Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.
There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.
The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from personal risk? Most importantly: are they happy?
The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early. And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child. So yeah, people who are having their kids die constantly aren't very happy. If you do insist on metrics that attempt to look specifically at happiness levels then in fact the US is one of the happiest countries (#14 by this ranking - http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gallup-table.html ), and Western Europe consistently lands in the top. So does that make it more ok for European space launches? Also, I'm a bit confused about how this claim relates to your primary claim about either civilization collapsing (happiness levels are not a good metric for likelyhood of civilization to collapse), and this also seems disconnected from your other claim about how these resources should go more to people who are suffering severely, since the people in the West who are not well off by Western standards are generally pretty well off compared to people in the developing world. So what is the claim you are trying to make here?
I remember, decades ago, caring about this sort of stuff. Now I realise that it's just another way of appropriating resources to have fun while others suffer.
Overtime, the amount of suffering has gone down by many metrics. For example, in most of the developing world, infant mortality now is much less than it was 50 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality The infant mortality rate of the planet as a whole has gone down by a factor of about 3 compared to the rate in the 1950s. The world's level of literacy is also increasing. Average lifespan has also gone up in the developing world. More importantly, that lifespan increase has occurred even if one just looks at the average lifespan of people who survive 3 years of age (this helps deal with most of the infant mortality issue). So no, civilization isn't collapsing. In fact, civilization is doing quite well.
Sure there are things we can do in the here and now to help people directly, like give more money to help deal with malaria and the like. If you want to really care about your own money going to optimal causes, a good thing to look at is Givewell http://www.givewell.org/ which identifies efficient, underfunded charities that are doing helpful work, especially in the developing world.
But, let's address your final claim that this is having fun while others suffer. That's simply not accurate and is missing the point. When the Apollo moon landings happened, people in poor areas crowded around the few radios they had to listen in. Why? Because as badly off as they were, they understood that some things really are achievements for humanity as a whole. In the long run, we're going to need to colonize space. And we'll need to be ready for it. Moreover, we have a real reason to figure out how common life is- for some reason there's almost no intelligent life out there. We need to figure out, for the good of humanity as a whole, if the Great Filter preventing the rise of intelligent civilizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter is ahead of us or behind us. I suspect that most of it is behind us, but if there's any in front of us, it needs to appear before space travel becomes cheap or easy. The more we know about how common life is, what kinds of life evolve, and other related issues, the better understanding we get of whether we need to be prepared for possible filtration up ahead. This is for the good of humanity as a whole.
This is important for two reasons. The first reason this is important is the obvious issue that the presence of liquid water makes the existence of life a lot more likely. It seems that conditions for life are really surprisingly common. What we still don't know is how likely life is to form in the first place and how easily it travels. There is speculation about panspermia and life on Earth having come from Mars on meteorites but the orbital mechanics make that direction a lot more likely than from Earth to the Mars.
The second reason this is important is that in the long-run colonization and exploration of Mars will be a lot easier if water is easily available. The presence of water will be directly helpful for some plans aside from directly helping humans. For example, the Mars Direct plan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct involves exploratory missions to Mars where some of the rocket fuel for the return is methane made on the surface. Current versions of that plan call for bringing the necessary hydrogen to Mars. This isn't too bad since hydrogen is only a small fraction of methane by mass. But if we could split the water using electrolysis and get the hydrogen directly from that that would potentially further reduce the amount of mass needed to be launched from Earth. Unfortunately, the water here seems to be not so common that one could actually rely on this. This is probably non-viable unless one had much better maps of where the water was, how deep it normally was, the exact locations of the water, detailed knowledge of what salts were making the water briny and any other major chemical contaminants which could make electrolysis machinery unhappy. So overall, this is unlikely to impact missions to Mars in that direct a way.
After the last James Bond movie I'm slightly worried about any company called "Quantum" having control over a lot of resources in a specific area. I do have to say getting a monopoly on niobium is a lot more Bond-villainy than trying to charge a higher price for water in a poor South American country (seriously, lamest Bond villain scheme everrrr.)
More substantially, I'm not completely sure this sort of discover is a good thing in the long term. We need to get better at making advanced electronics without relying on these elements or we need to get much better at recycling electronics (preferably both). This sort of thing is good in the short-term but is to some extent delaying the inevitable. On the other hand, maybe it will give us more time to develop alternatives.
