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End of a Scientific Legend?
pacopico writes to mention the sorry state of the well-known Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays, "smugness can breed complacency, and complacency carelessness. In recent years the laboratory has been in the news not for its successes but its failures.The result is a change of management, which the story goes on to discuss in great detail. It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"
smugness can also breed the urge to smell your own farts!
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
It's nice to see that their secrecy is still in effect.
Just last Monday, NPR's Fresh Air program featured investigative reporter Sharon Weinberger, who has just written a book titled Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. In the interview, Weinberger breaks down how the US Military has gone from bad to worse in terms of science, rejecting even its own internal peer-review system (including the JASONs) in favor of administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons".
Of course, the problem isn't new -- she points out in the interview that the Clinton administration was just as quick as anyone else to slam the door on global warming results that didn't match their polices. And in fact, the first two-thirds of the interview are studiously neutral in tone. But by the end, after host Terri Gross and Weinberger have laid the factual foundation, the Bush administration comes out looking pretty pathetic. With the current administration's secrecy, paranoia (the Wen Ho Lee fiasco at Los Alamos gets particular attention), and general disregard for the scientific method, it's pretty clear that if Los Alamos falls, it didn't jump -- it was pushed.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
Lasers Controlled Games!
smugness can breed complacency, complacency leads to carelessness. Carelessness leads to ... suffering
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I feel this is somehow relevant but my wit is failing to make a significant presentation. http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=134588&cid= 11236065
Currently they are building a whole new generation of supercomputing. based on plan 9.
And its not meant to be funny.. Its the truth. When some in the community questioned v9fx support in the linux kernel as not justified due to few users the folks at Los Alamos told them as much.
Next generation folks. LANL. ORNL, it doesn't matter..
Stuff gets done. :)
Both Argonne and Fermilab may soon be going under a similar change in management.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Remember, several of the labs (and I think Los Alamos falls into this group) are managed by Universities. And I just don't think those university administrators are really equiped to deal with managing a bunch of scientists whose IQ's are often very far above theirs, and who are sometimes willing to break rules and do end runs around them.
The college I went to many of the professors were famous in their fields and the admins were all just typical people. The things the profs would do to them (and while some were funny, some were pretty darn cruel) were often amazing. Yeah you might be a brilliant admin with an IQ of 110 or 120. But that 180 IQ professor is going dazzle you like you've never seen in your life and high end research is not a pursuit for the faint of heart! They're not just smart, they're often tough too!
I've heard some rather shocking stories from friends who work at two of the National labs that seems to bear this theory out.
It's of interest that when Google filter's search results in China, they were 'evil'. But a lab that developed weapons that vaporized 25,000 people in a few seconds is considered 'prestigious' and 'a legend'.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
For example, you could say "Only idiots would go to Wal-Mart," and "prove" it by saying "Everyone in Wal-Mart is an idiot".
Both statements are true. I don't know where you're going with this...
Ok, I posted this exact same comment above, so don't mod this up: I am one of the few people left who agrees with you, and this raises the question: isn't the meaning of a phrase determined in large part by its usage? If the majority of people use "beg the question" to mean "raise the question" then who are we to say it doesn't mean that. We don't need the phrase "it begs the question" anyways; you can always say "the argument is circular".
Philosophy.
Having been for an interview at another nuke design place I can save the whole thing runs against everything I grew up to believe. I can't imagine they get the best scientists these days. Pictures of "community" next to pictures of Hiroshima don't exactly inspire in-line with any morals. The day the place falls into ruin is the day we have some intelligence
We work with them on several projects and for the amount of money they spend with us I can't believe they're "going under" anytime soon. Either they're in a shitheap of debt, or the parent is wayyyyy off base with his accusations.
How about "no one goes to that resturant because it's always so crowded."
I'll show myself out.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
>Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays,
Anyone can build that kind of stuff in their garage.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
There is not a university in charge of LANL any more.
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There is a corporation of Bechtel and University of California.
