That is still technobabble. You still have to cart an energy source up, and it is usually stored chemically for big engines. I am guessing that by spitting out an atom (argon in this case) at some massive velocity, you do not need to cart as much mass about, which is where the real penalty comes from - accelerating fuel forward so you can spit it back later. But aspects of this argument seem really slippery. It is accepted wisdom, well established, and I assume true. But the science part of the article was really glossed over. OK, they know their audience, and science is to be presented as glossy bottom line stuff.
I'm no rocket scientist. Even metaphorically. Does anyone know why it really is more efficient? They are wanting to use a 200kwatt engine, so that is not going to be sourced using warm radioactive decay. As a once-chemist, I wouldn't choose argon as an energy source. That's a bit like carrying media consultants on a Mars mission, so you could keep throwing them back to Earth.
The object in the 60's wasn't I suspect to put a man on the moon, but to gain control of space. I do not understand otherwise why it is so difficult to repeat what was done 2 generations ago.
You also had a population then that believed in creating science rather than it being someone else's problem. Today, you are much better off being a lawyer or PR consultant or something and just buying it. This is probably true for for many OECD countries. Science is not cool. (Evolution vs creationism, yada, yada yada.)
So the next president has a number of real problems. He inherits an economy that really has problems supporting moderate comfort let alone excesses like war. How do you justifying paying money for cosmology? People get as much excitement from a computer game. To most, it isn't real anyway. That is the force behind the 'it-was-done-on-a-set-in-Nevada' jokes.
I have been a professional scientist, and I would have to agree with you. In terms of value for money, the new lunar rover lacks punch. In essence, the argument is that NASA, given 11 years more work and a squillion dollars, can put a cut down Winnebago on the moon. That's a hard sell. I'd get paid more as a PR guy pushing it than I would as a scientist developing it.
So, we stay on Earth. It has the good side effect of removing any delusion that there is anywhere to go if we screw the environment too much.
Meantime... Good boy, Mars Rover. No need to heel. Just keep digging for bones.
Currently, dogs are used for this purpose, and they do it rather well. Some millions of years of design have gone into it. Getting a robot to move in complex terrain would be a bitch of a job. I can see that you can armor a robot more easily than a dog, so it would be more useful in flat terrain that has sniper positions. Are these robots primarily for use in Republican voting territory?
I once saw a documentary on how clever hunting spiders were. Given the small brain size, they might be a useful model. You might even be able to clone a spider brain and use in an eight-legged robot. Of course, it would regard everyone as legitimate prey, and suck out the juices on capture. But that would guarantee the un-cooperative fugitive bit. They would have to have a 'disarm' capacity, such as waving a Library of Congress card at them. That way, a small elite could survive if they got loose in Washington. Of course, it would then test your ability to read, so that all the illiterate Congressmen with complimentary cards would still be doomed.
I assume they would be programmed to avoid 5 sided buildings. So if you chalk a pentagon around you, you would be safe from the devils.
In essence, I'd agree, but you are a bit harsh. It would be better to call it a curious result. I too tend not to recall much about dreams, but what I do is not about the colour. Not if coloured, just it is irrelevant. Whereas falling is remembered. (I'm 60 BTW, and first saw TV aged 15 in N&W, The Untouchables.)
Two points are important. TV watching to me is passive. So are dreams. You participate vividly, but without control. Reading a book is far more active. So maybe TV (or film for that matter) is great for putting you into passive participation mode. In short, TV mode could be a mental mode for how you are to participate. Whereas the Playstation generation who do not read books as much simply lack that code. In that sense, the research may tell us something useful, which has nothing to do with age really at all.
The other point is recall. Can you note the transition from B&W to colour really, and can you have it as non-important, and just inject it later once awake. I do remember watching the Wizard of Oz when young, a film which starts in B&W and then uses colour. When Dorothy arrives in Oz, the world turns to colour. At the time, it took me some time to realise that the film was in colour. It was just as real in B&W as in colour. To test the effect on a young generation would be tricky. You would have to get them used to B&W first. Then get them to press a button when films turn to colour. It may be quite a slow transition if it does not occur during a scene change.
Upshot is that this research is a cue to do some useful science. It is not much better than a curiosity.
No problem. I live in a total concrete and steel, all-walls, roof and floor, bunker. Made by a big International company - bin Laden Group, based in Jidda. Works perfectly.
To communicate with you, I am thumping on the walls.
If you are listening, could you please cut a hole in the wall. An upgrade is necessary - I need air.
I had wondered why babblefish didn't cope at all well with what had been said, and wondered if it was an odd dialect, or more likely, a wry comment in non-standard German. I deliberately mangle English at times.
I was wondering though that if a black hole had been created, it would possibly oscillate through the Earth, back and forth. The period of passage could be longer than 50 mins if it started with excess velocity, and went some distance above the earth before returning. So it would be largely invisible, and only noticed if it collided with a particularly vulnerable bit of gear. A sort of malign Flying Spaghetti Monster, without the theological support. It's just a speculative whimsy. Or it could just be that after 5 billion years of cosmic ray bombardment, one of them finally hit a plane. This is much easier to believe than the possibility that a software engineer screwed up the flight compensation.
Not Quantass. Quanta is the plural of quantum. Quantas is the plural of quanta. Quantass happens when two airlines fly into each other. This did not happen. I think.
Mind you, it did happen shortly after the black-hole-producing LHC mysteriously blew up. Maybe they are wanting us not to panic. Was your comment in Swiss-German by any chance?
'Gullible' means capable of becoming a raucous seabird. Everyone knows that. So why include the word. Silly as including The. Or Or and And.
Whereas 'naive' has to go in, because the intelligentsia (usually an intelligentsium, until you argue with it) have found that not only can you spell it naif, but you can dot the i twice, warble on about umlaut versus diaeresis, and clear sufficient space around you at the soiree that no-one notices you just farted.
Fact. (Fact is the past imperfect of Fict, and factions are groups that split apart in the past over fictions, but I digress. Mod me down.)
