Extremely high speed objects are something that we would have a lot of trouble reacting to. But comets come from the outskirts of our solar system. They can't get nearly that high. In general, very large objects don't travel that fast. The galactic rotation speed is much slower than.1c. Moreover, if any such impacts occurred at any time on any of the rocky planets or moons we would have noticed it. If any such object had collided with any of the gas giants in the last few thousand years we'd be able to see a record of it. Overall, I'm not terribly worried about that option. There are however, more disturbing similar threats that would be nearly impossible to deal with and would be nearly impossible to detect until it is too late. The two most obvious ones are rogue planets and brown dwarfs which if they decided to travel near the solar system could throw the Earth out of orbit. Similar remarks apply to passing black holes.
All of that is filtration events that are behind us. But there is potential filtration events in front of us. Asteroids and supernovae are natural examples. Similarly, there are possible events that could occur due to humans. Nuclear war is one example. It may well be that civilizations manage to eliminate themselves before they get advanced enough to spread around. There may be even nastier technologies that we haven't discovered yet. If there are any major filtration events that lie ahead of us, then they need to be very soon in our future. I suspect that most of the filtration in the past, but I'm not sure. One particularly concerning issue is that filtration events in the future don't need to be events that lead to full-out extinction. We've used most of the easily accessible oil and a fair bit of the easily accessible coal, and those resources were necessary to get to our current tech level. If some event sends our tech level back a few thousand years (or possibly even only a few hundred) it may well be that we won't have the resources necessary to return to a technologically advanced situation.
While we know that in practice actual asteroid and comet strikes on Earth are very rare, this sort of thing helps illustrate how we need to do a good job tracking the larger threats and preparing to deflect them if necessary. The good news is that the WISE mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer has successfully tracked most of the large asteroids that have near-Earth orbits and none of them are threats in the immediate future. There are however other dangers. For example, comets that are no longer outgassing could potentially have very elliptical orbits that would not be detected by WISE. Also, there may be smaller asteroids that WISE has not detected that could make a life pretty unpleasant in a more narrow area even if they don't lead to an extinction event. An asteroid that was around a thousand feet across (300 meters) could devastate a city and could easily escape detection from WISE. Moreover, there are some real worst case scenarios. If such an asteroid landed in either Pakistan or India for example they might think that the other had launched a nuclear weapon at them.
In general, we aren't doing enough to deal with potential existential risks. At this point, we don't know if the Great Filter is in front or behind us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. The basic idea of the Great Filter is that the easiest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that there's some set of events that make life unlikely to reach the interstellar level. That could be behind us, if for example life arising is unlikely or multicellular life arising is unlikely. But at least some filtration has to be in front of us. It seems that natural events (like asteroid strikes) are not common enough to be the entire filter. But there are other potential filtration events. Learning more about these issues not only helps preserve humanity it also helps get insight into why we seem to be alone. Unfortunately, funding for these sorts of things is tiny. The WISE mission for example was only $320 million and was used not just for the asteroid work but a lot of other good astronomy for objects both inside our solar system and more distant objects. This is a tiny cost compared to what is spent on non-science issues, and is particularly tiny when one considers it as being paid for almost exclusively by a single country.
This isn't quite true. As this survey paper shows http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.nutr.25.050304.092526 we have methods of increasing both the average and maximal life span in rats. That paper is primarily discussing this in the context of caloric restriction, which obviously is not a fun way of extending lifespan and has other problems. But other life extensions methods in rodents do seem to extent the maximal lifespan albeit not nearly as much as they move the average lifespan. Whether this can be applied to humans is still an open question.
It seems unlikely that this sort of thing would go only to the rich. Historically, medical treatments that have started in the rich have quickly spread to the general population. Look for example at plastic surgery. Moreover, many of the proposed treatments that would reduce aging are things like resveratrol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol or chemically similar compounds. Once we hit on a specific compound that works effectively, it will be likely patented for a few years and quite expensive then. Once the patent runs out or once similar other compounds are patented, there will be the usual drop in drug prices that occurs at that stage in the process.
