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(Yet) Another Year End List
gordonb writes "New Scientist has yet another of those endless end-of-year lists, "13 things that do not make sense", including such topics discussed on Slashdot this year as the placebo effect, dark energy, and the ever-popular cold fusion. I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."
The placebo effect does work! A friend of the family is a hypochondriac (I used to be a BAD one), and always has the same cold or disease as someone else. I told her that the trick to fending off hypochondria is to gently tap the underside of her chin 5 times slowly and the symptoms will go away.
:)
Guess what? It worked. I just made it up but I told her I heard about it on a medical show. The power of the mind is amazing, but it has taught me how easily duped we humans are. I guess this means don't trust anyone until you know what their end desire is.
This is an interesting article, but it seems common for them to say that these unknown "problems" might all boil down to bad research -- and I believe that could likely be the answer for many. "Bad research" covers all science conundrums: either you misread the results, or previous bad research gave you an incorrect theory.
Problems solved
Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does NOT MAKE SENSE! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? 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 deliberatin' and conjugatin' 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
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
FTFA: But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.
I was under the impression that Inflation is caused by a certain energy value of the Higgs field. Did I miss something and Higgs field is no longer the savior of Inflation?
This article is from March.
http://www.antilli.com/ - can anyone make sense of this?
The thought just occured to me, that if Slashdot is gonna be posting all these 'best of the year' type lists... then maybe Slashdot should compile its own 'best of' list?
Privacy is underrated!
"13 things that do not make sense"
Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does NOT MAKE SENSE! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? 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 deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] 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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Please try to keep the political commentary out. Slashdot is already sinking into the oblivion of obscurity, and ignorant front-page comments only serve to accelerate your lack of credibility.
Not only that... it's not much of a year end list... being published in March of 05 after all.
/. around the same time 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense
Heck, this was even on
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
All right! Always room for a little mindless, irrelevant editorializing, right?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Free markets make plenty of sense. Read your economics textbooks and your Wealth of Nations, and then you can start complaining about them....
Since the last time it was posted on /.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical.
Well no duh. Did they think it was dancing angels? We only use morphine as a pain reliever because it is a analogue of some naturally occuring molecules in the human body. And the placebo effect also tells us that there is some messaging between the brain and body and that thinking about stuff can effect that messaging. We may not know much of the details, but these articles the keep feigning ignorance of the placebo effect borders on pseudo science.
"Demon Haunted World"(well, techincally "Science as a Candle in the Darkness") which I am currently slogging through. He discusses a lot of there same "phenomenon" such as placebos and this, my personal favorite:
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says
Actually, earlier than even the "WoW" signal(sometime in the 60s IIRC) a bunch of Soviet scientists convened a conference to discuss how they swore they found intelligent life because they found a long, continuous perfect sine wave somewhere out in space. Turns out it was a quasar, a hithero unkown phenomena, but the Soviets made laughing stocks out of themselves by assuming first it was aliens instead of a more mundane explanation...
Monstar L
Firstly as somebody pointed out at the FIRST line and last lien it is writte "19 march 2005"... That is quite the start of the year. Second, as 4th position again some homeopathic non reproducible experiment, and cold fusion (13th). This rather sound like "unreproducible" research rather unexplicable stuff. I think jsut for a kicker I will have a look around to see what happenned as follow up from those... But since the only stuff we heard recently on homeopathy was the lancet(?) study, and since homeopath would jump on the gun for any study proving homeopathy works, I won't hold my breath. Probably again badly washed up test tube. I tell you, experiment on basophile are cursed :).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Anyone else notice the growing trend of people finding a cute little way to troll in their submittal paragraphs? I'd think this sort of blatant trolling wouldn't be allowed by the editors, hopefully they notice this trend and start trying to reverse it.
Why is this embarassing? Does that have any bearing on the science of the issue?
...
Physicists consider it embarassing when their existing theories make predictions that are off by more than a few orders of magnitude. The apparent effect of dark energy is something like 50 orders of magnitude larger than what current theories predict. I heard a cosmologist call this one of the most spectacular failures of modern physics, even if it doesn't have much bearing on our daily lives.
I am not a physicist, please correct me if this is inaccurate
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Why is this embarassing?
Because you mistakenly think you know all the answers.
But physics isn't about answers, it's about questions, and far from being an embarassment this problem is simply a Nobel waiting for its recipient. The most famous opportunity in physics.
KFG
This is getting ridiculous. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of stories here (not that they were USDA Grade A to begin with), accompanied by more frequent-- and more obvious-- trolling on the parts of the "Editors".
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to), but the editor who let a sneaky jab at free markets into the story text itself needs to be smacked. That was a troll, period. A blatant, bridge-dwelling, club-wielding troll.
No, I take that back. All the "Editors" need to be smacked. This is getting fucking ridiculous.
SlashDot: Trolls for nerds, stuff that was reported on the AP Newswire 5 days ago...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
We need more journalism like this in the popular media, to teach our kids that we don't know everything, and that some frontiers of knowledge haven't yet been pushed beyond their reach.
The evolution/creation/intelligent-design debate has taken on the nature of trench warfare; the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life, so they dig in and protect every axiom of their belief system no matter how fragile or poorly supported. As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.
I'm sure that many church leaders honestly believe that if kids are encouraged to doubt and question, they will lose their nascent faith, and perhaps discourage others. Likewise many educators assume that students who doubt and question current scientific beliefs will never become scientists, and undermine others who might.
The contemptible response is that those who question religious doctrine are branded as nonbelievers, and those who question scientific doctrine are dismissed as ignoramuses. Nothing goes so far to discourage the development of the scientific and spiritual leaders of the next generation.
