusion is likely to be a well-known palladium reaction, Wow signal is ubiquitous heterodyning).
And those are just the ones a disinterested dweeb like me can pick out. How many of the others are easily refuted by someone that knows a bit about astronomy?But... but...
Oh, wait. You're trolling! I've heard about this!
*backs away slowly*
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Price: U.S. $ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
To take it or to drop it?.
open4free ©
In 1991 an ultra high energetic particle was observed in Utah. It had so much energy in fact (travelling extremely close to the speed of light) that the particle, a single proton, had as much energy as a brick falling on your toe or a fastball travelling at 55mph.
The called the particle the Oh-My-God particle. Read a fun account on it here
That 'truth' is under attack is certain. But your implication above is nonsense. The reality is people of faith have a far greater hold on, and interest in, truth than those who do not believe God. Science as we know it came from men of faith, and without faith filled men, and women, science would not exist. But people opposed to faith are also opposed to truth when that challanges their 'beliefs'.
The answer to all of these questions is obvious: Jesus did it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm not sure which of the responses to reply to.. at first, I was a bit offended that my post was modded Troll, as I didn't intend my post as trolling or flamebait. Seeing the replies, however, I think I myself would mod my parent post as flamebait! Yikes -- that'll teach me to consider my audience I guess!
Anyway, many of the replies to mine state something like, "You're trying to use God to fill in scientific gaps! No fair, that's faith! Unprovable! Non-scientific! You can't do that!".
But my post wasn't simply trying to state that I believe God is the answer to Inflation and that scientists shouldn't even attempt to figure out the physical mechanics of it, 'cuz "God did it!".
What I found ironic in the article is that the Inflation hypothesis points quite directly to a powerful phenomenon capable of violating our laws of physics, and yet no-one mention the obvious truth that "sheesh, if this theory's right, the only thing that can currently explain such a thing would be God's direct action!"
There's no argument there, that's not flamebait or trolling, it's simply true! The scientists themselves are the ones saying, "this is completely impossible by the known laws of the universe", which is the same as saying, "The only way to explain this currently is by God's hand". I was only noting that they chose the former statement, and that that's the "in" thing these days, even if the scientist him/herself believes in God.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away...
Run.
Very fast.
Do not look back.
There has been some question, with a small but growing group of scientists who believe that C may in fact be slowing down. And possibly has been doing so on a declining exponential curve.
I find that if such were true, it'd also resolve the question of the uniformity of heat mentioned as an earlier problem.
Well, I'd say that makes the current administration's actions toward its "detainees" a violation of everything the country was supposed to stand for, wouldn't you?
... all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed .
But then again, ignorance seems to be pretty rampant, enough so that Justice Scalia can call the Ten Commandments "a symbol that government derives its authority from God" and not get publically pimp-slapped for it.
'Cause if we go back to the Declaration, it stated that
Scalia, who I'm sure knows better, can get away with this crap because of widespread ignorance. Why the ignorance? I couldn't tell you. But I tell you that this country is based on consent of the governed and preservation of their rights---and an administration that forgets that is a disgrace to the nation.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think God is more creative than that, I wouldn't doubt it if the universe was a mobius. So that the far end we see to our left is actually connected to our right.
Just seems more like God's style to me...
*shrug*
If the big bang happened at the center of the universe, and matter was emitted from it in all directions, then whats the problem? Matter travelled for 14 billion light years in one direction, and simultaneously other matter travelled for 14 billion light years in the opposite direction. So the universe should be 28 billion light years from end to end. Obviously i'm not a physicist, but what am I missing here?
Do you have to be -convinced- that this is not placebo?
Say, I prepare 50 doses of some kind of drug. (Not morphine, or nothing addictive, I don't want to become addict). I replace a random one with placebo, in such a way that I won't find out which one until after I finish the experiment. (say, mark the vial with UV ink). Then each day I take the drug, mark the empty vial with the date and write down perceived result. By the end of the experiment I know I have taken the placebo once, but every day I have strong reasons to believe (chance 49 in 50) it's the true drug I take that day.
Then just see which vial contained the placebo and match against the notes from that day?
HOW convinced do I have to be? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
You are assuming cooling at 4 degrees K in space works the same as at room temperature, does it really?
Just curious but why do you believe god exists?
