Yeah, and then they went and discovered that pesky neutron. Oh, and quantum mechanics. And don't forget, quantum field theory, an absolute plethora of particles, neutrinos, and both special and general relativity! But even before these developments drove a stake firmly through the heart of "gravity as electromagnetism in disguise", as you note:
Attempts to unify the two basic forces of the universe, usually by reducing gravitation to electromagnetism, was part of the electromagnetic program, but in spite of much work, no satisfactory solution was found.
Now, of course, just because they didn't find a satisfactory solution doesn't mean that there isn't one. However, in the meantime, solutions that ARE satisfactory have been obtained that describe gravitation as an interaction that is very much not reducible to E&M, or as curvature of space-time by mass-energy that need not be (and in the literal bulk of cases, the quark-quark interactions that govern nucleons and nuclear binding energies, is not) electrodynamic in origin. While I agree that to a large extent particle "mass" is the self-energy of its local field structure and might end up ALL being field energy in the end (once we unify field theory properly and completely), there are more fields than just gravitation and electromagnetism and more elementary particles than just electrons and "nuclei", which is about all that was known in 1904. Also, Maxwell's Equations simply don't have any ROOM for gravitation, with or without magnetic charges (symmetric completion). Whatever the TOE turns out to be, it (almost certainly) isn't "just" going to be MEs classical or quantum or QED tied to ELECTRONS. You see, sir, there are those pesky definitely-not-an-electron neutron, neutrino, muon, quark, photon, gluon, heavy vector boson thingies, many of which we can directly "see" in modern collider experiments, others which we can almost directly infer (quarks BOTH from structure AND from observations of jets).
And then there is the Higgs particle, which has possibly maybe mostly been seen but which awaits a few more sigma and which (sigh) sure, might turn out to be a chimera once again. But it is a pretty compelling theory and it, not MEs, does appear to provide an explanation for mass.
Perpetuation of an old idea in the teeth of all of the evidence accrued in the meantime that it was incorrect requires a sort of wilful blindness and is indeed the sign of either a crackpot or a troll. OR you could just be kidding on the trollish side of things, but reposting an old thing from well over 100 years ago... really?
Yeah, but then you get into the question of open vs closed, cyclic vs one-shot, and unknown physics. Not to mention our own impending ordinary death a few hundred billion years before the smallest stars cool. I'd rather worry about the possibility of nuclear war, pandemic disease, global starvation, or the coming ice age. Or squirrels. Squirrels are very worrisome, with their evil little noses and their big furry tails, ravaging the bird feeders and predating on my peach trees right before the peaches are harvestable. Alarming!
And if you forget the fact that the actual source of the free energy being used is Mr. Sun -- for EITHER diesel OR biodiesel (with the only real question being when the sunshine that contributed the energy occurred) -- one could read your words and become quite alarmed!
That's the REALLY funny thing about the whole debate. Outside of nuclear energy, 100% of everything else IS solar energy. Hydro? Really solar. Natural Gas? Solar. Oil-based fuel? Solar. Ethanol? Solar. Bio-whatever? Solar.
Wait, I take that back. If you have a lab that gets electricity from a nuclear power plant and grow your algae or whatever in artificial light, I suppose any resulting energy wouldn't be solar.
What we're really arguing about (well, not "we" because I'm not:-) isn't solar vs something else, it is whether it is easier/cheaper to mine and refine ancient sunlight than it is to commoditize and exploit contemporary sunlight. There isn't any simple answer to this because the costs and benefits of the two aren't constant in time. Even if you leave out the climate change "religion" (either way!) and all discussion of "externalities", PV solar is at this point quite competitive and getting more so as technologies continue to advance. Ethanol based fuels are also becoming increasingly competitive, corn-based or not. Bio-diesel may or may not make sense -- for a friend of mine who collects used cooking oil and uses it for his diesel, it makes a LOT of sense, for example -- but the only real way to decide is to do a fair cost-benefit analysis, not assert that bio-diesel costs more energy to make than you get burning it. That's just nonsense.
Storage is going to be getting more expensive as batteries get bigger and materials become more scarce. Your phone battery degrades, so will your community-sized battery pack. R&D will help things - it usually does, but supply and demand is going to be a killer.
Probably not. Actually there is a very good chance that they are going to get a lot cheaper as they stop using relatively scarce materials. At least if you believe any reasonable fraction of what is being reported in various media, such as:
Bill Joy is in the category of folks I'd generally classify as Not An Idiot, so this -- among many other threads and research avenues -- are likely to drop the cost of batteries to roughly 1/10th of what they are now, with better operational characteristics to boot.
