If (and only if) the trade occurred before the light-travel time from Washington, then (by special relativity) there exists a reference frame in which the trade occurred before the information was released in Washington.
It would be so fun to see this argument play out in court.
I'd prefer a heartbeat system. All the trades submitted between 12:00:00 and 12:00:05 are collected and processed and the results released at 12:00:06. Repeat every 5 seconds.
(I use 5 seconds for illustration purposes, I have little idea what the appropriate cycle period would be.)
The abundances of hydrogen, helium and lithium. The cosmic microwave background. The maximum age of stars. The observably different conditions at high red-shift. The agreement between observed large scale structure and that expected in a Big Bang + dark matter + dark energy universe.
(Disclaimer - I haven't read the article. Maybe they discuss this.)
What if I'm hugely stressed out because a tsunami or forest fire is coming or my critically injured child needs rushing to hospital or some such? If that changes my brain waves enough to prevent me driving, it would be unfortunate.
(To be fair, TFA says they're looking initially to use it on buses and armoured cars. I wonder if "masked man is pointing gun at my head and ordering me to drive" sufficiently alters the brain waves.)
Link: carbon dating can't be trusted beyond 150 million years.
Conclusion: The date of 100,000 years given here is wrong.
If you'd taken time to scan the paper, you'd easily find the section on dating (2.2): "A chronological model was developed using a combination of radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and relative palaeomagnetic intensity dating. [...] OSL measurements suggested that material incorporated into the basal sediments might date to 93,000 ± 9000 years ago."
I.e. the 100,000 years is independent of carbon dating. (Actually, I'm surprised they even attempted carbon dating in this environment.)
Say the threshold is 100. (It is a small election.) Candidate A got 200 primary votes, of those 150 had B as second choice, 50 had C. Do they say 'half of A's votes are 'used up', so the surplus is distributed as 150 votes for B each with a weight of 1/2, and 50 votes for C, each with weight of 1/2'? (That would be sensible but horribly complex to calculate.)
Alternatively, they just take 100 of the voting papers which had A as primary, and say "these are the votes we're redistributing". This is simpler, keeps the number of votes integral, but means the outcome of the election is non-deterministic (and potentially biased, depending on how the votes to be redistributed are selected). Given the lack of fractional votes in the document you link to, I take it to be this second option.
As it was my first time in Australia for an election, I watched on TV. The coverage was completely about the lower house. By the time I quit watching (Rudd's concession speech) I don't think there had been so much as a mention of the fact that senators were being elected also. It was weird and puzzling.
According to the article, the bacteria will live within the plant's cells. This is certainly possible (such endosymbiosis was the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts) but I do wonder whether it is really the case here, or if the reporter made an error.
If it does work as well as claimed (I'm always a bit skeptical about these 'amazing new tech' claims) then expect a whole lot of effort to go into breeding new plant varieties that get the most out of their new symbiont.
Much more useful than running your simulation on multiple different supercomputers is to run it multiple times on one supercomputer, but with your input variables perturbed slightly on each run. If you randomly perturb your input measurements proportional to the standard error in those measurements, then the differences between runs will directly tell you how accurate your forecast is. (This should work independent of whether inaccuracy is dominated by initial condition inaccuracy, or by round off. It doesn't help so much if your model is bad.) You probably don't need to do this for every single forecast. After you've done it often enough for different weather conditions, you should get to know what your accuracy profile looks like.
Nowhere does the article or summary say or imply this was an Israeli operation. Rather, a couple of nutcases decided on their own to attack those that they perceived as enemies of Israel.
From Wikipedia articles for Antarctica and Earth: Area of Antarctica = 14 million km^2. Area of Earth = 510 million km^2, so Antarctica covers 2.7% of Earth's surface, or 3.9% of the water surface. 98% of Antarctica has ice at least 1600m thick. For back-of-envelope calculation, call it 100% at exactly 1600m thick. Then if this all melts, the oceans will rise by 3.9% of 1600m, or 62m.
On the other hand, my understanding is that the problem which caused the hydrogen explosions at Fukashima I had been anticipated in the USA and all relevant plants were retrofitted to be able to safely vent hydrogen. Despite this being a known problem, the Japanese plants were not.
The direction of causality could easily be the opposite way around. If a candidate is known to be pro-internet-tax, then a pro-internet-tax business has reason to contribute to their campaign.