My dad decided that nuclear weapon jobs weren't the place to be when safety had to come in under budget. So he left.
http://www.kobtv.com/index.cfm?viewer=storyviewer
Before anyone jumps on the "Descriptive Grammar" wagon; yes, I am very familiar with the descriptive grammar concept in linguistics.
But it is one thing to violate the "don't end sentences with a prepostion" rule, and another thing entirely to take a word or phrase which has a very specific and nuanced meaning and try to make it apply to another situation through simple ignorance.
The best example I can come up with in the computer field is how most knowledgeable people will cringe when someone calls the computer itself the "hard drive" instead of a tower, box, or just "computer". "Hard drive" means something very specific, and calling something else by that name makes it very difficult for people to communicate. Language is an agreement by two people to use the same or at least similar conventions to aid in mutual understanding. People violating those conventions by laziness or ignorance gum up the works for everyone else.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
The US has already fallen way behind in scientific research.
America scrapped its supercollider while the Europeans built their LHC at CERN, so Europe will lead nuclear research for at least the next 20 years. Europe and Japan are doing advanced medical research while the US cuts funding and asks if its ethical to use stem cells.
The US has decided to abandon the Hubble telescope and allow it to burn up in the atmosphere, virtually abandon manned space travel, and divert most of the space research budget to militarizing space. Meanwhile the ESA is doing most of the space research and even China is launching manned missions.
Los Alamos losing its shine is such a minor thing compared to the rest of the US scientific community, it's barely worth noticing. The sad thing is by the time enough people notice the US is falling behind, it will be too late.
For those who are curious as to the correct meaning of "begs the question" I'd recommend reading http://skepdic.com/begging.html
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
Well, advertising yeast to a question, that is a tough one.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Isn't the purpose of science to test hypotheses? I have to assume that's what they're doing, so how are they failing?
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
The other laboratories in the DOE complex have for years fought against the "Ugly Step Sisters" (as they are called complex wide) to get funding for real work within the scope of research assigned to them in their DOE mandates. Whenever research was to be done in a particular area that is the focus of a particular lab, (ie INL-Civilian Nuclear power and safety, NREL-electric/hybrid vehicles, etc etc), the step sisters would approach the customer of the smaller labs using their holier than thou smooze and steal the funding at a DOE headquarters level, and not deliver a comparable product in the end. LANL, LLNL, and Sandia are capable of this because of congressional backing; California has a huge and powerful amount of congressional representation. And, when the prior Clinton Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson became Governor of New Mexico, it only empowered these labs to hog funding and mission further having both the Californian interests from the University of California, and Campuses in California, as well as New Mexico in some cases, as well as the previous secretary of energy.
The slapdown of the "scientific legends" is a breath of fresh air for real science funding at smaller labs doing real science with real accountability because the smaller labs are too small to screw up without loosing funding catastrophically.
I am not sorry for the "ugly step sisters". If one of them is getting a whooping, and it is traceable to significant screwups (lets see, LANL had faked elements 116, 117, and 118 on the periodic table, mustangs purchased on company credit cards, significant breaches of computer and cyber security that went unfixed for years. etc . etc. ). Then let them learn and clean up their act so they can be a contributing and honest member of our DOE's scientific complex.
The Department of Energy's Scientific Budget should be for accountable science, not a government welfare program that funds bad scientists and the managers who employ them.
I am staff scientist at another DOE lab and spent time at Los Alamos as a graduate fellow a few years ago. From the coverage in the media and from the comments of many politicians (many of whom stood to gain much if UC were to lose out in favor of universities/companies from their home state in the LANL bidding wars), one would think that Los Alamos was full of nothing but incompetence, dishonesty, and arrogance. That simply was not the case -- Los Alamos has had a very similar track record when compared to both other government labs and industry. This was pointed out in a very informative and insightful opinion piece that appeared in Physics Today:
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-57/iss-12/p60.html
While Los Alamos has certainly had its share of fiascos, I think a lot of bad press they received was because 1) They are the most visible government lab, and 2) Many politicians hoped that if they could humiliate the lab management enough, someone from their state could end up with the (now extremely lucrative) management contract.