Note that TFA mentions the Mountain Pass Mine as shut-down for environmental concerns. However, that mine is undergoing renovation and modernization. It is suppose to resume operating soon. I'm not sure this new site has any intrinsic advantage over Mountain Pass, especially given that the estimates for this new site are still not strongly confirmed. The estimates discussed in the summary TFA may be quite optimistic.
When I first read that my first thought was that they would have telescopes up there. But all they mean is an observation deck. How disappointing.
More seriously, TFA discusses how this is part of the attempt by Saudi Arabia to move away from having an economy run off of oil. So this will have hotels and offices inside. I'm not sure that this is the best thing to do to get off of such things given how many basic problems Saudi Arabia has and how many fairly cheap things could be done to improve the education and general productivity of most of the population.
One thing that will be an obvious issue for such a large building is the exact layout and behavior of the elevator system. Some modern tall buildings have elevators that don't have simple up and down buttons but rather have a keypad where one punches in what floor one wants to go to and then the system optimizes which elevator to send to you rather than simply sending the next available elevator in that direction. This also allows elevators to travel at faster than the amount they can deaccelerate in a single floor. There's some non-trivial math involved in making such systems, and even making them slightly more efficient can have large scale payoffs simply due to the sheer number of people. As real-estate becomes more expensive and scarce throughout the planet, we're going to need to look more and more at how pre-existing very large buildings have handled these sorts of issues. So I'm happy that we have people like the Saudis doing this now long before we really need it.
I see now. So as long as people have bad ideas about statistics it is ok. Believing some numbers are lucky is ok. Ignorant people saying things like "I haven't won and I've been playing for years, I have to win soon" is ok. Having people believe that God told them to buy a lottery ticket is ok. But when one someone actually has a chance to be correct about having a chance to win and make a profit then it isn't ok. Why don't the governments stop pretending. The lottery is intended on a tax for those who can't do math. And most of those people can't do math because the government schools failed to teach them. The government wants to use a lottery so it can get extra money from poor, uneducated people while pretending to have a progressive tax system which doesn't hurt the poor.
Seriously, this is supposed to be news for nerds and the summary gets a gratuitous attack on protractors? They aren't useless now and they certainly weren't useless in the past. Before electronic systems, protractors were needed for all sorts of applications in architecture and engineering. In other areas, the way stars were carefully charted used protractor-like instruments. This last was particularly important in many ancient cultures because they relied on the stars to figure out just when to plant. Later, in the age of navigation, the sextant (again a protractor variant) was used to help accurately estimate latitude, a critical ability for sailors allowing the exploration and trade which eventually gave us the modern world. Moreover, aside from these applications, having children work with protractors helps them improve their ability to estimate things at a glance and improve their geometric intuition something that is important in daily life as well as all sorts of jobs, whether as things like carpenters or more academic jobs like engineers and physicists.
Today's lesson: You aren't V. Neither the British or US government is an evil fascist state which brutally subjugates the populace. This isn't to say that they are perfect. Far from it. But the basic point is clear. Moreover, if either of the governments were so bad as to deserve fighting back then the method to respond would not involve hacking every single website you can most of whom are corporations which have nothing to do with anything. Sure it is probably fun to convince yourself that you are doing good, but your just a bunch of script kiddies who aren't being helpful while real activists spend their time and sometimes lives improving the governments and saving lives.
The pretty picture in TFA is caused by the nebula being lit up by radiation (mainly ultraviolent) from the dying star at the center. As the star dies from running out of stuff which is easy to efficiently fuse in the core, the star undergoes contractions and expansions which push the outer layers away to form a nebula. The term "planetary nebula" is a bit misleading- they are called that because they look like planetary discs if one looks for them in a small telescope. Phil Plait has a pretty good summary of what we are looking at - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/25/a-glowing-bubbly-bauble-in-space/
This is one of the silliest versions of a Singularity I've seen yet, and there are already a lot of contenders. This has a lot of the common buzzwords and patterns (like a weakly substantiated claim of exponential growth). It is interesting in that this does superficially share some similarity with how we might improve our intelligence in the future. The issue of recursive self-improvement where each improvement leads to more improvement is not by itself ridiculous. Thus, for example humans might genetically engineer smarter humans who then engineer smarter humans and so on A more worrisome possibility is that an AI that doesn't share goals with humans might bootstrap itself by steadily improving itself to the point where it can easily out-think us. This scenario seems unlikely, but there are some very smart people who take that situation seriously.