(1) We really don't know about the health effects of low levels of radiation. The linear no-threshold model is a best guess, but health effects could be better or worse than this. See the diagram at the top of this article.
(2) WHO did a big study into the health effects of Chernobyl.
No, things were clearly not done correctly at Fukushima.
The risk of a hydrogen explosion was not appreciated when the plant was built, but was understood later, and in the USA plants of this type were retrofitted with a means of safely venting the hydrogen. This was not done in Japan.
There was a similar tsunami about 1000 years ago, yet the plant owners refused to consider the possibility of a recurrence. At another nuclear plant not far from Fukushima, the safety engineer in the 1970s insisted on building the sea wall a couple of metres higher. That extra height saved the plant.
There were passive cooling systems at Fukushima which did not operate, because although they could run without power, they could not be turned on without power.
Sea water could have been used sooner to cool the cores, but this was delayed as it would render the reactors unrepairable. (Of course, they ended up much more messily unrepairable anyway.)
All these are things which should have been anticipated and therefore could have been avoided.
(Sorry for the lack of references - this is from memory from my reading while the disaster was unfolding.)
The latest game they made up (on Friday) was two card draw poker (i.e. hand size is two cards). I worked through the probabilities with them to get the rank of hands correct. (It turns out to be straight flush, pair, straight, flush, high card.)
Looking at this page I see that you could dissolve NH4NO3/FeSO4 mixture and add lead(II) citrate, which should cause the Fe to precipitate as citrate and the SO4 to precipitate with the lead, leaving NH4NO3 solution behind which can be dried and used in a bomb.
Practical problems abound - most notably, can you get lead citrate, and can you find a way to reuse it? However, I have only high school chemistry and it is unlikely that I found the optimal 'cleaning' reaction in a few minutes of web searching. Can anyone with more chemistry than me comment on whether there are practical ways for a mad bomber to separate out the NH4NO3?
Here, listing 24 previous disasters, the largest of which was also in Texas. You'd think they, of all places, would know to keep large quantities of ammonium nitrate away from population centers (or vice versa).
Scarily, some of those disasters were from when a large quantity of ammonium nitrate powder had solidified and people tried to break it up with explosives.
The news reports I'm seeing don't actually say it was an ammonium nitrate explosion in this case, although it seems a reasonable supposition.
In the 1980s, the commercial scientific publishers discovered that they could keep raising their subscription rates at well above inflation, and university libraries would keep paying them. So not only did their profits soar, but their expectation for future revenue increases also soared. On the basis of this, the companies were rated as being very valuable and got bought out for very large sums. Now some suit somewhere has invested billions of dollars in such a company, having borrowed the money to do so, and believes he is entitled to a reasonable rate of return on investment, so the huge subscription costs become 'reasonable' in that they are needed to support that billion dollar debt. What is lost to him is that the price paid for the company was based on the unreasonable proposition that not only were the current subscription rates reasonable, but that they could continue to be raised.
While the scenario above is consistent with my knowledge, I confess it is largely guess work.
Having said that, $3000 per article for open access is not out of line with the rest of the industry. The first non-commercial journal I looked up (Bioinformatics, by Oxford University Press) also charges $3000 to open access a full length article from a first world country.
I have a similar, although more elaborate, idea for 'testing' global warming/anthropomorphic climate change. Alas, I don't have the millions of dollars it would cost.
It is basically a combination of a trial, a university degree course and a reality TV show. We recruit bunch (say 50) scientifically literate recent graduates who are not committed to one view or the other on climate change. We offer them a graduate level salary to participate. First we train them up with uncontroversial background knowledge related to climate (mathematical modelling, meteorology, physical chemistry etc.) Then the pro and anti climate change people get to send their best scientists and try to convince the students of their case. Some oversight committee acts as judge to ensure fairness. All lectures and course material are made available online.
Both sides believe the science favours them and an unbiased observer, given full information, will agree with them. Therefore both sides should be eager to have this opportunity. The economic cost of humanity being wrong about whether climate change is happening will be in the trillions. Spending this much to aid in coming to a consensus would, I feel, be money very well spent.
Slashdot Mirror
I never claimed there was a problem with causality. Yes, I have taken a physics course. At university. As the lecturer.
If (and only if) the trade occurred before the light-travel time from Washington, then (by special relativity) there exists a reference frame in which the trade occurred before the information was released in Washington.
It would be so fun to see this argument play out in court.
