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2005 Scientific Highlights
Nomad37 writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has a great wrap-up of the great moments in 2005 for science. The story covers everything from evolution to space exploration, the role of genetics in brain disorder to nuclear fusion. The story provides a neat overview for those of us who haven't been checking Slashdot regularly enough!"
The story provides a neat overview for those of us who haven't been checking Slashdot regularly enough!
The dupes make it so we don't have to check regularly, silly.
Trolling is a art,
The authors of the article are really going to have egg on their face when the aliens land next week.
Sometimes, it's easy to forget that science is alive, well, and thriving when reading all the ID and creationist nonsense that is circulating throught the media today - it's a nice reminder that while ID is getting some press, REAL science is getting money, time, top-notch researchers, and revealing ever more about how our amazing Universe works. Happy New Year!!!
...from the article: "Not even the US President, George Bush, could ignore the historic hurricane season in the north Atlantic this year." - heh, heh, heh....
[Ducks and applies SPF50 flame-block]
I feel the unmasking of the fake results posted by Woo Suk Hwang could be a blessing for science, and one of the years highlights. It could be portrayed as why science works, although the community requires a basis of trust, eventually frauds will be revealed, hopefully creating more trust in the system.
What science requires are better media relations to portray this way of viewing the discipline.
It's the exact same fucking link, except this time it points to the top of the page. It's no more 'printer friendly' than the other one.
2005 Scientific Highlights That's whole lot of highlights!
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
"...who haven't been checking Slashdot regularly enough!"
What, you mean BSD isn't dead?
I thought the real breakthrough was when they cracked Mickey's genetic code and found out that while man shares 96% DNA with chimps, he also shares 90% DNA with mice, his other cousin. Woman refuses to share DNA.
This article is from the Sydney Morning Herald, reporting the American Association for the Advancement of Science's "Top 10". Yesterday the Evolution Named Scientific Achievement of 2005 story was the BBC reporting the same fucking list. By cleverly putting "evolution" in the title then Zonk got the standard 800 posts you always get when you wave that red flag.
A federal court ruling quashing the teaching of the religiously-motivated pseudo-science of intelligent design in Pennsylvania schools (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10545387/). Its great to have fought off this challenge to science and education in America (yet again), but sad that we are still having these challenges after all science has accomplished since Western mankind threw off the yoke theocracy first put on science in the Middle Ages.
Did you bother to even check the links? Seriously, *flamebait*? Anyways, I took a couple of screen shots to make this easier for you.
This is the version originally linked to.
This is the 'printer friendly' version he linked to.
If you're noticing a certain similarity right about now, that's because they're the exact same fucking page.
Mind.Forth artificial intelligence came of age in 2005.
> ...from the article: "Not even the US President, George Bush, could ignore the historic hurricane season in the north Atlantic this year." - heh, heh, heh....
Sure he could. He delegated ignoring it to FEMA.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Dupe dupe dupe dupe of url
dupe dupe dupe of url
dupe dupe dupe of url
As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the dupe of url
And you, you are my girl
No one can hurt you, oh, no
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
> (Weekends are good for a little "trolling" ;-)
But apparently not for a little good trolling.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Brian: Mr. President, there been a hurricane in New Oreleans.
i sode/553990/trivia.html
George W. Bush:In a treehouse Go away, I'm readin' Superfudge.
Brian: Mr. President, this is a national emergency, you got to come deal with this.
Geroge W. Bush: Don't make me do stuff.
http://www.tv.com/family-guy/fat-guy-strangler/ep
My Sysadmin Blog
Yeah, I thought he was trolling too. Then I looked at some of his (the GP) previous posts. Not so much.
To the GP, I am not disrespecting your faith, however
Most simplisticly, the reason your ferromagnet remains attached to the fridge instead of falling is because the potential electromotive force generated by the dipoles in the magnet and the fridge is greater than the potential gravitional force between the magnet and the earth. Note the word potential in both clauses. Until the magnet actually moves, no work has been done and thus no energy has been expended. It does not "cost" anything for the magnet to remain attached. If the magnet were weak enough that potential gravity could overrule it, then there would be a cost (for as long as the magnet continued to change inertially), to both the earth's inertia/angular momentum and the related magnetic domains.
I know it must seem magical, but its really just a simple case of the magnet being in the lowest possible rest-state (energy-wise) for that configuration.
You'll notice that it's not called the "Theory of Thermodynamics".
I guess this is the best metaphor that has ever been used in a science article.
>>Neutron stars are the *city-sized*, collapsed cores of massive stars.
Actually, the web team over at SMH don't provide a printer friendly link. The 'print' button in the article will send a specifically formatted version to your printer, but it's not linkable directly. Sorry!
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Sorta, depending on you how you look at friction. Any time the layperson's concept of "friction" is involved, it usually just means gravity (after all, in a zero-g environment, will two objects directly touching each other stay that way if a force is applied perpendicularly to one of them?)