Healthy skepticism, not jaded cynicism, should be encouraged everywhere if there is to be true advancement in any field. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and neither are knowledge and wisdom.
Do you have any friends? You're just so annoying. (Note: I'm not even disagreeing with your points. You're just obnoxious.)
> I told her that the trick to fending off hypochondria is to gently tap the underside of her chin 5 times slowly and the symptoms will go away. > Guess what? It worked. I just made it up but I told her I heard about it on a medical show. You're not the only one to come up with this: http://www.mercola.com/2005/oct/13/tapping_your_fe ars_away.htm
Can someone remind me how to mark a slashdot story as -1 (Troll)?
Women.
Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina (whole parallel universes with differing physical laws). By Occam's Razor, absolutely any alternate explanation to inflation is to be preferred - I can claim the Flying Spagetti Monster did it, right after He invented time travel, assisted by exactly 144,000 seraphim, whose names, in order of mightyness, start with Larry, Moe, and Curley Sue, and I've still proposed a theory that generates fewer unprovable hypothesi than an infinite number of undetectable "alternate' universes.
That's just for Guth's original work. Hawking tried to give some more backing to it, and had to postulate an unobservable second time dimension, an unobservable imaginary property to this second time axis, and as it turned out a way to apply a whole new form of math that involved rotation, ala trigonometry, without the negative quadrents existing to rotate through (since he dropped the negative half of the regular time axis fifty pages back). Even the totally mind boggleing concept of rotating vectors through dimensions that he had already rejected as non-existant didn't actually get rid of the infinite number of unobservable predictions problem, as Hawking finally acknowledged. Hawking was roundly criticized for treating imaginary in the mathematical sense as meaning imaginary in the common sense, and has since admitted he made both that and a few other mistakes in the papers behind "A Brief History of Time". If you know of someone who has done a better job, by all means, give a link, but all the ones I've seen seem to make the untestable predictions problem worse, not better.
That's precisely what's wild about inflation - it makes an infinite number of untestable predictions, and is still considered science for the testable ones. It does explain a few things very well (like homogeneity), so it's probably on the right track somewhere, but the real thory we need (IMNSHO) is going to explain why the universe looks superficially like the classic Big Bang model, deal with the ways the very early universe deviates from that classical model, fully (and not partially or selectively)include QM in the first few femtoseconds, and either prove that some physical constants are non-random, or show that they don't, at the least, have to be random and so don't have to spin off so many untestable predictions.
Who is John Cabal?
This is a test of lame Slashdot.
Microsoft Works.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Watch this space for important papers and articels about cold fusion.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
One of the more recent papers have a sound explanation of why the coloumb barrier can be circumvented at low temperatures.
Quite interesting.
The scientific community over there keeps growing and there are now hundreds of experiments which find seemingly "unexplainable" effects like excess temperature etc.
Neither do any else of dada21's posts
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause one direction to be hotter than another direction?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
+5, Insightful
Hmm, inflation eh? Here's another wild idea - What if during the big-bang the energy released was so much that it actually *increased* the speed of light itself, till it finally slowed down and settled..? :-)
http://efil.blogspot.com/
And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on.
Too thicko's unconcerned:
Homeopathy does not work in the way that "large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trials" are made. What is it about that aspect of the treatment that researchers and reporters of research can't hear, read or understand?
If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
And no doubt there will be heartfelt, sincerest appologies all around? No sackings though.
I can remember the good old days when Chrohn's disease was relatively unknown. And the placebos used to no effect on it.
CERN Courier says it could all be an error in calculation: http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/45/8/8
I wrote parts of this stuff
Can you provide an example of a free market, today or in history?
5 days ago?
How can you accuse the editors of trolling when you don't even read what they posted?
there is no free market. Market is always defined by restrain, necessity and lastly also pressure. Restrain by local to global laws, neccessity to always outdo the competition and pressure that either is created by the competition on your business or by the market itself (customers) that won't pull off, ie your products won't sell or won't reach your expected numbers of sales so that you eventually have to react and redefine your portfolio of products. Lastly, there is also no free market in that all participants of the market are dependent on each other, so that there is always an active force that enforces some restrain, necessity or pressure on your business and on the market. Free as in speech it of course mostly is, not for all products though, considering legal prosecution of export of for example strong encryption methods etc. But then again, what is freedom of speech worth if there is actually no freedom? And what is more, global markets are divided by the global players, whether they be the biggest players out there or the so-called smaller businesses. And, by dividing the market and of course the market shares, everyone is interested to keep that share or increase the amount of market share. With that in mind, and the introduction of b2b, we find that free market is actually a lie in that the market it a planned market and lastly also a planned economy. Of course, the actors in that economy mostly act on their behalf, being restricted by said restrains, necessities and pressure. They act semi-free in that they decide on their behalf and not on behalf of some third party that actually defines what to produce and when. Taking necessity into account and existing business relations (b2b), you will actually find that the only freedom one does have in the so-called free market is whether or not to actually be a part of that so-called free market. And, if that is what freedom leaves us as a choice in respect to market, then freedom is void in respect to the market, it is either be in it or leave it. And, considering that when you start complaining about something, it is always: you better leave as others who seek out to keep the system as it is, will eventually drive you out of it. Just my two cents, Carsten
I'd like to see someone explain the process that created a cosmic ray (reference) with energy (51 Joules) comparable to a brick being dropped on your foot.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Then, for a 2000-hour work year, we'd all make at least one million dollars a year and we'd all be rich.
Lordy, we all be millionaires!!!!
Feel stupid now, dumbass? You should.
Raising the minimum wage doesn't make an employee more valuable to an employer. Quite the opposite. Because if a low/no-skill worker isn't worth more to an employer than what he's paid, that low/no-skill worker will remain unemployed.