I'd prefer a heartbeat system. All the trades submitted between 12:00:00 and 12:00:05 are collected and processed and the results released at 12:00:06. Repeat every 5 seconds.
(I use 5 seconds for illustration purposes, I have little idea what the appropriate cycle period would be.)
The abundances of hydrogen, helium and lithium. The cosmic microwave background. The maximum age of stars. The observably different conditions at high red-shift. The agreement between observed large scale structure and that expected in a Big Bang + dark matter + dark energy universe.
(Disclaimer - I haven't read the article. Maybe they discuss this.)
What if I'm hugely stressed out because a tsunami or forest fire is coming or my critically injured child needs rushing to hospital or some such? If that changes my brain waves enough to prevent me driving, it would be unfortunate.
(To be fair, TFA says they're looking initially to use it on buses and armoured cars. I wonder if "masked man is pointing gun at my head and ordering me to drive" sufficiently alters the brain waves.)
Link: carbon dating can't be trusted beyond 150 million years.
Conclusion: The date of 100,000 years given here is wrong.
If you'd taken time to scan the paper, you'd easily find the section on dating (2.2): "A chronological model was
developed using a combination of radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and relative
palaeomagnetic intensity dating. [...] OSL measurements suggested that material incorporated into the basal sediments might date to
93,000 ± 9000 years ago."
I.e. the 100,000 years is independent of carbon dating. (Actually, I'm surprised they even attempted carbon dating in this environment.)
How does the distribution of surpluses work?
Say the threshold is 100. (It is a small election.) Candidate A got 200 primary votes, of those 150 had B as second choice, 50 had C. Do they say 'half of A's votes are 'used up', so the surplus is distributed as 150 votes for B each with a weight of 1/2, and 50 votes for C, each with weight of 1/2'? (That would be sensible but horribly complex to calculate.)
Alternatively, they just take 100 of the voting papers which had A as primary, and say "these are the votes we're redistributing". This is simpler, keeps the number of votes integral, but means the outcome of the election is non-deterministic (and potentially biased, depending on how the votes to be redistributed are selected). Given the lack of fractional votes in the document you link to, I take it to be this second option.
As it was my first time in Australia for an election, I watched on TV. The coverage was completely about the lower house. By the time I quit watching (Rudd's concession speech) I don't think there had been so much as a mention of the fact that senators were being elected also. It was weird and puzzling.
... involve neither putters nor 3.5" floppies. I'm so disappointed.
(For those who share my former ignorance, it is getting a frisbee to a distant target with as few throws as possible.)
Outreach.
(I'm stunned nobody has posted this link before me.)
According to the article, the bacteria will live within the plant's cells. This is certainly possible (such endosymbiosis was the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts) but I do wonder whether it is really the case here, or if the reporter made an error.
If it does work as well as claimed (I'm always a bit skeptical about these 'amazing new tech' claims) then expect a whole lot of effort to go into breeding new plant varieties that get the most out of their new symbiont.
Much more useful than running your simulation on multiple different supercomputers is to run it multiple times on one supercomputer, but with your input variables perturbed slightly on each run. If you randomly perturb your input measurements proportional to the standard error in those measurements, then the differences between runs will directly tell you how accurate your forecast is. (This should work independent of whether inaccuracy is dominated by initial condition inaccuracy, or by round off. It doesn't help so much if your model is bad.) You probably don't need to do this for every single forecast. After you've done it often enough for different weather conditions, you should get to know what your accuracy profile looks like.
Man, India moves fast. I hope it's looking where it's going or it could hit something. That would mush up a continent pretty bad.
Nowhere does the article or summary say or imply this was an Israeli operation. Rather, a couple of nutcases decided on their own to attack those that they perceived as enemies of Israel.
From Wikipedia articles for Antarctica and Earth:
Area of Antarctica = 14 million km^2. Area of Earth = 510 million km^2,
so Antarctica covers 2.7% of Earth's surface, or 3.9% of the water surface.
98% of Antarctica has ice at least 1600m thick. For back-of-envelope calculation, call it 100% at exactly 1600m thick.
Then if this all melts, the oceans will rise by 3.9% of 1600m, or 62m.
On the other hand, my understanding is that the problem which caused the hydrogen explosions at Fukashima I had been anticipated in the USA and all relevant plants were retrofitted to be able to safely vent hydrogen. Despite this being a known problem, the Japanese plants were not.
