High energy neutrinos like the ones under discussion should be being produced by the sun unless we are very wrong about how the stellar core acts. In that regard, ruling that out is important, just as ruling out these as being produced by high energy events in our galaxy.
Well yes, but keep in mind that we detect a much larger fraction of the neutrinos from the sun. So if the sun was producing a lot more high energy neutrinos than we expect, some of it could show up here. (Although really that would be ruled out by other considerations- IceCube has directional data for where it detects the neutrinos and that would show up very soon, and in fact, for various reasons related to the shape of the detector, it can only detect a small set of solar neutrinos anyways.)
Well, it wasn't obvious that they weren't coming from a combination of the sun and the galactic center. The sun might be producing a few much higher energy neutrinos than we expect which would indicate a deep misunderstanding in our models of the core but it was definitely a possibility. The galactic center is very poorly understood, and there's a lot of dust in the way, so some neutrino production method there would have been very plausible.
As of right now, the only confirmed neutrino sources we have that aren't artificial are the sun and SN 1987A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A. SN 1987A was a supernova in 1987 (the first one discovered that year, hence the A). The supernova was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a very nearby galaxy (which is close enough and small enough that there's been some question whether we should really call it a separate galaxy). The supernova was one of the every few that was close enough that it was visible to earth by the naked eye. While every supernova is believed to create many neutrinos (and in fact this flood is an important part of the process) most supernovas are too far away for us to detect the neutrinos from the supernova because neutrinos are so hard to detect.
As of right now, we don't have any way of making any neutrino detector that is more sophisticated than putting a big bunch of mass in the way and hoping to notice when neutrinos happen to hit it by sheer chance (which is extremely rarely). IceCube is one of a next-generation detector where we have used pre-existing mass, in this case, ice as the South Pole for the bulk of the detector. It turns out that the ice very deep down under high pressure (from the ice above it) is nearly perfectly transparent at the light frequencies need, while the bulk of ice on top blocks out stray light and a lot of stray particles that would swamp the signal.
Detectors like IceCube can be used to actually detect the neutrinos from a supernova before the supernova's light reaches Earth. This isn't due to the erroneous claim from a few years ago that neutrinos travel faster than light, but rather because when a supernova occurs, the light from the core of the star takes multiple hours to get out of the core because of all the mass in the way, while the neutrinos aren't slowed down by this almost at all. This means that the neutrinos effectively get a few hours head start on the light- since they are traveling so close to the speed of light, they get to keep almost all this head start by the time they reach Earth. In the case of SN 1987A the neutrinos did as predicted arrive a few hours before the light. This means we can if we detect a neutrino burst and can get its directional data (which IceCube can approximately do) then we can point our telescopes at a supernova *before the light arrives at Earth* which means we'll get to see the very beginning of the supernova and hopefully get a much better understanding.
Right now, to assist in this there is a Supernova Early Warning System http://snews.bnl.gov/ which is tied in to the various big detectors so it can let astronomers know that a neutrino surge has been detected- this could of course be a supernova, but there's also the even more exciting possibility of an as yet unrecognized event that produces a lot of neutrinos. It will be very important in either case that a lot astronomers get a good early look at it, both professional and amateur, so the system is designed so that anyone can sign up for alerts from it. So if you are an amateur astronomer you should probably sign up- they send out about once test alert a year.
So you assign a high probability to the final election being Jeb or Walker v. Hillary with Hillary then losing? How high a probability do you assign to that result?
The basic plan in the book is a variant of Mars Direct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct, which was a proposal for a much cheaper way of getting to Mars than previous proposals. The primary cost savings are in making some resources on site (especially fuel for the return). If you haven't read The Martian you should. The book was excellent. Also, relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1536/.
Reagan was the governor of California before he became President. It is true that no one would have believed you if you had said this when he was still an actor, but in late 1979 he was already plausible. I'm curious, what probability do you estimate that Trump will be the next US President?