Personally I believe in evolution because there's observable evidence to support it, there's no observable evidence of any supreme power merely a lack of evidence for scientific explanation. When a scientist says "hmm, this goes against all known laws of the universe" it's usually an overstatement and it only if fact doesn't fit with a theory or two. To use this to infer that it was god's work is a leap of faith. Perhaps you're inclined that way. Maybe it is possible that there is some supreme being, but there is no observable evidence that can be directly linked to such a thing. To link a relatively obscure problem in theoretical physics to the existence of a god does make me think you are indeed a troll, particularly the statement "the obvious truth that "sheesh, if this theory's right, the only thing that can currently explain such a thing would be God's direct action!"
"
How is ironic? The existence of a god violates our laws of physics, it is a two step leap from the observation that the phenomenon breaks laws of physics -
1. Oooh, this doesn't fit known theory.
2. It's obvious it must be the work of God
I expect there have been scientific studies on the existence of God I would be interested in the tests and any results, particularly on "How do you test such a thing when the arguments used by believers are so abstract?"
Who said He did?
How about: Because of His love for us? The entire Bible declares God's love for man. If that were not true, nothing in the Bible would make sense.
Nowhere will you find hatred declared by God for homosexuals, or any sinner. But we have a choice to make: repent of our sins and accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, or wave our fists in God's face. Are people going to hell? Most certainly. Why? Because they wish to. God is not the evil one here when someone refuses to repent from their sinful ways and accept Christ's death on the cross as payment for the debt they owe.
Sorry, but it is you that is talking total BS. God very clearly did implement marriage in Genesis, and it did not start as a property contract. He made it totally clear that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Because He is the Creator, He alone gets to set the rules.
Huh? Your bias is showing. God has never indiscriminately killed. Man has, however, many times over: WW I, WW II, etc.
Who is stuck in any crossfire? While Satan exists and does work in this world, man is fully capable of total depravity all by himself. Human nature is basically selfish and evil.
Agreed. God, who is revelled to us through His creation and His written word, does not preach hatred, or discrimination. But that is not the same as not declaring sin as unacceptable and the sinner condemned to hell if he/she refuses to repent and accept Christ as their Lord and Savior.
Now let me start off by saying I do *NOT* believe in dowsing. One of the leading theories by dowsing enthusiasts (I can't use the word practitioner) is that large, flowing bodies of water underground may have some effect on people, including inducing arm muscle reactions that move the little rods they carry. Or something like that. Whatever. The key was very large amounts of water worth drilling a well to get at.
An experiment by Randi buried PVC pipes underground and challenged dowsers to find the pipes. Well, how does 3/4" PVC tubes with water mimic a large underground water source? It was just a really piss poor experiment. Yeah, I suppose a proper test would involves burying a large tank of water underground, but the expense of a proper experiment does not excuse a poor one.
I'm a skeptic myself, but, I'm sorry, I can't get excited over Randi or his methods.
Penn & Teller do the same thing, although it can be argued their show is more for entertainment. There was one testing whether public toilets were really so dangerous. They went out and swabbed a selection of peoples asses to see if there is a threat from all those other butts sitting on those seats. The swabs are rubbed into Petri dishes with the usual solutions to see if anything grows. Not much grew.
Well, that completely fails to address the real issue. [1] They selected three or four relatively clean and normal people. [2] It's not really other people's butts that cause me concern in a public loo, it's what comes out of those butts (and other parts).
They should have swabbed a random selection of public toilet seats, and see what grew from those.
We always hear "the rules" from the female side. Nowhere are the rules from the male side. These are our rules! .. These are all numbered "1" ON PURPOSE!
,expect an answer you don't want to hear.
Please note
1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don't hear us bitching about you leaving it down.
1. Sometimes we are not thinking about you. Live with it.
1. Sunday = sports. It's like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.
1. Shopping is NOT a sport. And no, we are never going to think of it that way.
1. Crying is blackmail.
1. Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!
1. We don't remember dates. Mark birthdays and anniversaries on a calendar. Remind us frequently beforehand.
1. Most guys own three pairs of shoes -- tops. What makes you think we'd be any good at choosing which pair, out of thirty, would look good with your dress?
1. "Yes" and "No" are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.
1. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.
1. A headache that last for 17 months is a problem. See a doctor.
1. Check your oil! Please.
1. Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become null and void after 7 days.
1. If you won't dress like the Victoria's Secret girls, don't expect us to act like soap opera guys
1. If something we said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.
1. You can either ask us to do something or tell us how you want it done. Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.
1. Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during commercials.