A fair enough observation. I do not think there are any real technical difficulties. But with lottery tickets, the operators of the system would be the ones to lose if there is corruption. (Corruption has occurred I think on one-armed bandits in Las Vegas. A special chip. The casino was very unhappy.) In the case of elections, it is likely to be overseen by the establishment, those who gain from corruption. In general, an ossified establishment is recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, world wide, most corrupt elections take place using the current voting system. You have to place your ballot under the eye of a thug, or else you can do it freely, but the whole ballot box goes missing, etc. So the current paper system to me has the worst record.
Electronic voting in conjunction with an proof-of-vote you can take away should be better. Just as long as those administering it will be the losers. For the moment, lets call them Lloyds of London. If I can prove my vote was tampered with, Lloyds owe me $100. They can afford a glitch. They can't afford a rigged election. They also have to use open source software, but the on-the-day encryption codes do not get released until afterwards.
At least with electronic voting, like ATM machines, on-line, you cannot readily tamper with it and not have it complain and switch off. (Of course, detractors will say it was unstable and crashed.) With a central system requesting (public key encrypted) updates, the ballot box is very difficult to hijack, especially if the central system is mirrored overseas. I'd trust an electronic system, but only if I can trust those who set it up. That is possible.
Sadly, control freaks accumulate in politics. I cannot see them allowing control of elections out of their hands, even when they are not corrupt.
Yup. The key is to note that the extra gene is quite common, so is not disabling, and probably has advantages. At a guess, it will be linked to increased testosterone. It would possibly be just as valid to call it the "Road Rage Gene". Nor is that a bad thing. Stupid on a road, but a lot of people respond positively to having aggressive defenders around them. (Ok, call it the Pit Bull gene.)
So having isolated out an important gene, and hopefully setting up a test for it, the next bit of research can be into finding out what else it is associated with. Should all vice-presidents be expected to carry it?
On the other hand, the baldest guy I know (for his age) is mild mannered, intelligent, strong in opinions but polite, and great to work with. So all this testosterone theorizing may be so much crap. It may be associated with testosterone tolerance. Now that is worth researching.
What you say is reasonable. I used to be a chemist. I even had the embarrassment once at an airport of having a little vial of a chemical out of my bag being waved at me and being asked what it was. I said "I don't know." This was utterly truthful. I was bringing it in to have X-ray crystallography done on it. At which stage, I played my voice back in my head and thought "What does that mean to the border guy?" Oh, oh. I said it was mine, I had made it, it had a weird formula, and if he could identify it for me, great. I just wanted to know what it was. And I was off to the local university to find out. He was happy with that (in a grumpy sort of way.) All this was pre-9/11
I have not gone thru US customs post 9/11. I did know someone who did, with bits of electronics in his luggage. he was a production engineer taking stuff-ups from China back for detailed design analysis. He had a shit-load of trouble. About 4 hours before he could get onto a plane.
All this is reasonable to expect when social paranoia is given power. I don't like it either. But the original post was, I thought, about someone coming back from overseas and wanting to keep private the info on his laptop. It seems to me that if you act suspicious (encrypting the whole drive) then you are attracting attention. If 300 people have been vomited out of a jumbo jet, the priority must be to clear the very likely innocent as fast as possible. As a passenger, your priority is to get shunted though in the of-no-interest group. This applies if you are a terrorist, porn collector, or simply a good looking woman with photos of yourself on a nudist beach. Making it obvious you have something to hide is a dumb approach. Fun to think of, but stupid as real-world advice
As for being a specialist wanting to take stuff in. Yeah. You would have to evaluate packing it on the basis that you will be declaring it to a Russian customs inspector in 1961, he being well educated in Marxist-Leninist politics, the deviousness of smugglers, and how to keep the commissars happy. Openly declaring electronics and little vials of chemicals would simply speed up how fast you got taken to a specialist interview room. All three education streams probably apply today. (Marxist-Leninism uses different nouns, and the other two are unchanged).
Deary, deary me. A sane voice. You really don't belong here. Your lack of problems came about because you acted on a normal fashion. Read the posts. These guys are off on another planet.
An analogy. Imagine that you want to walk down a street at night, which just happens to have a lot of coke dealers on it. You have your own *private* reasons for being there. Cop patrols cruise by. The advice given by the other posts is wonderfully technical. The equivalent is. On seeing a cop car, scuttle into a doorway. Wear patterned clothing that allows you to blend into doorways. Wear rubber gloves and be prepared to drop any stash to allow plausible deniability. Have an artificial third leg. In short, wave a large neon sign saying "Look at me."
There is an observation in the science press that terrorists seem to be more likely to be geeks than non-geeks. From the posts here, I'd say they are simply more likely to be caught.
(Every pope since 1940 has called for a New World Order, whatever the hell that means)
Currently the order is alphabetical:
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
etc.
Venezuela
In a New World Order, it would be:
The Virgin Islands, including the (possibly mythical) British Virgins.
America
This Heaven/Hell division may be too simple. A third 'Purgatory' country might be needed, such as Cuba. The theologians will sort that out, possibly before the next millennium.
You seem to live in a boolean universe. Parents sort of trust their kids to drive responsibly, but know it will vary with who else is in the car. It makes sense to loan a car that they cannot show off in, nor be *encouraged* to drive faster than they have competence. Also, distraction in the car is a problem is well. Slower means more time to react to a threat.
Stats show that males (prob females too these days) stabilize at safe driving only when over 25. Stupid to only allow them to borrow the car when that old. They need the socialization way before then. Slower accidents may cause injury, but are no where near as likely to be fatal.
As for needing to drive over 80. Yup, it is remotely possible that that might happen. They also would need a bottle of whiskey in the car to act as medicinal alcohol in case of accidents. Yeah, right.
If you believe the Earth to be round (a really weird idea, but I accept it), then proving it is easy. On the inside back cover of New Scientist of 20 Sept (about a week ago), there is a discussion of how high you have to be to see curvature of the Earth. The answer is simple - about 18 km high. That's a genuine, yep-it-really-is-round observation. No place on Earth is that high. Below that you get into weasel arguments.
By weasel arguments, I mean explanations that occur when publicly arguing with a devious, well educated, cynical opponents. (Think Boston Legal.)
That page on New Scientist supplied four letters, and all are interesting. One is the 18 km one. Another gives a formula and concludes that at ordinary elevations, you have a difficult problem of proof.