The idea contained in this post is however irrecoverably ridiculous. The games which succeed aren't the games that make people smarter and challenge us more. They are the games that most efficiently exploit human reward and mechanisms and associated social feelings. Games that succeed are games like World of Warcraft and Farmville not games that involve human intelligence in any substantial fashion. The only games that do that are games that teach little kids to add or multiply or factor, and they never succeed well because kids quickly grow bored of them. The games of the future will not be games that make us smarter. The games of the future will be the games which get us to compulsively click more.
There have been some claims that this is an example Google being evil but this seems more like incompetence and hamfistedness than evil. This would be silly and minor if not for the reports that some of these people can't access their other Google products they use. Many people use gmail for their primary email. If any of these people use it for business they could be actively losing money from this. But this does lead to two basic lessons which are apparently not repeated enough: First, when you use a free service you get what you paid for. Second, backing things up is always a good idea.
I went to CTY for two summers. Some of the best experiences I had as a young kid were there. I also later went to PROMYS, which is Boston Univesity's program which teaches number theory to highschool students which I then ended up working for as a counselor when I became an undergrad. These programs are very good for kids.
You may find this funny but it isn't. How many little girls grew up with that sexist mentality and so didn't make discoveries?. How many of the interesting technologies in TFA weren't made because some little girl instead of becoming a scientist or an engineer became a housewife or a secretary because she was told just this sort of sexist bullshit? How many cures for diseases have been lost because of young ladies who grew up being told that they couldn't do math? And how many interesting business models won't happen because girls were told to expect boys to be the wage earners and girls to be the clothes buyers? Don't make stupid sexist jokes. Help remove the stereotypes. I'm a guy, and I want all my cool technologies we don't have yet. And joke like yours just reinforce exactly the social attitudes that make us not get the cool technology as quickly.
Diminishing marginal returns are very relevant for where government funding should go. Thus in general, small scientific programs are much more likely to have a very high output proportional to their cost than large programs. Since all science funding is tiny, cutting into it makes very little sense in that context. Of course, this is aside from the other serious issues with the recent pushes for austerity such as how in the US this apparently means cuts to absolutely everything except for military spending.
This looks very similar to the maps of the undersea telegraph and telephone lines from around a hundred years ago. See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1901_Eastern_Telegraph_cables.png This shouldn't be that surprising since the basic idea of the technology (large underwater cables to transmit information) is the same, the population centers a hundred years ago are not that far off from the population centers today, and the geoological constrains are similar also.
It is an unfortunate fact that in the current climate it is very hard to get people in the US interested in space when there's no big looming Soviet threat. This will be good for space in that it will help push people in the US to be more competitive, both because of our general competitive culture and because of the general, residual anti-communist attitudes (and yes, I know that the Chinese aren't really community at this point, but most Americans don't understand that.) So this will help encourage the US to be a bit more serious about space stuff. This is also good because competition is in general better. China might succeed at some things that the US and the various countries involved in the ISS have not done as well. Having different groups trying to tackle the same problems will often lead to different methods and technologies being applied, which in the long run benefits everyone. And of course, a space race is a much better form of competition than a lot of the alternatives like warfare.
Given that we just had a Slashdot article about how the space based James Webb telescope is already on the ropes with Congress, http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/0038247/Congress-Dumps-James-Webb-Space-Telescope, perhaps we should be worried that the same will happen for SKA. Unlike Webb, SKA is an international project, so it won't necessarily go down the tubes if the US backs out. Moreover, the US has backed out of European lead science projects before often with very little warning. SKA is going to allow some very interesting work. Among other things, SKA might be able to detect extraterrestrial life, either through direct radio signals (from intelligent life) which would be a really big deal, or more indirectly detect non-intelligent through the analysis of extrasolar planets' atmospheres (such as the detection of large amounts of oxygen). SKA will also be used for many other astronomy and astrophysics projects, such as examination of supernovas. SKA is very good science, let's hope that the penny pinchers who repeatedly cut tiny science programs while leaving defense, social security and medicare alone will not touch it. In the long run, science helps everyone.