Read here how increases in the unemployment rate of black teenages correlates exactly with increases in the minimum wage.
This article states that "A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon..." in the question about constants. I never knew about this, so off to google. According to one web page, bacterial life-forms were involved in the process of running these reactors. This idea isn't mentioned in the wikipedia article. Well, at least the wikipedia article does mention about the alpha constant, and says, "there is no physical reason why it should be exactly constant."
Software freedom...I love it!
#15 - Slashdot Moderators
Do a google search on what a 'troll' is... from the wikipedia:
The main motive for a user trolling is to disrupt the community in some way. Inflammatory, sarcastic, disruptive or humorous content is posted, meant to draw other users into engaging the troll in a fruitless confrontation. The greater the reaction from the community the more likely the user is to troll again, as the person develops beliefs that certain actions achieve his/her goal to cause chaos. This gives rise to the often repeated protocol in Internet culture: "Do not feed the trolls".
It does not mean someone you disagree with or don't like. The point of moderations like "Troll" and "Flamebait" is to remove noise from the signal, not to try an bias the signal towards your own sensibilities.
The post above is a lame joke and not a troll... the earlier post arguing with the list by saying inflation isn't a bad theory isn't a troll... if only slashdot had a -1 Curmudgeon...
Anyway, if you don't like my comment here, moderate it as OffTopic, not as a troll or flamebait or whatever. Many of us have marked Trolls to be extra negative, but moderator abuse is making this a useless feature as someone will down moderate a +5 post by labeling it a troll just because it is pro-microsoft or pro-drug-czar or pro-copyrights or whatever....
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Slashdot is dying if not already dead. It's so riddled with brain damaged ideology it's sad. But then again all of geekdom has degenerated into a morass of Leftist claptrap, conspiracy theories and policy wonks.
Taken at face value the term "free market" is an oxymoron, because a market is a place where things are bought and sold and so cannot be free in that sense. "Fair markets" or "Information-neutral markets" would be more correct, but there is no direct connection between information neutral markets and freedom: the term itself is loaded politically. In any case (and someone won a Nobel prize in economics for showing this) free markets are rarely free in reality because the large players always seek to make them asymmetric.
Pining for the fjords
in the universe to accelerate past the speed of light, so if the entire universe were to explode I guess that qualifies. Not to mention that initially everything was in a quantum state so the standard model didn't really apply at the beginning, after all, its when the rules of the standard model imprinted on our universe.
The trouble with that joke ("I went to the free market but nothing was free") is that some idiots say that there is no such thing as a free market. In essence that's true just as there is no such thing as an object at absolute zero. Markets are never "free"; they are always more or less free than other markets. As you observed, markets which are more free produce more wealth for the participants than markets which are interfered with to achieve some nominally desirable purpose like equality or justice.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
9 Dark energy
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. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
I wonder if they should re-examine this. Perhaps the universe is overall static in size. Much like the conservation of energy...
Perhaps it is our world and solar system that is becoming smaller and thus the universe "appears" to be getting larger. As space dust deposits minute amounts of dust on earth, it increases our gravity and thus affects time. We do know time and gravity have a relationship, and thus maybe we are missing the obvious.
Fractals...not uniform, but they provide a repeating pattern. Fractals occur in nature quite a bit, why not in the big scheme of the universe?
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to),
An unregulated free market didn't lead to Microsoft, because we don't *have* an unregulated free market
in the United States. In a real unregulated market, without things like patents, and the bazillions of dollars worth of government restrictions and regulations required to start a business, there would be a lot more competition for MS. It would actually be much harder for monopolies like MS to become overwhelmingly powerful in a real free market, because it would be much easier to set up shop and compete with them on a level playing field.
Of course some people say that there would be no innovation without patents... I contend that such an assertion is not true, and that the lack of artificial government granted monopolies (patents) would result in a constant "arms race" situation where companies would be forced to innovate constantly or die. Look at how military technology advances... the US is forced to constantly work on developing better battle technology exactly because there is no way to prevent our competitors from using what has already been invented. I mean, it's not like we could patent the nuclear bomb and keep Russia, China, India, Pakistan, etc. from using it...
Give us a real free market sometime, and let's see what happens... until then it's all just speculation, because we damn sure don't have anything approaching a free market now.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Why is the parent modded "Troll"? Moderators should not do this simply because they disagree with the comment, or because it disagrees with their personal position. The parent does not attempt to incite a flame war and should not be modded as it has been.
Well I am a chemist and a mass spectrometrist who in my youth used to regard Bieman as an almost godlike figure. Well he was wrong. The MS results were of limited sensitivity. The most likely form microbial life in Martian soil would take is to be dormant spores waiting for the rare periods when liquid water becomes available. These spores could be in a very low level in the Martian soil well below the level that would produce sufficent quantities of organic compounds to be detectible by MS.
The LR experiment is very sensitive. Levin was able to use it to show the presence of microorganisms in Antarctic ice cores, which could not be detected chemically, but which could be confirmed by the standard microbiological procedures of plating out. Lunar rock from the Apollo mission gave no false positives in the LR experiment.
All the recent results from Mars probes showing both evidence for the existance of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past and for evidence of the presence of water now, all serve to support the claim that the original Viking biology results provide a strong indication that microbial life is present on Mars. There is a case to answer. Now is the time for NASA to invest in sending a chiral LR experiment to Mars to further investigate and hopefully come up with some conclusive answers.
I think the apparent effect of dark energy is actually something around 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what current theories predict.
The only way to question science is via the scientific method.
Intelligent design. Life is so complicated that a superior being had to have a hand in it.
But just how complicated is it?
