Money spent by individuals in consumer spending produces more economic activity (more jobs overall) than public sector spending. This has been well studied for defense spending (same principle as the broken windows fallacy - not all economic activity is created equal). There are good reasons IMO to take money out of the pockets of individuals and spend it on e.g. defense or infrastructure or research, but that comes at a cost. The government can do some worthwhile things, but economic stimulus via tax-and-spend just isn't one of them.
And the same people who theorize this have careers riding on "Big Bang" being correct, while QV/EV threatens their livelihood.
Ohhhhh, you're one of those crackpots. Never mind then. I'm sure you're right and all of science is just a conspiracy to hide the truth about relativity/evolution/the big bang/whatever else would take effort to understand.
Have a brilliant new theory with actual evidence that explains everything? There's a Nobel Prize waiting for you. But all the wacky theories people don't want to accept today started from evidence that previous theories failed on.
Part of the problem is that the Bay Area is broken into a dozen small municipalities. When a business sets up in an area, the taxes are supposed to handle the infrastructure load, or the city might waive (direct) taxes for a while to get more people, jobs, and spending to get even more (indirect) taxes form that company. But when all the tax money goes to city A and half the infrastructure load goes to city B, well, B gets pissed. Somehow the greater Seattle area sorts all this out acceptably, not sure what the difference is.
The rest of the problem, of course, is the that Bay Area (and Cali in general) is flat broke. When I liked in the area, the city went through a couple years of not being able to keep the roads patched and the streetlights on simply because it refused to reduce its costs during the downturn - but they finally fired some employees (in areas where demand for those government services had nearly vanished - the people were idle), reduce pensions to something closer to private sector, and so on. After much wailing and doomsaying, they cut costs and everything was fine, but they didn't change until it had been bad for years. The county I was in was simply doomed: the required pension funding was roughly 100% of revenue. No bailout will come form the state of course, since it's also broke. So any additional load in an area turns into a crisis, as there's no slack for growth.
I keep waiting for Silly Valley businesses to realize just how inhospitable the area really is. Personally, I moved to the Seattle area, which doesn't seem to have these problems, and where "the cloud" seems to be happening, software wise. Seattle welcomes the growth - no protests here, just skyscrapers going up on every 3rd block or so.
We can detect gravity from our Sun, Moon, other planets, their moons, and other objects well enough to slingshot a space probe to Pluto, but we can't detect 95% of all mass and energy in our Universe? Come now, you are going to have to do better than this.
Right, and the physicists devoting their careers to this never thought of that, what occurred to you in the first 5 minutes? Dark matter doesn't "clump" like normal matter (no mechanism for friction, as far as anyone knows), so is expected to be a diffuse sphere the same size as the visible disk of the galaxy. All the normal matter is together in a disk, and further clumped into stellar systems, so even at 5:1 overall, dark matter is pretty sparse in our neighborhood compared to normal matter.
And why then are you sure there's no dark matter in e.g. the Sun? We know the total mass of the Sun, of course, and a bit about its internal processes, but not enough to exclude some low % of weakly interacting particles (and it would be nearly impossible to know if some of the matter in the core of a planet were dark matter, if the % is low). It's not like someone's proposing that there's a bunch of previously undetected mass at the solar system scale (though some of the mass we know about may be different than expected). Most of the predicted dark matter in our galaxy simply doesn't overlap the galactic disk.
Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant.
If it's everywhere as you claim, there should be exponentially more of this stuff to detect when compared to say, gravity
Which of course is why it was detected as soon as we started looking at large enough scales - it's not a theory looking for evidence, it's evidence looking for an explanation. Dark energy is an extremely tiny effect, even compared to gravity, per cubic meter. It's just that it's everywhere, while matter is quite sparse. Want a full and detailed explanation for the layman, so you know what you're arguing about? Here you go. Ed Copeland has become my favorite physicist of late, for his lack of arrogance or showmanship - just patient explanation.
Stop picking and choosing parts of paragraphs to argue and comment on the whole context. I stated that any method of "detecting" dark matter and energy exist without dark matter and energy. I even gave the example of gravitational lensing which people claim detects this stuff, yet the theorist who predicted gravitational lensing does not have this aether like stuff in his theory. In fact absolutely zero of his theories make such a prediction.
