This was a post by another Slashdotter that I saved. Didn't
write down who it was though. My bad.
Let's say you and I are sociopathic assholes, so whereas most
people might have some kind of implicit social contract, and a
sense of how people should act decently to one another, we're
jerks and write up and agree to some formal rules. Among these
rules are things like "Neither party will ever hit the other in
the head with a hammer and then steal their wallet while the
victim is incapacitated." Call that the WIPO rule.
We have another rule too. It's "Neither party will ever vandalize
the other's car." Call that the WTO rule.
Then I go and vandalize your car, totally in violation of the
rules. I don't deny it, either. Instead, I explain I had good
reasons to do it. "I really wanted to vandalize your car, and it
looked so vulnerable. I just couldn't help it!" but whether I had
a good reason or not, you claim I broke our agreement. You might
not feel all that hurt about the car, but breaking the agreement.. oh dear. We're sociopaths, but we're not uncivilized, are we?
After my amazing explanation for why I did it, you ask me: "Are
you going to do it again?" and I answer "Yeah, probably. Your car
still does look pretty vandalizable, and I really like vandalizing
cars." You answer "What about our agreement?" and I just shrug.
You ask, "Are our agreements important?" and I shrug again!!
You go see our mutual acquaintances, perhaps some people with whom
I also have some agreements. They're a little concerned to hear I
value our agreements so little. Will their cars be next? They
think it over and say, "Yeah, Sloppy broke his agreement to not
vandalize your car. You should get even."
So you do. You hit me in the head with a hammer and I wake up
without a wallet. You do it openly, too. Our acquaintances nod
with approval, even though you're breaking the agreement now. I
ask, "How can you do that?!?"
You explain: if I think the rules are so important, and I have
such a problem with being hit with hammers, THEN MAYBE I SHOULD
STOP FUCKING AROUND WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S CARS.
I don't know what I'll do. I still really do like vandalizing
cars. I'd like to vandalize your car again, and that other dude
with whom I have a no-vandalize agreement. But I'm not sure I like
this hammers development. OTOH, I don't know, maybe it's worth it.
The hammers hurt and I don't like losing my wallet all the time,
but the cars! Oh, the cars! That's so much fun.
This is spoken by someone who already lives under them. You have no "freedom of expression," you have limited expression as deemed by the government in a very and exceptionally narrowing scope as deemed by unelected bureaucrats in HRC's(human rights councils) who run tribunals outside the court system.
No, said the court, they “appropriately balance . . . freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values — a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings.”
Anti-hate laws breed political correctness, stifle debate.
No, “hate speech legislation is not aimed at discouraging repugnant or offensive ideas. It does not, for example, prohibit expression which debates the merits of reducing the rights of vulnerable groups. It only restricts the use of expression exposing them to hatred.”
Hate speech is hard to define.
The judges have defined it — as that which “a reasonable person, aware of the context and circumstances, would view the expression as likely to expose a person or persons to detestation and vilification on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.” They also provided “a workable approach” to combating it.
Apply the rules “objectively” (their emphasis).
Interpret “hatred and contempt” “as being restricted to those extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification.’ This filters out expression which, while repugnant and offensive, does not incite the level of abhorrence, delegitimization and rejection that risks causing discrimination or other harmful effects.”
Look to the effect of hate speech on the target. “Is the expression likely to expose the targeted person or group to hatred by others?”
A no-holds-barred debate may hurt but it does not harm anyone.
“Preventive measures do not require proof of actual harm. The discriminatory effects of hate speech are part of the everyday knowledge and experience of Canadians.”
Provocateurs do not mean to malign the group they attack.
Good try, but “allowing the dissemination of hate speech to be excused by a sincerely held belief would, in effect, provide an absolute defence and would gut the prohibition of effectiveness.”
The court could have added that human rights codes are not the only limitation on free speech.
Libel laws don’t allow writers to say whatever they want about, say, Conrad Black. Why is that chill less corrosive of free speech than anti-hate laws? Are minorities less worthy of legal protection?
The Criminal Code, too, limits free speech. I may be marched off to jail for up to two years if convicted of spreading hate. Granted, the bar to prosecute is higher there than under human rights codes. Still, it makes no sense to criminalize speech and jail people for their words, rather than merely imposing a fine on them.
IIRC there aren't enough of them and they're too low mass to make up the dark matter. After a bit of searching I found this thesis. It looks like a good introduction to the area.
IANAQP either. You may find this article interesting. (I found it absolutely fascinating. Devoured all the non-math parts in 4 hours.) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4325.pdf
From the paper on arXiv the time and error measurements are:
t = (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns.