From these 13 (or 14 or 15) unexplainable things, I would say that it's just so darn complicated that it would take a whole army of supreme beings to make it this complicated. That's why I have chosen to not believe in the "intelligent designer" theory.
It's just so darn obvious that it should be plural: INTELLIGENT DESIGNERS that's the theory for me. I've printed up stickers and I'm visiting schools to label all the textbooks I can find. I don't care if the books are science, math, home ec or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This idea is too big to rest!
Did anyone else notice that the "WOW signal" occurred the day before Elvis was pronounced dead?
"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."
28 billion? Closer to 100 billion if my memory serves me - they forgot to take into account expansion. Journalists shouldn't guess scientific data...
From the article...
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
Bird droppings.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
then you should check out digg.com. like slashdot, but better. the people are the editors, and generally, it just doesn't suck.
Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina (whole parallel universes with differing physical laws)
No it doesn't. It simply says that any given region of the universe at the time of the big bang will expand hugely more with inflation than without inflation. In terms of unobservable universes beyond the limit of what we can see, inflation makes no difference at all. All you need is for the universe to be big enough and for expansion to be the same everywhere and continue long enough. These hidden regions are a consequence of Big Bang theory with or without inflation.
I'm SO SICK of this endless "dupe article" trolling. If you want to bring up the quality of this site, how about either commenting on the article, or shutting up.
Wow. Dude, just wow. What color is the sky in your simplistic world?
You apparently disagree with the other post, which is fine, but what makes his viewpoint "simplistic"?
Couldn't agree with you more.
I bet he uses his other accounts to mod you down for that
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I think it's because you refer to yourself as "myself" rather than "I." Myself is retarded. Stop it. Myself am going to post this now.
Time is cubic?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
> Of course some people say that there would be no innovation without patents... I contend that such an assertion is not true, and that the lack of artificial government granted monopolies (patents) would result in a constant "arms race" situation where companies would be forced to innovate constantly or die.
The US drug companies are always on television telling you how important their profits are to continued research, but outside observers say they spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you read the older literature, it seems that placebos are very powerful treatments for many conditions, with a substantial fraction of subjects showing a positive response to placebo. The effect of placebos has been attributed to patient expectation. Some studies showed that patient expectation could override known pharmacological effects of drugs; patients given a stimulant but told that it was a sedative exhibited signs of sedation, and vice-versa. On the other hand, modern studies (e.g. this study suggest that placebos have rather small effects aside from pain (probably via release of endogenous opiates) and psychiatric conditions.
However, modern studies with placebos are done very differently than the early studies. In the old days, experimenters simply lied to the subjects and told them that they were receiving an active drug. This is no longer considered ethical, and subjects in modern studies must sign a form indicating that they are aware that there is a possibility that they will be given an inactive placebo. Given that the ethical issues preclude the replication of the early studies, this is a question that may never be entirely resolved.
A related issue is whether it is ethical for a physician to lie to a patient and give them a placebo. Modern ethical standards impose an obligation on the physician to be honest with patients, which--if placebos really can have beneficial effects--may be an obstacle to optimum treatment in circumstances where no better treatment is available. I've heard of cases physicians recommending herbal or homeopathic treatments, since in such cases they can honestly tell their patients, "Some patients find this helps." This is not quite the same as being able to say "This is a wonder drug; it will definitely make you feel better," but offers a compromise between the obligation to be honest and the obligation to offer the best therapy available.
On topic, since the discussion was started by the Slashdot editor: U.S. Federal Deficit by Political Party.
The fundamental idea behind cold fusion is the same as that for Muon catalyzed fusion - reduce the size of deuterium atoms and the nuclear attraction can be increased to the point that fusion occurs.
Palladium will hold more deuterium per unit volume than the same volume of liquid deuterium will. This means that the nuclei are closer to each other than they are in liquid deuterium. With the proper molecular structure of Palladium this increased density is enough that the deuterium will fuse. This does not require any 'new physics' to explain.
What does require some work is why these reactions don't release neutrons like hot fusion does. In hot fusion the nuclei can only get rid of their increased energy by 1. radiation 2. emission of particles. The energy and momentum conservation laws don't allow option one in deuterium fusion. Those same laws require 2 particles be emitted since one fast moving particle could not conserve the pre impact momentum of the colliding atoms. In cold fusion the helium nucleus can and will get rid of its extra energy by means of the increased electric field imparting kinetic energy in the form of heat into the palladium matrix. As a result the helium nucleus does not need to emit a neutron to conserve momentum. Once again, no new physics required.
I have read that part of the reason for the difficulty of duplicating the original experiments is that metallic palladium has 16 or so different atomic structures - only one of which will support cold fusion.
I have also read that there is a fairly easy way to overcome all of the difficulties of the experiment: put Palladium dust into deuterium gas at about 5000 PSI. The extra pressure on the metal evidently moves the nuclei a little closer together causing the container of deuterium to heat up and stay hot from continued fusion events. This was discovered by a Japanese researcher.
merely the Placebo effect?w ebmd/main797796.shtml/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/26/health/
However, this 'And there has to be special circumstances', is exactly the kind of crap psychics got away with for fifty years 100 years ago.
If homeopathy works, it is a medicine. Medicines have demonstratable effects on illnesses and the body. If a homeopathic medicine made from X has an effect on condition Y, it should repeatably have that effect.
And, more to the point, there is no way to do a double-blind test when homeopathy 'doctors' refuse to accept others can do exactly what they are doing and end up with the same 'medicine', so patients can either be given that medicine or given water, and watched.
Or, hell, just make a big batch of it and hand it over to a hospital for the study.
And the reason they act like this is because they know that if that were to happen, it would be demonstrated that giving people pure water and telling them it's a homeopathic remedy produces exactly the same effect as giving them the homeopathic remedy.