Hubble has done a very good job and is getting old. The technology has been vastly improved since when Hubble was first put in space. That's why we can have a lot of different space based instruments now, whereas when Hubble was put up it was the primary one. When Hubble finally becomes too damaged for effective use, we will have many other instruments. We already have Spitzer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope and will have the James Webb Telescope around 2018 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Telescope . Webb will be able to image far fainter objects than Hubble and in far more detail. I'm not that worried about Hubble breaking. It has done a very good job and served humanity well.
In the very long term, automated cars able to coordinate their driving will be more efficient. There will be fewer driving accidents and people will get where they are going faster. In the short term this sort of technology is more likely to be first actually used when it is limited to highway driving (which is comparatively simple) before it becomes useful for general driving. Unfortunately, it could take only a few bad accidents before people will start reacting strongly against automated systems even if the systems are safer than humans on average. This is sort of what we're seeing now already with nuclear power: the death toll from nuclear power is much smaller than coal, but nuclear power is treated as terrible because the accidents are rare and spectacular and involve a technology that is seen as novel, strange and unnatural.
I've learned stuff from The Onion. The most memorable tidbit was when they did the Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year http://www.theonion.com/articles/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates-another-su,2296/ which mentions Engblom v. Carey. When I saw that my thought was "wait, is that a real court case?" And it turned out it is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engblom_v._Carey . Really, an actual case revolving around your right for the government not to quarter soldiers in your homes. The Onion is awesome. They don't just do satire, they do clever, well-informed satire that is well-researched and includes neat factual details.
More radio telescopes are generally a good thing. One of the major tensions in the field now is whether one should have large radio telescopes or lots of comparatively smaller ones that coordinate their work. Both methods have different advantages. Lots of smaller telescopes linked has the major advantage that if some of them go down for some reason one can still do good science. However, the larger ones can have lots of neat technologies. As TFA discusses, this telescope (FAST) will be able to deform its mirrors in real time to focus on sources. That will help a lot for work on faint radio sources.
However, I'm not sure that this is the best use of resources. As discussed in TFA, the Square Kilometre array is being built by a variety of countries working together, and it will do a lot of the same stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array However, the SKA and FAST will be looking at different regions of the sky, and where they do overlap will be looking at different times. So overall this is helpful. Personally, if I were going to be putting this much resources into interesting Earth-based astronomy, I'd probably want to focus more on increasing our neutrino detectors. We're not investing very much in that, and it is a very new, very interesting field of astronomy/astrophysics. Moreover, neutrino astronomy is pretty much the only thing that can give us warning (albeit only a few hours) if a nasty supernova happens in our vicinity. Right now, that doesn't look likely, but it would be nice to have some warning in case our models are off. Moreover, even without a threat issue, since neutrinos can arrive before the light from a supernova (since the neutrino burst occurs before most of what we would call a supernova, and neutrinos travel at very close to the speed of light), they can help us point our optical and X-ray telescopes in the right regions before we the light reaches us, which is really helpful for advancing our understanding of such events.
Overall though, shouldn't be complaining. It is very difficult to get almost any good funding now for astronomy and cosmology research. In that regard, this is a good thing.
So the bad news is that this has to do with Twitter. The good news is that the star which went nova wasn't Betelgeuse.
(Ok, yeah, I know that most likely under current models, Betelgeuse going nova won't be that bad for Earth. However, this joke is slightly justified in that last supernova that was visible from Earth 1987A wasn't even a star that we expected to nova. And the neutron star that should be in the remnant still hasn't been found. There's a lot we don't understand about how stars die.)
This video is speed up- the video contains about 12 hours of footage. Note also that given where the sun is in the solar cycle we can likely expect more similar events soon. If any of them end up heading more directly in the direction of Earth it could interfere badly with electronics, especially in satellites. But we haven't gotten a really bad flare since the 19th century, but then there were events that even interfered with telegraph lines. And our current electronics are a lot more sensitive than stuff they had back then.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.
There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.