The /. summary is just short of 60% of the article! (By word count.)
The direction of causality could easily be the opposite way around. If a candidate is known to be pro-internet-tax, then a pro-internet-tax business has reason to contribute to their campaign.
(1) We really don't know about the health effects of low levels of radiation. The linear no-threshold model is a best guess, but health effects could be better or worse than this. See the diagram at the top of this article.
(2) WHO did a big study into the health effects of Chernobyl.
No, things were clearly not done correctly at Fukushima.
The risk of a hydrogen explosion was not appreciated when the plant was built, but was understood later, and in the USA plants of this type were retrofitted with a means of safely venting the hydrogen. This was not done in Japan.
There was a similar tsunami about 1000 years ago, yet the plant owners refused to consider the possibility of a recurrence. At another nuclear plant not far from Fukushima, the safety engineer in the 1970s insisted on building the sea wall a couple of metres higher. That extra height saved the plant.
There were passive cooling systems at Fukushima which did not operate, because although they could run without power, they could not be turned on without power.
Sea water could have been used sooner to cool the cores, but this was delayed as it would render the reactors unrepairable. (Of course, they ended up much more messily unrepairable anyway.)
All these are things which should have been anticipated and therefore could have been avoided.
(Sorry for the lack of references - this is from memory from my reading while the disaster was unfolding.)
The latest game they made up (on Friday) was two card draw poker (i.e. hand size is two cards). I worked through the probabilities with them to get the rank of hands correct. (It turns out to be straight flush, pair, straight, flush, high card.)
Looking at this page I see that you could dissolve NH4NO3/FeSO4 mixture and add lead(II) citrate, which should cause the Fe to precipitate as citrate and the SO4 to precipitate with the lead, leaving NH4NO3 solution behind which can be dried and used in a bomb.
Practical problems abound - most notably, can you get lead citrate, and can you find a way to reuse it? However, I have only high school chemistry and it is unlikely that I found the optimal 'cleaning' reaction in a few minutes of web searching. Can anyone with more chemistry than me comment on whether there are practical ways for a mad bomber to separate out the NH4NO3?
Here, listing 24 previous disasters, the largest of which was also in Texas. You'd think they, of all places, would know to keep large quantities of ammonium nitrate away from population centers (or vice versa).
Scarily, some of those disasters were from when a large quantity of ammonium nitrate powder had solidified and people tried to break it up with explosives.
The news reports I'm seeing don't actually say it was an ammonium nitrate explosion in this case, although it seems a reasonable supposition.
I suspect it goes something like this:
In the 1980s, the commercial scientific publishers discovered that they could keep raising their subscription rates at well above inflation, and university libraries would keep paying them. So not only did their profits soar, but their expectation for future revenue increases also soared. On the basis of this, the companies were rated as being very valuable and got bought out for very large sums. Now some suit somewhere has invested billions of dollars in such a company, having borrowed the money to do so, and believes he is entitled to a reasonable rate of return on investment, so the huge subscription costs become 'reasonable' in that they are needed to support that billion dollar debt. What is lost to him is that the price paid for the company was based on the unreasonable proposition that not only were the current subscription rates reasonable, but that they could continue to be raised.
While the scenario above is consistent with my knowledge, I confess it is largely guess work.
Having said that, $3000 per article for open access is not out of line with the rest of the industry. The first non-commercial journal I looked up (Bioinformatics, by Oxford University Press) also charges $3000 to open access a full length article from a first world country.
I have a similar, although more elaborate, idea for 'testing' global warming/anthropomorphic climate change. Alas, I don't have the millions of dollars it would cost.
It is basically a combination of a trial, a university degree course and a reality TV show. We recruit bunch (say 50) scientifically literate recent graduates who are not committed to one view or the other on climate change. We offer them a graduate level salary to participate. First we train them up with uncontroversial background knowledge related to climate (mathematical modelling, meteorology, physical chemistry etc.) Then the pro and anti climate change people get to send their best scientists and try to convince the students of their case. Some oversight committee acts as judge to ensure fairness. All lectures and course material are made available online.
Both sides believe the science favours them and an unbiased observer, given full information, will agree with them. Therefore both sides should be eager to have this opportunity. The economic cost of humanity being wrong about whether climate change is happening will be in the trillions. Spending this much to aid in coming to a consensus would, I feel, be money very well spent.