I'd destroy my hard drive too if I got word the government was coming.They don't need to know that I donated to wikileaks and other projects.
Unfortunately, if you do that you've switched from having done something politically unpopular to committing a clear crime which they can easily convict you. Destroying evidence is very rarely a good move.
...don't believe in the theory of evolution at least in principle? I know there are actual scientists who are skeptical of climate change but evolution
Oh yes, quite a few. The vast majority don't have degrees in relevant fields but some of them are quite smart and educated. Jonathan Sarfati for example is a chemist and a chess master and had some decent papers before he started spending all his time pushing for young earth creationism. Michael Behe is similar, although a proponent of ID/ weak old earth creationism (his degree is in biochemistry). He even has tenure at a real university. Then there are some really interesting cases of people who have degrees that are in the real fields in question. Jonathan Wells has a degree that is relevant until one finds out that he got his cell bio PhD specifically because he wanted to use the degree to "destroy Darwinism." Kurt Wise is a young earth creationist with a degree in geology. From Harvard no less. But this is the same fellow who has stated that he would believe in a literal Genesis no matter what the evidence.
In general, there are a handful of people of this sort. They aren't a sign of anything about evolution as much as they are evidence of the incredible lengths even smart humans can go to compartmentalize and rationalize beliefs that they feel a need to keep. One sees something related directly in the New Mexico bill. Two of the items listed, evolution and climate change, are things that they don't want to believe in for ideological reasons. One of them, human cloning, isn't something they believe is impossible (I think) but rather something they think would be evil to do. Thus, they are confusing the actual facts of nature with the facts of what they want.
Did I mention that these ultra-orthodox freeloaders are causing most of the upheaval and supporting hard-line policies?
Most of what you said is correct but this is just wrong. Much of the ultra-orthodox population doesn't think that there should be a Jewish state until the messiah comes. They care more about their welfare funding and will form a government with whomever promises them more money. The religious group that generally supports hard line policies is the dati leumi (literally, religious nationalists) who are religiously moderates.
I thought that Knuth had a deal with a mysterious British intelligence agency that as long as he didn't publish volume four they would let him remain metabolically active. I hope he doesn't have some illness that made their threats moot.
Bayesian analysis is a statistical method on the data about the star, not a method of observation. The Wikipedia article in question is talking about this paper http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/200811531&Itemid=129 where data about the movement of a star that was known to already have a planet around it was analyzed using Bayesian techniques to show that there was very likely a second planet. But that isn't an observational technique.
I did poorly on one test. Noticing this, I studied hard and greatly improved my grade in the next test. Would this flag up a warning that I'm a cheater?
That's a flag that is already used by teachers. That isn't the sort of more sophisticated statistical technique. I'm a calculus TA now, and I had a student last semester who got around a 75 on the first midterm and got a 100 on the next midterm, and a score in the high 90s on the last midterm. I'm pretty sure she just studied really hard (and it helps that she's fairly bright). But it is hard to tell in general what is happening. When one has 100 students in a class the probability is high that some will exhibit weird patterns by sheer chance. Unfortunately, with 100 students, it is also extremely likely that some of them will be cheating.
The thing that concerns me most about the stated techniques is looking at students who do well on the "harder questions" than on the easy ones. This happens all the time for innocent reasons, such as students budgeting more time to studying the harder sections of the material. Also, easier material is often covered early in a course and then not discussed in much detail later. On the final my students had this semester one thing they had to do was graph a line tangent to a specific curve. A lot of them did very poorly on that. I don't think cheating had anything to do with that. It much more likely had to do with the fact that students hadn't done it many times since the first midterm.
It wasn't just the price of wind that was an issue. From TFA:
Pickens placed a $1.5 billion wind turbine order from GE. But the problem: transporting the energy from West Texas to the rest of the state. Pickens planned to build his own transmission, but the approvals fell through, says economist Mike Giberson at Texas Tech.
This isn't an issue of relative energy cost. This is an issue of not being given permission to build the basic infrastructure he needed for his system to work.
Yes, spamming is a massive crime, akin to murder. This person is responsible for a third of the world's spam. How much time does a person waste per a month on dealing with spam? Let's say you waste 10 minutes (which is probably a lower estimate). That means you waste about 2 hours on spam a year. If we apply that estimate to just a few Americans (say 30 million of them) then that means in the course of one year this person has wasted 20 million hours of peoples time. There are around 9000 hours in a year. That means he's wasted about 2000 years worth of time. So in a year he's deprived from lives the same amount as if he killed thirty infants. Now, that's a ridiculous underestimate since there are a lot more internet users than just 30 million Americans. If we instead estimated using 300 million which is still an underestimate for the combined population of US and Europe that has regular internet access, that means he's doing the equivalent to killing 300 infants a year. Part of the problem here is that humans are really, really bad at appreciating scale. Killing an actual human being feels very different primarily because humans didn't evolve in a context where it was possible for someone to be evil by harming lots of people a tiny bit. But the point should be clear: By any rough metric this person is equivalent to a mass murderer.
