So if we all just click our heels together three times and say "There are NOT 7 billion people on this planet", all the anthropogenic problems will go away?
Thanks, Dorothy! That is an approach to the great evils of our time that the scientists have not come up with!
Now to get back to trying to understand how humanity created this mess, in the hope that somehow we might find a clue about how to mitigate at least part of it.
Good points. There is something that needs clarification:
The civilizations of the Amazon basin did not use slash and burn agriculture. They were built on top of terra preta agriculture, which is a system that works in rain forest conditions, that was unknown to Europe until the last decade or so. It involves sequestering large amounts of carbon in the soil in the form of biologically active charcoal, or biochar. The civilizations grew over hundreds of years, but were destroyed by disease in just a few decades. The terra preta soils would have reverted to jungle very quickly since these are very rich soils.
The terra preta system involved methods of handling sewage that were very different from European practices and may well have facilitated the rapid spread of European diseases. So far as I know, no one has done any research in this area, other than identifying that human waste was somehow incorporated into terra preta in significant quantities.
Remove a 200 year old oak tree, and it will be replaced by a dozen conifer saplings, each one adding new biomass much more quickly than the old oak that was taken away. A ton of mature oak does not have a 10th of the surface area of all those light weight saplings.
Gates created the IBM PC as much as anyone who worked for IBM.
I suppose, in a way... His wasn't the only disk operating system. The IBM PC would not have been significantly different without him.
I have to disagree with this. The other possibilities (CPM and what would become DR DOS) had the beginnings of good security built in. Had someone other than Gates gotten the IBM contract, it is likely that the anti-virus industry would never have come into being and we would not be plagued by all the malware, bots, identity theft issues, and so on that have become such a major part of the Microsoft dependent computer world.
Gates had more influence on the shortcomings of the IBM PC and its progeny than any other single person. When he was younger, he was not only a master at presenting bight, shiny Grand Visions, he was also a master at hiding making inconvenient limitations from people who should have known better. There was a ten year history of security issues with Unix that IBM engineers were thoroughly familiar with, yet Gates managed to bedazzle them into thinking that security was not important on a tiny 640 K machine.
The issues regarding Xampp security are well known and documented. (This is the link that would have made parent post a better post. But some persons prefer SHOUTING to backing up their assertions with useful informative statements.)
Basically, Xampp out of the box is not secure. It can be made reasonably secure for home / hobbyist level hosting and the link shows where to go to change settings and establish passwords. If the need is for a hardened site that adequately protects credit card data, health care data, patent almost pending data, etc, then there are better ways than Xampp. But if that level of security is needed, and the organization is seeking recommendations from Slashdot rather than its own security experts, then there will be a train wreck no matter what advice is given or taken.
Specific points in parent post are reasonable. In particular, if the only goal is to have a usable web site, then using Blue Host or a similar web hosting service is the best way to go. But you will not get much experience in configuring and securing your web site since the $6/mo that you are paying the host covers all that stuff.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned XAMPP or Portable XAMPP yet.
I used Portable XAMPP under WinXP as a development environment for several years. It comes with a couple of GUI management tools and has an active community behind it. Advantages: you get a LAMP-like setup on a removable drive running under an OS you are already comfortable with. If things go totally weird, you can replace the XAMPP drive with one loaded with an earlier backup and be confident that none of the weirdness has been left in your system. I found that was a very comforting thought when I was going through the newbie jitters phase.
XAMPP is probably powerful enough to handle 2,500 users doing typical Internet stuff (avoiding serving out hundreds of full length movies, etc). So it might be suitable for your production environment as well as development: install it on a fast fixed HD using Ubuntu Server as the OS and you will have a bullet proof operation that is easy to manage and develop for. XAMPP is plain vanilla and seems to play well with any of the Linux servers.
Here is a link to one source of XAMPP goodness. Anyone who is still using Windows should think about exploring the PortableApps site, too. There are some FOSS gems there.