The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from personal risk? Most importantly: are they happy?
The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early. And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child. So yeah, people who are having their kids die constantly aren't very happy. If you do insist on metrics that attempt to look specifically at happiness levels then in fact the US is one of the happiest countries (#14 by this ranking - http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gallup-table.html ), and Western Europe consistently lands in the top. So does that make it more ok for European space launches? Also, I'm a bit confused about how this claim relates to your primary claim about either civilization collapsing (happiness levels are not a good metric for likelyhood of civilization to collapse), and this also seems disconnected from your other claim about how these resources should go more to people who are suffering severely, since the people in the West who are not well off by Western standards are generally pretty well off compared to people in the developing world. So what is the claim you are trying to make here?
Overtime, the amount of suffering has gone down by many metrics. For example, in most of the developing world, infant mortality now is much less than it was 50 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality The infant mortality rate of the planet as a whole has gone down by a factor of about 3 compared to the rate in the 1950s. The world's level of literacy is also increasing. Average lifespan has also gone up in the developing world. More importantly, that lifespan increase has occurred even if one just looks at the average lifespan of people who survive 3 years of age (this helps deal with most of the infant mortality issue). So no, civilization isn't collapsing. In fact, civilization is doing quite well.
Sure there are things we can do in the here and now to help people directly, like give more money to help deal with malaria and the like. If you want to really care about your own money going to optimal causes, a good thing to look at is Givewell http://www.givewell.org/ which identifies efficient, underfunded charities that are doing helpful work, especially in the developing world.
But, let's address your final claim that this is having fun while others suffer. That's simply not accurate and is missing the point. When the Apollo moon landings happened, people in poor areas crowded around the few radios they had to listen in. Why? Because as badly off as they were, they understood that some things really are achievements for humanity as a whole. In the long run, we're going to need to colonize space. And we'll need to be ready for it. Moreover, we have a real reason to figure out how common life is- for some reason there's almost no intelligent life out there. We need to figure out, for the good of humanity as a whole, if the Great Filter preventing the rise of intelligent civilizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter is ahead of us or behind us. I suspect that most of it is behind us, but if there's any in front of us, it needs to appear before space travel becomes cheap or easy. The more we know about how common life is, what kinds of life evolve, and other related issues, the better understanding we get of whether we need to be prepared for possible filtration up ahead. This is for the good of humanity as a whole.
This is important for two reasons. The first reason this is important is the obvious issue that the presence of liquid water makes the existence of life a lot more likely. It seems that conditions for life are really surprisingly common. What we still don't know is how likely life is to form in the first place and how easily it travels. There is speculation about panspermia and life on Earth having come from Mars on meteorites but the orbital mechanics make that direction a lot more likely than from Earth to the Mars.
The second reason this is important is that in the long-run colonization and exploration of Mars will be a lot easier if water is easily available. The presence of water will be directly helpful for some plans aside from directly helping humans. For example, the Mars Direct plan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct involves exploratory missions to Mars where some of the rocket fuel for the return is methane made on the surface. Current versions of that plan call for bringing the necessary hydrogen to Mars. This isn't too bad since hydrogen is only a small fraction of methane by mass. But if we could split the water using electrolysis and get the hydrogen directly from that that would potentially further reduce the amount of mass needed to be launched from Earth. Unfortunately, the water here seems to be not so common that one could actually rely on this. This is probably non-viable unless one had much better maps of where the water was, how deep it normally was, the exact locations of the water, detailed knowledge of what salts were making the water briny and any other major chemical contaminants which could make electrolysis machinery unhappy. So overall, this is unlikely to impact missions to Mars in that direct a way.
You're worried about this because you saw a fictional company in a fictional movie that did bad things?
You need therapy. Jesus, what is wrong with you?
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/joke may help answer that question.
After the last James Bond movie I'm slightly worried about any company called "Quantum" having control over a lot of resources in a specific area. I do have to say getting a monopoly on niobium is a lot more Bond-villainy than trying to charge a higher price for water in a poor South American country (seriously, lamest Bond villain scheme everrrr.)
More substantially, I'm not completely sure this sort of discover is a good thing in the long term. We need to get better at making advanced electronics without relying on these elements or we need to get much better at recycling electronics (preferably both). This sort of thing is good in the short-term but is to some extent delaying the inevitable. On the other hand, maybe it will give us more time to develop alternatives.