(Posted anonymously out of fear of DOE muckety-mucks)
I worked at Sandia Natl Labs the last 3 summers, and heard lots of weird stories about people from Los Alamos. There was the guy who wore a cape everywhere, of course. There was also an individual who transferred from Los Alamos to Sandia (rarely do people transfer the other way), who could not get along with anyone, and did not last long. One of the researchers even initially worked at Sandia, transferred to Los Alamos, and then transferred back, saying the whole environment is just... off. Los Alamos is basically surviving on their history now. Their museum hasn't had much to add this last half a century; they mainly focus on the history of designing and testing the atomic bomb.
There's much more drama at these national labs than the general public might think...
The Economist is just part of the propaganda war hustling Los Alamos out of California's management and into the Texas Empire. When Ken Lay was convicted after Enron robbed over $8BILLION from California on the way down, it looked like the CA/TX war was going better for California. But superior Congressional firepower is trending towards Texas again.
--
make install -not war
That would be one small step for mankind, one large leap for the USA
The US is helping quite a bit with the LHC, in addition to many other non-European countries. I'm not sure how you came up with the 20-year European lead on particle physics (maybe you pulled it out of your ass), but as with any other research facility I'm sure there will be plenty of US scientists making progress there. How many European scientists do you think are working with NASA on the Mars rover data? Quite a few. The US is already putting billions behind the LHC, doesn't seem obvious that US scientists would contribute significantly to LHC research once it's fully built? Major research is largely an international affair today; most mature scientists put patriotism aside (unless you think Harvard's being pro-Bush by researching with stem cells).
"Europe and Japan are doing advanced medical research" - such as? And the US isn't? Stem cells aren't the last word in medical science. The US stem cell situation sucks to be honest, but that's not enough to pass judgment on any nation's medical progress. I wouldn't be surprised if the 2008 presidential election changed things dramatically, possibly moreso than the 2004 election did. Why couldn't it?
Yes, the Hubble is dead. That's why there are multiple replacemetns being proposed. I'm intrigued by your claim that NASA's abandoning manned space travel; I suppose this whole Project Constellation business is a great hoax, and that Lockheed and Boeing are in on it too. Yes, the US wants to militarize space, but they're doing a lot more too. And the Taikonauts are a joke compared to the routine ISS missions by NASA.
Seriously, if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, just shut up.
So is it ok then to use your and you're interchangeably, use an apostrophe for plurality, confuse loose and lose, among other things?
The US is a rapidly declining force, and that includes its science. I'm sure smugness and complacency played a major role in this, but so did arrogance and greed. The current Administration did more damage than most others combined, but the writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Unfortunately those likely to fill the gap aren't necessarily anybody else's first choice.
The real problem is that both Los Alamos and Lawrence Labs purpose was to design nuclear weapons which we know longer need to do. They are always searching for the need for a new weapon. A few years ago and still today they are pushing for a bunking busting nuke. Great way to generate lots of nuclear fallout from detonating the bomb in the ground. Right now they are looking to build a newer, higher reliability bomb. I am sure most of the scientists who would work on these projects know it is a great waste of resources. Yes, we need to keep a core expertese on nuclear weapons, but let's switch the major effort at these labs to deal with lack of cheap energy and so to be energy at any price.
I would mod you up, but for some reason when I view a collapsed comment, there are no mod options there. The new layout is broken, methinks.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
When I first read the title of this story, I thought maybe someone had disproven evolution. I'm glad it is still thought that my ancestors threw their shit at each other.
at first glance, it looks like the woman's boob is hanging out!