In theory triangulation (GPS, etc) will work. But in practice there are inevitably tiny little gremlins that theory fails to account for. When you are talking about errors of 17 or 18 meters over 732 kilometers, a systematic error in estimating pi by one half of one millionth of its value could be enough to explain the difference.
In this case direct triangulation is not possible since both sending and receiving locations are underground. There would have to be some additional measures to establish intermediate points that would be visible to the surveyor.
Which raises a question: how the heck did they get GPS locations of points that were far enough underground that they could get clear enough neutrino signals for this study? It would seem that the sending location, and definitely the receiving location, would have to be far below the distance that the weak GPS signals could penetrate. It really does seem that these experimental results are more about a previously unrecognized limitation in GPS technology than about the theory of relativity.
Seems likely that their finding is correct and the GPS equipment they used to determine the baseline has an error of +0.00232% (17 m too long at 732 km).
We may be on the verge of discovering a new source of minor bias in GPS technology, which could lead to something interesting.
Looks like it is time to review the engineering of the GPS devices.
Seems like a quick and easy first step would be to repeat the GPS measures some 15,000 times and see if those results are consistent. I'm guessing that what we have here is broken yardstick. Not a broken theory of relativity.
Easier answer: the point of origin and the point of measurement are a wee bit closer together than was thought to be the case.
IANAP, but it seems that the only accurate way of measuring this distance would be to bore a 732 km tunnel between Point A and Point B, pump all the air out so it is a vacuum, and do a direct measure with a laser. I doubt that this has been done. So I suggest treating the distance measure given by the neutrinos as accurate, and looking for sources of error in whatever yardstick was used before the experiment was done.
Einstein probably also said "And also check your yardstick".
All the problems arise from the use of human beings in the design, implementation, and maintenance processes.
.... Just like any mechanical or computer competent, humans tend to fail from time to time and just like with any other failure you can prevent that from causing catastrophic failure by building redundancy and checks into the system.
Ah! This is the first response that shows some potential for coming up with a solution to the problem.
What would an institution that provided the necessary redundancies and checks look like? Some kind of paramilitary structure? Or maybe a bit like a religious order? How could it be funded so that it would be immune from subversion or corruption? What would its service life need to be (a few decades, a couple of thousand years)?
How does one go about coming up with answers to these kinds of questions? Nuclear power may be the first industry that is forcing us to deliberately design human systems in this way, but one could argue the current world wide economic mess and the things that caused it are only going to be fixed if those human systems are deliberately redesigned with the same kind of fail-safe approach.
there is nothing wrong with nuclear technology. It, of itself, is safe.
In short, this is a very simplistic way to put it.
Yes, this is a very simplistic assertion. But it is also very useful to posit this to get it out of the way. Because until the fatal problems with human failings are solved, there is no need to discuss the much simpler problems of the science, engineering, and technology.
As so many who seem to object to GP post keep pointing out, Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the Fermi fast breeder reactor failure, the incident at Hanford where control rods were blown out of the core with such force that they were embedded in the ceiling of the containment vessel, and so on were all due to human mistakes. When the persons you are arguing with are making your points for you while sincerely believing that they are arguing against you, then logic alone is not going to get them to start using their minds and thinking the issues through. Sometimes presenting things in a very simplistic manner will shake some people's minds out of the muddy rut they have dug for themselves.
In short, there is nothing wrong with nuclear technology. It, of itself, is safe.
All the problems arise from the use of human beings in the design, implementation, and maintenance processes. We know that human beings are flawed in half a hundred different ways and to such an extent that there is no possibility of applying any kind of credible quality assurance to these modules. We can extrapolate from history and recognize that so long as human modules are involved in the nuclear power industry, there will be catastrophic failures.
What we need is a nuclear power industry that uses no human modules. Anything short of that is clearly defective by design.