6.9 + 7.4 = 14.3, which is pretty close to 10 nanoseconds.
Will 8.9 sigma do?
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1002/1002.1028v1.pdf
It's not that easy of course. DAMA/LIBRA, CoGEnT and now CRESS are getting hits
while XENON100 isn't. I'm interested in how this will eventually turn out.
I'm in the same boat. My first degree is physics, but now I'm doing my PhD is computer science. My particular interests are in particle physics, dark matter and astronomy/cosmology. The best place to scratch my itch I find is http://www.arxiv.org./ It's a preprint archive for physics, math, computer science and so-on. http://www.science20.com/ has some interesting blogs, but you have to be careful as there are a number of people there who use it as a platform to advance their own ideas. For more general science reading I have http://www.sciencedaily.com/ and http://www.astronomynow.com/ bookmarked. On the educational side I have Leonard Susskind's general education courses in physics bookmarked. They can be found at http://newpackettech.com/Resources/Susskind/.
Finding all of the existing physics is important as it helps calibrate the instrument and gives confidence it is working as expected.
I've been spending some time on arXiv looking at LHC related papers. So far they are saying, "No new physics beyond the standard model has been detected." WRT the Higgs, it hasn't been detected yet either. Tighter constraints have been put on it's mass - Due to the combined efforts of the Tevatron, LHC , LEP2 and DZERO. It's very early though. Experts in the field say we should wait until 2013-14. Scientists need the time to collect and analyze more data.
'A Quantum Diaries Survivor' is a blog by a physicist working at the LHC. His posts use real, recent data from the various experiments listed above. An entry posted today (22 April, 2011) is particularly relevant:
Problem, you can't rely on any matter or energy because they didn't exist yet.
Good question. No-one knows. Where did a supernatural god come from? "It just is that way." Is a valid answer to both questions.
2 - A singularity is a black hole? all the matter of the universe is compressed into a theorized pinhead that means the atoms can not move, therefor the matter is in a thermodynamic dead end. it can not change state.
Two problems:
1. The big bang doesn't have to start from a singularity. It can start from a small, dense hot object that isn't a black hole.
2. Atoms not moving is against the rules of quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are not a thermodynamic
dead end in the 80s (or 90s.) He showed that black holes have a temperature and, over massive time scales will radiate their mass
away as energy.
3- How long in time was the singularity stayed the way it was?
Probably some infinitesimally short time. (Like.000000000000000000000000000001 seconds. Give or take 10 to 20 zeros.)
AFAIK there's no way the big bang could have been a stable object that had any kind of lifespan. It could only go boom.
(Does time stop in a black hole?, I dont know.)
It does. As you get pulled close to and over the event horizon you accelerate to almost the speed of light. So, yes,
time dilates massively for you.
4 - What mystical force caused the explosion / expansion of the singularity?
As I said above, the BB doesn't have to start from a singularity. It can start from a small, dense ball-o-really hot stuff.
5 - I might be wrong on the name here but the hubble's constant of the expanding universe combiend with the gravity of the matter of the universe force would have to match to a accuracy ratio of 1 to 1 million million million in relation to each other otherwise the universe will
A - collpase on itself.
B - explode.
That's right. But, when you add dark energy to the picture, it looks like we live in an open universe where everything flies apart,
the universe cools to absolute zero and becomes silent, empty and boring.
6 - With the BB I read you only get hydrogen / heiliem atoms. This means you should get a steady cloud of gas expanding at 10^70 the speed of light
Yes, hydrogen and helium were created in the BB. The expanding gas at 10^70 part is complete nonsense. No physicist would ever
say that as we all know the maximum speed is c (the speed of light.)
As the universe expands, the gas cools. Over a billion years or so it collapsed into galaxies, stars, clusters, etc...
A - What causes the cloud to condense into galixies at the gas is uniformed.
As the gas cooled, it wasn't uniform. Small instabilities in density are magnified over time, creating what we have today.
B - Why wouldn't the gas collapse back to the sigularity?
This one I'm not so sure on. I think the expansion of the universe (Hubble constant) and the outward energy of the
explosion ensure the gas won't collapse back in on itself.
Do you want me to go on about how gas clouds can't form galaxies because they require a working super nova / sun to compact them enough for gravity to hold them?
You don't need a supernova to seed these things. As I said above, the gas wasn't uniform from the beginning. Those mass fluctuations
are enough to start the process.
BTW, look at a picture of the cosmic microwave background. The variations in color are the fluctuations I'm referring to.
Anyway, People have to use the BigBang theory because they have no other way to explain the universe and how they exist. And the other explanation they refuse to accept. So funding goes mainly/only? to such "research" hindering science other possibilities.