Your comment about copyright extensions isn't quite accurate though- if anything the situation is worse than that. Most countries have copyrights of the form "life of the author + k years" for some fixed k. If the authors start living a lot longer, the practical minimum copyright for works will get much longer.
Incidentally, if people want to see this sort of thing happen in their lifetimes, the best thing is to probably give money to the SENS Foundation http://sens.org/ which works to find age reducing and anti-aging medicines. They aren't very large but they spend their money very efficiently. They just recently got a set of grants to work on technology that will help filter white blood cells in old people and help remove the older, less functioning cells, and replace them with young cells. If this works out it is possible that the classical weakened immune systems of the elderly will be a thing of the past.
Yes, sorry imprecise on my part. I mean they don't do precise timing that is universal. They can be used as I understand for short timing in any specific location but not for timing that is by itself correct for two different locations. Is that correct? In any event, I agree with you that it seems like this shouldn't be an issue given how OPERA was doing the timing.
Not really. The GPS system and satnav systems take SR and GR into account automatically for working out locations. They don't automatically work out the precise timing. So if one is using GPS for timing one can't just rely on the standard GPS software and calculations for timing.
This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.
That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.
Eh, it is difficult to predict which papers will create a media firestorm and which won't. It often only seems obvious in retrospect that a given subject will be the sort that creates a media circus. This is a form of hindsight bias.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias. Paper titles that are descriptive, amusing and more memorable are not a bad thing.
Does possession of child porn constitute "reasonable cause to suspect"?
I don't know enough about the statute to directly answer that question. It wouldn't surprise me if it did simply given how as a society we treat child porn and anything remotely connected to it. But in this context one doesn't even need to go that far. From the article:
Finn acknowledged earlier this year that St. Patrick's School Principal Julie Hess had more than a year ago raised concerns that a priest was behaving inappropriately around children, but that he didn't read her written report until after the Rev. Shawn Ratigan was charged with child pornography counts this spring. Ratigan has pleaded not guilty.
In a memo dated May 19, 2010, Hess wrote that several people had complained Ratigan was taking compromising pictures of young children and that he allowed them to sit on his lap and reach into his pocket for candy
So this wasn't just that they had found pictures but that they had found pictures and had of actual behavior. TFA discusses further problems. I don't think a jury will need to think very hard about what exactly constitutes reasonable suspicion in this case.
The main discovery according to Abbie Smith http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/10/black_death_not_initiated_by_a.php is what DNA this did not contain. There was some speculation that there might be some plasmid (a small circular strand of DNA which bacteria can share with each other or sometimes pick up from the environment) that was making the plague more deadly. This result shows that that wasn't the case. The Black Plague was deadly due to lack of antibiotics, lack of sanitation, and lack of resistance. This means we don't need to be that worried about some sort of super-strain of plague coming back to bite us. It also helps underscore how much basic hygiene and sanitation help in reducing disease.
Honestly, I'm not that surprised that of all the astronauts who walked on the moon that this would be an issue with Edgar Mitchell. He's always been a bit of an odd ball/loose cannon. He's a strong believer in psychics and thinks that UFOs are actually visiting aliens. He also claims to have been involved in remote healing and ESP. He founded the very New Agey Institute for Noetic Sciences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences (some may remember them for getting some degree of reference in Dan Brown's last book.) A lot of NASA has had very little patience with him. It isn't surprising that he'd both have neglected to do something like tell the rest of NASA what he was taking back and that he would have annoyed them enough that they would not end up finding an amicable resolution of the issue.
Buddhism is the only religion that can be taken seriously and isn't about judging and killing other people in the name of some imaginary person.
Please read up on your history of the Indian subcontinent. Buddhists are more than capable of judging and killing other people, they just do it in the name of a person who is more likely to be a historical figure. (And we have more historical sources about Mohammed than we do about Buddha). Look also at some of the history of Sri Lanka if you want to see some interesting examples in modern times.