Note that TFA mentions the Mountain Pass Mine as shut-down for environmental concerns. However, that mine is undergoing renovation and modernization. It is suppose to resume operating soon. I'm not sure this new site has any intrinsic advantage over Mountain Pass, especially given that the estimates for this new site are still not strongly confirmed. The estimates discussed in the summary TFA may be quite optimistic.
When I first read that my first thought was that they would have telescopes up there. But all they mean is an observation deck. How disappointing.
More seriously, TFA discusses how this is part of the attempt by Saudi Arabia to move away from having an economy run off of oil. So this will have hotels and offices inside. I'm not sure that this is the best thing to do to get off of such things given how many basic problems Saudi Arabia has and how many fairly cheap things could be done to improve the education and general productivity of most of the population.
One thing that will be an obvious issue for such a large building is the exact layout and behavior of the elevator system. Some modern tall buildings have elevators that don't have simple up and down buttons but rather have a keypad where one punches in what floor one wants to go to and then the system optimizes which elevator to send to you rather than simply sending the next available elevator in that direction. This also allows elevators to travel at faster than the amount they can deaccelerate in a single floor. There's some non-trivial math involved in making such systems, and even making them slightly more efficient can have large scale payoffs simply due to the sheer number of people. As real-estate becomes more expensive and scarce throughout the planet, we're going to need to look more and more at how pre-existing very large buildings have handled these sorts of issues. So I'm happy that we have people like the Saudis doing this now long before we really need it.
I see now. So as long as people have bad ideas about statistics it is ok. Believing some numbers are lucky is ok. Ignorant people saying things like "I haven't won and I've been playing for years, I have to win soon" is ok. Having people believe that God told them to buy a lottery ticket is ok. But when one someone actually has a chance to be correct about having a chance to win and make a profit then it isn't ok. Why don't the governments stop pretending. The lottery is intended on a tax for those who can't do math. And most of those people can't do math because the government schools failed to teach them. The government wants to use a lottery so it can get extra money from poor, uneducated people while pretending to have a progressive tax system which doesn't hurt the poor.
Seriously, this is supposed to be news for nerds and the summary gets a gratuitous attack on protractors? They aren't useless now and they certainly weren't useless in the past. Before electronic systems, protractors were needed for all sorts of applications in architecture and engineering. In other areas, the way stars were carefully charted used protractor-like instruments. This last was particularly important in many ancient cultures because they relied on the stars to figure out just when to plant. Later, in the age of navigation, the sextant (again a protractor variant) was used to help accurately estimate latitude, a critical ability for sailors allowing the exploration and trade which eventually gave us the modern world. Moreover, aside from these applications, having children work with protractors helps them improve their ability to estimate things at a glance and improve their geometric intuition something that is important in daily life as well as all sorts of jobs, whether as things like carpenters or more academic jobs like engineers and physicists.
Today's lesson: You aren't V. Neither the British or US government is an evil fascist state which brutally subjugates the populace. This isn't to say that they are perfect. Far from it. But the basic point is clear. Moreover, if either of the governments were so bad as to deserve fighting back then the method to respond would not involve hacking every single website you can most of whom are corporations which have nothing to do with anything. Sure it is probably fun to convince yourself that you are doing good, but your just a bunch of script kiddies who aren't being helpful while real activists spend their time and sometimes lives improving the governments and saving lives.
The pretty picture in TFA is caused by the nebula being lit up by radiation (mainly ultraviolent) from the dying star at the center. As the star dies from running out of stuff which is easy to efficiently fuse in the core, the star undergoes contractions and expansions which push the outer layers away to form a nebula. The term "planetary nebula" is a bit misleading- they are called that because they look like planetary discs if one looks for them in a small telescope. Phil Plait has a pretty good summary of what we are looking at - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/25/a-glowing-bubbly-bauble-in-space/
This is one of the silliest versions of a Singularity I've seen yet, and there are already a lot of contenders. This has a lot of the common buzzwords and patterns (like a weakly substantiated claim of exponential growth). It is interesting in that this does superficially share some similarity with how we might improve our intelligence in the future. The issue of recursive self-improvement where each improvement leads to more improvement is not by itself ridiculous. Thus, for example humans might genetically engineer smarter humans who then engineer smarter humans and so on A more worrisome possibility is that an AI that doesn't share goals with humans might bootstrap itself by steadily improving itself to the point where it can easily out-think us. This scenario seems unlikely, but there are some very smart people who take that situation seriously.