I don't have much in the way of demographic data to give you but will note that the Ivyy League schools have some of the most generous need-based scholarships. For example, Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Brown all have need-blind admission.
I suspect that the income of families who send their kids to Yale or the other highly ranked schools is on average higher than that of the general population. But this isn't do to an issue of need as much as three other issues: 1) Higher income individuals are likely to perform better on relevant tests (more likely to be able to afford SAT tutoring, the children are more likely to be smarter since they had better nutrition and health-care at a young age.) 2) Lower income people likely go to high schools that have less capable college counseling 3) Connected to 2, many people aren't going to bother applying to those schools, since they aren't aware of the options that exist specifically to help low income individuals.
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
Except that's lot of people at Ivy league schools are students there on scholarships. I wasn't one of those. I went to Yale, and both my parents were Yale grads. I like to think I'm smart, but being from a high income bracket with legacy obviously helped a lot. But many if not most students didn't fall into that sort of category. For example, I knew one person who was the first female in her family to go to college ever and the first one in three generations not to have a teen pregnancy. She got to Yale by being very smart and working really hard.
For all that the rest of it was a glorious romp through suspension of disbelief land, nuking anything from orbit has never made sense to me--why not "kinetic bombardment" or something similar... probably not the same level of immediate--"ooh, that would be bad" from the audience.
Well, kinetic bombardment is tough when you are hitting a planet. If your target isn't very large and you've got an atmosphere you need something that will survive reentry or is very large. That's sort of the point of using mass drivers. In the context of the original line, they don't have any mass drivers. The ship isn't that large. Hence, nukes.
Part of the problem with nationalism is that they want specific land. The Israelis don't want Mars. They want a small strip in the Middle East. And the same for the Palestinians. If they weren't attached to specific areas of land everythign there would be much simpler.
SETI @ Home looks for certain types of Gaussian distributions in single strength. This has nothing to do with Gaussian elimination. Gauss was one of the most prolific and brightest mathematicians ever. There are a lot of things named after him that don't have to do with each other at all.
Yes, those ideas have been considered. The idea of having life based on other elements was proposed by chemists and biologists in the first place. Silicon is the only one of the ideas that is that plausible simply because it acts chemically similar to carbon. However, it doesn't have nearly as much flexibility in the sort of compounds it can form which makes it unlikely. Most metals don't have anything resembling the necessary chemistry (in general you want something that is on the staircase between metals and non-metals. Otherwise you can't get a large variety of chemistry). EMF is just stupid and seems to be the sort of thing that comes out simply from people thinking of "energy based lifeforms" in Star Trek and other scifi. This idea makes so little sense that it isn't clear where to start explaining what is wrong with it. There might be weird exotic forms of life that we haven't considered but there's not much we can do about it until we have a lot more ideas what is out there, so that doesn't amount to anything scientifically useful. But by all means, continue convincing yourself that your comments somehow buck some scientific establishment that hasn't thought about any of these issues.
The view from that planet must be nice. Unfortunately, given the orbit and the fact that the other star is a red giant, the planet isn't likely to be very habitable. But it isn't that far away, only about 1500 light years. I still find it really amazing that we're actually living in a time where we can map the planets in other star systems. And that we're able to do so from the comfort of Earth orbit is nothing short of amazing. And of course, all of this means that we are getting better estimates for the Drake equation as well. Everything used to be a complete unknown. But now the major room for variation are the biological variables not the astronomical ones.
This was actually a claim that was circulating in some circles in the lead up to that date. See for example "01-01-00: The Novel of the Millennium" by R.J. Pineiro. Actually don't read it. It is stupid, awful and boring and makes Dan Brown seem smart, educated, and coherent. But the idea in question is used as a very major aspect of that novel.
For example, the article asserts that 4 out of 10 people have shared a password in the last year. I've done that. I shared the password to one of my email accounts with my twin who needed access. And after he was done I changed the password. Much of the data here is very hard to actually show is bad without more context for what exactly people were doing. Also, while we're discussing these issues, obligatory xkcd - http://xkcd.com/792/.
