There's a tremendous amount of reproducible, controlled experiments in psychology. One area that in the last thirty years has been particularly successful is in quantifying and detecting cognitive biases. There have been very careful, clever experiments documenting the conjunction fallacy and when humans do it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy, the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology), confirmation bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias, and many more. Moreover, there are now being developed general theories that explain what sorts of errors in reasoning humans will make, and those theories are often falsifiable. Psychology does have problems and especially had problems historically. It probably has one of the worst signal to crap rates of any of the soft sciences, but that doesn't make it a science and doesn't mean people aren't doing very good work in it.
What makes this news troubling is that the researcher succeeded in being published in Science which was supposed to have a rigorous and effective peer-review process
Not really. The peer review process isn't set out to look for fraud. It is set out to look for bad data, poor experimental setups, poor interpretation of experiments, etc. The system assumes that the submitters are acting in good fatih. And this is a pretty good assumption: the vast majority of the time they are. The occasions where a problem occurs are few and far between. It would be a massive waste of resources and exhausting for all involved for peer review to try to actively look for signs of fraud.
Of course people referred to him by that name. The problem is that almost no modern scholar calls him that, so you have an organization going out of its way to use that form of the name. Moreover, he's classified in the report as a Muslim. So even if it had called him Maimonides it would be factually ridiculous. As to Leo Strauss, that wouldn't be the only bizarre thing that Leo Strauss said that is so stupid that even self-identified Straussians would probably not agree with it, and that hardly seems relevant. Trying to argue that Maimonides was Muslim makes about as much historical sense as trying to argue that Avicenna was Christian. And even this wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. Someone could have gotten confused about who they were talking about and not bothered to actually look up the details, not the first time such sloppiness has found its way into an official document, but that it is part of a broad pattern of problems with UNESCO.
It isn't at all surprising that UNESCO was the first part of the UN to recognize the Palestinian state. UNESCO has long been the most anti-Israel of any part of the UN I don't like the terms "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-Israel" as counterparts, one can be in favor of both. Focusing on that sort of approach creates way too much of a dichotomy. But, UNESCO is just anti-Israel. This is an organization which kicked Israel out temporarily once before, and at one point tried in an amazing example of historical revisionism apparently tried to claim that Maimonides was a Muslim. (See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4097506,00.html). Maimonides was for those who are not aware a premier Jewish philosopher and doctor in the Middle Ages who wrote the 13 principles of faith that Orthodox Jews generally as their founding beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides. UNESCO has also accused Israel of damaging archaeological sites even as the archaeological community has praised Israel for its preservation work. The bottom line is that UNESCO has a long history of not doing its actual job of promoting peace in the region and cultural/scientific cooperation but instead pushing an anti-Israel agenda. The Maimonides example is probably one of the worse, but it is the sort of nonsense that some people are talking about when they say that some forms of anti-Israel behavior really are just motivated by anti-Semitism.
All of that said, defunding UNESCO is a bad idea. They do some good work in the Middle East. And they do very good work on the rest of the globe. Moreover, recognizing a Palestinian state isn't that big a deal. This isn't like UNESCO's attempt 35 years ago to just kick Israel out.
The people most likely to be harmed by this are the Palestinians. Which is sad. The UN could for example have used this as an opportunity to push for better protections for minorities in the Palestinian territories, especially gays and Christians. UNESCO itself could have used this as an opportunity to get better protection of non-Islamic historical sites by the Palestinian governments. The people who are really hurt by this sort of thing are the Palestinian refugees in areas like Jordan who aren't being given citizenship in this new state, which means even if all of this goes through they will still be stateless people without a government to genuinely represent them.
That’s why President Obama supports the use of the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance and “In God we Trust” on our currency. These phrases represent the important role religion plays in American public life, while we continue to recognize and protect the rights of secular Americans. As the President said in his inaugural address, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” We’re proud of that heritage, and the strength it brings to our great country.
So apparently believers and non-believers are important but somehow believers are more important and get their beliefs enshrined in public life?