A third was from a seaman. Quite simply, the higher you are on a ship, the further you see, but the horizon is horizontal. So why do ships 'disappear below the horizon'? That is simple. Sound carries over water due to differences in refraction between close to the water. (Depending on what answer you want to get, you argue for a higher near-water speed because the molecular weight of water is about half that of air, so the molecules move faster, or argue that it is cooler and they move slower. Plenty of weasel room there.) Similarly, light doesn't quite move in a straight line. I would argue that it is refracted up just a little over water, especially over salty water. So a ship sailing off into the distance keeps heading across a Euclidian plane, but it dips below the upwards bend of light. As the 'effect' can be ascribed as due to water vapour, salt crystals, or a periodic effect due to the waves on the water, it is difficult to disprove. (In public, you then cap it off by saying to the audience. "There are similar but more difficult phenomena that explain whey the full moon is bigger near the horizon that when high in the sky". As far as I know, this is now believed to be an illusion. But try convincing a jury who dislike you of that.)
However, there are very high places where you can see the sea and a wide horizon. The Andes would be a preferred site. That is where the fourth letter came from. A climber who had done the experiment, at 6000 m high. A nylon line was stretched tight between two ice-axes, and a 6mm bulge above the line was noted. That's really high, heroic and convincing. But only convincing until there is money or beliefs at stake. Then someone says, how did you prove the line wasn't dipping. It might have been tight initially, and then lost elasticity in the cold. Another says, at high altitudes, and low oxygen, decision making gets a bit problematic. I expect you saw what you expected to see. A third says. "Got any photos", and even if you do, they are blurry as the line is much closer than the horizon.
So my answer to your 'where from' question is: High in the Andes, but go really prepared.
Getting back to the 'Intelligent Design' versus 'Darwinism' debate, I think all the posts I read (including my own) came from believers in evolution, or at least neutral. Mostly, they are fervent opponents of ID. And most, like me, will be quite ignorant of the ID arguments. I didn't see anyone putting up some good examples of what the better ID exponents find as problems in evolution. Well, that is like a bunch of round-earthers laughing at the flat-earthers. Just being right isn't good enough. You should know what they find as spurious in your belief, and why you still accept it. Letting them teach it, in a hostile scientific environment, would be educational for all. The buggers might have some good points to make.
Yes it can. You can postulate anything disprovable and then approach it in a scientific manner. You can postulate the Earth is flat (and that light bends up due to refractive differences.) It is difficult to disprove if you have never been more than 5 miles from your village, but in the end, yeah, the idea becomes untenable. More subtle is to hypothesize that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Not easy to disprove, but possible even in 1800.
Einstein was deeply unhappy with quantum mechanics. It was quite a reasonable position to take. Reasonable because he took a scientific approach to disproving it. Failed, but more power to his elbow as my granny used to say.
If ID says that the only intellectually acceptable conclusion is that evolution is just plain too improbable, and has slippery arguments, then that is fine. It is a testable proposition. If instead it says that God (or Demiurge or whoever) created the world in the appearance of evolution, then that is not testable. That last is a really neat idea if you are a lawyer and it got accepted in law. Once 4004 BC is accepted as a viable date, then so is Last Thursday, and your client is not guilty as the evidence was created.
I assume ID purports to go along with the scientific method. They do not have to provide an alternative (that's for church on Sunday), they just have to pick holes. Attacking ideas is a perfectly fine occupation, and your motivation is irrelevant. Attacking an idea because you privately loathe the guy who advocates it, does not alter your arguments (but may well cripple your vision.) They can go further, and advocate not just a guided development (a set of physical laws that propel development over 4000 million years), but an intelligent being or beings that do it. That opens up a can of worms about what constitutes intelligent and why mass extinctions are ok, but hey, they want to try, let em.
I do have severe reservations how a school could go about about teaching Intelligent Design in a scientific manner.
1. The attack is likely to be the 'death of a thousand cuts'. That is, doubt is cast on each item of proof. It is rather like having a proof for a double sided coin that is based on flipping it 1000 times. Each toss is really doubtful, no better than tossing a coin in fact. So if each and every one is doubtful, you must discard the lot. Funny how all 1000 were heads though. The counter to this is emphasize that evolution is a broad interpretation of what seems to be 4000 million years of the development of life. (Make that 4280 million if you believe the original article.) Nor is evolution incompatible with religion. But the key problem with ID is the really low level of intelligence. God drags his knuckles. Over the 4000 megayears of development leading to the quintessence of perfection, my body and brain, the designer screwed up quite badly on a number of aspects of the human body, such as having our eyes inside out. That is a tenable proposition, but does degrade the 'intelligent' down to the level rather similar to how humans run things.
2. The education will not be scientific. That is, will students not only be referred to web sites full of arguments against ID (as well as those for), but a student who ridicules the fervent beliefs of a teacher will get similar grades to one who cogently supports the teacher, supports the school ethos, the board of governors (or whatever), and the wider God fearing community. This last for me is a killer. I do not believe equal grades would happen.
But if someone says, yes, we can do it. Then let them try, provided a legislated backlash is available. If they fail to teach it in an open scientific manner (webcams recording stuff etc.), then they can be sued. They do not have to do a perfect job, but they do have to do a creditable job. It would be rather like a school run by Catholic priests arguing for the right for them to teach sex education. Sure they can, but only if they do a creditable job, and accept the right of pupils to ask embarrassing questions. A few could teach it, but not in a manner the majority could accept. They have the right, but not the capability.
1. The age given is 3.8 to 4.28 billion years (why billion, not giga. Dunno.) The scientist favours the oldest possible date, at a guess because that increases funding,
2. The evidence for life was speculative at best.
As the earth is known to have had liquid water for some time before the 4.28 possible date, this is not startling news. But they are rocks, and there is the possibility of establishing a case that they needed bacteria to create their striations. That's where the interest lies. It seems a bit too soon for life to evolve by too haphazard a route in that time.
Which implies a catalytic life-shaping environment, or an extra-terrestrial source, or of course, intelligent design. I've no objection to the latter, provided it is taught in a scientific manner. I've also no objection to proposing pigs can fly provided the analysis is, if not scientific, then nicely based on engineering.