1. Christopher Columbus did not need directions, and neither do we.
1. The relationship is never going to be like it was the first two months we were going out. Get over it. And quit whining to your girlfriends.
1. ALL men see in only 16 colours, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not a colour. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.
1. If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.
1. We are not mind readers and we never will be. Our lack of mind-reading ability is not proof of how little we care about you.
1. If we ask what is wrong and you say "nothing," we will act like nothing's wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.
1. If you ask a question you don't want an answer to
1. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine. Really.
1. Don't ask us what we're thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as navel lint, shotgun patterns, or monster trucks.
1. You have enough clothes.
1. You have too many shoes.
1. Peanuts are as exciting for us as handbags are for you.
1. I'm in shape. ROUND is a shape.
1. Thank you for reading this; Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight, but did you know we really don't mind that, it's like camping.
Now there are 20 interesting problems for Slashdotters to work on...
I was going to tackle a few of these, but the wife insisted that I paint the house and remodel the bathroom first. (sigh)
Proverbs 21:19
It doesn't exist!
Moti Milgrom proposed MOND:MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, which seems to do a much better job at describing large scale gravitational dynamics than dark matter...I watched the data come in sitting at the console of the VLT, and I also watched Nature reject the paper because alot of careers are riding on dark matter being real...
I remember hearing an interesting tidbit in a pharmacology class. Recovering addicts are supposed to avoid environments associated with their substance abuse. There's a psychological reason for this, but also a biological one (although obviously it's tough to draw a line between the two on issues like this).
For most drugs, a variation of Newton's law applies: each induced effect will have an opposite (and increasingly proportional) effect. This is why drug dosage frequently needs to be increased over time; it's also why, after a night of drinking, you might wake up unusually early feeling jittery -- your body has responded to the depressant with an unusually excited state, and one the depressant is metabolized, it takes a little while for things to settle back to equilibrium.
Anyway, the point is this: if you put a heroin user in the basement where they always shot up, their body will produce a response: their heartrate and blood pressure will go up, and they may become more sensitive to pain. The body is getting ready to partially counteract the administration of the heroin. This exacerbates the perceived need for the heroin, making a relapse more likely.
All of which is a long way of saying that yes, the body appears to learn, based on sensory input, what its biochemical state "ought" to be.
Girls
First, how do they know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather rather than decelerating at a slower than expected rate. The distance measurements I recall seeing were rather crude to determine acceleration. Second, if fundamental physical constants can vary over time, then perhaps so can things that depend on those constants like the brightness of the supernova types that are used to calibrate distance scales.
Well, over the past few years the initial results from 1998 have been confirmed with more measurements. Two groups were independently making this measurement, and the discovery of this acceleration was so unexpected, both groups didn't publish for a few months and in the end agreed to publish in the same journal with back to back articles.
So how did they do it? It turns out that a certain type of star explosion (a type 1a supernova) has a very distinct and specific brightness when they go off. these supernovae can shine as bright as their host galaxies for a few days, and so by looking at lots of galaxies, every so oftern they see the distinct brightness of a supernova going off. They then intensively monitor the light curve as the supernova fades over many tens of days, which gives a good indication of the physical distance to the supernova.
They then measure the redshift of the host galaxy, which gives the speed of recession for that supernova (the supernova system is moving within the galaxy), and you plot a form of these two quantities against each other. The resultant curve implied that only accelerating universe models fit. This was such a suprise that many astronomers started up more intensive searches for really distant supernovae, and these confirmed what the intial experiments suggested.
Now, there are sertain systematic errors to take account of - how do we know that all supernovae go off with the same brightness of explosion? What happens if there's lots of dust that makes supernovae appear dimmer (and thus farther away than they physically are?) I'd be happy to explain if you want, so send a reply to this post and I'll talk some more.
The short version (THIS is short?!) is that many effects that could give a false signal have been ruled out - exceptional results require excepconal evidence (sorry, Prof. Sagan!) so 99% of astronomers believe these results.
Ultimately, and I think this is a reasonable view, we shouldn't count "dark energy" as a solid theory until we observe it locally in our labs where we have far more control over observations and the experiment.
Sorry to be pedantic, but dark energy is an observed phenomenon. WHAT dark energy is, is the reall million dollar question. We'd love to see it in the lab, but when you work out what the typical effect of dark energy would be over omething the size of the solar system, it is a fantastically miniscule effect that we could not detect, never mind trying to detect it in a lab.
Hope this helps (and that you'll still be around to read this some 8 hours later....)