Research is based on theorizing, observation and proof. Roughly put, an idea is accepted if the experimental evidence confirms the idea
Detecting a new form of plasma has nothing to do with the fantasy of the big bang..
I'll bite too:
Can you point us to a paper in a credible peer reviewed science journal that says the big bang is a fantasy?
Scholar.google.com is a good place to start.
1) Why not move the excess population off-Earth? We're already talking about space tourism as a reality... it's not that big of a step from tourism to colonization, especially 90 years from now.
Because it takes a HUGE amount of energy to lift things out of our gravity well. It is also a huge undertaking to create infrastructure for that excess population off planet.
2) Who says that gasoline will be a primary source of energy in 2100, let alone transportation? One would figure that by the time prices for gas rises to $10/gal (in 2010 dollars), the market itself would find a way to either create hyper-efficient engines, or folks will just replace their gas-powered cars with electric-powered ones.
The laws of thermodynamics place an upper limit on the efficiency of all engines, or all devices that convert energy from one form to another. This applies to "hyper efficient" engines, creating bio gasses from crops, electricity from nuclear power etc.
Could someone who knows something about the current state of car engines comment on how much more efficient they can become?
Canadian citizen here:
Part of the speed of Canada's recovery comes from the fact it wasn't caught up in the banking/mortgage
problems that affected many countries. That's because our banks are much more heavily regulated.
Don't know enough about health care to comment.
What is comparatively new (only a few hundred years old) is (small-l) liberalism, in which minority viewpoints race from vilified, to tolerated, to accepted, to embraced. There is a huge section of adult society that basically worships any cause that claims to be tearing down some other, more established cause--an attitude once expected only of adolescents and madmen. In our race to destroy the trappings of
Of course you are free of bias and have studied the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
This was a post by another Slashdotter that I saved. Didn't write down who it was though. My bad.
.. oh dear. We're sociopaths, but we're not uncivilized, are we?
Let's say you and I are sociopathic assholes, so whereas most people might have some kind of implicit social contract, and a sense of how people should act decently to one another, we're jerks and write up and agree to some formal rules. Among these rules are things like "Neither party will ever hit the other in the head with a hammer and then steal their wallet while the victim is incapacitated." Call that the WIPO rule.
We have another rule too. It's "Neither party will ever vandalize the other's car." Call that the WTO rule.
Then I go and vandalize your car, totally in violation of the rules. I don't deny it, either. Instead, I explain I had good reasons to do it. "I really wanted to vandalize your car, and it looked so vulnerable. I just couldn't help it!" but whether I had a good reason or not, you claim I broke our agreement. You might not feel all that hurt about the car, but breaking the agreement
After my amazing explanation for why I did it, you ask me: "Are you going to do it again?" and I answer "Yeah, probably. Your car still does look pretty vandalizable, and I really like vandalizing cars." You answer "What about our agreement?" and I just shrug. You ask, "Are our agreements important?" and I shrug again!!
You go see our mutual acquaintances, perhaps some people with whom I also have some agreements. They're a little concerned to hear I value our agreements so little. Will their cars be next? They think it over and say, "Yeah, Sloppy broke his agreement to not vandalize your car. You should get even."
So you do. You hit me in the head with a hammer and I wake up without a wallet. You do it openly, too. Our acquaintances nod with approval, even though you're breaking the agreement now. I ask, "How can you do that?!?"
You explain: if I think the rules are so important, and I have such a problem with being hit with hammers, THEN MAYBE I SHOULD STOP FUCKING AROUND WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S CARS.
I don't know what I'll do. I still really do like vandalizing cars. I'd like to vandalize your car again, and that other dude with whom I have a no-vandalize agreement. But I'm not sure I like this hammers development. OTOH, I don't know, maybe it's worth it. The hammers hurt and I don't like losing my wallet all the time, but the cars! Oh, the cars! That's so much fun.
"Bread and games" according to Google translate.
http://breadandgames.net/
This is spoken by someone who already lives under them. You have no "freedom of expression," you have limited expression as deemed by the government in a very and exceptionally narrowing scope as deemed by unelected bureaucrats in HRC's(human rights councils) who run tribunals outside the court system.
Taken from http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/03/17/supreme_court_reaffirmed_canadian_balance_on_free_speech_siddiqui.html
Anti-hate laws undermine free speech.
No, said the court, they “appropriately balance . . . freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values — a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings.”
Anti-hate laws breed political correctness, stifle debate.