I would agree. You have to accept false positives. Humans carefully checking stuff are too slow. The Sapphire Worm doubled in size every 8.5 seconds. See this. Phishing is going to be slower, but I do not want to rely on a bureaucratic check-with-my-lawyer system.
One key point is the.nu in the address - Niue. Anyone running anything important out of Niue is essentially registered with www.cowboysandsharks.com. Enjoy the freedom if you are using it, but don't complain about the company you keep. Don't expect the Niue islanders to help. The place is a tiny island in the South Pacific, with about 1500 people (Wikipedia). Selling internet addresses is a cheap income source. They lack resources to police it.
I assume by proper units are TeV. At the full design speed of 7 TeV, that's 0.99999991 c. I can understand reporters rounding up, but it does imply that they are technically incompetent. Would they report a near-death experience as the real thing? Let's be kind and speculate that there is an editorial requirement that when atomic physics is being discussed, the word 'terror' (or tera or terra) shall be avoided utterly.
However, I was more amused by the relativity in this report on relativistic speeds - namely that the scientists were doing the moving.
Nor has anyone leapt on the 'clockwise' and pointed out the need among all these PhDs for spin doctors. I would like to know if they would be leptons or bosons. The former has a hint of victim of violence about it, and the latter a shiver-me-timbers feel, but then maybe word connotation is leading me astray. My degree was a long time ago. Last time I looked (Wikipedia), I got boggled at the half spin versus full spin distinction. Also, are spin doctors always created with parity preserved. They usually appear on TV in that form. Do opposing spins always cancel? A clockwise spin doctor in Hawaii is probably spinning on much the same axis as a counterclockwise one at CERN. These are important questions that some of the heavy-weight intellectuals such as Oprah need to debate. There are risks to the fabric of our universe here. (Could we eat a TV dinner and to our horror see the spinners furiously agreeing.)
Any physicists out there willing to speculate. They could even explain why the Higg's boson is called the 'God particle'.
The transformer failure is just one of those things. But, according to the article..
After it was started up Sept. 10, scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. They shut that down, then turned on a counterclockwise beam.
Now, accelerating a proton to the speed of light seems to me impossible, given that they are in a vacuum. But if they can do that, then the other interpretation is possible. It was the scientists who were circling at the speed of light, round say, a little beaker of protons. I'd like to commend whoever shut them down, then anti-beamed them to restore reality.
Re:Proof of the dangers of pollution!
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Yeah, but that is perfectly understandable. Very few people are actually perfectly normal. Everyone else is some sort of standard deviant, which is why they measure all you abnormals in standard deviations.
Other points The average number of limbs terrorists have (after bomb training) is less than a typical Americans. Average means mean, typical means mode, and median is what you drive your hummer down. The people to avoid are the non-standard deviants. The real problem is "the average intelligence is below average". Always use "less", not "fewer". 'Fewer' is for integer arithmetic, which is for financial mathematics. You can use "more" for integers and reals, but financiers have to use "More, more, more" Keep using up the DHMO. Reserve MHMO for caustic posts, THMO for acidic posts. I'm only making this last point to keep my post length perfectly normal. Dang. I need 3 more cha
I think the optimal environment is somewhat less than clean. Your immune system needs a mild thrashing now and then to work optimally. There is a two week kick-in needed for it to get working on newish threats. Far better for you to have encounters with likely threats and have a higher set of T-cells (or whatever the recognition set is) poised to kill the little bastards. On the other hand, your immune system can be overwhelmed by a massive continued threats and simply give up on the threat as being 'alien'. Not too dirty.
So I'd agreed with the less-than-sterile advocacy here, but go further. Some but not a lot of crap in your life is good. Basically, hospitals should be sterile, recovery at home (and infants to 3 months) should be clean, and the rest of us should only avoid serious threats.
As for the earlier posts that 'we will evolve to counter the threat'. Basically, that is true. But your metabolism should be regarded as an economy with winners and losers. Resources get switched to where they are needed. If people evolve lead resistance, it may be at the cost of less effective metal-centered enzymes. The other downside to evolution is that it is selective. It does not make for better. It simply weeds. It may well become hostile to techies. Lead (or TiO2 or whatever the threat is) resilience may require a smaller brain and blood-brain barrier that delivers less oxygen, but is a better filter. Or simply people who start breeding at age 14, and have lots of kids.
Evolution and the immune system pick winners. Clean-living good guys come last.
I understand your point. Once you have three particles, you are computationally screwed. So anything bigger than hydrogen is a bummer. Best to avoid particles altogether. String theory starts from the philosophical position that the universe is pointless, but vibrators make it endurable. I'm told it is a wonderland of elegant maths. Well, about 10^500 wonder-universes apparently. However, I object to strings being so pushy. What about the rest of the orchestra. Percussion got their star turn at the big bang, brass had that nice exponential shape period, but their bell point has been passed. Then the strings started sawing away, on a steady expansion that has gone on too long. 13 billion years and they haven't got to the Largo yet.
I think it is time the woodwinds had a chance. Some previous posts have been kind enough to mention the W and Z bassoons, but I think everything would be much simpler if the whole universe was modeled as an 11 dimensional pipe with lots of holes in the theory at regular intervals, and the ability to double the publication frequency by being a blowhard.
Of course, I'm off topic. But hey, the original picture really is into the big picture. It bundles all the sex steroids, male, female and the Vatican, all into a single group called sterol lipids. All of Hollywood just a fraction of one of the 68 types. Since it includes cholesterol, that's most of Washington. (The makers part, not the lipid shakers part.) So if a disease like the Washington-Hollywood Syndrome is so readily encompassed by the big picture, then it is only a small step to the multiverse, isn't it.
Thanks, comrade. I would never say the Earth looks like a blue and white egg. The next step would be to scan nearby space for Great A'Tuin. If one had the sheer bad luck to see the turtle, it would almost certainly be classified as a Russian State Secret, and you would never be seen again.
I thought there are fears that once the Shuttles no longer service the ISS in 2010, then access to the ISS will be limited to nations that can say "Da, you can have Georgia" in Russian.
So your friends will have to accept you talking through a Russian interpreter. This may well improve the conversation. I mean, how often can you say 'The earth is a blue and white ball' without getting boring. Whereas, a mistranslation such as 'Why on earth are your balls blue and white?' will at least help.