You finally go off on a tangent trying to claim that if we could somehow build a better detector we could detect 95% of the Universe, without addressing the first issue of "How the hell you can rationally claim that 95% of the Universe is hidden from view." and introducing topics that actually counter such a claim.
Such as neutrinos which are present, but surely not 95% of the Universe.
Why do you expect 95% of the universe to be visible to the tools we have? The central importance of humanity to the universe? Our godlike mastery of science and technology? Nothing but intellectual arrogance - how long have we even had electric light as a species. We're just starting to learn.
You talk about other explanations for gravitation lensing. Sure. There were also other theories, as I said, for galactic rotation rates. There were also many theories about the universe at the time the CMBR was released. But one theory predicted all three accurately, and the others didn't. So we go with that theory until we have something better because that's what the scientific method is.
My team is hiring developers like crazy, and I see the same at all the big shops. Sorry if you can't find work - maybe move to the West Coast where the jobs are?
Heck, historically it's pretty common that bandits taking money/food from people at gunpoint eventually become the government, as the people start expecting them to protect the people from other bandits, and the bandits reach the point where the only way they can steal more money is to make their victims more successful (so they can steal more in the long term).
That's just what I was saying. The programmer's task is always "automate what was new 3 years ago, and routine 1 year ago, using what got automated last time to help." It's a never-ending cycle, as automating X just allows you to do Y, which eventually becomes straightforward enough to automate.
There's nothing really new for programmers because, if you're doing it right, everything is really new for programmers all the time. Once anything becomes routine, we turn around and automate it, so the work is always this set of tasks we haven't figured out how to automate set.
Only a corner of Silly Valley is working on "Web 2.0" BS. There's a lot of real work going on too. The products offered by the likes of Facebook and Google may seem frivolous, but the backends needed to offer those products are changing the (back-end) world. As they knowhow to work reliably at a scale of 10k, 100k, 1M servers gets productized and offered in AWS and Azure (OK, those 2 are Seattle, but still) we see the beginning of the end of needing your own data center.
As a back-end guy, the fact I can now write three-tier web service that scales indefinitely as a hobby project, by plugging together AWS parts is pretty amazing. If I need 10000 cores for a few hours to model that flying car, space elevator, or machine learning system, I can not only get that easily on a moments notice, I can get it cheaply (a penny per core-hour cheap - that's something).
No, my argument is that he made a generalization about an entire population based on averages, so those generalizations are wrong - and racist.
Wait, what? Generalizations about a population can be quite accurate - as statistical measures of the population. That says little enough about any given individual, of course. E.g., you might be able to predict pretty accurately the number of children-per-woman in a given population over the next decade, but of course that tells you next to nothing about how big your neighbor's family will be. You can scream "urraysis" all day, but it's not really an argument.
We do have to avoid making generalizations even if they are based on sound averages. That's an ethics issue, not a scientific one.
I prefer to see good science be done. As a culture, we should focus on educating ourselves on the difference between individuals and groups, not on pretending obviously-true things are false. And we certainly shouldn't punish scientists for publishing true things (not that TFA was about scientific work, of course).
We shouldn't let any individuals be profiled in one way or another because of the stats on their ethnicity.
"Profiling" is one of those words that appeals to emotion to overcome logical flaws in one's argument, just like screaming urraysis at people, but still I agree - you can't reason from statistical trends to individuals, it just doesn't work that way.
Sure, and if there are other traits linked to those visible traits, they'd be just as mixed. It would all show up as statistical correlations in populations. Is anyone talking about predicting the behavior of individuals?
"Race" may be a bit of nonsense, especially these days when travel is so easy and so diffusion is fast, but I wouldn't find correlation between behavior and genetic factors that happen to produce visible distinctions unlikely. I'd be shocked if it weren't a minor factor compared to culture, behavior-wise, but that doesn't mean it's not measurable.
So your argument is "It offends me, so it's wrong"? It wouldn't surprise me at all if many aspects of behavior were influenced to some small degree by genetics. Individuals vary, but statistical averages across populations that correlate somewhat in both behavior and genetic similarity? Does that really sound so far-fetched?