In this case though, that's not really the type of "friction" in play. Like gravity, electromagnetism follows the inverse square law. And, in your example of a magnet suspended vertically from a horizontal surface, the field effect will rapidly fall off as the magnet's distance from the ferrite increases. In fact, because there is no potential force, other than that created by the magnet, which would balance gravitational potential, any increase in distance between the magnet and the ferrite will cause a drop in magnetomotive effect ("potential electromotive force") as well as true current-potential electromotive force. Thus the only "energy hill" is momentary and equal to that of the magnetomotive effect itself. Like balancing two identically weighted people on a a teeter-totter, as soon as you apply the slighest momentary force to one side, they are on an unstoppable (w/out addl force elsewhere) downward journey.
Not so with a horizontal ferromagnet on a vertical surface. Assuming right angles to the center of gravity, the magnet's distance from the ferrite never increases when gravitional potential becomes true force. The inverse square law has no effect. Now, the gravitional potential must continously meet or beat the non-varying (or very slightly varying) electromotive potential. Because some of the gravitional potential is now actual force (i.e. work is being done), it cannot continously stay "over the hill" as would be required, although if the magnet is weak enough and the two are toe-to-toe, gravity may very well continually "win" but with only enough force to induce minor inertial change and the rest being "consumed" by balancing the non-varying magnetomotive (i.e. the magnet slowly slides down the fridge). Obviously, such a precarious balancing act requires very little change on either side's potential to start a runaway resulting in the magnet either stopping or falling off into inverse-square-law world. This is the facination people have with so-called "permanent magnets"; that it is so easily possible to directly observe and manipulate the equilibrium point between two potentials.
The main cause of magnetism seeming so mysterious to many is that our instinctual inertial and gravitional perception is not what it seems at first glance. We think, instinctively, that we "feel" gravity, but what we're really feeling is a combination of fluid orientation and inertial potential. In other words, rather than perceiving the actual force performing work, we're perceiving potential energy offset by 1g perpendicular to our orientation. When someone "feels" the pull of a magnet, what they're really feeling is the potential for their hand to experience inertial change. If they allow their hand to move, they will mostly cease to notice the real force (they would notice the acceleration, but it's minor in the case of household magnets). Because one must always balance potential in order to prevent it from asserting the lowest possible energy state (i.e. expending itself), people mistakingly perceive this as work-energy when in reality they could balance it equally well with some external non-moving brace which prevented joint movement.
I guess it comes down to this: Effort as "not-work" means there is no real force involved, as you can't actually use it to do a damn thing.
Exactly. There is no way to tell the difference. That makes the idea unfalsifable (unable to be disproven). Because it is impossible to even test the idea, it is completely unscientific. That doesn't mean false, just outside the boundry of scientific inquiry. Given two possible explainations that are completely indistinguishable, one that requires a supernatural designer for which there is no evidence whatsoever and another explaination that does not, Occam's razor clearly favors the simpler explaination.
Call it religion, call it philosophy, just don't pretend that it is science.
Went to Slashdot, for transporting stories out of the past onto the front page.
And before anyone puts their little pedantic pants on, I fully realize that friction is not just the potential/opposing-potential that holds two objects together; I was glossing it over to get to the good bits. ;)
If a refridgerator magnet needs a power source, what is the power source for the Post-It(tm) note hanging beside it?
Gluons, duh.
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"Religios people" say that the world was created by god and jesus was his son, yet religious people say that jesus was only a prophet. Religious people also say that Brahma created the universe. Religious people say that you go to heaven when you die, religious people say that you are reborn in another shape.
That is approximately the quality of your argument about "scientists" saying that a water moleculs is life and an unborn child isn't.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that you are lumping together concepts from a number of disparate fields that have little or nothing in common with each other and use certain words very differently. I would be very surprised for example if a xeno-biologists would make a scientific contribution to the debate about abortion in the first place.
A micro-biologist will call any living cell life. Yet a moral philosopher won't accuse you of murder for taking antibiotics or other medicines (which destroy bacteria/viruses or even human cells). The debate about abortion is not about whether something is "alive" in a biological sense, but whether in a moral sense it is a person you are killing or not, which is a totally different debate, led by totally different poeple.
While I would agree with you that the "origin" of the universe might be unknowable in principle, the difference between religious faith and scientific explanations is that religious faith often precludes further investigations and/or changes to the best current explanation. Religious faith was happy to stop with the earth as the centre of the universe created 6000 years ago...
Scientists are never totally "happy" with their theories, they are developed and refined. Even theories that were once seen as absolute, such as Newton's laws, were shown to be limiting cases of broader, more unified concept.
Once you get to a point where someone says "this is it, this is the answer, I wrote it in a book, no need for further questions, don't bother checking it yourself" then you get yourself into a situation that is a quite similar to religion. While this happens at times in science (i.e. we "knew" all about the atom at one point before people started finding more exotic subatomic particled), it is never an absolute.
For me, that is the one major difference between science and religion: science is built on the premise that theories are imperfect and must be continually developed, while religion is built on the idea that someone knows "the truth" which is absolute and should not be questioned.