Fry: "Nobody drives in New York, too much traffic."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I grew up in Los Alamos. My dad worked there over twenty years until he retired. He retired because the culture there had gotten sufficiently unbearable and it wasn't worth putting up with because he could no longer do the kind of science he loved. He wasn't alone among experienced senior researchers there who were fed up and leaving. When the braniest town in the world has a brain drain, there's trouble.
Management by the University of California is possibly the best thing that ever happened to LANL. Whatever the mission given to LANL by DOE, it would be carried out in an academic culture. People were rewarded professionally and looked up to informally for doing good science and good research. Ok, it wasn't all utopia, there was also the petty politicking that goes along with academia and grant groveling. I still think it was good and a lot of good work was done there.
When I moved to California I discovered that some people here objected to the UC management of LANL. They didn't want to be associated with a nuclear weapons lab. I think that's wrong and that they were foolish if they thought that the UC disowning LANL would make it go away. LANL needs the UC because the alternative is too horrible. That has come to pass and now LANL is under joint management of UC and defense contractors. I've heard rumors that the mission changed from far out theoretical, pure and semi-pure research and shifted towards more immediate engineering of new weapons. The new regime is pushing security and secrecy to the point of paranoia and counterproductivity. For many scientists, it isn't fun anymore.
I don't expect LANL to evaporate within the next 5 years. There is still plenty there that doesn't suck. I do expect they'll have trouble replacing talent in some areas. I think it's not yet too late to restore the soul of the place and bring it back and do some world class science.
Start Running Better Polls
Kaboom!!!
Los Alamos once had the tradition that the lab director had to have a Nobel Prize. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appointed a lawyer. It's been downhill since then.
No.
I'd love to post on this but if I stated everything I knew I'd probably be fired. What I will say is that (IMHO) I expect to see many reports of Fraud, Waste, & Abuse coming out of this as do I expect many researchers to leave because of their new corporate masters (IMHO) cannibalistic ways.
punch it up your arsehole cuntface
Yes, a control node reduces to O(n), but you suffer from having a potential hot-spot and from the risks involved in having a single point of failure. Given the cost of supercomputer time (even on pile-of-pc clusters) these are not good characteristics to have. Again, I'd love to learn more about how they have solved/plan to solve such issues. They are exceptionally nasty.
I remember talking to some of the Los Alamos guys at SC|05 and don't recall hearing this stuff being mentioned, but IIRC most of those who had in-depth understanding were off wandering the tables when I came by. Really, supercomputing is an area that really needs a Slashdot section to itself - if not an entire collaboration site! - there is so much fascinating work going on where the fundamentally defining researcg simply isn't getting circulated much beyond the first few cubes.
(I fully respect an organization's right to privacy, and particularly understand the interesting IP complexities involved in Government labs - I've worked in enough! - where copyright limitations on the Government are routinely bypassed by either classifying the work or having a contractor do enough to have them claim the IP. Sometimes the really interesting stuff simply can't be circulated for actual reasons. However, I've also run into many situations where really interesting stuff isn't circulated simply because nobody thought to, and for absolutely no other reason at all, good, bad or indifferent.)
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)
Once again I must step in here and duly point out that the last few scientific surveys done in the US have concluded that fully FIFTY PERCENT (50%) of Americans have IQs of below 100!
You might say "There not all they're.."
Name me another nation that has this dismal level of intelligence.
Sad. Very sad.
Tony King
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- aqk
F U
I'd hardly call VTK (Visualisation Toolkit) a failure. It's made my job a lot easier. It is a wonderful piece of software as well as all the bells and whistles of being an open source project. There is also something about the way they archive published papers that is apparently leading world. For a university/organisation to remain competitive, especially today, there is a lot of housekeeping involved before progress can be made. I congratulate Los Alamos. They seem to be doing a bang up job to me.
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I was just chatting tonight with a manager in one of the larger divisions at LANL who said that, all in all, not much has changed with the recent change in management. And speaking from personal experience (three years, on and off), the people at LANL today are doing science that is just as amazing - if not more so - as they at the Lab in it's "hey-day."