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That is still technobabble. You still have to cart an energy source up, and it is usually stored chemically for big engines. I am guessing that by spitting out an atom (argon in this case) at some massive velocity, you do not need to cart as much mass about, which is where the real penalty comes from - accelerating fuel forward so you can spit it back later. But aspects of this argument seem really slippery. It is accepted wisdom, well established, and I assume true. But the science part of the article was really glossed over. OK, they know their audience, and science is to be presented as glossy bottom line stuff.
I'm no rocket scientist. Even metaphorically. Does anyone know why it really is more efficient? They are wanting to use a 200kwatt engine, so that is not going to be sourced using warm radioactive decay. As a once-chemist, I wouldn't choose argon as an energy source. That's a bit like carrying media consultants on a Mars mission, so you could keep throwing them back to Earth.
The object in the 60's wasn't I suspect to put a man on the moon, but to gain control of space. I do not understand otherwise why it is so difficult to repeat what was done 2 generations ago.
You also had a population then that believed in creating science rather than it being someone else's problem. Today, you are much better off being a lawyer or PR consultant or something and just buying it. This is probably true for for many OECD countries. Science is not cool. (Evolution vs creationism, yada, yada yada.)
So the next president has a number of real problems. He inherits an economy that really has problems supporting moderate comfort let alone excesses like war. How do you justifying paying money for cosmology? People get as much excitement from a computer game. To most, it isn't real anyway. That is the force behind the 'it-was-done-on-a-set-in-Nevada' jokes.
I have been a professional scientist, and I would have to agree with you. In terms of value for money, the new lunar rover lacks punch. In essence, the argument is that NASA, given 11 years more work and a squillion dollars, can put a cut down Winnebago on the moon. That's a hard sell. I'd get paid more as a PR guy pushing it than I would as a scientist developing it.
So, we stay on Earth. It has the good side effect of removing any delusion that there is anywhere to go if we screw the environment too much.
Meantime...
Good boy, Mars Rover. No need to heel. Just keep digging for bones.
Currently, dogs are used for this purpose, and they do it rather well. Some millions of years of design have gone into it. Getting a robot to move in complex terrain would be a bitch of a job. I can see that you can armor a robot more easily than a dog, so it would be more useful in flat terrain that has sniper positions. Are these robots primarily for use in Republican voting territory?
I once saw a documentary on how clever hunting spiders were. Given the small brain size, they might be a useful model. You might even be able to clone a spider brain and use in an eight-legged robot. Of course, it would regard everyone as legitimate prey, and suck out the juices on capture. But that would guarantee the un-cooperative fugitive bit. They would have to have a 'disarm' capacity, such as waving a Library of Congress card at them. That way, a small elite could survive if they got loose in Washington. Of course, it would then test your ability to read, so that all the illiterate Congressmen with complimentary cards would still be doomed.
I assume they would be programmed to avoid 5 sided buildings. So if you chalk a pentagon around you, you would be safe from the devils.
In essence, I'd agree, but you are a bit harsh. It would be better to call it a curious result. I too tend not to recall much about dreams, but what I do is not about the colour. Not if coloured, just it is irrelevant. Whereas falling is remembered. (I'm 60 BTW, and first saw TV aged 15 in N&W, The Untouchables.)
Two points are important. TV watching to me is passive. So are dreams. You participate vividly, but without control. Reading a book is far more active. So maybe TV (or film for that matter) is great for putting you into passive participation mode. In short, TV mode could be a mental mode for how you are to participate. Whereas the Playstation generation who do not read books as much simply lack that code. In that sense, the research may tell us something useful, which has nothing to do with age really at all.
The other point is recall. Can you note the transition from B&W to colour really, and can you have it as non-important, and just inject it later once awake. I do remember watching the Wizard of Oz when young, a film which starts in B&W and then uses colour. When Dorothy arrives in Oz, the world turns to colour. At the time, it took me some time to realise that the film was in colour. It was just as real in B&W as in colour. To test the effect on a young generation would be tricky. You would have to get them used to B&W first. Then get them to press a button when films turn to colour. It may be quite a slow transition if it does not occur during a scene change.
Upshot is that this research is a cue to do some useful science. It is not much better than a curiosity.
No problem. I live in a total concrete and steel, all-walls, roof and floor, bunker.
Made by a big International company - bin Laden Group, based in Jidda.
Works perfectly.
To communicate with you, I am thumping on the walls.
If you are listening, could you please cut a hole in the wall.
An upgrade is necessary - I need air.
I had wondered why babblefish didn't cope at all well with what had been said, and wondered if it was an odd dialect, or more likely, a wry comment in non-standard German. I deliberately mangle English at times.
I was wondering though that if a black hole had been created, it would possibly oscillate through the Earth, back and forth. The period of passage could be longer than 50 mins if it started with excess velocity, and went some distance above the earth before returning. So it would be largely invisible, and only noticed if it collided with a particularly vulnerable bit of gear. A sort of malign Flying Spaghetti Monster, without the theological support. It's just a speculative whimsy. Or it could just be that after 5 billion years of cosmic ray bombardment, one of them finally hit a plane. This is much easier to believe than the possibility that a software engineer screwed up the flight compensation.
Not Quantass.
Quanta is the plural of quantum.
Quantas is the plural of quanta.
Quantass happens when two airlines fly into each other. This did not happen. I think.
Mind you, it did happen shortly after the black-hole-producing LHC mysteriously blew up. Maybe they are wanting us not to panic. Was your comment in Swiss-German by any chance?
Why would you put it in?
'Gullible' means capable of becoming a raucous seabird.
Everyone knows that.
So why include the word. Silly as including The. Or Or and And.
Whereas 'naive' has to go in, because the intelligentsia (usually an intelligentsium, until you argue with it) have found that not only can you spell it naif, but you can dot the i twice, warble on about umlaut versus diaeresis, and clear sufficient space around you at the soiree that no-one notices you just farted.
Fact.
(Fact is the past imperfect of Fict, and factions are groups that split apart in the past over fictions, but I digress. Mod me down.)