Which isn't the least bit surprising, because homeopathic remedies are pure water. But, hey, there are places willing to do the studies, and in fact have done the studies.
And, no, the study in the article doesn't prove anything. A single study with a weird result isn't proof of anything. There have been 'guess which way the coin flip will go' studies where a person got 65% of them right, but that doesn't prove anything, because other studies have been unable to replicate them.
Of course, now that a study has gone their way, they'll be even less likely to help with research that will prove homeopathy to be a big bag of crap.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
As noted earlier, this article is from March, making it a mystery why it is presented as a "year-end list". Apart from that, it boggles the mind how New Scientist could include the Ennis "Belfast" experiment on the list of unsolved mysteries, without even mentioning the "Horizon" experiment that thoroughly debunked it several years ago. http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopat hy.shtml
> Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina
Is that really any different from our understanding of chemistry and gravity?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I swear to god, dada21 is the new TripMasterMonkey. Only dada21 posts like ten times as much worthless shit and is a hundred times more annoying. Hey dada21, please stop posting for a bit, OK? OK. Thx.
Four replies, none of which address the argument.
Claim: Free markets make perfect sense! They are the most logical, sensible system.
Counterclaim: If you're on the top of the pile. Those being crushed on the bottom might reasonably feel otherwise.
Counter-counterclaim: [sarcasm] Yeah, because it isn't like everyone benefits from the freemarket system. Only the Waltons benefit from their stores. Not the millions of poorer people that are able to afford more goods and live better lives because they can afford cheaper goods.
Counter-counter-counterclaim: [paraphrased, for the benefit of those who missed the point] Some people can't even afford to shop at Wal-Mart.
Are you people unaware that people go hungry in the USA, which prides itself as being the richest, freest, fairest nation in the world?
Do you really think an unconstrained market would improve their lot?
Do you think they deserve to be crushed under the weight of the machine?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The great thing about slashdot is that, despite all the idiotic stories, there are usually some good comments explaining what's wrong with each story. Alterslash will usually pick a lot of them out for you automatically. If you want both, plus a little bit of del.icio.us thrown in, there's always diggdot.
Free Hans!
But then again, I'm immune to the placebo effect.
Military Intelligence
Would you have reacted so bitterly if that was the joke that was used? Knowing slashdot, sadly, there probably someone out there who will come out and argue, in all seriousness, about the intelligence of the military, and how their uncle was a genius at Mil Intel.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The title is completely irrelevant to the content of the message, incorrect because it is not about a year's end list, and it begins with a parenthesis. It's just horrible.
It's an interesting article, too, or I wouldn't even bother saying this.
/ Per
The parent was moderated -1, Funny . Does this not suggest that the moderators are against humor? I guess the moderators could be saying that that the post was -1 because it was offtopic and funny because it was funny, but shouldn't the moderation number correspond to the reason? Added to this someone who posted the exact same thing after this got modded 4, Funny . Will this be modded 5, Offtopic?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Now wasn't that easy?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Along with realizing that Dark Energy and Dark Matter come from the same explanation (see previous post), we'll have this list whittled down to a much more reasonable 10 Items before you know it. After all, who has ever heard of a Top 13 list?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In a real unregulated market, without things like patents, and the bazillions of dollars worth of government restrictions and regulations required to start a business, there would be a lot more competition for MS.
When you say "without things like patents", I assume you also mean "without copyrights". In that sort of a market, there would be no competition for Microsoft, because there would be no Microsoft, since their whole business model depends upon enforcement of copyrights. It is perhaps possible that software companies could use contract law rather than copyright law to prevent wholesale redistribution of their products, but that would lead to a very inefficient market, since the transaction costs would be very high.
Also, if we're throwing out IP law, trade secrets have to go, too. That means that even if a software company were able to function by selling software bound up with contractual restrictions, there would be no law beyond employment contracts that could be used to prevent employees from stealing a copy of the source code and selling it to competitors, and definitely no way to prevent those competitors from selling the software as their own once they managed to acquire it, by hook or by crook.
Without copyright, I don't think the software-for-sale industry could exist.
Would that be a better world? It's hard to be certain, but I actually think it wouldn't be, and I work within the software services-and-support industry. I think we need software-for-sale, too, as well as Free software, BSD software, public domain software, etc. There are places for all sorts of structures, and copyright gives us the basic tool used to build them.
I'm pretty libertarian, and I'm pretty unhappy with the badly unbalanced state of IP law in the US and most of the world, but doing away with it entirely is a bad idea, IMO.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Stop Posting articles from New Scientist that are from 6 months back!
How is this possibly a failure of modern physics, an embarassment, or any such thing?
It means scientists had a hypothesis, tested it against the evidence, find it doesn't fit, and keep on working on the problem. That's what science _is_! Or should be tell, for example, Isaac Newton that he should be 'embarrassed' for not getting his equations 100% right in the first place, and the same with most other scientists?
I was reading about the Placebo effect and though, all those vegans might be on to something.
Yet another article (not the source article, but the post to /.) to make reference to the fact that there is yet another list at the end of the year. How long does it take those who disclaim their conformity to realize they are conforming by disclaiming their conformity, and to start disclaiming their disclaimers?
Aw, crap... am I being original, either? Slippery slope, folks.
So quit disclaiming and say what you gotta say.
Trade and barter among primitive people often was. And the market distortions (eg, extortion or theft) were pretty straightforward failure modes.
I can't probe the intent of the grandparent, but I think there's obvious differences between copyright and patents.
1 The placebo effect
The power of the human mind is amazing in what it can manifest by just concentrated thought alone. This will become more evident in time as research is done into it. It will also explain healings, premonitions, so-called ESP, etc...