The translation for most of these is really simple: The obvious political calculations don't support the petitions. The vast majority of people who support the decriminalization of pot are people who would vote for Obama anyways. (There might be some libertarians in the Tea Party but even bringing up legalization at their rallies had lead to booing. See e.g. http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Pot-Legalization-Brings-Boos-at-Tea-Party-Rally.). The only one that's even more blatant than that is the petition answer about removing "under God" from the pledge of allegiance. The people who care about that definitely aren't going to vote for anyone other than Obama (well, if Huntsman won the Republican primary then maybe, but right now he's polling at 2% among registered Republicans...). That petition response is even more noteworthy for having a nice mix of trying to claim that non-believers make up an important part of the US even as Obama endorses the claim that God is important to nation. The worst part of all this is that his political calculation is correct: Next election I'm probably going to be voting for him. Because the other option will be a lot worse.
This is helpful but not that helpful. There are at this point a variety of potential explanations for what went wrong in the OPERA experiment. These include mismeasuring the tunnel length, issues with the clock calibration, and issues with the statistical analysis among other issues. It is important to note that while the OPERA group is double checking most of these issues, this experiment only really helps deal with a single problem, the statistical analysis of the neutrinos. If they are associated to individual bursts, the statistical test will be much simpler. So even if this still gets the same result, this won't be that strong evidence that there's something real going on here.
A better replication attempt is that which is being done by MINOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS, the equivalent experiment at Fermilab in the US. One reason that OPERA was paying careful attention to the arrival times (when their main interest was actually in measuring neutrino oscillation) was that MINOS had earlier reported data that tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be going too fast. Now that OPERA has done their work, MINOS is working on doing a more detailed analysis that should be out by around February.
Overall, I still think that there's a mistake here, but it is interesting to see how long this is taking to find where the mistake was. The apparent initial sprint by physicists to find the error is turning into a marathon. The data though still needs to be somehow reconciled with the fact that neutrinos from SN 1987a (a supernova that occurred close to Earth and whose light and neutrinos reached Earth in 1987 ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987Arel=url2html-7691http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A> had the neutrinos arrive when conventional theory predicted them, that is a few hours before the light. This isn't due to neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, but due to the fact that neutrinos are produced at the way beginning of a supernova in the core and then fly out with a headstart because they can easily avoid most of the matter in the star but the light takes time to get through the star. But, if the neutrinos traveled faster than light to the extent OPERA data suggests then SN 1987A neutrinos should have arrived years earlier.
There are some other possibilities that would reconcile the two claims. For example, it is possible that neutrinos actually travel faster in a denser medium. This would be really weird. It is also possible that the reactions we think produce neutrinos actually produce a very short lived tachyon which itself decays into a neutrino. This starts running afoul of Occam's razor, but would explain why one would see too much velocity in the OPERA setting but not from the supernova. This hypothesis is actually also pretty easily testable: one needs to use a shorter distance for one's neutrino detectors and see if the apparent velocity goes up.
Overall, I still suspect that this is a fluke or error of some kind. But I really hope it isn't. This could be the Michelson–Morley experiment of our error, the first anomaly which leads to a glimpse of some fantastically deeper understanding of the universe. But I really wouldn't bet on it.
There are a fair number of people who don't pay for their utilities when they rent apartments. This is especially true in buildings that have minimal individual temp control. I don't need to pay for my utilities. I'm pretty sure that in general I'm less careful about say not leaving windows open than I would be if I had to pay for using heat dumping as a way of cooling my apartment when the heat is too high. I feel guilty about that doing that but hey. In a similar vein, I suspect that lots of people who do control the temperatures would keep them down if the thermostat instead of displaying just the temperature displayed the actual cost accumulating. That's probably a lot technically simpler than trainable AI.
We can keep food safety inspections, at least until an adequate private inspection regime is in place (like the one that inspects food and facilities for Kosher and Halal dietary requirements).
If someone has food that isn't kosher they are unlikely to ever know about it (well unless it turns out that their deity is real). If food poisoning occurs people can die. Not the same thing. Moreover, as a former Orthodox Jew with a lot of experinece with the way the kashrut inspection groups work, I can assure you that they are a good model of exactly what can go wrong with for-profit entities running inspections. They use almost anything as an excuse to simply raises the amount they are charging often in a way complely unrelated to whether or not it risks an actual violation of kashrut rules.
The real problem with this sort of thing is the arms race that it inspires. Sure, one might not mind this sort of attack on Iran. But what happens in the next stage when China or Iran tries to do this to some other country? The problem with making new weapons is that the advantage they give only lasts until someone else has it. The collateral damage they do lasts indefinitely. This sort of lesson is especially true for something like this that can most easily target civillian assets.