There are types of information that every sane person thins should be classified. For example, the engineering details of how to make nuclear weapons should probably be classified. There's a limit to how much of that can be practically classified because those secret are so old, but a similar remark about hydrogen bombs would apply. Similarly, if one country has a high ranking spy in another country's government (say for example the Brits having a North Korean colonel giving them information from the inside), wanting to keep that information secret is reasonable. These are but two of the more clear cut examples. There's a lot of information about the specs of military hardware that could give an enemy advantages if they knew about it. Radar used in defense systems (which is what was leaked in this context) is exactly that sort of thing.
There are examples where governments try to classify things that they shouldn't. Sometimes they use that as a way of disguising violations of their citizens rights. Other times they use it as a way of covering their asses after they do something incompetent. But it is a mistake to look at the examples where governments have abused their ability to classify things and then conclude that all classification is bad.
Zeta(s) as defined by just the series diverges for everything with real part less than or equal to 1. It is only when one looks at the analytic continuation that this makes sense. In that analytically continued function, zeta(s) is zero when s is a negative even integer.
Curiosity's official name is the Mars Science Laboratory. This thing is massive, like really massive. Instead of a dinky little probe like Sojourner or the slightly larger Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Curiosity is about the size of an SUV. This will be the largest rover ever sent to another planet by an order of magnitude. It will be able to do all sorts of interesting geological experiments. It doesn't have that much direct life searches, which is unfortunate because the original life searches on the Viking probes was so inconclusive (most of the tests were positive but no organic molecules were found. There's been some suggestion that certain chlorine compounds in the soil could have destroyed the organics when heating).
There's a very good animation of the plan for Curiosity landiing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw. The whole process is complicated, involving aero breaking, then rocket breaking and while the rockets hover the whole probe over the ground, the rover is slowly lowered onto the surface. There are unfortunately a fair number of points of failure for this. If it does work though this will be a triumph of modern engineering and give us a lot more knowledge about Mars.
There's a function defined by zeta(s)= 1 + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s...
Ok. Pretty basic mistake I made here. This series should not have the initial 1. Not sure why I wrote that. So one has zeta(s)= 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s...
(Disclaimer: I'm a number theory grad student but this isn't precisely my area).
The Riemann Hypothesis is roughly the following: There's a function defined by zeta(s)= 1 + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s... You can make this function make sense for any complex number as long as it has real part greater than 1. However, this series does not converge for s less than or equal to 1 1. However, it turns out that this function has what is called an "analytic continuation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_continuation. Essentially it is possible to make a function on the complex plane that is smooth (in the sense of being infinitely differential), and agrees with this function everywhere. This function is known as the Riemman Zeta Function. The only caveat is that one cannot give a sensible definition for the value at s=1. (Essentially as s gets near 1, the value of the function goes to infinity).
It turns out that the behavior of zeta is deeply related to the prime numbers because of another way of writing the above series as a product over the prime numbers. So for example, a major triumph of 19th century math was showing that this function was not zero anywhere on the line with real part of s =1. This implied an approximate estimate for the size of the nth prime number called the prime number theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem.
The Riemann hypothesis is a much stronger claim about where the zeta function is zero. It turns out that it is very easy to show that the zeta function is zero at every negative even integer. These are the trivial zeros, There are other, more difficult to locate zeros. The hypothesis conjectures that these zeros all lie on the line with real part equal to 1/2. That is, every zero is of the form 1/2 + it where t is some real number. If this is true many nice things will follow.
Most people who have thought about this question believe that it is true. There's a lot of evidence for it, such as the fact that literally billions of zeros have been located on this line, and the fact that it can be shown in a certain sense that almost all the non-trivial zeros lie near the 1/2 line. We also know that in a certain sense a positive fraction of the non-trivial zeros need to lie on the line (one needs to be careful here with what this means since there are infinitely many such zeros).