2 The horizon problem
They will eventually find out that time is not a constant... it is currently changing speed very slowly, and possibly changed very fast close to the big bang.
4 Belfast homeopathy results
Once again, just more proof of the power of the human mind to manifest impossible results.
5 Dark matter
There is no dark matter. Our understanding of gravity is just wrong.
6 Viking's methane
Created by microscopic organic material that survived the trip from earth aboard the Viking module.
8 The Pioneer anomaly
Once again, we do not properly understand gravity yet.
9 Dark energy
Our understanding of time/gravity is not complete and is not the same in all places and moments in the universe.
10 The Kuiper cliff
Yes, there are more large planets in our solar system that have not yet been found.
11 The Wow signal
The signal was terrestrial and mistaken for one coming from space.
12 Not-so-constant constants
In different places and different moments in time, nothing is guaranteed constant.
13 Cold fusion
Cold fusion is possible, but the conditions required to create the reaction keep changing because of reasons we do not yet understand.
Now let's hope Slashdot preserves my theories so people of the future can see them come true. They will call me a prophet.
Meh.
The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine.
Step 1: Take 10 molecules of the histamine - place in a sterile test tube. (Carefully so as to not drop and lose any molecules)
Step 2: Take another test tube with 100 ml of deionized water.
Step 3: Throw away the first Test tube - just leaving a test tube full of deionized water
Step 4: Administer the deionized water to the patient
The concept of diluting a solution to the point where it "probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule" sounds like absolute hokum to me. Even with a VERY small amount of the original substance you would need to dilute the solution to a point where you had the histamine "concentrated" into one part of the solution, which you then separated from the "clean" part. And for an "imprint" of the substance to be made on the water molecules they would have to "bump" into the substance, and then move into the "clean" part of the solution (which could happen - but really?).
IMO this is actually a case of more evidence for the placebo effect
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Posit some form of tachyon with imaginary mass and real kinetic and intrinsic energy, so that their energy follows E=(iM)C^2/sqrt(1-(V/C)^2) . If V>C, the square root denominator is imaginary, but iM is imaginary also, so the result is real energy, curving spacetime and sometimes exchanging energy with other particles, vaguely like normal sublight massive particles. If the average kinetic energy of these tachyons was the same thermal 2.7K as normal matter, they would be zipping around at very high multiples of the speed of light. In events where they gained energy, they would slow down, and they would speed up if they lost energy. If we assume that most of the tachyons have an imaginary mass of the same magnitude as a real proton, then their median (not average!) speed would be something like 800,000 times the speed of light in deep space.
Galaxies are not deep space, but rather deep gravity wells - falling into such a deep gravity well will add quite a bit of energy to a tachyon, and slow it down substantially. It will still zip through the galaxy in a few months, but it will linger, and increase the local concentration of mass-energy, affecting rotation rates. However, it will not slow down very much extra at all in the vicinity of a "mere" star or planet or benchtop G measurement experiment, so tachyons will be impossible to detect in the lab, and will have small local effects in solar systems. So these tachyons behave something like Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
Next, the number of tachyons captured in the galaxies and their overall effects will vary in deep time - tachyons with hotter median energy will linger more often in more closely spaced galaxies closer to the big bang. This may have an effect on the mechanics of expansion, and appear as acceleration effects in the expansion of the universe (mad hand waving here - I might have blundered on a sign error).
Lastly, very near the moment of the big bang, when all the massive unbound quarks are zipping around at high relativistic thermal velocities, we might expect the tachyons to move around at "low" relativistic thermal velocities as well. Particles moving at speeds just below and just above the speed of light will be much more likely to interact directly than particles in very separated velocity ranges. The closely coupled tachyons could flatten variations in thermal energy well beyond the the limits of light speed.
Admittedly, this is all wild speculation, and as I am unable to do the proper mathematics I probably have no business making such speculations. I don't have any good idea of how tachyons could interact with anything besides their effects on the curvature of spacetime, or even the details of their adiabatic cooling as the universe expanded. I don't think tachyons would interact much with each other, or with light, or with other force exchange particles, except through gravitational curvature. And I am very uncomfortable positing something I cannot directly measure.
But hey, this is Shashdot, the home of the halfbaked opinion. So I can get this off my chest, perhaps to be found someday by some physicist looking for loonytoon ideas to use for target practice.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
The one problem with life on Mars is the Gaia Hypothesis. We are supposing that life on Mars is hanging on by a thread -- the Gaia Hypothesis argues that life modifies its environment to perpetuate itself, and if there really were life on Mars, it would be pretty unmistakable.
The idea that water molecules can retain an image of a solute is rediculous.it flies in the face of just about everything we know about water. that is why i think that homeopathy is the part of human thought that is MOST in contradiction to science; it is far, far worse the Intelligent design or religion or belief in the free market (that thrown in just for flamebait, but true nontheless)
Based on HHS figures for 2005 a single person is in poverty if he earns less than $9570/yr.
$5.15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 48 wk/yr = $9888/yr (assume 2 weeks unpaid vacation, 2 weeks unpaid holiday/sick)
For an average family of 2 adults, 2 children, the poverty level is $19,350/yr.
2 ppl * $5.15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 48 wk/yr = =$19776/yr.
I suppose you could argue that not all families have both parents working. But if they're in poverty and they want to get out, they both pretty much should be working.
US Census poverty thresholds are very close to the figures the Dept. HHS gives. Mind you, personally I think the minimum wage should be increased; but the above back-of-the-envelope calcuation does not support your assertion. The real problem seems to be that people in poverty are only able to find/hold part-time jobs, and thus aren't able to rack up 40 hrs/wk, 48 wks/yr. But it seems to me that's more likely to be the fault of the individual (can't find extra work, don't want to work so many hours) than of businesses.