I think culture is the dominant factor in how we behave (if you're talking statistical trends of large groups), but not the only factor. Environmental and genetic factors seem likely to influence behavior as well - why wouldn't they?
In any case, we should go with the data, not with the least offensive hypothesis.
If you want to claim that up to 95% of the Universe is made up of dark matter and energy, fine. We can watch geysers on a gas giant's moon, but we can't detect 95% of the space between our Earth and the probe watching? Come now, something is wrong with that claim. Oh I know, someone decided that "dark matter and energy don't exist in our Solar system". Then why is it absent in our solar system?
Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant. All we know about it is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating over time. No idea why or how (or at least stuff that's been explained at my limited level of understanding is just guesswork), but the measurements aren't controversial. And the energy that would be required to cause this expansion, overcoming gravity and all, would be the dominant thing in the universe (or maybe space just works that way, no energy required?).
Dark matter is most likely here in the solar system, no reason for it not to be, but we don't know how to build a specific detector. It's existence is pretty clear now from the combination of galactic rotation rates, gravitational lensing from stuff we can't otherwise see, and the CMBR data. The CMBR data showed the same ~5:1 ratio of dark matter to normal matter as the WIMP dark matter theory of galaxy rotation, to two significant digits. It's nature is unknown, except by its negatives - it doesn't interact with light, and it's not fast-moving like neutrinos.
This is about filling in gaps in mathematical models to make them work, there is nothing ever "detected". Everything used to claim "we detected dark matter/energy" exists without those two things, like gravitational lensing.
Not sure what you want by "detected". Dark energy, whatever it may be, is a placeholder name for an effect that inarguably exists. The measurements of large-scale expansion are clear. Dark matter was "filling in gaps in mathematical models" (the place all hypotheses start) 10 years ago. Now it's been detected to the same extent the Higgs Boson has: theory predicted measurements, but measurements that require some math to understand. In neither case do we have a machine that goes "ping" when a HB/DM particle hits it, what we have is data that's explained very accurately by theory, and not at all by the null hypothesis.
In the case of dark matter, there are teams working on building a specific detector, as we know so little about it, and there's much good physics to be done once we know more. Particle masses? Strong force interaction? Heck, we'll learn a ton just from the nature of the detector that works: by what mechanism can dark matter possibly interact with normal matter (beyond gravity)? Neutrinos were hard enough to detect and physicists were pretty sure how they interacted.
From a logical perspective we have been able to study quite a bit of our solar system hands on, and we have never been able to detect either dark matter or dark energy
So all things that exist, exist within our solar system and are detectable with existing technology? The Higgs boson didn't exist 2 years ago, but exists now? I'm struggling to follow your reasoning.
There were many theories to explain galactic rotation rates: MOND, WIMPs, MACHOs, many more I've forgotten. But out of the whole pack, WIMPs predicted the recent CMBR data accurately. When the math works, and accurately predicts unrelated measurements unknown when the hypothesis was made, well, science means we go with that until we have something better. We still don't know enough about dark matter to build a detector, but that's not required - what matters is that this theory survived when the others were falsified.
I'm sure there are many physicists cooking up more specific hypotheses about what dark matter "really is", and whoever's right will have the correct recipe for a detector. Only then will we know stuff like particle masses, and maybe even get something better than the Standard Model out of the mess.
Just like "Climate Change" , it is "settled" and no further investigation is to be done.
You couldn't be more wrong: it is "settled" and billions of dollars of public research funding are required, or the Earth will die in a fire! Of course, none of that research will be allowed to contradict existing claims, or even question them, but if you think that matters you miss the whole point.
MOND can't explain the CMBR data at all, while dark matter, WIMPs specifically, predicted the observed proportions accurately.
So we know now: dark matter is there, it's ~80% of matter, and it's WIMPs not MACHOs. String theory predicts a family of 1-plank-mass-ish particles - just one more untestable string theory claim, but it would fit dark matter pretty well. If we ever actually build a dark matter detector that works, the worst might happen: we might have to start taking string theory seriously too! Eeeesh.
Dark matter was there in todays proportions in the hot early universe, so no. All the MACHO theories went by the wayside with the CMBR data, it's WIMPs now for sure.