Sure. There are definite limits of that sort that aren't implausible. But at the same time, we know that if present trends continue our computational substrates will hit the end of the line in a few decades. Fundamental limits mean that if our understanding of the laws of physics are correct we hit the limits for classical computational systems in about fifty years. It is hard to say when such limits get hit for quantum stuff (and one needs to be careful about what one means here). At that some point, one will eventually run into a situation where just making things bigger will be the most viable option. The only known exception to this is if one can make wormholes and take advantage of closed-time like curves. See http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/ctc.pdf. Even then, there are eventual limits, it just isn't clear they are limits any civilization would ever care about. So although people in the 1950s were wrong, they probably weren't wrong about the very long run. Even today, we have supercomputers, mainframes and large clusters that aren't that far off from what were envisioned in the 1950s. If aliens are out there and this is wrong then this is almost as interesting a claim as the claim that they are out there. In some respects it is a bigger claim because it means we are wrong about very fundamental physics, whereas finding life is in complete consistency with physics as we know it.
I agree that at this point we can't detect any smaller projects and that at this point "smaller" means a bit larger than Earth (unless the project does something ridiculous that dumps out a lot of radiation, like say a controlled black hole that is constantly fed matter). And such projects are much more likely. Even projects the size of a small moon are probably hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us and would be utterly invisible to us by any technology we can conceive.
Messages aren't the only problem though. We don't see any signs of artificial structures either. There are not as far as we can tell any Dyson spheres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere. or stellar engineering. If a species had say a hundred million years to spread in our galaxy they should have taken over a substantial portion and tried at least a few large scale engineering projects. We don't see any signs of this sort of thing either. Some of these sorts of things may be just tough to see, Dyson spheres and Matrioska brains:will be hard to detect but should be detectable if they are in line of sight to anywhere in the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy. Seeing the far side of the Milky Way is tough because there are lots of stars and dust in the way, but the infrared signature should still be visible and certainly should be visible in nearby galaxies. We haven't looked very hard for such things but people have looked somewhat and see no signs. Similarly, there's no indication of stellar engineering. Humans have come up with only a handful of possible stellar engineering ideas, but no doubt many more ideas are possible. We see no indication of any of them.
That seems to be not the case. Look at the car bailout. The Big Three were not making cars anyone wanted to buy. So instead they made the taxpayers pay them anyways. If you have sufficient influence then you don't necessarily need to sell a product or service.
No. It does not mean there's a global oligarchy. For one thing, many of these are publicly traded companies. So individuals do have some input. They may have very little, but it does exist. Moreover, a 147 entities is actually quite a lot. And many of those companies are in direct competition with each other. So while it is true that many of these companies own stock in each other, they aren't close to controlling each other in any reasonable sense. If the various bailouts are any indication, one doesn't need a mysterious oligarchy to control governments. Old-fashioned lobbying works just fine.
Ron Paul would want to cut this even if there weren't an economic argument that it is inflating college costs. He just wants to cut things. The economic argument is an argument to get to his bottom line of cutting federal programs.
That said, there's an actual argument that such loans are increasing the cost of colleges in general, and there's a a whole cottage industry of for-profit colleges that have grown up which give bad educations and get most of their money off of federal loans. And the cost of college is increasing faster than the inflation rate. http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/20/pf/college/college_price.moneymag/ Part of this is probably that more and and more people want to go to college and are willing to pay whatever it takes. Another issue is that some colleges are increasing their tuition prices while being much more willing to give out scholarships, effectively engaging in a form of price discrimination so they can charge different amounts based on how much people can afford.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. Also, some people go out of their way to go to named schools rather than local state schools for reasons of status and prestige even when the academics aren't substantially different. But some of this cost issue may be due to the student loan program, so it may make sense to actually revises or revamp the federal student loan program. However, the immediate result of cutting the loans won't be a correction of college costs, but rather simply an immediate screwing-over of the people who can't easily afford college.