Agree with parent post: it is long past time to recognize that in real world terms the human caused risks in the nuclear power industry are just too damn expensive to handle. Anyone who disagrees with that summation should be closely examined to see if they are human. If they do seem to be human, then for safety's sake they need to be recognized as flawed and their assertions dismissed as not credible.
You can empathise without sympathising. Not everyone deserves sympathy.
Not everyone deserves empathy, either.
I think if you could take an honest poll, everyone over 50 could recall at least one instance where they acted similar to any one instance of this photographer's theft of another's work. But this guy has made such thefts a pattern within his life. I really cannot empathize with that. As far as empathy goes, he seems right out there with the serial killers, and very far away from the average blokes that deserve empathy, and sometimes sympathy.
People like you seem to forget (or not understand) just how hard it is to travel between star systems, and how ridiculously far apart they are.
Actually, people like me sometimes throw tomfoolery at slashdot. Sometimes the responses those posts generate come from persons who are quite far out on the tail of the normal distribution. Such responses can illuminate, if only faintly, very distant and alien modes of human comprehension.
In all probability, any species sufficiently advanced to have FTL would use it to export its riff-raff to galaxies far, far away. Remember, our first contact will not be with the ones who dreamed, designed, and engineered the FTL ships. It will be with the Cortezes and Pizzaroes who seek their fortunes far from the established trade routes, beyond the reach of their species laws and ethics.
I learned when my daughter started to date that you do not need to actually threaten the boy with the shotgun.
Just make sure that she has to introduce the boy to you before she gets to leave. And just happen to be cleaning the shotgun when he comes by. There is no need to get overt about it.
A twenty gage double barrel side by side is known to be effective.
Young eyes are better at recognizing novel patterns than highly trained older eyes. As a person gains experience in a highly visual field like astronomy, they are more likely to regard something they had never seen before as a variant of what they already knew. A youngster to the field is more likely to bring the same image to someone else's attention: "What do you think this is? Could it be a Carolian snark?"
Women in the US and I believe in Europe (and possibly across the entire human species) invest less ego in discovery activities than men do. Women are less likely to be anxious about making mistakes, and are therefore more likely to show unusual findings to more experienced persons.
While many conclusions can be drawn from these two assertions, the obvious one is that observatories should actively recruit young, naive, nubile women to do all the night time work of taking the first look at all visual data. This would probably be the single most effective way in which astronomy could attract new males to its studies.
What's funny is that I didn't hear the "Woosh". Usually I hear the "Whoosh" just after I push the Submit button, so I get the full benefit of self-humiliation from the earliest possible moment.
Except that the Copenhagen interpretation dismisses the principle of locality as an inescapable observer bias that is not binding on the Universe (it is instead a limit to our capacity to perceive or understand the Universe). Without the principle of locality, Bell's theorem pretty much falls apart.
The Sugar Beats summed up the whole quandary quite well, I think: "I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on." If you can get your head around that, then you are one step closer to understanding today's physics. That does not mean that physics goes away; it means only that the proper study of physics are the models of the Universe that we create in our heads, and not the Universe itself.
Causality is a useless attempt at simplification in any reasonably healthy ecosystem. Including the internal ecosystem of any mammal that is not actually in the last stages of dying.
This stuff is better handled by thinking of it as Skinner type black boxes. Give the gut a stimulus, look for a consistent response. You can do lot of good science at that level. But try to get any more mechanistic than that and there are too many possible alternative pathways and, at this point, by far too little established knowledge to make judgments about the likelihood of any given causal path.
Remember, this post is being generated by a sentient being whose thoughts are influenced by the billions of microbes that are happily living in his gut.
Somewhere in the world, there is a bridge that is missing its troll.
Or maybe that bridge was one of the many that have washed away and that is why there is a troll wandering around, making stupid about overhyped storm warnings.
Slashdot Mirror
So if we all just click our heels together three times and say "There are NOT 7 billion people on this planet", all the anthropogenic problems will go away?