Well, I have no idea what protections are in the Ozstitution, but you'd have to be nuts to see it as endorsement of a specific religion. As long as anyone can put the religious icon of their choice on the stamp, the government's clean IMO. At least in the US, there's no constitutional protection from ever being exposed to religion.
Now, I could see an objection to putting a foreign head of state on a stamp, but the Dalai Lama, cool guy that he is, declared himself no longer the ruler of Tibet years ago, and permanently dissociated the religious leadership from the secular government-in-exile of Tibet.
It was also very dependent on the cast. It takes a lot for the audience to relate to guys in alien costumes, even SF nerds like me. I'm doubtful the magic will happen again.
Wow, a lot of the cast died so young - Jeff Conaway to drugs, Andreas Katsulas to smoking, Richard Biggs at 44 to a heart condition. Good to see Stephen Furst still going (aside from playing my favorite character on B5, he successfully changed his dangerous lifestyle during the B5 years, losing almost 100 pounds).
But whatever else goes wrong, at least the fighters "in space" won't fly like jets. Did any other SF TV series or movie get that right? The space battles are still cool to watch, aging effects and all, just because it makes some physical sense.
Maybe they could get around to putting the series up on Netflix
All the discs are available, last I looked. I don't know why you'd look for anything on the vast wasteland that is Netflix streaming - there's nothing there but tumbleweeds and Netflix-original stuff.
So, wait, you're upset that the characters were flawed? Aliens acted in ways that made little sense? That's what made the show good - no one was perfect, the "good guys" did stupid shit too, and not everyone seemed rational. I liked it.
But yeah, season 5 had little to offer.
For me the show's attraction was watching Andreas Katsulas, Peter Jurasik, and Stephen Furst playing against one another, and the arcs of their characters. Londo discovering morality too late to do anything but suffer for his sins, G'Kar discovering what it means to be a religious leader (some of JMSs best writing IMO), and Vir showing that even in the most corrupt society, a strong moral compass serves you well in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Money spent by individuals in consumer spending produces more economic activity (more jobs overall) than public sector spending. This has been well studied for defense spending (same principle as the broken windows fallacy - not all economic activity is created equal). There are good reasons IMO to take money out of the pockets of individuals and spend it on e.g. defense or infrastructure or research, but that comes at a cost. The government can do some worthwhile things, but economic stimulus via tax-and-spend just isn't one of them.
Oh, finally found the link I wanted. apply this to your favorite "all the physicists are wrong" theory - try for a high score!
And the same people who theorize this have careers riding on "Big Bang" being correct, while QV/EV threatens their livelihood.
Ohhhhh, you're one of those crackpots. Never mind then. I'm sure you're right and all of science is just a conspiracy to hide the truth about relativity/evolution/the big bang/whatever else would take effort to understand.
Have a brilliant new theory with actual evidence that explains everything? There's a Nobel Prize waiting for you. But all the wacky theories people don't want to accept today started from evidence that previous theories failed on.
Part of the problem is that the Bay Area is broken into a dozen small municipalities. When a business sets up in an area, the taxes are supposed to handle the infrastructure load, or the city might waive (direct) taxes for a while to get more people, jobs, and spending to get even more (indirect) taxes form that company. But when all the tax money goes to city A and half the infrastructure load goes to city B, well, B gets pissed. Somehow the greater Seattle area sorts all this out acceptably, not sure what the difference is.
The rest of the problem, of course, is the that Bay Area (and Cali in general) is flat broke. When I liked in the area, the city went through a couple years of not being able to keep the roads patched and the streetlights on simply because it refused to reduce its costs during the downturn - but they finally fired some employees (in areas where demand for those government services had nearly vanished - the people were idle), reduce pensions to something closer to private sector, and so on. After much wailing and doomsaying, they cut costs and everything was fine, but they didn't change until it had been bad for years. The county I was in was simply doomed: the required pension funding was roughly 100% of revenue. No bailout will come form the state of course, since it's also broke. So any additional load in an area turns into a crisis, as there's no slack for growth.
I keep waiting for Silly Valley businesses to realize just how inhospitable the area really is. Personally, I moved to the Seattle area, which doesn't seem to have these problems, and where "the cloud" seems to be happening, software wise. Seattle welcomes the growth - no protests here, just skyscrapers going up on every 3rd block or so.