Relevant comic: http://www.askdreldritch.com/comic687.html. More substantially, there's now a twitter feed with regular updates http://twitter.com/#!/ROSAT_Reentry. The rate of descent is pretty fast. One thing to keep in mind is that although the chance of someone being hit by debris is around 1 in 3000 or so, the chance of a specific person being hit is much lower. It is extremely unlikely that two people will be hit so by a rough approximation, if someone is hit there is a 1 in 6 billion chance that it is you. So the chance is about 1/(3000 * 10^9)= 1 in 3 trillion. Even if one assumes a fairly high probability that when one person gets hit multiple people will get hit, the chance is still on the order of 1 in a trillion. That said, this sort of uncontrolled reentry is not ideal. But most satellites are either in higher orbits or are small enough such that everything will burn up when they reenter. Large satellites entering in an uncontrolled fashion is pretty rare.
Mercury has been phased out of most vaccines. This was done in the late 1990s in response to concerns that the mercury was somehow causing autism in children. Note that this had no impact on autism rates so the anti-vaxxers then switched to talking about ambiguous toxins. Thiomersol is still used in some vaccines but it is only a small fraction of vaccines, such as some versions of the flu vaccine. If necessary that can be easily replaced. It would be stupid because the mercury levels are tiny but it wouldn't have much of an impact. I'm more concerned that this sort of blanket ban would inadvertently impact smaller uses where mercury is really necessary for specialized uses in other areas. The ban also doesn't seem to address the differences between organic and inorganic mercury which have wildly different chemical properties in practice.
The solution there is simple when one has an amorphous group like OWS. Join in with friends who agree with you about the TSA, pick the other points that OWS is protesting that you agree with and join in. If necessary, try to start protesting groups like the companies that managed to lobby for the backscatter x-ray machines.
I really don't like how Bujold's Vorkosigan series comes after a path where one says no to humor. Sure, they can be pretty serious at times. Bujold has explicitly said that she thinks one of the keys to good literature is making characters have a miserable time (not her exact wording but pretty close). But the light-hearted bits are terribly funny. And even when things are going wrong, a lot of the characters, especially Miles, have such delightfully sardonic attitudes that this shouldn't be there. Frankly, a lot of these paths should lead to the same books as options. Overall, amusing but not a great actual flow chart for the purpose intended.
This is not the Meissner effect! If it were you wouldn't be able to do the stunt where they move the disk to a different angle and it stays there. This is more subtle. The Meissner effect involves superconductors not letting magnetic field lines pass through the superconductor. This involves special superconductors that allow magnetic field lines to pass through but make the field lines get trapped in imperfections in the superconductor. The name of this effect is "flux pinning" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning. Here is the website of the group who made this video where they explain it http://www.quantumlevitation.com/levitation/Quantum_Levitation.html
This isn't as big a jump as the summary suggests. There are amateurs who sometimes get access to large telescopes, and one can do decent in system astronomy with backyard telescopes. Similarly, a lot of the observation of the recent supernova in M85 were done by amateur astronomers. Since one of the most important things to determine about a supernova is how the brightness rises and falls, for close by supernova it is very important to have near continual observation with a lot of data points. Since there are a lot of amateur astronomers out there this means that even when a major telescope doesn't have a good view of the event they can still see it. Also, while not amateurs in the sense of adults, similar programs to give telescope time to highschool and college students exist. Significant discoveries from that sort of work have been discussed on Slashdot before. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/068250/18-Year-Old-Student-Discovers-Comet-Break-Up.
He's also lucky in that it is even more apparent now in 2011 than it was in 2008 that Yahoo is flailing and not doing well at all. On the other hand, maybe if Microsoft had purchased it the new overarching management would have done a better job. Also, part of the failure of Yahoo has been Bing taking some of their former market share. And since Yahoo Search is essentially going to be Bing soon http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm that's essentially done with. Yahoo has very little left that it is used that is that popular. When I was younger a lot of people used Yahoo! Games for things like chess, and I understand that that still has a fair bit of use. But that was actually an acquisition from outside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Games of another website. They've done very little to further develop or improve that since then. Overall, they simply haven't been very proactive with improving their existing services, and of those they have modified it has often been not for the better. In some sense part of the problem is that much of what they have is while not a full walled-garden, it is a garden that isn't easy to move in and out of. And that just doesn't work very well. (Although it does seem like some of the mobile devices are definitely moving back in that direction. Maybe if Yahoo made a more functioning version of their stuff in the form of apps?)
Slashdot Mirror
That's not true. Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel Prize in economics for his work with Tversky on behavioral economics.