A fair enough observation. I do not think there are any real technical difficulties. But with lottery tickets, the operators of the system would be the ones to lose if there is corruption. (Corruption has occurred I think on one-armed bandits in Las Vegas. A special chip. The casino was very unhappy.) In the case of elections, it is likely to be overseen by the establishment, those who gain from corruption. In general, an ossified establishment is recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, world wide, most corrupt elections take place using the current voting system. You have to place your ballot under the eye of a thug, or else you can do it freely, but the whole ballot box goes missing, etc. So the current paper system to me has the worst record.
Electronic voting in conjunction with an proof-of-vote you can take away should be better. Just as long as those administering it will be the losers. For the moment, lets call them Lloyds of London. If I can prove my vote was tampered with, Lloyds owe me $100. They can afford a glitch. They can't afford a rigged election. They also have to use open source software, but the on-the-day encryption codes do not get released until afterwards.
At least with electronic voting, like ATM machines, on-line, you cannot readily tamper with it and not have it complain and switch off. (Of course, detractors will say it was unstable and crashed.) With a central system requesting (public key encrypted) updates, the ballot box is very difficult to hijack, especially if the central system is mirrored overseas. I'd trust an electronic system, but only if I can trust those who set it up. That is possible.
Sadly, control freaks accumulate in politics. I cannot see them allowing control of elections out of their hands, even when they are not corrupt.
Yup. The key is to note that the extra gene is quite common, so is not disabling, and probably has advantages. At a guess, it will be linked to increased testosterone. It would possibly be just as valid to call it the "Road Rage Gene". Nor is that a bad thing. Stupid on a road, but a lot of people respond positively to having aggressive defenders around them. (Ok, call it the Pit Bull gene.)
So having isolated out an important gene, and hopefully setting up a test for it, the next bit of research can be into finding out what else it is associated with. Should all vice-presidents be expected to carry it?
On the other hand, the baldest guy I know (for his age) is mild mannered, intelligent, strong in opinions but polite, and great to work with. So all this testosterone theorizing may be so much crap. It may be associated with testosterone tolerance. Now that is worth researching.
What you say is reasonable. I used to be a chemist. I even had the embarrassment once at an airport of having a little vial of a chemical out of my bag being waved at me and being asked what it was. I said "I don't know." This was utterly truthful. I was bringing it in to have X-ray crystallography done on it. At which stage, I played my voice back in my head and thought "What does that mean to the border guy?" Oh, oh. I said it was mine, I had made it, it had a weird formula, and if he could identify it for me, great. I just wanted to know what it was. And I was off to the local university to find out. He was happy with that (in a grumpy sort of way.) All this was pre-9/11
I have not gone thru US customs post 9/11. I did know someone who did, with bits of electronics in his luggage. he was a production engineer taking stuff-ups from China back for detailed design analysis. He had a shit-load of trouble. About 4 hours before he could get onto a plane.
All this is reasonable to expect when social paranoia is given power. I don't like it either. But the original post was, I thought, about someone coming back from overseas and wanting to keep private the info on his laptop. It seems to me that if you act suspicious (encrypting the whole drive) then you are attracting attention. If 300 people have been vomited out of a jumbo jet, the priority must be to clear the very likely innocent as fast as possible. As a passenger, your priority is to get shunted though in the of-no-interest group. This applies if you are a terrorist, porn collector, or simply a good looking woman with photos of yourself on a nudist beach. Making it obvious you have something to hide is a dumb approach. Fun to think of, but stupid as real-world advice
As for being a specialist wanting to take stuff in. Yeah. You would have to evaluate packing it on the basis that you will be declaring it to a Russian customs inspector in 1961, he being well educated in Marxist-Leninist politics, the deviousness of smugglers, and how to keep the commissars happy. Openly declaring electronics and little vials of chemicals would simply speed up how fast you got taken to a specialist interview room. All three education streams probably apply today. (Marxist-Leninism uses different nouns, and the other two are unchanged).
Deary, deary me. A sane voice. You really don't belong here. Your lack of problems came about because you acted on a normal fashion. Read the posts. These guys are off on another planet.
An analogy.
Imagine that you want to walk down a street at night, which just happens to have a lot of coke dealers on it. You have your own *private* reasons for being there. Cop patrols cruise by. The advice given by the other posts is wonderfully technical. The equivalent is. On seeing a cop car, scuttle into a doorway. Wear patterned clothing that allows you to blend into doorways. Wear rubber gloves and be prepared to drop any stash to allow plausible deniability. Have an artificial third leg. In short, wave a large neon sign saying "Look at me."
There is an observation in the science press that terrorists seem to be more likely to be geeks than non-geeks. From the posts here, I'd say they are simply more likely to be caught.
(Every pope since 1940 has called for a New World Order, whatever the hell that means)
Currently the order is alphabetical:
In a New World Order, it would be:
This Heaven/Hell division may be too simple. A third 'Purgatory' country might be needed, such as Cuba. The theologians will sort that out, possibly before the next millennium.
You seem to live in a boolean universe. Parents sort of trust their kids to drive responsibly, but know it will vary with who else is in the car. It makes sense to loan a car that they cannot show off in, nor be *encouraged* to drive faster than they have competence. Also, distraction in the car is a problem is well. Slower means more time to react to a threat.
Stats show that males (prob females too these days) stabilize at safe driving only when over 25. Stupid to only allow them to borrow the car when that old. They need the socialization way before then. Slower accidents may cause injury, but are no where near as likely to be fatal.
As for needing to drive over 80. Yup, it is remotely possible that that might happen. They also would need a bottle of whiskey in the car to act as medicinal alcohol in case of accidents. Yeah, right.
If you believe the Earth to be round (a really weird idea, but I accept it), then proving it is easy. On the inside back cover of New Scientist of 20 Sept (about a week ago), there is a discussion of how high you have to be to see curvature of the Earth. The answer is simple - about 18 km high. That's a genuine, yep-it-really-is-round observation. No place on Earth is that high. Below that you get into weasel arguments.
By weasel arguments, I mean explanations that occur when publicly arguing with a devious, well educated, cynical opponents. (Think Boston Legal.)
That page on New Scientist supplied four letters, and all are interesting. One is the 18 km one. Another gives a formula and concludes that at ordinary elevations, you have a difficult problem of proof.