The prior orbit was at the L2 point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2 one of the very few stable points in the solar system. Leaving WMAP there would be a bad idea because it makes a very nice spot become more hazardous. We're already having serious trouble with spacejunk in Earth orbit. There's no good reason to star trashing up the rest of the system also.
ACS:Law is a British lawfirm that has done a lot of IP related stuff although apparently was not all prominent until their recent forays into dealing with piracy issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACS:Law . They should not be confused with the American Constitution Society, although that organization has the website acslaw.org. ACS:Law's homepage is http://www.acs-law.co.uk/ although amusingly enough it doesn't turn up on the first page of Google hits at all when you Google for "ACS Law."
If we had stayed with Apollo type craft there would have almost certainly been more fatalities. Space travel is very dangerous. This isn't going to change anytime soon and wouldn't be different if we had used Apollo-like vehicles. Indeed, I'd tentatively guess that the reduced expense of such vehicles might mean many more launches and thus likely even more fatalities.
This is chess rating algorithm. The goal is to predict given a matchup between two players with known histories how they will likely fare in a game or series of games against each other. Elo is the standard rating system and has been for some time. These algorithms are improvements on that. So they predict better who will win. They have nothing to do with playing actual chess. So the Turk is irrelevant to this discussion (aside from the not minor issue that the operator has been dead for some time.)
I'd like to see this same information broken-down State-by-State, so we can see which states are most censoring. I'm betting New York and California and Pennsylvania are near the top, given their previous activities.
The first of those two states are states which have high populations. So you would expect a lot of requests related to those states even if they were doing the same thing as the other states. Pennsylvania also has a large pop although not nearly as much. (California is the most populace state with 36 million people (about 1.5 times the size of the next largest. New York is the third most populous state with around 20 million people, and Pennsylvania is the 6th most populated with around 13 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population).
However, looking at the actual interactive map, which can be found at http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/ (and is not linked to in the summary or TFA. Great job, Slashdot and BBC), there seems to be only a very weak correlation between the size of a country and the number of requests. I am confused a bit about some of the things on the map, such as the decision to list Puerto Rico separately from the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd destroy my hard drive too if I got word the government was coming.They don't need to know that I donated to wikileaks and other projects.
Unfortunately, if you do that you've switched from having done something politically unpopular to committing a clear crime which they can easily convict you. Destroying evidence is very rarely a good move.
...don't believe in the theory of evolution at least in principle? I know there are actual scientists who are skeptical of climate change but evolution
Oh yes, quite a few. The vast majority don't have degrees in relevant fields but some of them are quite smart and educated. Jonathan Sarfati for example is a chemist and a chess master and had some decent papers before he started spending all his time pushing for young earth creationism. Michael Behe is similar, although a proponent of ID/ weak old earth creationism (his degree is in biochemistry). He even has tenure at a real university. Then there are some really interesting cases of people who have degrees that are in the real fields in question. Jonathan Wells has a degree that is relevant until one finds out that he got his cell bio PhD specifically because he wanted to use the degree to "destroy Darwinism." Kurt Wise is a young earth creationist with a degree in geology. From Harvard no less. But this is the same fellow who has stated that he would believe in a literal Genesis no matter what the evidence.
In general, there are a handful of people of this sort. They aren't a sign of anything about evolution as much as they are evidence of the incredible lengths even smart humans can go to compartmentalize and rationalize beliefs that they feel a need to keep. One sees something related directly in the New Mexico bill. Two of the items listed, evolution and climate change, are things that they don't want to believe in for ideological reasons. One of them, human cloning, isn't something they believe is impossible (I think) but rather something they think would be evil to do. Thus, they are confusing the actual facts of nature with the facts of what they want.
Did I mention that these ultra-orthodox freeloaders are causing most of the upheaval and supporting hard-line policies?
Most of what you said is correct but this is just wrong. Much of the ultra-orthodox population doesn't think that there should be a Jewish state until the messiah comes. They care more about their welfare funding and will form a government with whomever promises them more money. The religious group that generally supports hard line policies is the dati leumi (literally, religious nationalists) who are religiously moderates.
I thought that Knuth had a deal with a mysterious British intelligence agency that as long as he didn't publish volume four they would let him remain metabolically active. I hope he doesn't have some illness that made their threats moot.
Bayesian analysis is a statistical method on the data about the star, not a method of observation. The Wikipedia article in question is talking about this paper http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/200811531&Itemid=129 where data about the movement of a star that was known to already have a planet around it was analyzed using Bayesian techniques to show that there was very likely a second planet. But that isn't an observational technique.
I did poorly on one test. Noticing this, I studied hard and greatly improved my grade in the next test. Would this flag up a warning that I'm a cheater?