There's a tremendous amount of reproducible, controlled experiments in psychology. One area that in the last thirty years has been particularly successful is in quantifying and detecting cognitive biases. There have been very careful, clever experiments documenting the conjunction fallacy and when humans do it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy, the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology), confirmation bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias, and many more. Moreover, there are now being developed general theories that explain what sorts of errors in reasoning humans will make, and those theories are often falsifiable. Psychology does have problems and especially had problems historically. It probably has one of the worst signal to crap rates of any of the soft sciences, but that doesn't make it a science and doesn't mean people aren't doing very good work in it.
What makes this news troubling is that the researcher succeeded in being published in Science which was supposed to have a rigorous and effective peer-review process
Not really. The peer review process isn't set out to look for fraud. It is set out to look for bad data, poor experimental setups, poor interpretation of experiments, etc. The system assumes that the submitters are acting in good fatih. And this is a pretty good assumption: the vast majority of the time they are. The occasions where a problem occurs are few and far between. It would be a massive waste of resources and exhausting for all involved for peer review to try to actively look for signs of fraud.
Of course people referred to him by that name. The problem is that almost no modern scholar calls him that, so you have an organization going out of its way to use that form of the name. Moreover, he's classified in the report as a Muslim. So even if it had called him Maimonides it would be factually ridiculous. As to Leo Strauss, that wouldn't be the only bizarre thing that Leo Strauss said that is so stupid that even self-identified Straussians would probably not agree with it, and that hardly seems relevant. Trying to argue that Maimonides was Muslim makes about as much historical sense as trying to argue that Avicenna was Christian. And even this wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. Someone could have gotten confused about who they were talking about and not bothered to actually look up the details, not the first time such sloppiness has found its way into an official document, but that it is part of a broad pattern of problems with UNESCO.
It isn't at all surprising that UNESCO was the first part of the UN to recognize the Palestinian state. UNESCO has long been the most anti-Israel of any part of the UN I don't like the terms "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-Israel" as counterparts, one can be in favor of both. Focusing on that sort of approach creates way too much of a dichotomy. But, UNESCO is just anti-Israel. This is an organization which kicked Israel out temporarily once before, and at one point tried in an amazing example of historical revisionism apparently tried to claim that Maimonides was a Muslim. (See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4097506,00.html). Maimonides was for those who are not aware a premier Jewish philosopher and doctor in the Middle Ages who wrote the 13 principles of faith that Orthodox Jews generally as their founding beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides. UNESCO has also accused Israel of damaging archaeological sites even as the archaeological community has praised Israel for its preservation work. The bottom line is that UNESCO has a long history of not doing its actual job of promoting peace in the region and cultural/scientific cooperation but instead pushing an anti-Israel agenda. The Maimonides example is probably one of the worse, but it is the sort of nonsense that some people are talking about when they say that some forms of anti-Israel behavior really are just motivated by anti-Semitism.
All of that said, defunding UNESCO is a bad idea. They do some good work in the Middle East. And they do very good work on the rest of the globe. Moreover, recognizing a Palestinian state isn't that big a deal. This isn't like UNESCO's attempt 35 years ago to just kick Israel out.
The people most likely to be harmed by this are the Palestinians. Which is sad. The UN could for example have used this as an opportunity to push for better protections for minorities in the Palestinian territories, especially gays and Christians. UNESCO itself could have used this as an opportunity to get better protection of non-Islamic historical sites by the Palestinian governments. The people who are really hurt by this sort of thing are the Palestinian refugees in areas like Jordan who aren't being given citizenship in this new state, which means even if all of this goes through they will still be stateless people without a government to genuinely represent them.
That’s why President Obama supports the use of the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance and “In God we Trust” on our currency. These phrases represent the important role religion plays in American public life, while we continue to recognize and protect the rights of secular Americans. As the President said in his inaugural address, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” We’re proud of that heritage, and the strength it brings to our great country.
So apparently believers and non-believers are important but somehow believers are more important and get their beliefs enshrined in public life?