A third was from a seaman. Quite simply, the higher you are on a ship, the further you see, but the horizon is horizontal. So why do ships 'disappear below the horizon'? That is simple. Sound carries over water due to differences in refraction between close to the water. (Depending on what answer you want to get, you argue for a higher near-water speed because the molecular weight of water is about half that of air, so the molecules move faster, or argue that it is cooler and they move slower. Plenty of weasel room there.) Similarly, light doesn't quite move in a straight line. I would argue that it is refracted up just a little over water, especially over salty water. So a ship sailing off into the distance keeps heading across a Euclidian plane, but it dips below the upwards bend of light. As the 'effect' can be ascribed as due to water vapour, salt crystals, or a periodic effect due to the waves on the water, it is difficult to disprove. (In public, you then cap it off by saying to the audience. "There are similar but more difficult phenomena that explain whey the full moon is bigger near the horizon that when high in the sky". As far as I know, this is now believed to be an illusion. But try convincing a jury who dislike you of that.)
However, there are very high places where you can see the sea and a wide horizon. The Andes would be a preferred site. That is where the fourth letter came from. A climber who had done the experiment, at 6000 m high. A nylon line was stretched tight between two ice-axes, and a 6mm bulge above the line was noted. That's really high, heroic and convincing. But only convincing until there is money or beliefs at stake. Then someone says, how did you prove the line wasn't dipping. It might have been tight initially, and then lost elasticity in the cold. Another says, at high altitudes, and low oxygen, decision making gets a bit problematic. I expect you saw what you expected to see. A third says. "Got any photos", and even if you do, they are blurry as the line is much closer than the horizon.
So my answer to your 'where from' question is: High in the Andes, but go really prepared.
Getting back to the 'Intelligent Design' versus 'Darwinism' debate, I think all the posts I read (including my own) came from believers in evolution, or at least neutral. Mostly, they are fervent opponents of ID. And most, like me, will be quite ignorant of the ID arguments. I didn't see anyone putting up some good examples of what the better ID exponents find as problems in evolution. Well, that is like a bunch of round-earthers laughing at the flat-earthers. Just being right isn't good enough. You should know what they find as spurious in your belief, and why you still accept it. Letting them teach it, in a hostile scientific environment, would be educational for all. The buggers might have some good points to make.
Yes it can. You can postulate anything disprovable and then approach it in a scientific manner. You can postulate the Earth is flat (and that light bends up due to refractive differences.) It is difficult to disprove if you have never been more than 5 miles from your village, but in the end, yeah, the idea becomes untenable. More subtle is to hypothesize that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Not easy to disprove, but possible even in 1800.
Einstein was deeply unhappy with quantum mechanics. It was quite a reasonable position to take. Reasonable because he took a scientific approach to disproving it. Failed, but more power to his elbow as my granny used to say.
If ID says that the only intellectually acceptable conclusion is that evolution is just plain too improbable, and has slippery arguments, then that is fine. It is a testable proposition. If instead it says that God (or Demiurge or whoever) created the world in the appearance of evolution, then that is not testable. That last is a really neat idea if you are a lawyer and it got accepted in law. Once 4004 BC is accepted as a viable date, then so is Last Thursday, and your client is not guilty as the evidence was created.
I assume ID purports to go along with the scientific method. They do not have to provide an alternative (that's for church on Sunday), they just have to pick holes. Attacking ideas is a perfectly fine occupation, and your motivation is irrelevant. Attacking an idea because you privately loathe the guy who advocates it, does not alter your arguments (but may well cripple your vision.) They can go further, and advocate not just a guided development (a set of physical laws that propel development over 4000 million years), but an intelligent being or beings that do it. That opens up a can of worms about what constitutes intelligent and why mass extinctions are ok, but hey, they want to try, let em.
I do have severe reservations how a school could go about about teaching Intelligent Design in a scientific manner.
1. The attack is likely to be the 'death of a thousand cuts'. That is, doubt is cast on each item of proof. It is rather like having a proof for a double sided coin that is based on flipping it 1000 times. Each toss is really doubtful, no better than tossing a coin in fact. So if each and every one is doubtful, you must discard the lot. Funny how all 1000 were heads though. The counter to this is emphasize that evolution is a broad interpretation of what seems to be 4000 million years of the development of life. (Make that 4280 million if you believe the original article.) Nor is evolution incompatible with religion. But the key problem with ID is the really low level of intelligence. God drags his knuckles. Over the 4000 megayears of development leading to the quintessence of perfection, my body and brain, the designer screwed up quite badly on a number of aspects of the human body, such as having our eyes inside out. That is a tenable proposition, but does degrade the 'intelligent' down to the level rather similar to how humans run things.
2. The education will not be scientific. That is, will students not only be referred to web sites full of arguments against ID (as well as those for), but a student who ridicules the fervent beliefs of a teacher will get similar grades to one who cogently supports the teacher, supports the school ethos, the board of governors (or whatever), and the wider God fearing community. This last for me is a killer. I do not believe equal grades would happen.
But if someone says, yes, we can do it. Then let them try, provided a legislated backlash is available. If they fail to teach it in an open scientific manner (webcams recording stuff etc.), then they can be sued. They do not have to do a perfect job, but they do have to do a creditable job. It would be rather like a school run by Catholic priests arguing for the right for them to teach sex education. Sure they can, but only if they do a creditable job, and accept the right of pupils to ask embarrassing questions. A few could teach it, but not in a manner the majority could accept. They have the right, but not the capability.
1. The age given is 3.8 to 4.28 billion years (why billion, not giga. Dunno.) The scientist favours the oldest possible date, at a guess because that increases funding,
2. The evidence for life was speculative at best.
As the earth is known to have had liquid water for some time before the 4.28 possible date, this is not startling news. But they are rocks, and there is the possibility of establishing a case that they needed bacteria to create their striations. That's where the interest lies. It seems a bit too soon for life to evolve by too haphazard a route in that time.
Which implies a catalytic life-shaping environment, or an extra-terrestrial source, or of course, intelligent design. I've no objection to the latter, provided it is taught in a scientific manner. I've also no objection to proposing pigs can fly provided the analysis is, if not scientific, then nicely based on engineering.