Dr Fish
I am no physicist, but maybe somebody could clarify this... Could we explain the horizon problem thru entanglement?
Doesn't the unexplained observations of #8 seem like a possible explanation for #3? If we solve #8, we might also have an answer for #3.
"That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old."
therefore, we can theorize that light travels at twice the speed of light, accounting for the exact doubling of the numbers.
but in all seriosness, this makes perfect sense. assuming the big bang theory is true (which personally i do not believe it is) then it would have exploded in what is now the center of the universe, and worked its way outward from there, assuming a perfect sphere (which i know the universe is not, but for numbers like these it is close enough) you simply have the diameter and the radius. i dont understand why this is a problem for them.
"Potpourii doesn't taste as good as it smells." - Dark_Link2135
Dark matter = highly energetic cosmic rays?
Pioneer 10/11 being pushed out faster by all those tetraneutrons that have escaped the detectors up until now. (They had to go somewhere.)
Clearly the answers to these questions are contained in the other questions. The rest of the answers are left as an exercise to the reader.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did anyone ever figure out how bumblebees can defy gravity after it was proven "impossible"?
...something about being too big 'n heavy and not flapping their little wings fast enough.
Um, what government?
Who do you think is president of Iraq?
Prime minister?
Any other elected position?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Why would a Wookiee -- an eight foot tall Wookiee -- want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
But more importantly, you have to ask yourself: what does that have to do with this case? (calmly) Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense.
And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
--South Park
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
> Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other
You can't see from one edge of the visible universe to the other.
You can only see from the center to the edge.
That's because Hubble expansion coupled with the limiting speed of light define the edge of the visible universe from the position of the observer.
Change the position of the observer to the edge of the visible universe and the edges will move.
This article contains a host of issues.
The Dark Matter problem is actually the Dark Matter problemS, plural. Galactic dark matter is only the tip of the iceberg, and can be explained by baryonic matter. Dark matter (or energy) on larger scales is a different kettle of fish. A better heading would have been: "Large scale dynamics of the universe", which would take in the horizon problem, the dark matter problem and the dark energy problem.
The article in this regard is a bit like a software requirements document written by a user: it's in terms of projected solutions rather than actual problems. The actual problem is that we don't understand the large-scale dynamics of the universe. The solution may be anything from exotic particles to weird properties of space to alternative dynamics. We just don't know.
The things about alpha changing and tetra-neutrons are cool, but far more likely to be mistakes than new phenomena.
The stuff about high-energy cosmic rays is probably the most interesting, and in fact there are a wealth of phenomena that have been observed by large detectors such as SNO and Kamiokande over the years that really don't make sense. The possibility of new physics at high energies, or entirely novel particles (magnetic monopoles, for example) is quite real, and some of the anomalies observed in these detectors may be indicators of these things.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Science by its conduct concerns itself primarily with repeatable phenomena. If, given equal starting conditions, a phenomenon occurs randomly or unpredictably, then to science it is questionable it exists at all. BUT, that has no bearing on any individual moment in time. If an event really occurs, it is "real" during that period of time, regardless of whether it is repeatable in the future.
In essence science places a statistical weight on the "proof" of its existence, based on the percentage of experiments that result in a positive result for that phenomenon. Things like gravity have a very high statistical weight because every well-run experiment results in a positive proof of the existence of gravity. Things like miracles, ESP, homeopathy, psychokinesis, etc have a very low statistical weight because no or almost no well-run experiments have resulted in a positive result.
HOWEVER, it needs to be understood that these are not definitive proof against any existence of these phenomena. They are simply proof against the repeatability of such phenomena. Because while repeatability is a central philosophical underpinning of science, it is not a logical necessity of existence.
It is entirely possible that there exists a class of phenomena that do not submit themselves to the regular, repeatable study of science. They could be phenomena that occur spontaneously, independent of starting conditions. They could phenomena that occur randomly, given equal starting conditions. They could be phenomena that respond to stimuli so diverse and multiple that we cannot fully understand or control the experimental conditions.
And science, because of its reliance on repeatable results explained by hypothesis and theory, would have trouble studying them.
Okay... I can live with getting points. Heck, I like getting points, it shows people like my writings. But seriously... interesting?
That would mean you find it an ntreesting idea to give people more drugs so that you can have casual conversations with them, or that you find it interesting that morphine rocks.
hmmm...
Nah.