I can't probe the intent of the grandparent, but I think there's obvious differences between copyright and patents.
Agreed, but since Microsoft's position in the market owes nothing to patents (Microsoft didn't even bother acquiring patents until very recently, when they realized that patents might be an effective weapon against FLOSS), I suspect it's more likely that the poster conflates all IP into one big nasty ball of badness.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In point one we learn: surprise, placebos DO work!
...
In point four we learn: oops, homoepathy works.
And suddenly, also in point 4: however, if you make a test and compare placebos with homeopathy, the homeopathy has not a higher success rate
LOL, I only can say.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
....physics isn't about answers, it's about questions....
The problem is that some the answers are disliked because they demolish long held cherished philosophical viewpoints and widely held underlying assumptions. These assumptions are the scientists equivalent of religious faith. Dark energy, matter, the pioneer probes "mysterious" acceleration and Hubble's "law" are postulated to preserve uniformitarian beliefs. One such scientific tenet of faith is the invariability of so called constants, all related to each other. "Constants" such as Planck's constant, alpha and the speed of light and related others, are, in the minds of most current scientists, sacred cows that cannot be admitted to having changed, perhaps drastically over the ages of time. Many of these observed "anomalies" can be explained by simply admitting that these cherished constants may have been many orders of magnitude different in the long ago ages of the beginning of the Universe and may be even yet changing slowly. There is nothing constant about our observed Universe, so why should these "constants" not also change over time?
All theory is gray
And answer without an exlanation is not an answer, just more philosophy.
Show me the data.
KFG
I am not a physicist, please correct me if this is inaccurate
You are inaccurate but right.
I wonder if you know what an order of magnitude is?
The apparent effect of dark energy is something like 50 orders of magnitude larger than what current theories predict.
1
10
100
1...[insert 49 zeros]...0
From the first line to the last one we have a difference of the order of magnitute of 50.
In other words, if you step on top of the tower of Pisa and drop a stone, it would not only not land in a different city, but on a different planet in a different galaxy.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
....Show me the data...
There is no problem with the data whatsoever. It is the attempts to explain the data in the light of currently held assumptions that requires convoluted, non-existent constructs, such as dark matter and energy. It is in fact the data that is calling into question many long held beliefs. One of these beliefs is that all of the so called constants have never and are still unchanging parameters of the Universe. Abandoning such beliefs is difficult, but then the need for dark matter evaporates as a means to try to interpret the data.
About 400 years ago a Danish Astronomer first challenged the then widely held notion that light takes no time to travel any distance. Experiments done with lanterns and shutters from mountain tops "proved" that this was so. It took about 50 years and many repeated experiments, before the larger scientific community finally accepted the fact that the speed of light was finite. Even Einstein had a hard time coming to grips with some of the implications of quantum theory. Many widely held theories of science have fallen to new data. This is what makes science interesting but also obsoletes science text books faster than most other kinds of books.
All theory is gray
It is much, MUCH, MUCH cheaper to copy the work of someone else, than to fund the research necessary to discover/develop the concept in the first place. So, if it costs only $10 million to develop (a tiny ammount) something like practical hydrogen extraction & storage methods, and it only costs your competitors $1 million to appropriate your newly developed methods for themselves, you'll be out of business. Period. Trade-secrets only work so far, and keeping new developments secret is necessarily bad for the advancement of science.
That works precisely because this is not an entirely free-market system. It works because we won't buy Chinese imitations of American-designed weapons. They would be a lot cheaper! Defense is not a profit-making industry, so it doesn't follow the same rules. Each country IS going to develop their own technologies, even if they can BUY them cheaper elsewhere.
I think we can agree on extensive reforms of the patent system, but doing away with it entirely is a horiffic idea.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There is no problem with the data whatsoever.
Show me your conclusion from the data.
About 400 years ago a Danish Astronomer first challenged the then widely held notion that light takes no time to travel any distance. Experiments done with lanterns and shutters from mountain tops "proved" that this was so.
No it did not. And the astronomer understood and published that it did not (and the experimenter was Italian. Fellow by the name of Galileo. Ole merely repeated the experiment with a better timepiece, further defining the minimum of the speed of light).
The speed of light is inherent in the laws of electromagnetic interaction. Change the speed of light and you must also change all phenomenon relying on electromagentic interactions. Like how your atoms stick together and stuff.
This isn't faith. It is demonstrable.
Most other constants aren't any particular deep mystery or even fundamental to physics. They are simply unit conversion factors from the Metric (or whatever other) system of measurment to the "natural" unit of the phenomenon.
Basically they don't even exist as "real" phenomena. They are side effects of using yardsticks to measure them instead of sticks of some other length.
Many widely held theories of science have fallen to new data.
Exactly.
Show me the data.
KFG
.....The speed of light is inherent in the laws of electromagnetic interaction.....
No known laws or principles of physics mandates that the speed of light be constant. Its speed is highly dependent on the nature of the medium through which it propagates. That is what makes lenses, prisms fiber optics and other media do what they do. The nature of space is determined by its contents and as such affects the speed of light. When the Universe was small and dense, the nature of space was also very much different and thus the speed at which light propagates through the medium of space. Gravity bends the light near a star because gravity affects the properties of the space around the star. The gravity of a black hole is so great that the light is bent back to its source before it can ever get out of such a black hole. It is indeed true that some of the properties of atomic structure are affected by this. The nature of the light produced by all atoms is well characterized by current knowledge of quantum physics. Recent discoveries that the red shift of far away galaxies occurs in discrete quantum bands negates the idea that the red shift is caused by incredibly rapid movement of the these far away objects, but by the quantum leaps of the electron orbits of the light emitting atoms of these incredibly far away places.