The idea contained in this post is however irrecoverably ridiculous. The games which succeed aren't the games that make people smarter and challenge us more. They are the games that most efficiently exploit human reward and mechanisms and associated social feelings. Games that succeed are games like World of Warcraft and Farmville not games that involve human intelligence in any substantial fashion. The only games that do that are games that teach little kids to add or multiply or factor, and they never succeed well because kids quickly grow bored of them. The games of the future will not be games that make us smarter. The games of the future will be the games which get us to compulsively click more.
There have been some claims that this is an example Google being evil but this seems more like incompetence and hamfistedness than evil. This would be silly and minor if not for the reports that some of these people can't access their other Google products they use. Many people use gmail for their primary email. If any of these people use it for business they could be actively losing money from this. But this does lead to two basic lessons which are apparently not repeated enough: First, when you use a free service you get what you paid for. Second, backing things up is always a good idea.
I went to CTY for two summers. Some of the best experiences I had as a young kid were there. I also later went to PROMYS, which is Boston Univesity's program which teaches number theory to highschool students which I then ended up working for as a counselor when I became an undergrad. These programs are very good for kids.
You may find this funny but it isn't. How many little girls grew up with that sexist mentality and so didn't make discoveries?. How many of the interesting technologies in TFA weren't made because some little girl instead of becoming a scientist or an engineer became a housewife or a secretary because she was told just this sort of sexist bullshit? How many cures for diseases have been lost because of young ladies who grew up being told that they couldn't do math? And how many interesting business models won't happen because girls were told to expect boys to be the wage earners and girls to be the clothes buyers? Don't make stupid sexist jokes. Help remove the stereotypes. I'm a guy, and I want all my cool technologies we don't have yet. And joke like yours just reinforce exactly the social attitudes that make us not get the cool technology as quickly.
Diminishing marginal returns are very relevant for where government funding should go. Thus in general, small scientific programs are much more likely to have a very high output proportional to their cost than large programs. Since all science funding is tiny, cutting into it makes very little sense in that context. Of course, this is aside from the other serious issues with the recent pushes for austerity such as how in the US this apparently means cuts to absolutely everything except for military spending.
This looks very similar to the maps of the undersea telegraph and telephone lines from around a hundred years ago. See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1901_Eastern_Telegraph_cables.png This shouldn't be that surprising since the basic idea of the technology (large underwater cables to transmit information) is the same, the population centers a hundred years ago are not that far off from the population centers today, and the geoological constrains are similar also.
It is an unfortunate fact that in the current climate it is very hard to get people in the US interested in space when there's no big looming Soviet threat. This will be good for space in that it will help push people in the US to be more competitive, both because of our general competitive culture and because of the general, residual anti-communist attitudes (and yes, I know that the Chinese aren't really community at this point, but most Americans don't understand that.) So this will help encourage the US to be a bit more serious about space stuff. This is also good because competition is in general better. China might succeed at some things that the US and the various countries involved in the ISS have not done as well. Having different groups trying to tackle the same problems will often lead to different methods and technologies being applied, which in the long run benefits everyone. And of course, a space race is a much better form of competition than a lot of the alternatives like warfare.
Given that we just had a Slashdot article about how the space based James Webb telescope is already on the ropes with Congress, http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/0038247/Congress-Dumps-James-Webb-Space-Telescope, perhaps we should be worried that the same will happen for SKA. Unlike Webb, SKA is an international project, so it won't necessarily go down the tubes if the US backs out. Moreover, the US has backed out of European lead science projects before often with very little warning. SKA is going to allow some very interesting work. Among other things, SKA might be able to detect extraterrestrial life, either through direct radio signals (from intelligent life) which would be a really big deal, or more indirectly detect non-intelligent through the analysis of extrasolar planets' atmospheres (such as the detection of large amounts of oxygen). SKA will also be used for many other astronomy and astrophysics projects, such as examination of supernovas. SKA is very good science, let's hope that the penny pinchers who repeatedly cut tiny science programs while leaving defense, social security and medicare alone will not touch it. In the long run, science helps everyone.
