Slashdot Mirror
(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."
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
Since the last time it was posted on /.
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
> 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.
Funny about that... The current minimum [wage] places a family below the federal poverty level, unable (as Wal-Mart's chairman put it) to shop even at Wal-Mart.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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!
"The current minimum [wage] places a family below the federal poverty level"
I guess it's a good thing that not everyone working at Wal-Mart is their family's primary income provider then. Don't teenagers and single adults with no children deserve to make money as well?
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.