What puts us in the center of the Universe? Wasn't the matter that we're made up of "thrown" from the center of the Universe by the Big Bang? Is it possible that we could be closer to one edge that the others? Maybe applying classical reasoning to this situation is what's misleading me.
You are ignorant.
Iraq does not have a presidential system of government; they have no directly elected president. That's not how the transitional government works. Instead, like many countries, they have a parliamentary system.
The Iraqi national assembly is composed of 275 representatives elected with proportional representation. Those 275 representatives were elected in January, and were inaugurated this week. The assembly will elect a person called the President of State through a two-thirds majority vote, along with two deputies who will work like our Vice Presidents work. These three people will comprise a Presidency Council that makes up the executive branch of the Iraqi interim government. The Presidency Council has veto power over the national assembly, but the national assembly can override a Presidency Council veto with a supermajority vote.
The Presidency Council will nominate a prime minister and a cabinet, and these individuals will be confirmed by a simple majority vote of the national assembly.
This stuff is all set into law by the transitional constitution, the "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period," which was ratified last March by the Iraqi Governing Council and which went into effect last June when the occupation ended. It sounds like you might like to read it.
To repeat less snarkily what a sibling post said, just because you cannot conceive a mechanism doesn't mean that none exists.
As a scientist your job is to examine the available data and come up with hypotheses. If the Belfast study suggests that homeopathy works, it's not your place to declare "but there's no spider venom in there!" It's your place to discover a new mechanism, or (much more likely) to find the flaw in the study.
Medicine in particular is full of places where we don't understand the mechanism, from aspirin to "complementary medicines" such as acupuncture. I'm actually a bit surprised acupuncture didn't make the list. The data in its favor is very strong, at least for some conditions, despite having almost no useful theory. (I've never had it myself, but the evidence is a lot more than anecdotal.) It makes a better candidate for the list than homeopathy, which is consistently slapped down by better evidence.
I'm fairly certain that the Belfast study will eventually be disproven, as so many others have. Homeopathy is rife with wishful thinking from its very creation in a silly theory that "like cures like" with zero scientific merit; the ludicrous-dilution factor is merely the cap on the silliness. Wishful thinking is a prime cause of poor scientific method.
But if you "don't get how they can claim that stuff like" this works, you don't get to point to your existing theory as proof. You have to point to data, because data trumps theory. If people replicate the Belfast study and the data gets more solid, it's your theory that goes, not the claims. I sure hope not, because it would force us to scrap a theory that's done some awesome work without giving us much of a pointer where the new theory list. But if I have to, I have to, because that's what science is.
:( ah man the
Link is down
Burn them at the stake, maybe not -- but destroy the careers of disbelievers? They'd have no qualms about that at all. My cousins in Oklahoma would love it.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Am I the only one who thinks that #11 The Wow signal is pretty lame in comparison to all of the others on the list?
San Francisco Photographers
Holy crap! They were covered by the BBC news and Air America for the past two days too!
You think that they're stealing from the Daily Show too?
This is a high-school level science expeiment (directions on how to do it are in the Amateur Scientist column of Feb. 1995 Scientific American, if you're interested you can get ALL the AS columns on CD at http://brightscience.com/), and has been known of for decades, but the exact cause is a mystery.
e scence_lights_up_fusion_research.html
3 /1833245!
But there is recent speculation and evidence that this basement-science experiment generates nuclear fusion:
http://www.scispot.org/archives/physics/sonolumin
Oh, and from that page, one of the "Selected sonoluminescence resources on the web" is no less an authoritative science source than...http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/0
Tag lost or not installed.
Then what about the Flood? The Plagues? All the times your god commanded his worshipers to slaughter their enemies, including that one bit where he commanded them to be joyful while they smashed infants against the rocks?
Or, what about all the times he killed not indiscriminately but with malice aforethought, such as when he sent those bears to rip apart the children after they called a priest names? Or when god had a certain individual tortured to death in a symbolic act?
Sorry, but, if one is to believe the Bible, your god is the greatest enemy humanity has ever known.
'i didnt get the girl, therefore im not an asshole' big problem with that logic
You insensitive clod!
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
I don't know if someone posted about this yet.
But come on noone been able to prove this phenomena in almost 25 years now.
I've seen it a live, a BBC reporter using just his mind to make the graph of a computer
(spinning the equivalent of 1 billion coins a second) go upwards.
Pure mind over matter.
The reporter was every bit sceptical like most of us.
Of course I would love it to test it myself.