What is this "consequence to your karma" stuff? Aside from the fact that the post is obviously inappropriate religious trolling and entirely off topic (especially for a first post) and hence EARNS some bad karma, we are WAY down in the thread at this point and nobody cares.
Look, poster human who allegedly is trying to convert people to Islam: The Quran is a violent -- incredibly violent, almost maximally violent as far as comparative religious mythology is concerned -- inconsistent, absurd collection of assertions. Its only -- only -- possible claim to being perfect truth is that it claims, as often as possible "This document is perfect truth". Here, look, I can make the same claim -- "This post is perfect truth". Do you now believe it? No, you judge it on the basis of certain common-sense comparisons to your prior beliefs and your life experience, that is, the EVIDENCE for how the world works. If you completely lacked this common sense base, you'd do things like walk off of buildings because you disbelieve in gravity, burn your hands on the red hot stove the third or fourth time just because the red coils are pretty, be unable to drive your car or operate simple machinery.
Having read the Quran cover to cover multiple times, it is a purely extortionist document. Count the number of times Allah threatens to burn up unbelievers. My favorite -- where he details how he will hold unbelievers in the fire and burn off their skin, then magically regrow their skin back so he can iterate, burning their skin off in an unterminated do-loop for the rest of eternity. It isn't ever "believe this because it makes the most sense and is in perfect correspondence with your experience of the world and the evidence of your senses" it is "believe this because if you don't I will HURT YOU FOREVER!" It's like Muhammed took the hell meme from Christianity -- where it is really only barely expressed in a few places and is itself inconsistent and silly and quite possibly an add-on from long after Jesus lived, IF Jesus as a unitary entity and not a syncretic creation ever lived -- and said "That's the ticket! If they won't believe this crap straight up, I'll scare the robes right off of them with all of the horrific stuff Allah will do to them if they call me a liar!"
The beauty of evidence-based reasoning is that it is self-correcting and anybody can use it. You don't need angels dictating to you in caves, you don't need angels showing you golden tablets, you don't need mystic poets or prophets or seers. You don't have to be beloved by God (if God exists) or selected by God (if God exists) or be brainwashed into considering some documentary collection to be the one authority on how the Universe REALLY works BEYOND QUESTION at the expense of completely turning off your critical reasoning facility when examining certain aspects of the world. Anybody can play. Yes, you probably need an IQ on the high side of 85 or 90, but that's enough to have a fair bit of common sense and to be able to learn not to play with fire or walk off of tall buildings.
"Science" is just the collection of beliefs about the real world that are supported by a mostly consistent network of evidence and evidence supported beliefs. Like a belief in the law of gravitation -- gravity doesn't CARE what you believe -- as you grow up and drop things (including yourself) it will teach you what it is, and you can either learn or not learn and if you walk off a cliff in the future it and the laws of physics, chemistry and biology that govern your material existence will cause you to splat at the bottom and cease as an organized named biological entity quite independent of your beliefs. Using those laws you can infer the age of the Universe and conclude that documents that assert that the Universe is (say) 6000 years old are absurdly wrong. Using simple common sense and math you can conclude that documents that assert that there was a big flood that covered the entire surface of the world from a rain that lasted 40 days and nights, and that
But there are even more shallow gravity wells in the asteroid belt, and plenty of water there as well. A single asteroid may contain more water than all the oceans of earth [space.com].
This didn't seem right to me, and it's not. Reading the very article you linked in to defend this assertion, the asteroid in question contains more FRESH water than all of the LAKES AND RIVERS on Earth. About five times as much fresh water, but only 1/7 of the total water combined. There is a lot of water in the Earth's oceans.
This doesn't really affect your conclusions -- as you say, there is a lot of water available on some asteroids or various moons in the solar system that have much shallower gravity wells than the Earth or Mars -- but that said, no need to exaggerate.
We can teach drivers not to start the car engine with the car in "drive" because they might run someone over, or we can just design the car not to start except in park.
We can also design cars to be incapable of driving faster than 30 miles per hour, because that is determined (by a committee of "experts", of course) to be the maximum "safe" speed that embraces 99% of all drivers on the road.
We'd all just pay for this safety. Pay in time. Pay in convenience. Pay in no longer having any possibility of "racing" a car or pushing the performance envelope for cars. Pay in no longer permitting anybody, anywhere, to design a car that does NOT have the speed governor built right in, and use all of the other crap that the CoE decided was necessary for even a raging drunk to be safe behind the wheel, including the car-surround baby bumpers and reinforced passenger compartment and feature that won't let the car start without all passengers wearing a kevlar vest and safety helmet.