We can detect gravity from our Sun, Moon, other planets, their moons, and other objects well enough to slingshot a space probe to Pluto, but we can't detect 95% of all mass and energy in our Universe? Come now, you are going to have to do better than this.
Right, and the physicists devoting their careers to this never thought of that, what occurred to you in the first 5 minutes? Dark matter doesn't "clump" like normal matter (no mechanism for friction, as far as anyone knows), so is expected to be a diffuse sphere the same size as the visible disk of the galaxy. All the normal matter is together in a disk, and further clumped into stellar systems, so even at 5:1 overall, dark matter is pretty sparse in our neighborhood compared to normal matter.
And why then are you sure there's no dark matter in e.g. the Sun? We know the total mass of the Sun, of course, and a bit about its internal processes, but not enough to exclude some low % of weakly interacting particles (and it would be nearly impossible to know if some of the matter in the core of a planet were dark matter, if the % is low). It's not like someone's proposing that there's a bunch of previously undetected mass at the solar system scale (though some of the mass we know about may be different than expected). Most of the predicted dark matter in our galaxy simply doesn't overlap the galactic disk.
Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant.
If it's everywhere as you claim, there should be exponentially more of this stuff to detect when compared to say, gravity
Which of course is why it was detected as soon as we started looking at large enough scales - it's not a theory looking for evidence, it's evidence looking for an explanation. Dark energy is an extremely tiny effect, even compared to gravity, per cubic meter. It's just that it's everywhere, while matter is quite sparse. Want a full and detailed explanation for the layman, so you know what you're arguing about? Here you go. Ed Copeland has become my favorite physicist of late, for his lack of arrogance or showmanship - just patient explanation.
Stop picking and choosing parts of paragraphs to argue and comment on the whole context. I stated that any method of "detecting" dark matter and energy exist without dark matter and energy. I even gave the example of gravitational lensing which people claim detects this stuff, yet the theorist who predicted gravitational lensing does not have this aether like stuff in his theory. In fact absolutely zero of his theories make such a prediction.
You finally go off on a tangent trying to claim that if we could somehow build a better detector we could detect 95% of the Universe, without addressing the first issue of "How the hell you can rationally claim that 95% of the Universe is hidden from view." and introducing topics that actually counter such a claim.
Such as neutrinos which are present, but surely not 95% of the Universe.
Why do you expect 95% of the universe to be visible to the tools we have? The central importance of humanity to the universe? Our godlike mastery of science and technology? Nothing but intellectual arrogance - how long have we even had electric light as a species. We're just starting to learn.
You talk about other explanations for gravitation lensing. Sure. There were also other theories, as I said, for galactic rotation rates. There were also many theories about the universe at the time the CMBR was released. But one theory predicted all three accurately, and the others didn't. So we go with that theory until we have something better because that's what the scientific method is.
My team is hiring developers like crazy, and I see the same at all the big shops. Sorry if you can't find work - maybe move to the West Coast where the jobs are?
Exactly - advancing matters one increment at a time in each field is how we change the world. No magic wand, just lots of people working hard.
you can build and operate the hamster wheels right at home; maybe a giant one in front of Parliament or Buckhingham for Her Majesty's pleasure.
I though London already had a giant hamster wheel on the South Bank - the EDF Energy Hamster Wheel?
Heck, historically it's pretty common that bandits taking money/food from people at gunpoint eventually become the government, as the people start expecting them to protect the people from other bandits, and the bandits reach the point where the only way they can steal more money is to make their victims more successful (so they can steal more in the long term).
That's just what I was saying. The programmer's task is always "automate what was new 3 years ago, and routine 1 year ago, using what got automated last time to help." It's a never-ending cycle, as automating X just allows you to do Y, which eventually becomes straightforward enough to automate.
There's nothing really new for programmers because, if you're doing it right, everything is really new for programmers all the time. Once anything becomes routine, we turn around and automate it, so the work is always this set of tasks we haven't figured out how to automate set.
Only a corner of Silly Valley is working on "Web 2.0" BS. There's a lot of real work going on too. The products offered by the likes of Facebook and Google may seem frivolous, but the backends needed to offer those products are changing the (back-end) world. As they knowhow to work reliably at a scale of 10k, 100k, 1M servers gets productized and offered in AWS and Azure (OK, those 2 are Seattle, but still) we see the beginning of the end of needing your own data center.