That's a flag that is already used by teachers. That isn't the sort of more sophisticated statistical technique. I'm a calculus TA now, and I had a student last semester who got around a 75 on the first midterm and got a 100 on the next midterm, and a score in the high 90s on the last midterm. I'm pretty sure she just studied really hard (and it helps that she's fairly bright). But it is hard to tell in general what is happening. When one has 100 students in a class the probability is high that some will exhibit weird patterns by sheer chance. Unfortunately, with 100 students, it is also extremely likely that some of them will be cheating.
The thing that concerns me most about the stated techniques is looking at students who do well on the "harder questions" than on the easy ones. This happens all the time for innocent reasons, such as students budgeting more time to studying the harder sections of the material. Also, easier material is often covered early in a course and then not discussed in much detail later. On the final my students had this semester one thing they had to do was graph a line tangent to a specific curve. A lot of them did very poorly on that. I don't think cheating had anything to do with that. It much more likely had to do with the fact that students hadn't done it many times since the first midterm.
Pickens placed a $1.5 billion wind turbine order from GE. But the problem: transporting the energy from West Texas to the rest of the state. Pickens planned to build his own transmission, but the approvals fell through, says economist Mike Giberson at Texas Tech.
This isn't an issue of relative energy cost. This is an issue of not being given permission to build the basic infrastructure he needed for his system to work.
Yes, spamming is a massive crime, akin to murder. This person is responsible for a third of the world's spam. How much time does a person waste per a month on dealing with spam? Let's say you waste 10 minutes (which is probably a lower estimate). That means you waste about 2 hours on spam a year. If we apply that estimate to just a few Americans (say 30 million of them) then that means in the course of one year this person has wasted 20 million hours of peoples time. There are around 9000 hours in a year. That means he's wasted about 2000 years worth of time. So in a year he's deprived from lives the same amount as if he killed thirty infants. Now, that's a ridiculous underestimate since there are a lot more internet users than just 30 million Americans. If we instead estimated using 300 million which is still an underestimate for the combined population of US and Europe that has regular internet access, that means he's doing the equivalent to killing 300 infants a year. Part of the problem here is that humans are really, really bad at appreciating scale. Killing an actual human being feels very different primarily because humans didn't evolve in a context where it was possible for someone to be evil by harming lots of people a tiny bit. But the point should be clear: By any rough metric this person is equivalent to a mass murderer.
I don't have much in the way of demographic data to give you but will note that the Ivyy League schools have some of the most generous need-based scholarships. For example, Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Brown all have need-blind admission. I suspect that the income of families who send their kids to Yale or the other highly ranked schools is on average higher than that of the general population. But this isn't do to an issue of need as much as three other issues: 1) Higher income individuals are likely to perform better on relevant tests (more likely to be able to afford SAT tutoring, the children are more likely to be smarter since they had better nutrition and health-care at a young age.) 2) Lower income people likely go to high schools that have less capable college counseling 3) Connected to 2, many people aren't going to bother applying to those schools, since they aren't aware of the options that exist specifically to help low income individuals.
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
Except that's lot of people at Ivy league schools are students there on scholarships. I wasn't one of those. I went to Yale, and both my parents were Yale grads. I like to think I'm smart, but being from a high income bracket with legacy obviously helped a lot. But many if not most students didn't fall into that sort of category. For example, I knew one person who was the first female in her family to go to college ever and the first one in three generations not to have a teen pregnancy. She got to Yale by being very smart and working really hard.
So now we are having the government step in and tell people what they can and cannot buy based on a possible intangible benefit to the band?
Note that production and capture of antihydrogen is not new. There's been prior work trying to use it to test for possible CPT violations. See for example hussle.harvard.edu/~atrap/Papers/2010/AntihydrogenPhysicsToday.pdf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005APS..DPPFP1058V and http://www.physics.harvard.edu/Thesespdfs/speck.pdf.
For all that the rest of it was a glorious romp through suspension of disbelief land, nuking anything from orbit has never made sense to me--why not "kinetic bombardment" or something similar... probably not the same level of immediate--"ooh, that would be bad" from the audience.
Well, kinetic bombardment is tough when you are hitting a planet. If your target isn't very large and you've got an atmosphere you need something that will survive reentry or is very large. That's sort of the point of using mass drivers. In the context of the original line, they don't have any mass drivers. The ship isn't that large. Hence, nukes.
Part of the problem with nationalism is that they want specific land. The Israelis don't want Mars. They want a small strip in the Middle East. And the same for the Palestinians. If they weren't attached to specific areas of land everythign there would be much simpler.