This is an argument that is as old as time. If you like working with a fascist language that only permits you do allocate memory through an opaque interface that cheerfully trades off speed for an illusion of security, there are many to choose from. C, it is absolutely true, has comparatively few safety nets, although there are tools and techniques for making it as safe as you like. It is also true that it is difficult to write more efficient code than one can write in C short of coding in assembler, and C allows one to inline assembler for those cases where only assembler will let you access certain systems features (instead of waiting until the CoE decide that they are "safe"). Similarly, even good old Fortran has its place if you are doing massive linear algebra and want to optimize it for bleeding edge CPU features.
Could one modify C a lot more minimally, to make it safer than it is by nature while still not enforcing the OO kool-ade and outright prohibiting the use of malloc and pointers? Sure, probably -- some of the tools out there basically do that. But there are times when one can write code with malloc and pointers that is just plain magic compared to what one can get with OO opaque memory management.
Yep yep. A book a day (or very close to that) from roughly when I was seven or eight years old until I was 32 and my first son was born (which very much put a damper on that). I was probably the only kid "ever" to go to Duke with a footlocker full of paperbacks that I stacked up on the one meager shelf on the wall of my dorm room so it reached to the ceiling. At the time I had to cut back due to offspring (a period that lasted almost 25 years, and to some extent continues today) I had at least 3000 to 4000 books that I owned personally, mostly paperbacks. I still own maybe half of these. With kids, I was lucky to read 1-2 a week -- a rate equal to that of a "super" reader, especially when they were young, although at various points that rate would go up due to reading them kid's books (the books I'm talking about were almost entirely "adult full length novels" although I shamelessly include Baum and ERB and books that now would be counted as "teen" novels as books of that grade dominated my pre-teen reading.
At this point -- approaching 63 -- I probably read 3 to 5 novels a week, entirely on my kindle book reader on my tablet (or sometimes my phone). Kindle books, especially new writings in SF&F, are often as inexpensive in modern currency as used paperbacks or paperback in general were back in the 60's and early 70's -- I remember well buying new paperbacks for prices ranging from $0.50 to $0.95, and my bitterness as they rose first to $1.95, then $2.95, and then as high as $4.95 over the 70's and 80', much faster than the value of money so they were actually more expensive. I try to spend under $4 for kindle books, and have entire series that I've binge-read that cost $1.99 to $2.99 each (and a few that have cost $0.99 each for full length books, under a dollar again!).
There are, however, two DIFFERENT totals that can describe my lifetime reading. One is the actual total number of books I've read AT LEAST once, without counting rereads. The other is the total number of times I've read any book, including one I've read before, cover to cover. Because I am space and money limited, much of the reading above has been rereads. For example, I've read things like LOTR or the Chronicles of Amber series (books 1 through 9, the original) at least dozens of times, each. Hell, I've read both of them in English dozens of times and in Spanish a time or two. Then there are books that I've read that sucked or that were OK, but I just didn't enjoy them so once was enough (All Quiet on the Western Front, a small mountain of so-called "literature" I was actually forced to read in school, much of it so unremarkable that I can't recall titles or plot). Long ago I decided I like things with "plot", rather than the anecdotal ramblings of period pieces or books that are the moral equivalent of today's reality TV.
I'm guessing that in roughly 55 years of power reading, 30 of that unencumbered, I've read at least ten thousand unique books, and have read "a novel" at least twice that including rereads, making it my average to reread a book twice, although it is a pretty biased average with a smaller set being a lot more than twice, a larger set being twice, and a fairly large set being just once and done.
Why do people -- including my own kids -- not read so much now? Ever so many reasons. TV is a huge one -- I grew up in India in the 60's without TV and it was reading or wandering through the alleys and scrub desert around my house, and I did a fair bit of both. Video games -- I go through phases even now when I will burn a day or ten on the e-cocaine of computer gaming (working on Divinity on Steam as soon as I quit this, but have burned weeks to months of wake-time on WoW, D1 and D2, nethack etc, Baldur's Gate, electronic sudoku, electronic jigsaw puzzles -- and yes, these seriously displace reading). A school system that places no value on reading per se and that forces one to read books that suck (however "intellectual" they may be) instead of stuff that is fun enough to compete with TV, spo
I mean, stupid questions. 50 years ago we had Viet Nam, the cold war, racism that makes the tiny flares of it that we have no seem like a joke by comparison. Women were pretty much chattel. The world teetered on the perpetual brink of nuclear war. Poverty (as a percentage of the population) was rampant worldwide and what COUNTED as poverty was a lot poorer than what is counted as poverty now. A huge fraction of the world's population lived under outright tyrannies and oligarchies without even the fig leaf of democracy. Information was tightly controlled, and communication at long distances was enormously expensive. Medicine was comparatively primitive even in the first world; in the third world it was still the purview of tribal shamans. Life expectancy was much lower. Finally, a major fraction of the technology that makes our lives enormously richer even if one is comparatively "poor" simply didn't exist.