As a back-end guy, the fact I can now write three-tier web service that scales indefinitely as a hobby project, by plugging together AWS parts is pretty amazing. If I need 10000 cores for a few hours to model that flying car, space elevator, or machine learning system, I can not only get that easily on a moments notice, I can get it cheaply (a penny per core-hour cheap - that's something).
Pure awesome. :)
No, my argument is that he made a generalization about an entire population based on averages, so those generalizations are wrong - and racist.
Wait, what? Generalizations about a population can be quite accurate - as statistical measures of the population. That says little enough about any given individual, of course. E.g., you might be able to predict pretty accurately the number of children-per-woman in a given population over the next decade, but of course that tells you next to nothing about how big your neighbor's family will be. You can scream "urraysis" all day, but it's not really an argument.
We do have to avoid making generalizations even if they are based on sound averages. That's an ethics issue, not a scientific one.
I prefer to see good science be done. As a culture, we should focus on educating ourselves on the difference between individuals and groups, not on pretending obviously-true things are false. And we certainly shouldn't punish scientists for publishing true things (not that TFA was about scientific work, of course).
We shouldn't let any individuals be profiled in one way or another because of the stats on their ethnicity.
"Profiling" is one of those words that appeals to emotion to overcome logical flaws in one's argument, just like screaming urraysis at people, but still I agree - you can't reason from statistical trends to individuals, it just doesn't work that way.
Sure, and if there are other traits linked to those visible traits, they'd be just as mixed. It would all show up as statistical correlations in populations. Is anyone talking about predicting the behavior of individuals?
"Race" may be a bit of nonsense, especially these days when travel is so easy and so diffusion is fast, but I wouldn't find correlation between behavior and genetic factors that happen to produce visible distinctions unlikely. I'd be shocked if it weren't a minor factor compared to culture, behavior-wise, but that doesn't mean it's not measurable.
So your argument is "It offends me, so it's wrong"? It wouldn't surprise me at all if many aspects of behavior were influenced to some small degree by genetics. Individuals vary, but statistical averages across populations that correlate somewhat in both behavior and genetic similarity? Does that really sound so far-fetched?
I think culture is the dominant factor in how we behave (if you're talking statistical trends of large groups), but not the only factor. Environmental and genetic factors seem likely to influence behavior as well - why wouldn't they?
In any case, we should go with the data, not with the least offensive hypothesis.
If you want to claim that up to 95% of the Universe is made up of dark matter and energy, fine. We can watch geysers on a gas giant's moon, but we can't detect 95% of the space between our Earth and the probe watching? Come now, something is wrong with that claim. Oh I know, someone decided that "dark matter and energy don't exist in our Solar system". Then why is it absent in our solar system?
Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant. All we know about it is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating over time. No idea why or how (or at least stuff that's been explained at my limited level of understanding is just guesswork), but the measurements aren't controversial. And the energy that would be required to cause this expansion, overcoming gravity and all, would be the dominant thing in the universe (or maybe space just works that way, no energy required?).
Dark matter is most likely here in the solar system, no reason for it not to be, but we don't know how to build a specific detector. It's existence is pretty clear now from the combination of galactic rotation rates, gravitational lensing from stuff we can't otherwise see, and the CMBR data. The CMBR data showed the same ~5:1 ratio of dark matter to normal matter as the WIMP dark matter theory of galaxy rotation, to two significant digits. It's nature is unknown, except by its negatives - it doesn't interact with light, and it's not fast-moving like neutrinos.
This is about filling in gaps in mathematical models to make them work, there is nothing ever "detected". Everything used to claim "we detected dark matter/energy" exists without those two things, like gravitational lensing.
Not sure what you want by "detected". Dark energy, whatever it may be, is a placeholder name for an effect that inarguably exists. The measurements of large-scale expansion are clear. Dark matter was "filling in gaps in mathematical models" (the place all hypotheses start) 10 years ago. Now it's been detected to the same extent the Higgs Boson has: theory predicted measurements, but measurements that require some math to understand. In neither case do we have a machine that goes "ping" when a HB/DM particle hits it, what we have is data that's explained very accurately by theory, and not at all by the null hypothesis.