SETI @ Home looks for certain types of Gaussian distributions in single strength. This has nothing to do with Gaussian elimination. Gauss was one of the most prolific and brightest mathematicians ever. There are a lot of things named after him that don't have to do with each other at all.
Oops, you are correct. For some reason I thought the red one was a red giant not a red dwarf.
Yes, those ideas have been considered. The idea of having life based on other elements was proposed by chemists and biologists in the first place. Silicon is the only one of the ideas that is that plausible simply because it acts chemically similar to carbon. However, it doesn't have nearly as much flexibility in the sort of compounds it can form which makes it unlikely. Most metals don't have anything resembling the necessary chemistry (in general you want something that is on the staircase between metals and non-metals. Otherwise you can't get a large variety of chemistry). EMF is just stupid and seems to be the sort of thing that comes out simply from people thinking of "energy based lifeforms" in Star Trek and other scifi. This idea makes so little sense that it isn't clear where to start explaining what is wrong with it. There might be weird exotic forms of life that we haven't considered but there's not much we can do about it until we have a lot more ideas what is out there, so that doesn't amount to anything scientifically useful. But by all means, continue convincing yourself that your comments somehow buck some scientific establishment that hasn't thought about any of these issues.
The view from that planet must be nice. Unfortunately, given the orbit and the fact that the other star is a red giant, the planet isn't likely to be very habitable. But it isn't that far away, only about 1500 light years. I still find it really amazing that we're actually living in a time where we can map the planets in other star systems. And that we're able to do so from the comfort of Earth orbit is nothing short of amazing. And of course, all of this means that we are getting better estimates for the Drake equation as well. Everything used to be a complete unknown. But now the major room for variation are the biological variables not the astronomical ones.
This was actually a claim that was circulating in some circles in the lead up to that date. See for example "01-01-00: The Novel of the Millennium" by R.J. Pineiro. Actually don't read it. It is stupid, awful and boring and makes Dan Brown seem smart, educated, and coherent. But the idea in question is used as a very major aspect of that novel.
For example, the article asserts that 4 out of 10 people have shared a password in the last year. I've done that. I shared the password to one of my email accounts with my twin who needed access. And after he was done I changed the password. Much of the data here is very hard to actually show is bad without more context for what exactly people were doing. Also, while we're discussing these issues, obligatory xkcd - http://xkcd.com/792/.
The prior orbit was at the L2 point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2 one of the very few stable points in the solar system. Leaving WMAP there would be a bad idea because it makes a very nice spot become more hazardous. We're already having serious trouble with spacejunk in Earth orbit. There's no good reason to star trashing up the rest of the system also.
ACS:Law is a British lawfirm that has done a lot of IP related stuff although apparently was not all prominent until their recent forays into dealing with piracy issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACS:Law . They should not be confused with the American Constitution Society, although that organization has the website acslaw.org. ACS:Law's homepage is http://www.acs-law.co.uk/ although amusingly enough it doesn't turn up on the first page of Google hits at all when you Google for "ACS Law."
If we had done the same and gone back to the Apollo program, 14 people would still be alive.
Right, because no one died in the Apollo 1 fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 . And because no one almost died on Apollo 13. And because no Soviets died in craft similar to the Apollo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 .
If we had stayed with Apollo type craft there would have almost certainly been more fatalities. Space travel is very dangerous. This isn't going to change anytime soon and wouldn't be different if we had used Apollo-like vehicles. Indeed, I'd tentatively guess that the reduced expense of such vehicles might mean many more launches and thus likely even more fatalities.
This is chess rating algorithm. The goal is to predict given a matchup between two players with known histories how they will likely fare in a game or series of games against each other. Elo is the standard rating system and has been for some time. These algorithms are improvements on that. So they predict better who will win. They have nothing to do with playing actual chess. So the Turk is irrelevant to this discussion (aside from the not minor issue that the operator has been dead for some time.)
I'd like to see this same information broken-down State-by-State, so we can see which states are most censoring. I'm betting New York and California and Pennsylvania are near the top, given their previous activities.
The first of those two states are states which have high populations. So you would expect a lot of requests related to those states even if they were doing the same thing as the other states. Pennsylvania also has a large pop although not nearly as much. (California is the most populace state with 36 million people (about 1.5 times the size of the next largest. New York is the third most populous state with around 20 million people, and Pennsylvania is the 6th most populated with around 13 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population).
However, looking at the actual interactive map, which can be found at http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/ (and is not linked to in the summary or TFA. Great job, Slashdot and BBC), there seems to be only a very weak correlation between the size of a country and the number of requests. I am confused a bit about some of the things on the map, such as the decision to list Puerto Rico separately from the US.