Energy-matter, space-time and gravity are all interrelated and as space itself expanded, associated parameters adjusted themselves and are still observed to be doing so, albeit very slowly today. The pioneer spacecraft "mystery" is one of these evidences that cannot be explained easily if one is determined to dogmatically assert that these "constants" must not ever change.
All theory is gray
No known laws or principles of physics mandates that the speed of light be constant.
Weeeeell, yes, they do, and this has been understood since the mid 1800s. It can be demonstrated in any decently equiped high school physics lab.
The speed of light is fixed by its method of propagation and only by its method of propagation.You may change the speed of light, but only by changing the nature of electromagnatism across the board. Change the speed of light and you inherently also change the speed of all electric motors; and the force which binds all molecules together.
So the question becomes is there anything that mandates whether the electromagnetic forces can't change.
More importantly, can you show any data indicating that it has; and bearing mind that such a change would effect the very makeup of physical matter.
Personally I don't give a damn. My whole point in this thread is against the idea of dogmatism of any kind.
Just show me the data.
Its speed is highly dependent on the nature of the medium through which it propagates.
No, it isn't. The speed with which light propagates through a medium is highly dependant upon the medium, but the speed of light at any given time within the medium remains the constant c. You are confusing instantaneous speed with average speed. If you drive a car at a constant 60 mph, but stop to piss every mile, your average speed will be much lower than 60 mph.
The concept of medium here means whether there is matter involved, since light stops to piss when it encounters matter. Space is not matter and does not affect the speed of light. It is not a medium. Again this is inherent in the nature of electromagnatism and only in the nature of electromagnatism.
Gravity bends the light near a star because gravity affects the properties of the space around the star.
But does not affect light's speed one iota, because gravity does not affect the electromagnetic force.
The pioneer spacecraft "mystery" is one of these evidences that cannot be explained easily if one is determined to dogmatically assert that these "constants" must not ever change.
It cannot be explained at all in any scientific manner by any means, easily or otherwise. One may postulate that some constant has changed, but one may also postulate that a giant invisible turtle is pushing them along.
This is philosophy. Simply assuming that a constant has changed in order to gain a desired result is "faith."
Just show me the data. I'd be glad to collect the Nobel by overturning all of known physics.Really, I would. Just look a few stories up from this one. I'd have accomplished something even Einstein didn't do (he refined physics, he didn't overturn it).
But to collect the data you might first want to learn something about what you're talking about, because you aren't allowed to simply make shit up for the sake of convenience.
You have to show the data.
KFG
This is no end-of-year list. It was published in March!
Well, the defintion of simple, for one. Only one thing is needed to fix all ills: a free market. It's a religion, not a well reasoned point of view. Everyting is fixed by one thing, like I said, simplistic.
Jadedness is what happens when your ideology runs out ;)
Think of someone with average intelligence. Now think 1/2 the world is dumber than that guy.
Well, the defintion of simple, for one. Only one thing is needed to fix all ills: a free market. It's a religion, not a well reasoned point of view. Everyting is fixed by one thing, like I said, simplistic.
in response to...
Give us a real free market sometime, and let's see what happens... until then it's all just speculation
???
I'm not taking a side on the free market issue, because I don't care about that today. I just want to point out that it doesn't sound like he's promising it will fix all ills. He's just saying it might be nice and it's worth a shot. Sounds like a fair enough point.
Think of someone with average intelligence. Now think 1/2 the world is dumber than that guy.
I know what an order of magnitude is. And it turns out that the error is more like 120 orders of magnitude from the perspective of the cosmological constant.
Source for the following (emphasis mine): Physics World
Dark energy: the suspects
- Cosmological constant (w = -1)
Originally introduced by Albert Einstein, it was later suggested by Yakov Zel'dovich that quantum vacuum energy would produce a constant energy density and pressure. However, theoretical predictions yield a cosmological constant that is 120 orders of magnitude higher than the observational value. Regardless of cosmology, quantum vacuum energy exists. Whether the cosmic contribution is in fact zero, or finely tuned, is one of the outstanding challenges in physics.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
.....Space is not matter and does not affect the speed of light.....
The properties of space --- free space that is--- very much affect electromagnetic energy propagation, including its speed. The purpose of every transmitting antenna is to launch such electromagentic waves into space. Without getting into complicated math here, one of the properties of space that determines critical parameters of antenna design is the electrical impedance of free space. An antenna is basically an impedance matching device between the the impedance of the RF generator and free space, enabling the energy of the former to be efficiently transferred to the latter. Both the impedance and the light speed are in the formulas for antenna design. You can look this stuff up in any radio engineering handbook.
Gravity DOES affect electromagnetic waves. The gravitational field of the sun bends starlight, just as a lens, such that the apparent position of a star is markedly different if the light has gone close, past the sun on its way to us. Gravity affects the properties of space and thus matter-energy moving through that space.
NO law of physics requires any of these "constants" to be invariant over time. There are "conservation" laws of mass-energy, momentum etc, that are not violated even if the speed of light and related parameters change. In order to carry the same energy, if a bullet (photon or electron) travels faster, some of its mass is converted into energy. The converse is also true. Einstein first came up with these discoveries and they have been verified experimentally too many times to count. Space-time, gravity and matter-energy are all relative to one another and there is nothing absolute to any one of them. You can think of the speed of light as one way of describing the properties of space. Matter-energy determine the strength of gravity in a region of space. It is interesting that the equations of electromagnetism and atomic behavior all have references to c or parameters related thereto and these all contain a time dimension. The equations concering gravity however do not make reference to any kind of time units.
All theory is gray