Princeton Engineering Anomaly Research
If it was hocus-pocus it would have been scrapped from Princeton University by now.
yes, it really is a bad article when they don't consult mbrother to see if he agrees.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
since I pay an insurance company money, but I don't pay when I go to the doctors office, that means my visits are free?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"psychosomatic recognition"
But what is it? how does it work? what is ogung on in the body?
it's like saying "We put gas in the car, then through a system conversion it make the car go" as an explanation of how a combustion engine works.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
a) no placebo is free
b) id a placebo was free, then it wouldn't work because people would know it was a placebo.
so the price ration may not be better.
In fact, charging more may make the placebo effectmore likly to happen. "Wow, 25 bucks a pill! this stuff must be great."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
9 out of 13 have to do with astrophysics.
Perhaps we should all become rocket scientists to
help solving the final questions. My answer is 42.
Even accounting for the international date line, the /. article is referencing another article written one day in the future.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
For the past few decades, I've been making a hobby of researching inexplicable observations. It's good mental exercise. Usually, a natural explanation, not involving new laws of science, is eventually discovered.
E.g., in the 19th century, there were several anomolous astronomical observations: the precession of Mercury's orbit, the Moon's orbit, etc. Explaining Mercury required inventing general relativity. Explaining the Moon, and all the other anomolies, did not. That's why no one today remembers those problems.
Nevertheless, the occasional significant solution means that we have to look at them all.
I'm a professional astronomer and with expertise in quasar spectra, the basis for the claims and counter claims for a time-variable fine structure constant. I am more qualified than the article writer on this topic. Count me on the side of Patrick Petitjean and other skeptical astronomers who think the case unproven.
Is it wrong for me to share my expert opinion here? Should people only agree with articles or make jokes about them?
If there was consensus that alpha had changed, this should be on this list, because there would then indeed be a big gap in our understanding. Right now the gap seems more likely to me to be one of techniques of data analysis. If the Australian group is right, we'll get there, but we're not there yet.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
>Various european countries are exploring this option and 2 pilot projects have been set up in the UK in order to research this very point. Once the results of these have been audited then policy as a whole will change.
Don't count on it. Policy regarding illicit drugs does not solely depend on its known effects on its abusers.
As a Dutchman who sees the main party in government actually seeking to reverse decades of succesfull policy, I wish you were right though.
Two problems:
1) We don't believe we are at the center of the universe. So a person sitting in a galaxy 14 billion ly to our left is more than 14 billion ly away from a person sitting in a galaxy to our right, and they are too far away to ever have been in contact. So how can one look like the other? While this may be moot if you assume we are at the center and everything is moving away from us, you also have to assume those galaxies 14 billion ly from us have been moving away from us at the speed of light ever since the Big Bang. However:
2) The galaxies we are seeing 14 billion ly from us now are not moving at the speed of light. So a billion years ago, they might have been 13.5 billion light years away, in which case we know the universe was at least 27 billion light years across, but only 13 billion years old.
And to anyone who knows GR here, yes I have oversimplified. :)
Ulrik
I just wanted to let everyone know that I am starting an experiment to examine the effects of a placebo. What will happen is, you apply to be a subject in my experiment on the placebo effect. I will administer to you a placebo pill, clearly labelled as a placebo, and you then tell me if my placebo helped your vision to improve, thus showing clearly that the placebo effect is real.
Come, join my placebo effect experiment!
Oh . . . wait . . . right.
Do not touch -Willie
Yeah, blame your fucked-up "police action" in Vietnam on the UN.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/03-04/mar06.htm
was taken the following:
I didn't see this on /. until now, but one of my friends asked me to elaborate on the astrophysics points of this article for him, and this was what I said...
h ich gives a non-detection with error-bars much smaller than Webb's
So, as you might or might not know, I'm pretty skeptical about
"new" physics. So here is my take on the astrophysics-related problems.
#2 - The horizon problem. What this means is that, at some point in the
past, what we call "the entire universe" was in causal contact with one
another. Inflation is the theory that generally explains how this is
possible, and I like this theory very much. Because it not only solves
this problem, but explains why the spatial curvature of the universe is
flat, why there are no magnetic monopoles, and where the seeds for
structure formation came from, inflation (or something very much like
it) is expected to have occurred in the past. No one knows definitively,
what KIND of inflation occurred (there are many models of it), but this is
no longer considered an outstanding problem.