The translation for most of these is really simple: The obvious political calculations don't support the petitions. The vast majority of people who support the decriminalization of pot are people who would vote for Obama anyways. (There might be some libertarians in the Tea Party but even bringing up legalization at their rallies had lead to booing. See e.g. http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Pot-Legalization-Brings-Boos-at-Tea-Party-Rally.). The only one that's even more blatant than that is the petition answer about removing "under God" from the pledge of allegiance. The people who care about that definitely aren't going to vote for anyone other than Obama (well, if Huntsman won the Republican primary then maybe, but right now he's polling at 2% among registered Republicans...). That petition response is even more noteworthy for having a nice mix of trying to claim that non-believers make up an important part of the US even as Obama endorses the claim that God is important to nation. The worst part of all this is that his political calculation is correct: Next election I'm probably going to be voting for him. Because the other option will be a lot worse.
This is helpful but not that helpful. There are at this point a variety of potential explanations for what went wrong in the OPERA experiment. These include mismeasuring the tunnel length, issues with the clock calibration, and issues with the statistical analysis among other issues. It is important to note that while the OPERA group is double checking most of these issues, this experiment only really helps deal with a single problem, the statistical analysis of the neutrinos. If they are associated to individual bursts, the statistical test will be much simpler. So even if this still gets the same result, this won't be that strong evidence that there's something real going on here.
A better replication attempt is that which is being done by MINOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS, the equivalent experiment at Fermilab in the US. One reason that OPERA was paying careful attention to the arrival times (when their main interest was actually in measuring neutrino oscillation) was that MINOS had earlier reported data that tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be going too fast. Now that OPERA has done their work, MINOS is working on doing a more detailed analysis that should be out by around February.
Overall, I still think that there's a mistake here, but it is interesting to see how long this is taking to find where the mistake was. The apparent initial sprint by physicists to find the error is turning into a marathon. The data though still needs to be somehow reconciled with the fact that neutrinos from SN 1987a (a supernova that occurred close to Earth and whose light and neutrinos reached Earth in 1987 ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987Arel=url2html-7691http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A> had the neutrinos arrive when conventional theory predicted them, that is a few hours before the light. This isn't due to neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, but due to the fact that neutrinos are produced at the way beginning of a supernova in the core and then fly out with a headstart because they can easily avoid most of the matter in the star but the light takes time to get through the star. But, if the neutrinos traveled faster than light to the extent OPERA data suggests then SN 1987A neutrinos should have arrived years earlier.
There are some other possibilities that would reconcile the two claims. For example, it is possible that neutrinos actually travel faster in a denser medium. This would be really weird. It is also possible that the reactions we think produce neutrinos actually produce a very short lived tachyon which itself decays into a neutrino. This starts running afoul of Occam's razor, but would explain why one would see too much velocity in the OPERA setting but not from the supernova. This hypothesis is actually also pretty easily testable: one needs to use a shorter distance for one's neutrino detectors and see if the apparent velocity goes up.
Overall, I still suspect that this is a fluke or error of some kind. But I really hope it isn't. This could be the Michelson–Morley experiment of our error, the first anomaly which leads to a glimpse of some fantastically deeper understanding of the universe. But I really wouldn't bet on it.
There are a fair number of people who don't pay for their utilities when they rent apartments. This is especially true in buildings that have minimal individual temp control. I don't need to pay for my utilities. I'm pretty sure that in general I'm less careful about say not leaving windows open than I would be if I had to pay for using heat dumping as a way of cooling my apartment when the heat is too high. I feel guilty about that doing that but hey. In a similar vein, I suspect that lots of people who do control the temperatures would keep them down if the thermostat instead of displaying just the temperature displayed the actual cost accumulating. That's probably a lot technically simpler than trainable AI.
We can keep food safety inspections, at least until an adequate private inspection regime is in place (like the one that inspects food and facilities for Kosher and Halal dietary requirements).
If someone has food that isn't kosher they are unlikely to ever know about it (well unless it turns out that their deity is real). If food poisoning occurs people can die. Not the same thing. Moreover, as a former Orthodox Jew with a lot of experinece with the way the kashrut inspection groups work, I can assure you that they are a good model of exactly what can go wrong with for-profit entities running inspections. They use almost anything as an excuse to simply raises the amount they are charging often in a way complely unrelated to whether or not it risks an actual violation of kashrut rules.
The real problem with this sort of thing is the arms race that it inspires. Sure, one might not mind this sort of attack on Iran. But what happens in the next stage when China or Iran tries to do this to some other country? The problem with making new weapons is that the advantage they give only lasts until someone else has it. The collateral damage they do lasts indefinitely. This sort of lesson is especially true for something like this that can most easily target civillian assets.