In the case of dark matter, there are teams working on building a specific detector, as we know so little about it, and there's much good physics to be done once we know more. Particle masses? Strong force interaction? Heck, we'll learn a ton just from the nature of the detector that works: by what mechanism can dark matter possibly interact with normal matter (beyond gravity)? Neutrinos were hard enough to detect and physicists were pretty sure how they interacted.
From a logical perspective we have been able to study quite a bit of our solar system hands on, and we have never been able to detect either dark matter or dark energy
So all things that exist, exist within our solar system and are detectable with existing technology? The Higgs boson didn't exist 2 years ago, but exists now? I'm struggling to follow your reasoning.
There were many theories to explain galactic rotation rates: MOND, WIMPs, MACHOs, many more I've forgotten. But out of the whole pack, WIMPs predicted the recent CMBR data accurately. When the math works, and accurately predicts unrelated measurements unknown when the hypothesis was made, well, science means we go with that until we have something better. We still don't know enough about dark matter to build a detector, but that's not required - what matters is that this theory survived when the others were falsified.
I'm sure there are many physicists cooking up more specific hypotheses about what dark matter "really is", and whoever's right will have the correct recipe for a detector. Only then will we know stuff like particle masses, and maybe even get something better than the Standard Model out of the mess.
Just like "Climate Change" , it is "settled" and no further investigation is to be done.
You couldn't be more wrong: it is "settled" and billions of dollars of public research funding are required, or the Earth will die in a fire! Of course, none of that research will be allowed to contradict existing claims, or even question them, but if you think that matters you miss the whole point.
MOND can't explain the CMBR data at all, while dark matter, WIMPs specifically, predicted the observed proportions accurately.
So we know now: dark matter is there, it's ~80% of matter, and it's WIMPs not MACHOs. String theory predicts a family of 1-plank-mass-ish particles - just one more untestable string theory claim, but it would fit dark matter pretty well. If we ever actually build a dark matter detector that works, the worst might happen: we might have to start taking string theory seriously too! Eeeesh.
Dark matter was there in todays proportions in the hot early universe, so no. All the MACHO theories went by the wayside with the CMBR data, it's WIMPs now for sure.
Well, I have no idea what protections are in the Ozstitution, but you'd have to be nuts to see it as endorsement of a specific religion. As long as anyone can put the religious icon of their choice on the stamp, the government's clean IMO. At least in the US, there's no constitutional protection from ever being exposed to religion.
Now, I could see an objection to putting a foreign head of state on a stamp, but the Dalai Lama, cool guy that he is, declared himself no longer the ruler of Tibet years ago, and permanently dissociated the religious leadership from the secular government-in-exile of Tibet.
It was also very dependent on the cast. It takes a lot for the audience to relate to guys in alien costumes, even SF nerds like me. I'm doubtful the magic will happen again.
Wow, a lot of the cast died so young - Jeff Conaway to drugs, Andreas Katsulas to smoking, Richard Biggs at 44 to a heart condition. Good to see Stephen Furst still going (aside from playing my favorite character on B5, he successfully changed his dangerous lifestyle during the B5 years, losing almost 100 pounds).
But whatever else goes wrong, at least the fighters "in space" won't fly like jets. Did any other SF TV series or movie get that right? The space battles are still cool to watch, aging effects and all, just because it makes some physical sense.
Maybe they could get around to putting the series up on Netflix
All the discs are available, last I looked. I don't know why you'd look for anything on the vast wasteland that is Netflix streaming - there's nothing there but tumbleweeds and Netflix-original stuff.
So, wait, you're upset that the characters were flawed? Aliens acted in ways that made little sense? That's what made the show good - no one was perfect, the "good guys" did stupid shit too, and not everyone seemed rational. I liked it.
But yeah, season 5 had little to offer.
For me the show's attraction was watching Andreas Katsulas, Peter Jurasik, and Stephen Furst playing against one another, and the arcs of their characters. Londo discovering morality too late to do anything but suffer for his sins, G'Kar discovering what it means to be a religious leader (some of JMSs best writing IMO), and Vir showing that even in the most corrupt society, a strong moral compass serves you well in the long run.