Hubble has done a very good job and is getting old. The technology has been vastly improved since when Hubble was first put in space. That's why we can have a lot of different space based instruments now, whereas when Hubble was put up it was the primary one. When Hubble finally becomes too damaged for effective use, we will have many other instruments. We already have Spitzer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope and will have the James Webb Telescope around 2018 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Telescope . Webb will be able to image far fainter objects than Hubble and in far more detail. I'm not that worried about Hubble breaking. It has done a very good job and served humanity well.
In the very long term, automated cars able to coordinate their driving will be more efficient. There will be fewer driving accidents and people will get where they are going faster. In the short term this sort of technology is more likely to be first actually used when it is limited to highway driving (which is comparatively simple) before it becomes useful for general driving. Unfortunately, it could take only a few bad accidents before people will start reacting strongly against automated systems even if the systems are safer than humans on average. This is sort of what we're seeing now already with nuclear power: the death toll from nuclear power is much smaller than coal, but nuclear power is treated as terrible because the accidents are rare and spectacular and involve a technology that is seen as novel, strange and unnatural.
I've learned stuff from The Onion. The most memorable tidbit was when they did the Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year http://www.theonion.com/articles/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates-another-su,2296/ which mentions Engblom v. Carey. When I saw that my thought was "wait, is that a real court case?" And it turned out it is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engblom_v._Carey . Really, an actual case revolving around your right for the government not to quarter soldiers in your homes. The Onion is awesome. They don't just do satire, they do clever, well-informed satire that is well-researched and includes neat factual details.
Will this mean they'll need to update the xkcd shirts?
More radio telescopes are generally a good thing. One of the major tensions in the field now is whether one should have large radio telescopes or lots of comparatively smaller ones that coordinate their work. Both methods have different advantages. Lots of smaller telescopes linked has the major advantage that if some of them go down for some reason one can still do good science. However, the larger ones can have lots of neat technologies. As TFA discusses, this telescope (FAST) will be able to deform its mirrors in real time to focus on sources. That will help a lot for work on faint radio sources.
However, I'm not sure that this is the best use of resources. As discussed in TFA, the Square Kilometre array is being built by a variety of countries working together, and it will do a lot of the same stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array However, the SKA and FAST will be looking at different regions of the sky, and where they do overlap will be looking at different times. So overall this is helpful. Personally, if I were going to be putting this much resources into interesting Earth-based astronomy, I'd probably want to focus more on increasing our neutrino detectors. We're not investing very much in that, and it is a very new, very interesting field of astronomy/astrophysics. Moreover, neutrino astronomy is pretty much the only thing that can give us warning (albeit only a few hours) if a nasty supernova happens in our vicinity. Right now, that doesn't look likely, but it would be nice to have some warning in case our models are off. Moreover, even without a threat issue, since neutrinos can arrive before the light from a supernova (since the neutrino burst occurs before most of what we would call a supernova, and neutrinos travel at very close to the speed of light), they can help us point our optical and X-ray telescopes in the right regions before we the light reaches us, which is really helpful for advancing our understanding of such events.
Overall though, shouldn't be complaining. It is very difficult to get almost any good funding now for astronomy and cosmology research. In that regard, this is a good thing.
So the bad news is that this has to do with Twitter. The good news is that the star which went nova wasn't Betelgeuse.
(Ok, yeah, I know that most likely under current models, Betelgeuse going nova won't be that bad for Earth. However, this joke is slightly justified in that last supernova that was visible from Earth 1987A wasn't even a star that we expected to nova. And the neutron star that should be in the remnant still hasn't been found. There's a lot we don't understand about how stars die.)
This video is speed up- the video contains about 12 hours of footage. Note also that given where the sun is in the solar cycle we can likely expect more similar events soon. If any of them end up heading more directly in the direction of Earth it could interfere badly with electronics, especially in satellites. But we haven't gotten a really bad flare since the 19th century, but then there were events that even interfered with telegraph lines. And our current electronics are a lot more sensitive than stuff they had back then.