There are a lot of current attempts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, and some very serious mathematicians think that the quasicrystal approach might work. Right now there are a lot of different approaches, including some which connect the hypothesis to certain claims in quantum mechanics. However, at this point, despite the many attempts there are a lot of weaker claims that we can't prove that we'd expect to prove before the Riemann hypothesis. It turns out that all the non-trivial zeros need to have a real part strictly between 0 and 1. But we can't even prove what essentially amounts to the worst case scenario, that there are zeros arbitrarily near the 0 and 1 lines. I expect this to be dealt with well before the full Riemann hypothesis is proven. There are other weaker hypotheses that are implied by RH that one would also expect to be proven first. So far the quasicrystal approach sounds promising but has had very little in the way of actual fruit. But this may just be that it is a relatively new set of tools and they need to be carefully developed. Overall, I'd be surprised if this project works simply because even if a quasicrystal approach eventually proves the full result it will require so much stuff to happen before hand.
Quasicrystals look like they can be used for a lot of interesting things. They have interesting thermal and conductive properties.
But they have nothing to do with space elevators. These don't have the desired properties for that all. But we already have substances that do have the desired properties, carbon nanotubes. We need to figure out how to make them in large enough quantities in high enough quality. This is really tough. There's good news in that nanotubes are useful for lots of things, so there's already steady research in nanotube manufacturing for lots of uses other than space elevators. But is unlikely that we will see a space elevator any time soon.
First, Berlusconi and his cronies control the traditional media in Italy. Making something difficult for their competitors is in their direct financial interest. This also works well because a major reason they can stay in power are elderly individuals who don't understand and are scared by all this new-fangled technology. At this point, Berlusconi is clearly one of the most corrupt and incompetent politicians ever in Italy. This whole thing would be funny if not for the fact that this womanizing shmuck is in charge of one of the largest economies in Europe during an ongoing financial crisis. It seems to me that this sort of thing might actually be enough for the sane Italians to wake up and realize how fucked up their government is. Th But so far, they've had a lot of crazy crap and haven't yet done so, and Wikipedia itself is not nearly as popular in Italy as it is in some other languages. (For example, the German Wikipedia is extremely popular in the German speaking world.) So I'm pessimistic.
Actually, the level of radioactivity released in a nuclear blast is comparatively small. That's because nuclear reactors have a lot more junk in them (the total amount of fission that occurs in a normal reactor over its lifespan orders of magnitude more than a fission bomb), and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes were not that large. Nuclear blasts also spread the radioactive material out a lot more making it not as concentrated. I do think that the fears of nuclear power are wildly exaggerated but at the same time I don't think that pointing to the modern day habitability of these two cities is good evidence.
So the really big question is how long the primary evacuation zone is going to be left open. At this point it looks like it won't be that terribly long, maybe 50 years or so. However, Japan's history of negative attitudes about nuclear power (for quite understandable reasons) makes it likely that the zone will stay for longer than necessary. Even when we people are let in, it is likely that few people will actively want to return for a while. Since Japan is so small and has such population density issues this could have a much more disproportionate than Chernobyl did on the USSR even though that was by many metrics a much worse accident.
However, none of this is a good reason to be that fearful of nuclear power. It still seems clear that nuclear power is far safer and more reliable than most other forms of power including coal, gas and oil. By number of deaths per a terrawatt hour nuclear power is one of the safest. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. Nuclear power simply seems worse because radioactivity is so scary and because when disasters occur they are rare and spectacular rather than routine. To see how irrational the various anti-nuke fears are one needs to only look at how groups like Greenpeace protest anything remotely nuclear such as fusion power even though it shares none of the risks of fission power. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/.