Sorry, but you're really using a big strawman here regarding scientists, as if they are the ones who uncritically and ignorantly make blind non-falsifiable assumptions. I guess you've never witnessed a real scientific debate. The existence or non-existence of a deity falls outside the scope of science as it cannot be proven nor disproven. It can be said that no falsifiable claims exist by which to measure whether the deity exists (or interacts with) the physical world. Emperical evidence shows that this deity prefers a very constant and consistent universe.
or subscribe to intelligent design (which by the way is not Creationism, and in probably the most important way is more like evolution than creation)
Nope, it has been proven in court that ID == Creationism == religion. Feel free to read the testimony of the leading ID proponents and authors.
Regardless which side of the debate anyone falls on, these issues have never been, nor will ever be, about so-called "science"
The same can be said about Astrology vs. Science or a Witch Doctor vs. Surgeon. One side has non-falsifiable theories, the other has. Just because there is disagreement doesn't mean both sides are equally right. The crux of ID arguments is ignorance and by rigging the angles through which something can have happened. Behe has clearly shown his own ignorance by being unaware of dozens of articles being written on the flagellum, yet claiming for a fact they did not exist (prior to having them plopped down in front of him).
The issue with ID is not that they present a theory which is unpleasant (lots of scientists are religious), but that they are intellectually and politically dishonest. Now they are openly making political threats against the judge. So much for neutrality...
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Scanned it. Page one had conventional false hood. The polar ice caps are not at a record low. Only 50-100 million years ago they were completely gone.
I though this post looked familiar.
So if this post is a troll, does the addition of a paragraph to an otherwise identical post make this one not a troll?
As has been shown in court, ID proponents are typically prone to rehashing the same old refuted material in the hope that if they rehash it enough, in the public opinion it'll be truthlike.
see a Text Widget
2005 has been characterised by more blown sub-theories (e.g. string cosmology) and raise-eyebrows-and-shrug data (e.g. the Fountains of Enceladus) than any other year I can remember.
At long last, it's becoming socially acceptable to admit that a popular theory is more or less complete bollocks. It's difficult to overstate how valuable that is to the progress of science.
ID has brought this about in a way that Creationism couldn't, because ID is more "moderate" and reasonable, less polarised. Careless detractors can easily winding up looking like ranting idiots (many have and continue to). This was Dr Johnson's original plan, he made no bones about it then or now, and despite all of the kicking and screaming it's actually working. Its latest score has been a judge willing to overreact in a convincing fashion.
Now... here lies a dilemmma... trilemma, really: Naturalistic (with the implied "Atheistic") science needs to let approaches like ID get a foot in the door even if they're completely wrong. ID in turn needs Evolution to keep it honest as much as it keeps the Evolution team on their toes... and ID in turn needs Creationism. If nothing else, it needs something to be less extreme than. Creationism needs ID -- again, if for no other reason than to have a moderate cousin for the timid to stop at.
And so on. You can't pull up the weeds -- regardless of which you regard as weeds -- without also damaging the crop.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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The question was "what is ID?". The best people to answer those questions are the inventors of the concept, the people who wrote the textbooks, and principal proponents and the financial backers. During the proceding of the court case, Behe and others were found to be mistelling the truth. For example, he claimed there was no scientific research being done on e.g. the flagellum when there was. Thus, he was claiming non-existence of something when the existence is easily proven. What more proof do you need that these figures don't know what they're talking about? You can attribute it to ignorance or to malice, either way their credibility is worthless. Maybe you have different views on what the core of ID is, but I find Behe to be more of an authority figure on ID than you.
It has been proven that the ID textbooks started out as Creationism textbooks, but that the word "Creation" was simply literally replaced with "Intelligent Design". Where do legalities come into play here? It's rather a sore-loser attitude to blame the judge (who was appointed by G.W. Bush out of all people) for ID's shortcomings.
For some reason, when we talk about ID, you immediately start referring to the word "God", which indicates the Christian deity. I thought we were discussing ID here, which explicitly leaves open what this creative force is. It might be dozens of deities, it might be aliens from other planets, anything. Whenever ID/Creationism is discussed, the Christian God is right around the corner... why would that be?
The flaw throughout your argument is that you claim that falsifiable theories are somehow equivalent to non-falsifiable ones. The consequence of this argument is that the concept of "false" no longer exists as everything becomes true. Then you further undermine your own argument by actually choosing a position by drawing a line across religious lines. It makes much more sense to draw the line at falsifiable vs. non-falsifiable or observable vs. non-observable, visible vs. invisible or emotional vs. rational. These lines are much more visible and relevant in argumentations than believers vs. non-believers.
Thus, the second consequence of your argument is that religious scientists cannot possibly exist. Interestingly, the ones who claim something intangible must exist seem to require the tangible to not exist (like Behe).
I really wonder how you envision anything being non-true if everything is equivalent to eachother and rational debate is impossible. We have 2500 deities in recorded human history... they must all be true then. After all, anyone who claims otherwise is biased from their pre-existing view. You could claim that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist, but that's just because you fall in the anti-Bunny camp.
The only way to accept your argument as entirely valid is by being forced to also accept a whole range of other obviously ridiculous possibilities and equating the objective with the subjective.
see a Text Widget
I've browsed at -1 ever since the moderation system was added to Slashdot.