Sure. There are definite limits of that sort that aren't implausible. But at the same time, we know that if present trends continue our computational substrates will hit the end of the line in a few decades. Fundamental limits mean that if our understanding of the laws of physics are correct we hit the limits for classical computational systems in about fifty years. It is hard to say when such limits get hit for quantum stuff (and one needs to be careful about what one means here). At that some point, one will eventually run into a situation where just making things bigger will be the most viable option. The only known exception to this is if one can make wormholes and take advantage of closed-time like curves. See http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/ctc.pdf. Even then, there are eventual limits, it just isn't clear they are limits any civilization would ever care about. So although people in the 1950s were wrong, they probably weren't wrong about the very long run. Even today, we have supercomputers, mainframes and large clusters that aren't that far off from what were envisioned in the 1950s. If aliens are out there and this is wrong then this is almost as interesting a claim as the claim that they are out there. In some respects it is a bigger claim because it means we are wrong about very fundamental physics, whereas finding life is in complete consistency with physics as we know it.
I agree that at this point we can't detect any smaller projects and that at this point "smaller" means a bit larger than Earth (unless the project does something ridiculous that dumps out a lot of radiation, like say a controlled black hole that is constantly fed matter). And such projects are much more likely. Even projects the size of a small moon are probably hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us and would be utterly invisible to us by any technology we can conceive.
Messages aren't the only problem though. We don't see any signs of artificial structures either. There are not as far as we can tell any Dyson spheres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere. or stellar engineering. If a species had say a hundred million years to spread in our galaxy they should have taken over a substantial portion and tried at least a few large scale engineering projects. We don't see any signs of this sort of thing either. Some of these sorts of things may be just tough to see, Dyson spheres and Matrioska brains :will be hard to detect but should be detectable if they are in line of sight to anywhere in the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy. Seeing the far side of the Milky Way is tough because there are lots of stars and dust in the way, but the infrared signature should still be visible and certainly should be visible in nearby galaxies. We haven't looked very hard for such things but people have looked somewhat and see no signs. Similarly, there's no indication of stellar engineering. Humans have come up with only a handful of possible stellar engineering ideas, but no doubt many more ideas are possible. We see no indication of any of them.
What do you think is the answer to Fermi's question? That is, why do you think we see no signs of intelligent life other than humans?
That seems to be not the case. Look at the car bailout. The Big Three were not making cars anyone wanted to buy. So instead they made the taxpayers pay them anyways. If you have sufficient influence then you don't necessarily need to sell a product or service.
No. It does not mean there's a global oligarchy. For one thing, many of these are publicly traded companies. So individuals do have some input. They may have very little, but it does exist. Moreover, a 147 entities is actually quite a lot. And many of those companies are in direct competition with each other. So while it is true that many of these companies own stock in each other, they aren't close to controlling each other in any reasonable sense. If the various bailouts are any indication, one doesn't need a mysterious oligarchy to control governments. Old-fashioned lobbying works just fine.
Ron Paul would want to cut this even if there weren't an economic argument that it is inflating college costs. He just wants to cut things. The economic argument is an argument to get to his bottom line of cutting federal programs.
That said, there's an actual argument that such loans are increasing the cost of colleges in general, and there's a a whole cottage industry of for-profit colleges that have grown up which give bad educations and get most of their money off of federal loans. And the cost of college is increasing faster than the inflation rate. http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/20/pf/college/college_price.moneymag/ Part of this is probably that more and and more people want to go to college and are willing to pay whatever it takes. Another issue is that some colleges are increasing their tuition prices while being much more willing to give out scholarships, effectively engaging in a form of price discrimination so they can charge different amounts based on how much people can afford.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. Also, some people go out of their way to go to named schools rather than local state schools for reasons of status and prestige even when the academics aren't substantially different. But some of this cost issue may be due to the student loan program, so it may make sense to actually revises or revamp the federal student loan program. However, the immediate result of cutting the loans won't be a correction of college costs, but rather simply an immediate screwing-over of the people who can't easily afford college.
Confirmed now as down, exact location where it went down still unknown. See http://spacepolicyonline.com/pages/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1960:rosat-is-down&catid=91:news&Itemid=84.