It turns out that, for government labs, any PR really isn't always good PR.
This is sort of introspective and a little from the conspiracy nut dept, but I thought was interesting enough to post.
:)
I'm going to assume a few things as given :
1 - Many very secure R&D facilities have been constructed since the dawn of the Cold War era up until as recently as the Clinton Administration. I say Clinton because he left office with a surplus, and really watched the budget which brings me to #2 which is :
2 - 3/4 of the US government doesn't know what 1/4 of the defense and security spending goes for, or really what assets we have as far as that spending is concerned.
So, you have about 50 good years of relatively unregulated and well funded spending going on building places very like Los Alamos.
I would venture to say only 1/3 of those facilities are still in use, and we probably have 'forgotten' about many more just from high ranking staff changes in the security / r&D / intel sectors of the government, since some things never existed on a ledger to begin with.
I wonder what it would take for Uncle sam to "take stock" in what we have just going to waste and sell it back to the public sector as data centers.
The point is the fuss over Los Alamos could be applied to any of I think thousands of places, it just hasn't happened there yet. Why not just consolidate and ditch the liablity all together?
So long as uncle sam isn't the one selling the feeds, of course.
Just an idea, as I said kind of coming from left field. Seems like a win/win situation, but I doubt it would ever happen.
Bah. People like you like to skullfuck any precision out of the language and then smugly say, "it was the will of the masses!"
What is sadder is that you didn't get a +5 funny for that joke.
Philosophy.
You know whats even worse? 40% of sickdays are mondays and fridays!
Hmmm, seems to be familiar...
OK so New Mexico politicians will keep the lab alive (last paragraphs) and maybe biology research is the wrong field for a classified-capable facility's limited time. I'm glad to see they closed down and restructured based on at the least those two news story with the missing sensitive data and suspected spy. Hopefully the facility will acquire better utilization and purpose but in nuclear technology it's OK to be a backup as long as you're competent. IMO, the lab should continue to exist, not only to do the computational research, but most importantly to compete with the other two labs in the west and elsewhere because competition is important and should be especially encouraged with something as risky and complex as nuclear technology.
I for a moment thougth, that the title was refering to the /. story of Bill Gates stepdown from Microsoft.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Tyrany of the moronic majority! If only we could beg (oh, I mean raise) the IQ of the masses!
OK, I'm confused. Let me get this straight. Redefining "hacker" to mean "someone who toys around creatively with software" instead of the virtually universally accepted definition of "a programmer who breaks into computer systems" is OK, but redefining "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" is bad?
Exactly who gets to decide what is and isn't OK to redefine? The geeks? And what criteria goes into the decision? Or is it just whatever we happen to feel like today?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I wish I'd known of you sooner. Not for your delightful wit or scientifical cleverosity, but for your name. You see, I was in a spelling bee, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and some cruel spirit selected this word for me. I had a vaguely correct sense of the origin and came up with "gardeloo"--which some sources tell me is even an acceptible variant. Are you a Scot? What do you think? I asked an English fellow and he was unfamiliar with the word, explaining that despite his people's efforts, Scotland has acquired modern plumbing.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
You're still missing the point. The sibling response to yours put it best: "It desperately pleads for mercy the question, why are such well educated and technical people incredibly anal?"
The trap that nerds seem to most often fall into is trying to project technical definitions too widely, and that's precisely what's happening here. No-one, including myself who has university training in logic, cares that the term "begs the question" has a specific technical meaning as a logical fallacy. Language is context-dependent - the term "polymorphism" has a rather different meaning to a C++ programmer and a Haskell programmer, and both will tell you you're a dumbass for using it the other way. Both are wrong, both are simply exhibiting tunnel vision.
Another trap that many people fall into is not recognizing that many of the grammatical rules they learned as children were just anal teachers trying to perpetuate their pet peeves, and don't actually apply in the modern world. Relax, look around you, and try learning English as she is spoke!
from outer space!
(ducks)