Thanks, Dorothy! That is an approach to the great evils of our time that the scientists have not come up with!
Now to get back to trying to understand how humanity created this mess, in the hope that somehow we might find a clue about how to mitigate at least part of it.
Good points. There is something that needs clarification:
The civilizations of the Amazon basin did not use slash and burn agriculture. They were built on top of terra preta agriculture, which is a system that works in rain forest conditions, that was unknown to Europe until the last decade or so. It involves sequestering large amounts of carbon in the soil in the form of biologically active charcoal, or biochar. The civilizations grew over hundreds of years, but were destroyed by disease in just a few decades. The terra preta soils would have reverted to jungle very quickly since these are very rich soils.
The terra preta system involved methods of handling sewage that were very different from European practices and may well have facilitated the rapid spread of European diseases. So far as I know, no one has done any research in this area, other than identifying that human waste was somehow incorporated into terra preta in significant quantities.
Remove a 200 year old oak tree, and it will be replaced by a dozen conifer saplings, each one adding new biomass much more quickly than the old oak that was taken away. A ton of mature oak does not have a 10th of the surface area of all those light weight saplings.
Gates created the IBM PC as much as anyone who worked for IBM.
I suppose, in a way... His wasn't the only disk operating system. The IBM PC would not have been significantly different without him.
I have to disagree with this. The other possibilities (CPM and what would become DR DOS) had the beginnings of good security built in. Had someone other than Gates gotten the IBM contract, it is likely that the anti-virus industry would never have come into being and we would not be plagued by all the malware, bots, identity theft issues, and so on that have become such a major part of the Microsoft dependent computer world.
Gates had more influence on the shortcomings of the IBM PC and its progeny than any other single person. When he was younger, he was not only a master at presenting bight, shiny Grand Visions, he was also a master at hiding making inconvenient limitations from people who should have known better. There was a ten year history of security issues with Unix that IBM engineers were thoroughly familiar with, yet Gates managed to bedazzle them into thinking that security was not important on a tiny 640 K machine.
I would not say that it is embarrassing.
It sure kicks the shit out of intellectual hubris. But that is a good thing.
The issues regarding Xampp security are well known and documented. (This is the link that would have made parent post a better post. But some persons prefer SHOUTING to backing up their assertions with useful informative statements.)
Basically, Xampp out of the box is not secure. It can be made reasonably secure for home / hobbyist level hosting and the link shows where to go to change settings and establish passwords. If the need is for a hardened site that adequately protects credit card data, health care data, patent almost pending data, etc, then there are better ways than Xampp. But if that level of security is needed, and the organization is seeking recommendations from Slashdot rather than its own security experts, then there will be a train wreck no matter what advice is given or taken.
Specific points in parent post are reasonable. In particular, if the only goal is to have a usable web site, then using Blue Host or a similar web hosting service is the best way to go. But you will not get much experience in configuring and securing your web site since the $6/mo that you are paying the host covers all that stuff.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned XAMPP or Portable XAMPP yet.
I used Portable XAMPP under WinXP as a development environment for several years. It comes with a couple of GUI management tools and has an active community behind it. Advantages: you get a LAMP-like setup on a removable drive running under an OS you are already comfortable with. If things go totally weird, you can replace the XAMPP drive with one loaded with an earlier backup and be confident that none of the weirdness has been left in your system. I found that was a very comforting thought when I was going through the newbie jitters phase.
XAMPP is probably powerful enough to handle 2,500 users doing typical Internet stuff (avoiding serving out hundreds of full length movies, etc). So it might be suitable for your production environment as well as development: install it on a fast fixed HD using Ubuntu Server as the OS and you will have a bullet proof operation that is easy to manage and develop for. XAMPP is plain vanilla and seems to play well with any of the Linux servers.
Here is a link to one source of XAMPP goodness. Anyone who is still using Windows should think about exploring the PortableApps site, too. There are some FOSS gems there.