Relevant comic: http://www.askdreldritch.com/comic687.html. More substantially, there's now a twitter feed with regular updates http://twitter.com/#!/ROSAT_Reentry. The rate of descent is pretty fast. One thing to keep in mind is that although the chance of someone being hit by debris is around 1 in 3000 or so, the chance of a specific person being hit is much lower. It is extremely unlikely that two people will be hit so by a rough approximation, if someone is hit there is a 1 in 6 billion chance that it is you. So the chance is about 1/(3000 * 10^9)= 1 in 3 trillion. Even if one assumes a fairly high probability that when one person gets hit multiple people will get hit, the chance is still on the order of 1 in a trillion. That said, this sort of uncontrolled reentry is not ideal. But most satellites are either in higher orbits or are small enough such that everything will burn up when they reenter. Large satellites entering in an uncontrolled fashion is pretty rare.
Mercury has been phased out of most vaccines. This was done in the late 1990s in response to concerns that the mercury was somehow causing autism in children. Note that this had no impact on autism rates so the anti-vaxxers then switched to talking about ambiguous toxins. Thiomersol is still used in some vaccines but it is only a small fraction of vaccines, such as some versions of the flu vaccine. If necessary that can be easily replaced. It would be stupid because the mercury levels are tiny but it wouldn't have much of an impact. I'm more concerned that this sort of blanket ban would inadvertently impact smaller uses where mercury is really necessary for specialized uses in other areas. The ban also doesn't seem to address the differences between organic and inorganic mercury which have wildly different chemical properties in practice.
The solution there is simple when one has an amorphous group like OWS. Join in with friends who agree with you about the TSA, pick the other points that OWS is protesting that you agree with and join in. If necessary, try to start protesting groups like the companies that managed to lobby for the backscatter x-ray machines.
I really don't like how Bujold's Vorkosigan series comes after a path where one says no to humor. Sure, they can be pretty serious at times. Bujold has explicitly said that she thinks one of the keys to good literature is making characters have a miserable time (not her exact wording but pretty close). But the light-hearted bits are terribly funny. And even when things are going wrong, a lot of the characters, especially Miles, have such delightfully sardonic attitudes that this shouldn't be there. Frankly, a lot of these paths should lead to the same books as options. Overall, amusing but not a great actual flow chart for the purpose intended.
This is not the Meissner effect! If it were you wouldn't be able to do the stunt where they move the disk to a different angle and it stays there. This is more subtle. The Meissner effect involves superconductors not letting magnetic field lines pass through the superconductor. This involves special superconductors that allow magnetic field lines to pass through but make the field lines get trapped in imperfections in the superconductor. The name of this effect is "flux pinning" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning. Here is the website of the group who made this video where they explain it http://www.quantumlevitation.com/levitation/Quantum_Levitation.html
This isn't as big a jump as the summary suggests. There are amateurs who sometimes get access to large telescopes, and one can do decent in system astronomy with backyard telescopes. Similarly, a lot of the observation of the recent supernova in M85 were done by amateur astronomers. Since one of the most important things to determine about a supernova is how the brightness rises and falls, for close by supernova it is very important to have near continual observation with a lot of data points. Since there are a lot of amateur astronomers out there this means that even when a major telescope doesn't have a good view of the event they can still see it. Also, while not amateurs in the sense of adults, similar programs to give telescope time to highschool and college students exist. Significant discoveries from that sort of work have been discussed on Slashdot before. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/068250/18-Year-Old-Student-Discovers-Comet-Break-Up.
He's also lucky in that it is even more apparent now in 2011 than it was in 2008 that Yahoo is flailing and not doing well at all. On the other hand, maybe if Microsoft had purchased it the new overarching management would have done a better job. Also, part of the failure of Yahoo has been Bing taking some of their former market share. And since Yahoo Search is essentially going to be Bing soon http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm that's essentially done with. Yahoo has very little left that it is used that is that popular. When I was younger a lot of people used Yahoo! Games for things like chess, and I understand that that still has a fair bit of use. But that was actually an acquisition from outside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Games of another website. They've done very little to further develop or improve that since then. Overall, they simply haven't been very proactive with improving their existing services, and of those they have modified it has often been not for the better. In some sense part of the problem is that much of what they have is while not a full walled-garden, it is a garden that isn't easy to move in and out of. And that just doesn't work very well. (Although it does seem like some of the mobile devices are definitely moving back in that direction. Maybe if Yahoo made a more functioning version of their stuff in the form of apps?)