No. I'm attempting to explain that people have thought about this a lot, and we understand why it won't work. I also gave you references on what to read that will explain it in detail. I strongly recommend Scott's book I mentioned earlier. If you do think that your idea has any chance of working, the best thing to do is to try and actually go read a bit on the subject and see if you can make it work. But in general, it is worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of ideas *don't work* and understanding why they won't work is important. I'm curious, would you have a similar reaction if I were having a discussion with someone who had an idea about using a dynamo powered by a generator to generate an infinite amount of electric power?
No. You get one such flip. It won't actually matter if you flip them at the same time or not. As long as you keep your coin carefully in a little box (where keeping it carefully in a little box is essentially a metaphor for keeping it in a little box that doesn't let any stray photons in), you can do your flip whenever you want. But let's say we had a billions coins so we could each get a billion flips. We still can't use that to send information faster than the speed of light because we have no way to control how the coins flip. All we'll know is that for my nth coin, it flipped the same way as your nth coin, and that that was true for every n. But if I tried to manipulate how my coin will flip then the entanglement goes away.
No. That's not how entanglement works. A better way of thinking about entanglement is imagining two fair coins that can be any distance apart and the first time you flip them, you are guaranteed that they'll either both be heads or both be tails. This isn't a perfect description, but this is close enough. If one wants to be mathematically rigorous then we'd say that two particles are entangled if we cannot describe their combined state simply as the tensor product of the state of each one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement#Quantum_mechanical_framework. If you want to read a good introduction to a lot of these issues, I recommend Scott Aaronson's "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" which is essentially aimed as an introduction to quantum computing for non-experts with a some math background (essentially assumes is ok with basic linear algebra and basic calculus). Scott is an absolutely fantastic writer.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. There's no known way to get faster than light communication using entanglement and if we're correct in our understanding of physics then it is entirely impossible. One can take two particles that are entangled but if one changes the state of one of them, it doesn't alter the other's state, it simply breaks the entanglement.
In related news on quantum computing 6-photon boson sampling has also been performed (incidentally also by researchers at Bristol with some overap between the two groups). See http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2435 for details and discussion. Boson sampling is an important idea which involves estimating the probability distribution of non-intersecting photons. Crucially, boson sampling may be substantially easier to construct since they don't require nearly as much in the way of complicated machinery and error correction as full-power quantum computers, but there are also strong reasons to believe that boson sampling cannot be done efficiently on a conventional computer. That paper is http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01182 (which also has some other very cool results - they've made essentially reconfigurable chips for this rather than having to make new ones for any specific photon sampling procedure). The original paper which proposed boson sampling is http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf.
Humanity has now had almost 20 years of continual presence on Mars either in orbit or on Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor reached Orbit of Mars in September of 1997 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Global_Surveyor and remained active through 2006. Because of Mars Express, Opportunity and MRO for most of that time period we've actually had multiple Martian probes active during almost all of the last 15 years. Since the arrival of Curiosity as well as MAVEN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAVEN and the Mars Orbiter Mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission it is likely that we will have probes on Mars through when humans first arrive.
It is also worth emphasizing that this work is not mere exploration but has serious and substantial concerns. We need to find out how common life is. It is an important part of understanding if we need to be concerned about a Great Filter or not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Is the solution to the Fermi paradox that life is rare, or that complex life is rare? Is it something else? Or is something that civilizations do which drastically curtails their own lifespans? In that regard, exploration of the solar system is vitally important to the future of our civilization. And this is even before we discuss the fact that the more we understand about Mars the easier colonization will be.
In psychology, individuals are... individual. If you can replicate the results exactly, then you must be doing something wrong.
This is confused. People are individuals but studies look at general trends. And those should remain the same. Humans being individuals doesn't make them immune to statistical analysis.
No, it is a pretty accurate summary of what is happening. You focus post-hoc on where you got a good result. Say for example you want to test a new anti-diabetes drug. Does the drug work in the general population? Well, data doesn't support that. So then you look at subgroups. Does your data show success in say just men or just women? What about black men? Black women? White women? Etc. This isn't the only serious problem, sometimes one can choose which statistical tests to do or how to compensate for complicating factors. If you have enough choices you can make anything looks successful.