Ok. This is classic patent trolling. They aren't going after the Wi-Fi manufacturers who have the resources to possibly fight this in court but rather going against the little people. There's an obvious fix for this. Force people to sue the companies that make potentially infringing technologies rather than the people who buy them until there's a precedent with the company that the tech is infringing. Unfortunately, with the grab-bag of junk that is America Invents now done, everyone is going to avoid serious patent reform for another decade. So this isn't getting fixed for a while. Then we'll probably get some other terrible mix of good and bad stuff in some new law and the whole process will repeat itself. Good for the lawyers. Not very good for everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Extremely high speed objects are something that we would have a lot of trouble reacting to. But comets come from the outskirts of our solar system. They can't get nearly that high. In general, very large objects don't travel that fast. The galactic rotation speed is much slower than .1c. Moreover, if any such impacts occurred at any time on any of the rocky planets or moons we would have noticed it. If any such object had collided with any of the gas giants in the last few thousand years we'd be able to see a record of it. Overall, I'm not terribly worried about that option. There are however, more disturbing similar threats that would be nearly impossible to deal with and would be nearly impossible to detect until it is too late. The two most obvious ones are rogue planets and brown dwarfs which if they decided to travel near the solar system could throw the Earth out of orbit. Similar remarks apply to passing black holes.
All of that is filtration events that are behind us. But there is potential filtration events in front of us. Asteroids and supernovae are natural examples. Similarly, there are possible events that could occur due to humans. Nuclear war is one example. It may well be that civilizations manage to eliminate themselves before they get advanced enough to spread around. There may be even nastier technologies that we haven't discovered yet. If there are any major filtration events that lie ahead of us, then they need to be very soon in our future. I suspect that most of the filtration in the past, but I'm not sure. One particularly concerning issue is that filtration events in the future don't need to be events that lead to full-out extinction. We've used most of the easily accessible oil and a fair bit of the easily accessible coal, and those resources were necessary to get to our current tech level. If some event sends our tech level back a few thousand years (or possibly even only a few hundred) it may well be that we won't have the resources necessary to return to a technologically advanced situation.
While we know that in practice actual asteroid and comet strikes on Earth are very rare, this sort of thing helps illustrate how we need to do a good job tracking the larger threats and preparing to deflect them if necessary. The good news is that the WISE mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer has successfully tracked most of the large asteroids that have near-Earth orbits and none of them are threats in the immediate future. There are however other dangers. For example, comets that are no longer outgassing could potentially have very elliptical orbits that would not be detected by WISE. Also, there may be smaller asteroids that WISE has not detected that could make a life pretty unpleasant in a more narrow area even if they don't lead to an extinction event. An asteroid that was around a thousand feet across (300 meters) could devastate a city and could easily escape detection from WISE. Moreover, there are some real worst case scenarios. If such an asteroid landed in either Pakistan or India for example they might think that the other had launched a nuclear weapon at them.
In general, we aren't doing enough to deal with potential existential risks. At this point, we don't know if the Great Filter is in front or behind us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. The basic idea of the Great Filter is that the easiest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that there's some set of events that make life unlikely to reach the interstellar level. That could be behind us, if for example life arising is unlikely or multicellular life arising is unlikely. But at least some filtration has to be in front of us. It seems that natural events (like asteroid strikes) are not common enough to be the entire filter. But there are other potential filtration events. Learning more about these issues not only helps preserve humanity it also helps get insight into why we seem to be alone. Unfortunately, funding for these sorts of things is tiny. The WISE mission for example was only $320 million and was used not just for the asteroid work but a lot of other good astronomy for objects both inside our solar system and more distant objects. This is a tiny cost compared to what is spent on non-science issues, and is particularly tiny when one considers it as being paid for almost exclusively by a single country.
This isn't quite true. As this survey paper shows http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.nutr.25.050304.092526 we have methods of increasing both the average and maximal life span in rats. That paper is primarily discussing this in the context of caloric restriction, which obviously is not a fun way of extending lifespan and has other problems. But other life extensions methods in rodents do seem to extent the maximal lifespan albeit not nearly as much as they move the average lifespan. Whether this can be applied to humans is still an open question.
It seems unlikely that this sort of thing would go only to the rich. Historically, medical treatments that have started in the rich have quickly spread to the general population. Look for example at plastic surgery. Moreover, many of the proposed treatments that would reduce aging are things like resveratrol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol or chemically similar compounds. Once we hit on a specific compound that works effectively, it will be likely patented for a few years and quite expensive then. Once the patent runs out or once similar other compounds are patented, there will be the usual drop in drug prices that occurs at that stage in the process.