I would agree. You have to accept false positives. Humans carefully checking stuff are too slow. The Sapphire Worm doubled in size every 8.5 seconds. See this. Phishing is going to be slower, but I do not want to rely on a bureaucratic check-with-my-lawyer system.
One key point is the .nu in the address - Niue. Anyone running anything important out of Niue is essentially registered with www.cowboysandsharks.com. Enjoy the freedom if you are using it, but don't complain about the company you keep. Don't expect the Niue islanders to help. The place is a tiny island in the South Pacific, with about 1500 people (Wikipedia). Selling internet addresses is a cheap income source. They lack resources to police it.
I assume by proper units are TeV. At the full design speed of 7 TeV, that's 0.99999991 c. I can understand reporters rounding up, but it does imply that they are technically incompetent. Would they report a near-death experience as the real thing? Let's be kind and speculate that there is an editorial requirement that when atomic physics is being discussed, the word 'terror' (or tera or terra) shall be avoided utterly.
However, I was more amused by the relativity in this report on relativistic speeds - namely that the scientists were doing the moving.
Nor has anyone leapt on the 'clockwise' and pointed out the need among all these PhDs for spin doctors. I would like to know if they would be leptons or bosons. The former has a hint of victim of violence about it, and the latter a shiver-me-timbers feel, but then maybe word connotation is leading me astray. My degree was a long time ago. Last time I looked (Wikipedia), I got boggled at the half spin versus full spin distinction. Also, are spin doctors always created with parity preserved. They usually appear on TV in that form. Do opposing spins always cancel? A clockwise spin doctor in Hawaii is probably spinning on much the same axis as a counterclockwise one at CERN. These are important questions that some of the heavy-weight intellectuals such as Oprah need to debate. There are risks to the fabric of our universe here. (Could we eat a TV dinner and to our horror see the spinners furiously agreeing.)
Any physicists out there willing to speculate. They could even explain why the Higg's boson is called the 'God particle'.
After it was started up Sept. 10, scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. They shut that down, then turned on a counterclockwise beam.
Now, accelerating a proton to the speed of light seems to me impossible, given that they are in a vacuum. But if they can do that, then the other interpretation is possible. It was the scientists who were circling at the speed of light, round say, a little beaker of protons. I'd like to commend whoever shut them down, then anti-beamed them to restore reality.
Yeah, but that is perfectly understandable. Very few people are actually perfectly normal. Everyone else is some sort of standard deviant, which is why they measure all you abnormals in standard deviations.
Other points
The average number of limbs terrorists have (after bomb training) is less than a typical Americans.
Average means mean, typical means mode, and median is what you drive your hummer down.
The people to avoid are the non-standard deviants.
The real problem is "the average intelligence is below average".
Always use "less", not "fewer". 'Fewer' is for integer arithmetic, which is for financial mathematics.
You can use "more" for integers and reals, but financiers have to use "More, more, more"
Keep using up the DHMO. Reserve MHMO for caustic posts, THMO for acidic posts.
I'm only making this last point to keep my post length perfectly normal. Dang. I need 3 more cha
I think the optimal environment is somewhat less than clean. Your immune system needs a mild thrashing now and then to work optimally. There is a two week kick-in needed for it to get working on newish threats. Far better for you to have encounters with likely threats and have a higher set of T-cells (or whatever the recognition set is) poised to kill the little bastards. On the other hand, your immune system can be overwhelmed by a massive continued threats and simply give up on the threat as being 'alien'. Not too dirty.
So I'd agreed with the less-than-sterile advocacy here, but go further. Some but not a lot of crap in your life is good. Basically, hospitals should be sterile, recovery at home (and infants to 3 months) should be clean, and the rest of us should only avoid serious threats.
As for the earlier posts that 'we will evolve to counter the threat'. Basically, that is true. But your metabolism should be regarded as an economy with winners and losers. Resources get switched to where they are needed. If people evolve lead resistance, it may be at the cost of less effective metal-centered enzymes. The other downside to evolution is that it is selective. It does not make for better. It simply weeds. It may well become hostile to techies. Lead (or TiO2 or whatever the threat is) resilience may require a smaller brain and blood-brain barrier that delivers less oxygen, but is a better filter. Or simply people who start breeding at age 14, and have lots of kids.
Evolution and the immune system pick winners. Clean-living good guys come last.
I understand your point. Once you have three particles, you are computationally screwed. So anything bigger than hydrogen is a bummer. Best to avoid particles altogether. String theory starts from the philosophical position that the universe is pointless, but vibrators make it endurable. I'm told it is a wonderland of elegant maths. Well, about 10^500 wonder-universes apparently. However, I object to strings being so pushy. What about the rest of the orchestra. Percussion got their star turn at the big bang, brass had that nice exponential shape period, but their bell point has been passed. Then the strings started sawing away, on a steady expansion that has gone on too long. 13 billion years and they haven't got to the Largo yet.
I think it is time the woodwinds had a chance. Some previous posts have been kind enough to mention the W and Z bassoons, but I think everything would be much simpler if the whole universe was modeled as an 11 dimensional pipe with lots of holes in the theory at regular intervals, and the ability to double the publication frequency by being a blowhard.
Of course, I'm off topic. But hey, the original picture really is into the big picture. It bundles all the sex steroids, male, female and the Vatican, all into a single group called sterol lipids. All of Hollywood just a fraction of one of the 68 types. Since it includes cholesterol, that's most of Washington. (The makers part, not the lipid shakers part.) So if a disease like the Washington-Hollywood Syndrome is so readily encompassed by the big picture, then it is only a small step to the multiverse, isn't it.
Thanks, comrade. I would never say the Earth looks like a blue and white egg. The next step would be to scan nearby space for Great A'Tuin. If one had the sheer bad luck to see the turtle, it would almost certainly be classified as a Russian State Secret, and you would never be seen again.
I thought there are fears that once the Shuttles no longer service the ISS in 2010, then access to the ISS will be limited to nations that can say "Da, you can have Georgia" in Russian.
So your friends will have to accept you talking through a Russian interpreter. This may well improve the conversation. I mean, how often can you say 'The earth is a blue and white ball' without getting boring. Whereas, a mistranslation such as 'Why on earth are your balls blue and white?' will at least help.