#3 -- the GZK cutoff vs. ultra-high-energy cosmic rays -- There are a
number of examples that are up to a factor of 10 higher than the
cutoff. The reason a cutoff is expected is because a cosmic ray (i.e. a
proton) coming from outside our galaxy above 5*10^19 eV would interact
with the CMB, producing a pion and losing energy, until it is below
5*10^19 eV. However, we have no experience measuring energies this high,
and it is easy to imagine that there is a systematic effect in measuring
these energies, and that there is no inconsistency. It's not like we see
cosmic rays a factor of 100 or 1000 times as energetic... so I'm not
convinced this is a real effect.
#5 -- dark matter. This has been known to be a problem since 1933,
actually. Does it exist? Almost definitely -- either that, or general
relativity is wrong. GR might be wrong, but it has passed every
experimental test thus far. There are a few leading candidates for what
dark matter might be, but no one has detected it yet (despite what DAMA
claims). Neutrinos have mass, but not enough to make up the dark matter.
But if GR is correct, there is overwhelming evidence for dark matter from
the microwave background, large scale structure, rotation curves of spiral
galaxies, velocity dispersions in clusters of galaxies, absorption from
the lyman-alpha forest, and gravitational lensing. There is also an
insufficient amount of "normal matter" (protons, neutrons, and electrons)
to make up the dark matter, as is well known from nucleosynthesis.
#8 -- There is a simple possible explanation for the pioneer anomaly --
solar heating of one side of the spacecraft, causing it to speed up. If
that's NOT responsible, then indeed, we don't know what's causing it.
This may be an indicator of new physics, but it may also be much ado about
nothing more than the non-uniform heating of metal.
#9 -- Dark Energy. This is a big mystery. BIG. As in, there is
currently no good explanation, this is almost undoubtedly a real effect,
and people (including me) are working hard on this. Katie Freese (in the
article) has a possible explanation, but it's not a very good one, and
if correct, requires a new set of gravitational laws as well. This may be
the most interesting unsolved problem in astrophysics today.
#12 -- variations of the fine-structure constant. Most people think John
Webb is crazy, and his team is the only one that sees time-variation in
alpha. Everyone else who looks at the same data and does analysis gets a
null result. If there were stock in this, I would sell it all.
What the article reports is sensationalistic and erroneous. Check out
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0402177,
w
papers.
Too bad that they report some real effects, some speculative effects, and
some almost-definitive non-effects all together, with no discrimination.
this Post should be like +100 informative. it's so rare that a slashdott commenter posts something so totally informative with a link to back it up.
Well, the reasoning is that because they're not high, they can hold a job, go to NA, and generally live a normal, non-junkie life. Of course they're also chained to a methadone clinic. But hey, I'm sure that's better than sucking dick for smack.
I think you mean Ashlee Simpson, or Jaime Lynn Spears.
Moo.
I couldn't get the link from the article to work. However, I found this link by searching on the site.
From the article:
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
Er... the universe is 28 billion lightyears wide, and 14 billion years old. 14 = 1/2*28, so wouldn't the radiation have had enough time to populate the universe, assuming it does not need to travel all the way across, but only to the middle? As long as radiation from all sides of the universe travels halfway across the universe, 14 billion lightyears, and if the universe is uniformly populated by stars and other radiation-producers (eg, no side/sector of the universe with significantly more stars than the other sides), and all sides of the universe expanding at roughly the same rate, then why wouldn't 14 billion years be enough time for the universe to be uniformly populated by same-temp radiation? Go easy, IANAS.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
And why, in all the entirety of the universe, would any being care anything about this tiny speck of dust on the ass-end of a rather non-descript galaxy?
How about: Because of His love for us? The entire Bible declares God's love for man. If that were not true, nothing in the Bible would make sense.
But nothing in the bible DOES make sense.
Technoli
Fact(of light): Primary wavefront gives rise to secondary wavefront in all direction. Say: During Big-Bang, a matter traveled from centre towards east and another matter Travelled towards west at the speed of light. The mass travelling towards east, when it moves dx metre forwars in the speed of light, the energy(heat, light) "has already" travelled dx metre backward... and is "head to head" with the mass travelling in the opposite direction. (that implies)=> Heat radiation "seems" to have travelled between the two horizons from nearly 28 billion light years apart and our while universe is only 14 billion years old. So even if the universe is expanding at the speed of light, we can still receive the Heat radiation between the two horizons of the universe. PROVE ME WRONG?
Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain).