In theory triangulation (GPS, etc) will work. But in practice there are inevitably tiny little gremlins that theory fails to account for. When you are talking about errors of 17 or 18 meters over 732 kilometers, a systematic error in estimating pi by one half of one millionth of its value could be enough to explain the difference.
In this case direct triangulation is not possible since both sending and receiving locations are underground. There would have to be some additional measures to establish intermediate points that would be visible to the surveyor.
Which raises a question: how the heck did they get GPS locations of points that were far enough underground that they could get clear enough neutrino signals for this study? It would seem that the sending location, and definitely the receiving location, would have to be far below the distance that the weak GPS signals could penetrate. It really does seem that these experimental results are more about a previously unrecognized limitation in GPS technology than about the theory of relativity.
Seems likely that their finding is correct and the GPS equipment they used to determine the baseline has an error of +0.00232% (17 m too long at 732 km).
We may be on the verge of discovering a new source of minor bias in GPS technology, which could lead to something interesting.
Looks like it is time to review the engineering of the GPS devices.
Seems like a quick and easy first step would be to repeat the GPS measures some 15,000 times and see if those results are consistent. I'm guessing that what we have here is broken yardstick. Not a broken theory of relativity.
Easier answer: the point of origin and the point of measurement are a wee bit closer together than was thought to be the case.
IANAP, but it seems that the only accurate way of measuring this distance would be to bore a 732 km tunnel between Point A and Point B, pump all the air out so it is a vacuum, and do a direct measure with a laser. I doubt that this has been done. So I suggest treating the distance measure given by the neutrinos as accurate, and looking for sources of error in whatever yardstick was used before the experiment was done.
Einstein probably also said "And also check your yardstick".
All the problems arise from the use of human beings in the design, implementation, and maintenance processes.
.... Just like any mechanical or computer competent, humans tend to fail from time to time and just like with any other failure you can prevent that from causing catastrophic failure by building redundancy and checks into the system.
Ah! This is the first response that shows some potential for coming up with a solution to the problem.
What would an institution that provided the necessary redundancies and checks look like? Some kind of paramilitary structure? Or maybe a bit like a religious order? How could it be funded so that it would be immune from subversion or corruption? What would its service life need to be (a few decades, a couple of thousand years)?
How does one go about coming up with answers to these kinds of questions? Nuclear power may be the first industry that is forcing us to deliberately design human systems in this way, but one could argue the current world wide economic mess and the things that caused it are only going to be fixed if those human systems are deliberately redesigned with the same kind of fail-safe approach.
there is nothing wrong with nuclear technology. It, of itself, is safe.
In short, this is a very simplistic way to put it.
Yes, this is a very simplistic assertion. But it is also very useful to posit this to get it out of the way. Because until the fatal problems with human failings are solved, there is no need to discuss the much simpler problems of the science, engineering, and technology.
As so many who seem to object to GP post keep pointing out, Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the Fermi fast breeder reactor failure, the incident at Hanford where control rods were blown out of the core with such force that they were embedded in the ceiling of the containment vessel, and so on were all due to human mistakes. When the persons you are arguing with are making your points for you while sincerely believing that they are arguing against you, then logic alone is not going to get them to start using their minds and thinking the issues through. Sometimes presenting things in a very simplistic manner will shake some people's minds out of the muddy rut they have dug for themselves.
In short, there is nothing wrong with nuclear technology. It, of itself, is safe.
All the problems arise from the use of human beings in the design, implementation, and maintenance processes. We know that human beings are flawed in half a hundred different ways and to such an extent that there is no possibility of applying any kind of credible quality assurance to these modules. We can extrapolate from history and recognize that so long as human modules are involved in the nuclear power industry, there will be catastrophic failures.
What we need is a nuclear power industry that uses no human modules. Anything short of that is clearly defective by design.