Your comment about copyright extensions isn't quite accurate though- if anything the situation is worse than that. Most countries have copyrights of the form "life of the author + k years" for some fixed k. If the authors start living a lot longer, the practical minimum copyright for works will get much longer.
Incidentally, if people want to see this sort of thing happen in their lifetimes, the best thing is to probably give money to the SENS Foundation http://sens.org/ which works to find age reducing and anti-aging medicines. They aren't very large but they spend their money very efficiently. They just recently got a set of grants to work on technology that will help filter white blood cells in old people and help remove the older, less functioning cells, and replace them with young cells. If this works out it is possible that the classical weakened immune systems of the elderly will be a thing of the past.
Oh ok. I see where my confusion lies. Thanks.
Yes, sorry imprecise on my part. I mean they don't do precise timing that is universal. They can be used as I understand for short timing in any specific location but not for timing that is by itself correct for two different locations. Is that correct? In any event, I agree with you that it seems like this shouldn't be an issue given how OPERA was doing the timing.
Not really. The GPS system and satnav systems take SR and GR into account automatically for working out locations. They don't automatically work out the precise timing. So if one is using GPS for timing one can't just rely on the standard GPS software and calculations for timing.
This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.
That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.
Eh, it is difficult to predict which papers will create a media firestorm and which won't. It often only seems obvious in retrospect that a given subject will be the sort that creates a media circus. This is a form of hindsight bias.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias. Paper titles that are descriptive, amusing and more memorable are not a bad thing.
Does possession of child porn constitute "reasonable cause to suspect"?
I don't know enough about the statute to directly answer that question. It wouldn't surprise me if it did simply given how as a society we treat child porn and anything remotely connected to it. But in this context one doesn't even need to go that far. From the article:
Finn acknowledged earlier this year that St. Patrick's School Principal Julie Hess had more than a year ago raised concerns that a priest was behaving inappropriately around children, but that he didn't read her written report until after the Rev. Shawn Ratigan was charged with child pornography counts this spring. Ratigan has pleaded not guilty. In a memo dated May 19, 2010, Hess wrote that several people had complained Ratigan was taking compromising pictures of young children and that he allowed them to sit on his lap and reach into his pocket for candy
So this wasn't just that they had found pictures but that they had found pictures and had of actual behavior. TFA discusses further problems. I don't think a jury will need to think very hard about what exactly constitutes reasonable suspicion in this case.
The main discovery according to Abbie Smith http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/10/black_death_not_initiated_by_a.php is what DNA this did not contain. There was some speculation that there might be some plasmid (a small circular strand of DNA which bacteria can share with each other or sometimes pick up from the environment) that was making the plague more deadly. This result shows that that wasn't the case. The Black Plague was deadly due to lack of antibiotics, lack of sanitation, and lack of resistance. This means we don't need to be that worried about some sort of super-strain of plague coming back to bite us. It also helps underscore how much basic hygiene and sanitation help in reducing disease.
Honestly, I'm not that surprised that of all the astronauts who walked on the moon that this would be an issue with Edgar Mitchell. He's always been a bit of an odd ball/loose cannon. He's a strong believer in psychics and thinks that UFOs are actually visiting aliens. He also claims to have been involved in remote healing and ESP. He founded the very New Agey Institute for Noetic Sciences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences (some may remember them for getting some degree of reference in Dan Brown's last book.) A lot of NASA has had very little patience with him. It isn't surprising that he'd both have neglected to do something like tell the rest of NASA what he was taking back and that he would have annoyed them enough that they would not end up finding an amicable resolution of the issue.
Ah yes. If Christians, Muslims and Jews can engage in the No-True-Scotsman fallacy it isn't surprising that it can be done with Buddhism as well.
Buddhism is the only religion that can be taken seriously and isn't about judging and killing other people in the name of some imaginary person. Please read up on your history of the Indian subcontinent. Buddhists are more than capable of judging and killing other people, they just do it in the name of a person who is more likely to be a historical figure. (And we have more historical sources about Mohammed than we do about Buddha). Look also at some of the history of Sri Lanka if you want to see some interesting examples in modern times.