No, “hate speech legislation is not aimed at discouraging repugnant or offensive ideas. It does not, for example, prohibit expression which debates the merits of reducing the rights of vulnerable groups. It only restricts the use of expression exposing them to hatred.”
Hate speech is hard to define.
The judges have defined it — as that which “a reasonable person, aware of the context and circumstances, would view the expression as likely to expose a person or persons to detestation and vilification on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.” They also provided “a workable approach” to combating it.
Apply the rules “objectively” (their emphasis).
Interpret “hatred and contempt” “as being restricted to those extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification.’ This filters out expression which, while repugnant and offensive, does not incite the level of abhorrence, delegitimization and rejection that risks causing discrimination or other harmful effects.”
Look to the effect of hate speech on the target. “Is the expression likely to expose the targeted person or group to hatred by others?”
A no-holds-barred debate may hurt but it does not harm anyone.
“Preventive measures do not require proof of actual harm. The discriminatory effects of hate speech are part of the everyday knowledge and experience of Canadians.”
Provocateurs do not mean to malign the group they attack.
Good try, but “allowing the dissemination of hate speech to be excused by a sincerely held belief would, in effect, provide an absolute defence and would gut the prohibition of effectiveness.”
The court could have added that human rights codes are not the only limitation on free speech.
Libel laws don’t allow writers to say whatever they want about, say, Conrad Black. Why is that chill less corrosive of free speech than anti-hate laws? Are minorities less worthy of legal protection?
The Criminal Code, too, limits free speech. I may be marched off to jail for up to two years if convicted of spreading hate. Granted, the bar to prosecute is higher there than under human rights codes. Still, it makes no sense to criminalize speech and jail people for their words, rather than merely imposing a fine on them.
IIRC there aren't enough of them and they're too low mass to make up the dark matter. After a bit of searching I found this thesis. It looks like a good introduction to the area.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.2757
Out of curiosity I went to the site. My initial impression wasn't good.
Time it took for the site to appear: 43 seconds
Time it took for the site to fully load: 80 seconds
I didn't bookmark it.
IANAQP either. You may find this article interesting. (I found it absolutely fascinating. Devoured all the non-math parts in 4 hours.) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4325.pdf
Hello: The paper in question can be found here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.3328.pdf Apologies if this has been posted already.
http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
They claim accuracy to within +-20 cm.
From the paper on arXiv the time and error measurements are:
t = (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns.
6.9 + 7.4 = 14.3, which is pretty close to 10 nanoseconds.
Sadly the neutrinos are being fired through solid earth.
http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf They claim a measuring accuracy of +- 20 cm.
The original paper can be found on arXiv: "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam" http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf
Will 8.9 sigma do? http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1002/1002.1028v1.pdf It's not that easy of course. DAMA/LIBRA, CoGEnT and now CRESS are getting hits while XENON100 isn't. I'm interested in how this will eventually turn out.
I'm in the same boat. My first degree is physics, but now I'm doing my PhD is computer science. My particular interests are in particle physics, dark matter and astronomy/cosmology. The best place to scratch my itch I find is http://www.arxiv.org./ It's a preprint archive for physics, math, computer science and so-on. http://www.science20.com/ has some interesting blogs, but you have to be careful as there are a number of people there who use it as a platform to advance their own ideas. For more general science reading I have http://www.sciencedaily.com/ and http://www.astronomynow.com/ bookmarked. On the educational side I have Leonard Susskind's general education courses in physics bookmarked. They can be found at http://newpackettech.com/Resources/Susskind/.
Finding all of the existing physics is important as it helps calibrate the instrument and gives confidence it is working as expected.
I've been spending some time on arXiv looking at LHC related papers. So far they are saying, "No new physics beyond the standard model has been detected." WRT the Higgs, it hasn't been detected yet either. Tighter constraints have been put on it's mass - Due to the combined efforts of the Tevatron, LHC , LEP2 and DZERO. It's very early though. Experts in the field say we should wait until 2013-14. Scientists need the time to collect and analyze more data.
'A Quantum Diaries Survivor' is a blog by a physicist working at the LHC. His posts use real, recent data from the various experiments listed above. An entry posted today (22 April, 2011) is particularly relevant:
http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/did_atlas_just_see_higgs-78316
Problem, you can't rely on any matter or energy because they didn't exist yet.
Good question. No-one knows. Where did a supernatural god come from? "It just is that way." Is a valid answer to both questions.
2 - A singularity is a black hole? all the matter of the universe is compressed into a theorized pinhead that means the atoms can not move, therefor the matter is in a thermodynamic dead end. it can not change state.
Two problems: 1. The big bang doesn't have to start from a singularity. It can start from a small, dense hot object that isn't a black hole.