"In fact, scans show that there is no such thing as a pain centre. Pain springs mainly from the activation of areas associated with attention and emotion." (Mapping the Mind, Rita Carter, 1998). We know a lot to be able to say that there is no dedicated brain part that objectively measures how painful something is, it's a construct of our mind and can be manipulated by a placebo.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Look, it's very easy to go on about "freely elected government", but it doesn't make people happier. Freely elected government is not good by itself. And people can be happier, freer and better off under a monarchy or even a dictatorship. Swedes, Danes, Dutch all have kings and queens and they seem to live much better lives overall than the Americans do.
Iraq is a fiasco, because the whole infrastructure went to hell. Public works, factories, universities, everything was badly shaken as people were forced to jump from a relatively civilized and economically well off (ignoring the US-driven idiotic and inhumane sanctions) to a country with powerful clerics, terrorists and the economy in ruins.
Not to mention the pillage of the Iraqi State Museum, prison torture and everything else.
Free elections are overrated. They are just the means to our goals of better lifes for everyone, not the goal itself.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Free elections are overrated.
If you ever have the occasion to wonder, this is the point where I decided that you're a dipshit who's not worth even a fraction of a second of my attention.
How does a blind man know when he's finished wiping his ass?
The scientists themselves are the ones saying, "this is completely impossible by the known laws of the universe", which is the same as saying, "The only way to explain this currently is by God's hand".
Not really. You seem to be viewing laws as being some thing which must be true and must be followed, hence if something breaks them, it must require some all-powerful being.
But "laws" are just are description of how the Universe works. If something is happening that seems impossible by our scientific theories, then those theories are wrong. We might not know what on earth is going wrong, but this doesn't mean God, angels, invisible unicorns or anything else is responsible.
Get your own brain, retard.
0% for reading comprehension.
The message to which I replied said:
As I pointed out, and as you agree ("The assembly will...") Iraq does not yet have a freely elected government.
It does have a (largely) freely elected national assembly.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Iraq does not yet have a freely elected government.
It was elected in January, and it was inaugurated earlier this month. You are completely wrong about this.
It does have a (largely) freely elected national assembly.
"Largely freely elected?" What is that supposed to mean? Are you just trolling?
The Wow Signal
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No, the national assembly was elected. The government has yet to be formed.
You'd claim that everyone had free access to the polls? That the people who didn't vote in the "Sunni" regions didn't vote of their own free will?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
No, the national assembly was elected. The government has yet to be formed.
I bet if you try, you could split that hair even more finely. If you really put your mind to it, I mean.
You'd claim that everyone had free access to the polls?
Not just me. All the election monitors, including those sent by the UN, say so.
And a gf who needs $6,000 in gifts annually needs an attitude adjustment.
Just gotta find the right woman.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I thought they decided to charge for the straight dope message boards? Am I remembering that incorrectly, or did they realize how stupid that was, and revert to free registration?
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
You don't know the difference between a parliament and a government but you do know all the details of the Iraqi transitional law. Odd.
Got a source for that? I've been looking around and can't seem to find any reliable looking stuff online.
The ever reliable says:
By the way, there were no UN monitors.
As Wikipedia says:
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Sorry, I'm not that interested in having a conversation with somebody who (1) argues just for the sake of arguing and (2) gets all his information from "Wikipedia."
Plonk.
1. Everyone accuses others of their own sin.
2. So, got a better source?
By the way, only plonkers plonk.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
As a Engineer who became a Qi Gong practitioner, I can easily verify that the mind-body link is very powerful.
r tial_arts.html has my occasional ramblings on Qi Gong for those who are interested.
You are very much in control of your own body, its just that most people haven't had the training to do anything with it.
The challenge for Western scientists is that studying the mind-body link is pretty hard because how do you study the effect of "thinking your cancer away" vs. "pretending to think your cancer away"? Once you involve the patients mind, its impossible to do a double-blind study.
However, the Chinese have actually done a lot of this sort of study in an effort to "rationalize" the last 3000 years of Qi Gong study. But they had to do things like have a "fake" qi gong master vs. a "real" qi gong master, then have people take classes from both...
http://www.opinionatedbastard.com/archives/cat_ma
For those who want a more western slant, I suppose you can Google behavioral medicine, but the western slant ignores the fact that while the mind can affect the body, so can the body affect the body. Sitting around thinking "my cancer is getting smaller" may help, but so will going for a walk every day.
The real thing to study from my point of view is why oncologists don't prescribe meditation and exercise...