There are types of information that every sane person thins should be classified. For example, the engineering details of how to make nuclear weapons should probably be classified. There's a limit to how much of that can be practically classified because those secret are so old, but a similar remark about hydrogen bombs would apply. Similarly, if one country has a high ranking spy in another country's government (say for example the Brits having a North Korean colonel giving them information from the inside), wanting to keep that information secret is reasonable. These are but two of the more clear cut examples. There's a lot of information about the specs of military hardware that could give an enemy advantages if they knew about it. Radar used in defense systems (which is what was leaked in this context) is exactly that sort of thing.
There are examples where governments try to classify things that they shouldn't. Sometimes they use that as a way of disguising violations of their citizens rights. Other times they use it as a way of covering their asses after they do something incompetent. But it is a mistake to look at the examples where governments have abused their ability to classify things and then conclude that all classification is bad.
Zeta(s) as defined by just the series diverges for everything with real part less than or equal to 1. It is only when one looks at the analytic continuation that this makes sense. In that analytically continued function, zeta(s) is zero when s is a negative even integer.
Curiosity's official name is the Mars Science Laboratory. This thing is massive, like really massive. Instead of a dinky little probe like Sojourner or the slightly larger Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Curiosity is about the size of an SUV. This will be the largest rover ever sent to another planet by an order of magnitude. It will be able to do all sorts of interesting geological experiments. It doesn't have that much direct life searches, which is unfortunate because the original life searches on the Viking probes was so inconclusive (most of the tests were positive but no organic molecules were found. There's been some suggestion that certain chlorine compounds in the soil could have destroyed the organics when heating).
There's a very good animation of the plan for Curiosity landiing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw. The whole process is complicated, involving aero breaking, then rocket breaking and while the rockets hover the whole probe over the ground, the rover is slowly lowered onto the surface. There are unfortunately a fair number of points of failure for this. If it does work though this will be a triumph of modern engineering and give us a lot more knowledge about Mars.
There's a function defined by zeta(s)= 1 + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s...
Ok. Pretty basic mistake I made here. This series should not have the initial 1. Not sure why I wrote that. So one has zeta(s)= 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s...
The Riemann Hypothesis is roughly the following: There's a function defined by zeta(s)= 1 + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s... You can make this function make sense for any complex number as long as it has real part greater than 1. However, this series does not converge for s less than or equal to 1 1. However, it turns out that this function has what is called an "analytic continuation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_continuation. Essentially it is possible to make a function on the complex plane that is smooth (in the sense of being infinitely differential), and agrees with this function everywhere. This function is known as the Riemman Zeta Function. The only caveat is that one cannot give a sensible definition for the value at s=1. (Essentially as s gets near 1, the value of the function goes to infinity).
It turns out that the behavior of zeta is deeply related to the prime numbers because of another way of writing the above series as a product over the prime numbers. So for example, a major triumph of 19th century math was showing that this function was not zero anywhere on the line with real part of s =1. This implied an approximate estimate for the size of the nth prime number called the prime number theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem.
The Riemann hypothesis is a much stronger claim about where the zeta function is zero. It turns out that it is very easy to show that the zeta function is zero at every negative even integer. These are the trivial zeros, There are other, more difficult to locate zeros. The hypothesis conjectures that these zeros all lie on the line with real part equal to 1/2. That is, every zero is of the form 1/2 + it where t is some real number. If this is true many nice things will follow.
Most people who have thought about this question believe that it is true. There's a lot of evidence for it, such as the fact that literally billions of zeros have been located on this line, and the fact that it can be shown in a certain sense that almost all the non-trivial zeros lie near the 1/2 line. We also know that in a certain sense a positive fraction of the non-trivial zeros need to lie on the line (one needs to be careful here with what this means since there are infinitely many such zeros).