Agree with parent post: it is long past time to recognize that in real world terms the human caused risks in the nuclear power industry are just too damn expensive to handle. Anyone who disagrees with that summation should be closely examined to see if they are human. If they do seem to be human, then for safety's sake they need to be recognized as flawed and their assertions dismissed as not credible.
You can empathise without sympathising. Not everyone deserves sympathy.
Not everyone deserves empathy, either.
I think if you could take an honest poll, everyone over 50 could recall at least one instance where they acted similar to any one instance of this photographer's theft of another's work. But this guy has made such thefts a pattern within his life. I really cannot empathize with that. As far as empathy goes, he seems right out there with the serial killers, and very far away from the average blokes that deserve empathy, and sometimes sympathy.
People like you seem to forget (or not understand) just how hard it is to travel between star systems, and how ridiculously far apart they are.
Actually, people like me sometimes throw tomfoolery at slashdot. Sometimes the responses those posts generate come from persons who are quite far out on the tail of the normal distribution. Such responses can illuminate, if only faintly, very distant and alien modes of human comprehension.
Good point.
In all probability, any species sufficiently advanced to have FTL would use it to export its riff-raff to galaxies far, far away. Remember, our first contact will not be with the ones who dreamed, designed, and engineered the FTL ships. It will be with the Cortezes and Pizzaroes who seek their fortunes far from the established trade routes, beyond the reach of their species laws and ethics.
You walk ro a Walmart? Clearly it is you who are an alien in these parts.
I learned when my daughter started to date that you do not need to actually threaten the boy with the shotgun.
Just make sure that she has to introduce the boy to you before she gets to leave. And just happen to be cleaning the shotgun when he comes by. There is no need to get overt about it.
A twenty gage double barrel side by side is known to be effective.
In Perl the typing is context dependent. So it is very fast in the easy parts but then you have to slow down for the hard parts.
Young eyes are better at recognizing novel patterns than highly trained older eyes. As a person gains experience in a highly visual field like astronomy, they are more likely to regard something they had never seen before as a variant of what they already knew. A youngster to the field is more likely to bring the same image to someone else's attention: "What do you think this is? Could it be a Carolian snark?"
Women in the US and I believe in Europe (and possibly across the entire human species) invest less ego in discovery activities than men do. Women are less likely to be anxious about making mistakes, and are therefore more likely to show unusual findings to more experienced persons.
While many conclusions can be drawn from these two assertions, the obvious one is that observatories should actively recruit young, naive, nubile women to do all the night time work of taking the first look at all visual data. This would probably be the single most effective way in which astronomy could attract new males to its studies.
Oh.
What's funny is that I didn't hear the "Woosh". Usually I hear the "Whoosh" just after I push the Submit button, so I get the full benefit of self-humiliation from the earliest possible moment.
Except that the Copenhagen interpretation dismisses the principle of locality as an inescapable observer bias that is not binding on the Universe (it is instead a limit to our capacity to perceive or understand the Universe). Without the principle of locality, Bell's theorem pretty much falls apart.
The Sugar Beats summed up the whole quandary quite well, I think: "I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on." If you can get your head around that, then you are one step closer to understanding today's physics. That does not mean that physics goes away; it means only that the proper study of physics are the models of the Universe that we create in our heads, and not the Universe itself.
Causality is a useless attempt at simplification in any reasonably healthy ecosystem. Including the internal ecosystem of any mammal that is not actually in the last stages of dying.
This stuff is better handled by thinking of it as Skinner type black boxes. Give the gut a stimulus, look for a consistent response. You can do lot of good science at that level. But try to get any more mechanistic than that and there are too many possible alternative pathways and, at this point, by far too little established knowledge to make judgments about the likelihood of any given causal path.
Remember, this post is being generated by a sentient being whose thoughts are influenced by the billions of microbes that are happily living in his gut.
Somewhere in the world, there is a bridge that is missing its troll.
Or maybe that bridge was one of the many that have washed away and that is why there is a troll wandering around, making stupid about overhyped storm warnings.