No. When people are arguing over definitions, the best response is to just drop the terms and look at the actual impacts in question. This is called tabooing your words http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/. Words don't have intrinsic meanings, one can of course discuss specific definitions, but that isn't by itself helpful. One can when people disagree over definitions say things like "This is an example under Definition 1, but not Definition 2" but however you are defining terms like "constitutional Republic" or "Representative democracy" will not in any way shape or form alter the fundamental question: whether people have a say in what our government does.
Missing the point. The point is that you need to focus on the effects, not what you or anyone else calls it. The problem with "kinetic military actions" is precisely that - that it disguises the actual impact in question. That's an example where exactly this sort of thing- not focusing on definitions and looking at consequences is what matters.
Please don't get hung up on arguing over definitions. It isn't productive. The point Lessig is making is that there's very little say that the general population has in what actually is happening. That statement, whether true or false, is independent of choice of labeling.
Mathematicians. I don't how many times I've seen a sequence of integers and then gone to Sloane's encyclopedia to see if the sequence is known. This is helpful in both not duplicating others work (e.g. finding out that something one has found is already known) or b) identifying that a given sequence is a known sequence and then using that as a guideline on what to prove. That last bit happens surprisingly often when one has combinatorial structure to something: pop the sequence of numbers you've got into his database and it will tell you something like the first 6 terms matching some nice combinatorial thing and then you can with that guidance go and prove that in general that's what the sequence really is.
As someone who has been on both Reddit and Voat and got onto to Voat before the recent influxes, yes, Voat has a terrible problem with a much higher fraction of shitty people.
Slashdot Mirror
High energy neutrinos like the ones under discussion should be being produced by the sun unless we are very wrong about how the stellar core acts. In that regard, ruling that out is important, just as ruling out these as being produced by high energy events in our galaxy.
Well yes, but keep in mind that we detect a much larger fraction of the neutrinos from the sun. So if the sun was producing a lot more high energy neutrinos than we expect, some of it could show up here. (Although really that would be ruled out by other considerations- IceCube has directional data for where it detects the neutrinos and that would show up very soon, and in fact, for various reasons related to the shape of the detector, it can only detect a small set of solar neutrinos anyways.)
Well, it wasn't obvious that they weren't coming from a combination of the sun and the galactic center. The sun might be producing a few much higher energy neutrinos than we expect which would indicate a deep misunderstanding in our models of the core but it was definitely a possibility. The galactic center is very poorly understood, and there's a lot of dust in the way, so some neutrino production method there would have been very plausible.
As of right now, the only confirmed neutrino sources we have that aren't artificial are the sun and SN 1987A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A. SN 1987A was a supernova in 1987 (the first one discovered that year, hence the A). The supernova was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a very nearby galaxy (which is close enough and small enough that there's been some question whether we should really call it a separate galaxy). The supernova was one of the every few that was close enough that it was visible to earth by the naked eye. While every supernova is believed to create many neutrinos (and in fact this flood is an important part of the process) most supernovas are too far away for us to detect the neutrinos from the supernova because neutrinos are so hard to detect.
As of right now, we don't have any way of making any neutrino detector that is more sophisticated than putting a big bunch of mass in the way and hoping to notice when neutrinos happen to hit it by sheer chance (which is extremely rarely). IceCube is one of a next-generation detector where we have used pre-existing mass, in this case, ice as the South Pole for the bulk of the detector. It turns out that the ice very deep down under high pressure (from the ice above it) is nearly perfectly transparent at the light frequencies need, while the bulk of ice on top blocks out stray light and a lot of stray particles that would swamp the signal.
Detectors like IceCube can be used to actually detect the neutrinos from a supernova before the supernova's light reaches Earth. This isn't due to the erroneous claim from a few years ago that neutrinos travel faster than light, but rather because when a supernova occurs, the light from the core of the star takes multiple hours to get out of the core because of all the mass in the way, while the neutrinos aren't slowed down by this almost at all. This means that the neutrinos effectively get a few hours head start on the light- since they are traveling so close to the speed of light, they get to keep almost all this head start by the time they reach Earth. In the case of SN 1987A the neutrinos did as predicted arrive a few hours before the light. This means we can if we detect a neutrino burst and can get its directional data (which IceCube can approximately do) then we can point our telescopes at a supernova *before the light arrives at Earth* which means we'll get to see the very beginning of the supernova and hopefully get a much better understanding.