2. Atoms not moving is against the rules of quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are not a thermodynamic dead end in the 80s (or 90s.) He showed that black holes have a temperature and, over massive time scales will radiate their mass away as energy.
3- How long in time was the singularity stayed the way it was?
Probably some infinitesimally short time. (Like .000000000000000000000000000001 seconds. Give or take 10 to 20 zeros.)
AFAIK there's no way the big bang could have been a stable object that had any kind of lifespan. It could only go boom.
(Does time stop in a black hole?, I dont know.)
It does. As you get pulled close to and over the event horizon you accelerate to almost the speed of light. So, yes, time dilates massively for you.
4 - What mystical force caused the explosion / expansion of the singularity?
As I said above, the BB doesn't have to start from a singularity. It can start from a small, dense ball-o-really hot stuff.
5 - I might be wrong on the name here but the hubble's constant of the expanding universe combiend with the gravity of the matter of the universe force would have to match to a accuracy ratio of 1 to 1 million million million in relation to each other otherwise the universe will
A - collpase on itself.
B - explode.
That's right. But, when you add dark energy to the picture, it looks like we live in an open universe where everything flies apart, the universe cools to absolute zero and becomes silent, empty and boring.
6 - With the BB I read you only get hydrogen / heiliem atoms. This means you should get a steady cloud of gas expanding at 10^70 the speed of light
Yes, hydrogen and helium were created in the BB. The expanding gas at 10^70 part is complete nonsense. No physicist would ever say that as we all know the maximum speed is c (the speed of light.)
As the universe expands, the gas cools. Over a billion years or so it collapsed into galaxies, stars, clusters, etc...
A - What causes the cloud to condense into galixies at the gas is uniformed.
As the gas cooled, it wasn't uniform. Small instabilities in density are magnified over time, creating what we have today.
B - Why wouldn't the gas collapse back to the sigularity?
This one I'm not so sure on. I think the expansion of the universe (Hubble constant) and the outward energy of the explosion ensure the gas won't collapse back in on itself.
Do you want me to go on about how gas clouds can't form galaxies because they require a working super nova / sun to compact them enough for gravity to hold them?
You don't need a supernova to seed these things. As I said above, the gas wasn't uniform from the beginning. Those mass fluctuations are enough to start the process.
BTW, look at a picture of the cosmic microwave background. The variations in color are the fluctuations I'm referring to.
Anyway, People have to use the BigBang theory because they have no other way to explain the universe and how they exist. And the other explanation they refuse to accept. So funding goes mainly/only? to such "research" hindering science other possibilities.
Research is based on theorizing, observation and proof. Roughly put, an idea is accepted if the experimental evidence confirms the idea
Detecting a new form of plasma has nothing to do with the fantasy of the big bang..
I'll bite too: Can you point us to a paper in a credible peer reviewed science journal that says the big bang is a fantasy? Scholar.google.com is a good place to start.
Coolest explanation ever.
1) Why not move the excess population off-Earth? We're already talking about space tourism as a reality... it's not that big of a step from tourism to colonization, especially 90 years from now.
Because it takes a HUGE amount of energy to lift things out of our gravity well. It is also a huge undertaking to create infrastructure for that excess population off planet.
2) Who says that gasoline will be a primary source of energy in 2100, let alone transportation? One would figure that by the time prices for gas rises to $10/gal (in 2010 dollars), the market itself would find a way to either create hyper-efficient engines, or folks will just replace their gas-powered cars with electric-powered ones.
The laws of thermodynamics place an upper limit on the efficiency of all engines, or all devices that convert energy from one form to another. This applies to "hyper efficient" engines, creating bio gasses from crops, electricity from nuclear power etc.
Could someone who knows something about the current state of car engines comment on how much more efficient they can become?
Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC
Don't be a bozon: Don't drink and drive. Unless... http://www.angryflower.com/schrod.gif
Canadian citizen here: Part of the speed of Canada's recovery comes from the fact it wasn't caught up in the banking/mortgage problems that affected many countries. That's because our banks are much more heavily regulated. Don't know enough about health care to comment.
Maybe
But the mass-energy remains constant. Loss of mass in black hole = gain of energy from emitted photons
Speaking of lies... ...
What is comparatively new (only a few hundred years old) is (small-l) liberalism, in which minority viewpoints race from vilified, to tolerated, to accepted, to embraced. There is a huge section of adult society that basically worships any cause that claims to be tearing down some other, more established cause--an attitude once expected only of adolescents and madmen. In our race to destroy the trappings of
Of course you are free of bias and have studied the situation.