There are a lot of current attempts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, and some very serious mathematicians think that the quasicrystal approach might work. Right now there are a lot of different approaches, including some which connect the hypothesis to certain claims in quantum mechanics. However, at this point, despite the many attempts there are a lot of weaker claims that we can't prove that we'd expect to prove before the Riemann hypothesis. It turns out that all the non-trivial zeros need to have a real part strictly between 0 and 1. But we can't even prove what essentially amounts to the worst case scenario, that there are zeros arbitrarily near the 0 and 1 lines. I expect this to be dealt with well before the full Riemann hypothesis is proven. There are other weaker hypotheses that are implied by RH that one would also expect to be proven first. So far the quasicrystal approach sounds promising but has had very little in the way of actual fruit. But this may just be that it is a relatively new set of tools and they need to be carefully developed. Overall, I'd be surprised if this project works simply because even if a quasicrystal approach eventually proves the full result it will require so much stuff to happen before hand.
Quasicrystals look like they can be used for a lot of interesting things. They have interesting thermal and conductive properties.
But they have nothing to do with space elevators. These don't have the desired properties for that all. But we already have substances that do have the desired properties, carbon nanotubes. We need to figure out how to make them in large enough quantities in high enough quality. This is really tough. There's good news in that nanotubes are useful for lots of things, so there's already steady research in nanotube manufacturing for lots of uses other than space elevators. But is unlikely that we will see a space elevator any time soon.
First, Berlusconi and his cronies control the traditional media in Italy. Making something difficult for their competitors is in their direct financial interest. This also works well because a major reason they can stay in power are elderly individuals who don't understand and are scared by all this new-fangled technology. At this point, Berlusconi is clearly one of the most corrupt and incompetent politicians ever in Italy. This whole thing would be funny if not for the fact that this womanizing shmuck is in charge of one of the largest economies in Europe during an ongoing financial crisis. It seems to me that this sort of thing might actually be enough for the sane Italians to wake up and realize how fucked up their government is. Th But so far, they've had a lot of crazy crap and haven't yet done so, and Wikipedia itself is not nearly as popular in Italy as it is in some other languages. (For example, the German Wikipedia is extremely popular in the German speaking world.) So I'm pessimistic.
Actually, the level of radioactivity released in a nuclear blast is comparatively small. That's because nuclear reactors have a lot more junk in them (the total amount of fission that occurs in a normal reactor over its lifespan orders of magnitude more than a fission bomb), and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes were not that large. Nuclear blasts also spread the radioactive material out a lot more making it not as concentrated. I do think that the fears of nuclear power are wildly exaggerated but at the same time I don't think that pointing to the modern day habitability of these two cities is good evidence.
So the really big question is how long the primary evacuation zone is going to be left open. At this point it looks like it won't be that terribly long, maybe 50 years or so. However, Japan's history of negative attitudes about nuclear power (for quite understandable reasons) makes it likely that the zone will stay for longer than necessary. Even when we people are let in, it is likely that few people will actively want to return for a while. Since Japan is so small and has such population density issues this could have a much more disproportionate than Chernobyl did on the USSR even though that was by many metrics a much worse accident.
However, none of this is a good reason to be that fearful of nuclear power. It still seems clear that nuclear power is far safer and more reliable than most other forms of power including coal, gas and oil. By number of deaths per a terrawatt hour nuclear power is one of the safest. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. Nuclear power simply seems worse because radioactivity is so scary and because when disasters occur they are rare and spectacular rather than routine. To see how irrational the various anti-nuke fears are one needs to only look at how groups like Greenpeace protest anything remotely nuclear such as fusion power even though it shares none of the risks of fission power. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/.
Ok. This is classic patent trolling. They aren't going after the Wi-Fi manufacturers who have the resources to possibly fight this in court but rather going against the little people. There's an obvious fix for this. Force people to sue the companies that make potentially infringing technologies rather than the people who buy them until there's a precedent with the company that the tech is infringing. Unfortunately, with the grab-bag of junk that is America Invents now done, everyone is going to avoid serious patent reform for another decade. So this isn't getting fixed for a while. Then we'll probably get some other terrible mix of good and bad stuff in some new law and the whole process will repeat itself. Good for the lawyers. Not very good for everyone else.