Right now, to assist in this there is a Supernova Early Warning System http://snews.bnl.gov/ which is tied in to the various big detectors so it can let astronomers know that a neutrino surge has been detected- this could of course be a supernova, but there's also the even more exciting possibility of an as yet unrecognized event that produces a lot of neutrinos. It will be very important in either case that a lot astronomers get a good early look at it, both professional and amateur, so the system is designed so that anyone can sign up for alerts from it. So if you are an amateur astronomer you should probably sign up- they send out about once test alert a year.
So you assign a high probability to the final election being Jeb or Walker v. Hillary with Hillary then losing? How high a probability do you assign to that result?
The basic plan in the book is a variant of Mars Direct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct, which was a proposal for a much cheaper way of getting to Mars than previous proposals. The primary cost savings are in making some resources on site (especially fuel for the return). If you haven't read The Martian you should. The book was excellent. Also, relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1536/.
Reagan was the governor of California before he became President. It is true that no one would have believed you if you had said this when he was still an actor, but in late 1979 he was already plausible. I'm curious, what probability do you estimate that Trump will be the next US President?
I can't actually tell if this is meant to be a serious comment. Do you actually think Trump is likely to be the next elected US President?
No. I'm attempting to explain that people have thought about this a lot, and we understand why it won't work. I also gave you references on what to read that will explain it in detail. I strongly recommend Scott's book I mentioned earlier. If you do think that your idea has any chance of working, the best thing to do is to try and actually go read a bit on the subject and see if you can make it work. But in general, it is worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of ideas *don't work* and understanding why they won't work is important. I'm curious, would you have a similar reaction if I were having a discussion with someone who had an idea about using a dynamo powered by a generator to generate an infinite amount of electric power?
No. You get one such flip. It won't actually matter if you flip them at the same time or not. As long as you keep your coin carefully in a little box (where keeping it carefully in a little box is essentially a metaphor for keeping it in a little box that doesn't let any stray photons in), you can do your flip whenever you want. But let's say we had a billions coins so we could each get a billion flips. We still can't use that to send information faster than the speed of light because we have no way to control how the coins flip. All we'll know is that for my nth coin, it flipped the same way as your nth coin, and that that was true for every n. But if I tried to manipulate how my coin will flip then the entanglement goes away.
No. That's not how entanglement works. A better way of thinking about entanglement is imagining two fair coins that can be any distance apart and the first time you flip them, you are guaranteed that they'll either both be heads or both be tails. This isn't a perfect description, but this is close enough. If one wants to be mathematically rigorous then we'd say that two particles are entangled if we cannot describe their combined state simply as the tensor product of the state of each one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement#Quantum_mechanical_framework. If you want to read a good introduction to a lot of these issues, I recommend Scott Aaronson's "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" which is essentially aimed as an introduction to quantum computing for non-experts with a some math background (essentially assumes is ok with basic linear algebra and basic calculus). Scott is an absolutely fantastic writer.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. There's no known way to get faster than light communication using entanglement and if we're correct in our understanding of physics then it is entirely impossible. One can take two particles that are entangled but if one changes the state of one of them, it doesn't alter the other's state, it simply breaks the entanglement.
In related news on quantum computing 6-photon boson sampling has also been performed (incidentally also by researchers at Bristol with some overap between the two groups). See http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2435 for details and discussion. Boson sampling is an important idea which involves estimating the probability distribution of non-intersecting photons. Crucially, boson sampling may be substantially easier to construct since they don't require nearly as much in the way of complicated machinery and error correction as full-power quantum computers, but there are also strong reasons to believe that boson sampling cannot be done efficiently on a conventional computer. That paper is http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01182 (which also has some other very cool results - they've made essentially reconfigurable chips for this rather than having to make new ones for any specific photon sampling procedure). The original paper which proposed boson sampling is http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf.
When you say "real soon" do you mean within 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? More?
What probability do you estimate that Trump will be elected the next US President?
And that happens for every single major species and for all members? How likely does that seem?
Humanity has now had almost 20 years of continual presence on Mars either in orbit or on Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor reached Orbit of Mars in September of 1997 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Global_Surveyor and remained active through 2006. Because of Mars Express, Opportunity and MRO for most of that time period we've actually had multiple Martian probes active during almost all of the last 15 years. Since the arrival of Curiosity as well as MAVEN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAVEN and the Mars Orbiter Mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission it is likely that we will have probes on Mars through when humans first arrive.
It is also worth emphasizing that this work is not mere exploration but has serious and substantial concerns. We need to find out how common life is. It is an important part of understanding if we need to be concerned about a Great Filter or not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Is the solution to the Fermi paradox that life is rare, or that complex life is rare? Is it something else? Or is something that civilizations do which drastically curtails their own lifespans? In that regard, exploration of the solar system is vitally important to the future of our civilization. And this is even before we discuss the fact that the more we understand about Mars the easier colonization will be.
In psychology, individuals are ... individual. If you can replicate the results exactly, then you must be doing something wrong.
This is confused. People are individuals but studies look at general trends. And those should remain the same. Humans being individuals doesn't make them immune to statistical analysis.
No, it is a pretty accurate summary of what is happening. You focus post-hoc on where you got a good result. Say for example you want to test a new anti-diabetes drug. Does the drug work in the general population? Well, data doesn't support that. So then you look at subgroups. Does your data show success in say just men or just women? What about black men? Black women? White women? Etc. This isn't the only serious problem, sometimes one can choose which statistical tests to do or how to compensate for complicating factors. If you have enough choices you can make anything looks successful.
Similar issues have shown up in other fields. Psychology has had serious faillures to replicate many major studies http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/replication_controversy_in_psychology_bullying_file_drawer_effect_blog_posts.html and when there have been attempts to replicate them they have often not gotten the same results. And there are very similar problems in education https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/14/almost-no-education-research-replicated-new-article-shows. Pre-registration of experiments is important, but it would also help a lot if there were journals dedicated to replication and also if academia took replication more seriously: I know people who are tenure track who haven't tried to replicate some studies because it doesn't look as good for tenure promotion to just replicate something rather than do something new. There are serious cultural issues that need to change.
No. When people are arguing over definitions, the best response is to just drop the terms and look at the actual impacts in question. This is called tabooing your words http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/. Words don't have intrinsic meanings, one can of course discuss specific definitions, but that isn't by itself helpful. One can when people disagree over definitions say things like "This is an example under Definition 1, but not Definition 2" but however you are defining terms like "constitutional Republic" or "Representative democracy" will not in any way shape or form alter the fundamental question: whether people have a say in what our government does.
Missing the point. The point is that you need to focus on the effects, not what you or anyone else calls it. The problem with "kinetic military actions" is precisely that - that it disguises the actual impact in question. That's an example where exactly this sort of thing- not focusing on definitions and looking at consequences is what matters.
Please don't get hung up on arguing over definitions. It isn't productive. The point Lessig is making is that there's very little say that the general population has in what actually is happening. That statement, whether true or false, is independent of choice of labeling.
Mathematicians. I don't how many times I've seen a sequence of integers and then gone to Sloane's encyclopedia to see if the sequence is known. This is helpful in both not duplicating others work (e.g. finding out that something one has found is already known) or b) identifying that a given sequence is a known sequence and then using that as a guideline on what to prove. That last bit happens surprisingly often when one has combinatorial structure to something: pop the sequence of numbers you've got into his database and it will tell you something like the first 6 terms matching some nice combinatorial thing and then you can with that guidance go and prove that in general that's what the sequence really is.
As someone who has been on both Reddit and Voat and got onto to Voat before the recent influxes, yes, Voat has a terrible problem with a much higher fraction of shitty people.