Of course if you were male, white, middle to upper class, living in the first world, or male and upper class in the second and third world, you might have thought it was just peachy.
Hey, I'm on the wrong side of it already. In some ways, my brain works a lot better than it did when I was young. For example, when I was 18/19 I was getting B's in courses that I know teach. Then, I could barely remember the laws of physics and all of the formulas involved -- largely because I didn't understand them and couldn't derive them. Now I don't even bother preparing if I need to show students how to solve some problem out of an intro physics textbook. I can solve all of them (within statistical noise of "stupid algebra mistakes" or "misreading the problem" which I can still manage at my advanced age). Period. Usually very quickly, with a fully annotated explanation, if necessary accompanied by derivations all the way back to e.g. Newton's Laws and empirical force laws etc.
On the other hand, if I work VERY HARD, I can learn all of the names of the students in a class I teach as long as it isn't a large group lecture class, over the course of a semester. But sadly, I forget their names even when I manage this within a year or two, with at most a very few exceptions. I can learn some things incredibly quickly -- perhaps because I have a well-established matrix of knowledge into which I can insert things, hook them up to things I already know, make sense of them, and thereby remember them in an easily accessible and useful way -- while at the same time I probably do worse at remembering piles of disconnected facts, the sorts of things I would work on "memorizing" back as a callow undergraduate. I still remember going over pages of formulas right before going into an exam, drilling them so I'd remember them long enough to get through the exam (and then promptly forgetting most of them) where what I SHOULD have been doing is learning to DERIVE them all from a tiny set of first principles that I would have used over and over (had I done this) so that I didn't EVER "memorize" them, I would have just plain learned them, as I eventually did, after I started to TEACH them.
That's why I view studies like the top article with a certain degree of skepticism, in spite of the fact that it (apparently) attracts flames. I'm not a neuroscientist, it is true, but I am a friggin' expert on neural networks and predictive modeling and information theory, have actually written a patent application for a "true AI" that I let expire because of a lack of funding more than a lack of ability to implement it, am married to an ex-neuroscientist who is now a physician -- and I used to type all of her neuroscience papers back when she was doing research as she didn't know how to type and I type like the wind. And yes, I teach. I take teaching very seriously. I study teaching, learning, and the brain, and I teach my STUDENTS about the brain and learning as much as possible because as my anecdotes above indicate, there are indeed good ways and bad ways to try to learn things. One of the many things I teach them -- sometimes pretty forcefully -- is that sleep is indeed the time short term memory is turned into long term memory. It is also a time where the brain pulls off some near miraculous background bookkeeping and housecleaning without the active participation of our interior monologue intentional self. We (our brains) actually do "work" in our sleep and a very common experience is to work very hard on something one day, sleep on it, and return to it the next day and just "see" all at once what the solution is, even though one spent NO time actually verbally sequentially reasoning about it while awake in the meantime. I have guided students who are trying to learn physics on four hours of sleep a night (and gradually driving themselves crazy in the process) into sleeping a disciplined MINIMUM of 6 to 8, working towards a minimum of 8, and thereby rescued them from the D or F they were inevitably working themselves towards while damaging their sanity and completely destroying their personal happiness.
Am I a Ph.D. brain researcher? No, but I am a Ph.D. and I do know a fair bit about the brain, memory, a
I'm a member of the post-60 cadre myself, and all I can say is that my memory is indeed failing to some extent. I refuse to state whether or not it is correlated with my sex hormone levels, in part because I possess no good way to measure them. I'm pretty sure, however, that they aren't coming out of my ass.
Since you are already modded up to 5, I'll reply in verbal support. The OSI stack is more of an abstraction after the first 3.5 layers -- the top three layers are all about the software that uses the network, not the network per se, and honestly I think that the idea of applying "net neutrality" to the application, presentation, and session layers is an absurdity as they have never really been a "networking" issue but more a matter of choice of software design at the two ends of the connection. For example, one way of interpreting "neutrality" would be a requirement that the designers of internet-based games write their games to be playable on any top level windowing system in all operating systems -- something like under Steam on steroids. If I wrote a simple game intended to run only under Linux and function only using one particular graphics stack and library set AND wrote it to run over an ISP-run network, I personally could be held in violation of a 7 layer net neutrality law. Imagine Apple, Microsoft, Linux, BSD, OS/2 all being forced by "net neutrality" to make their presentation layers interoperable. A nightmare, impossible to enforce, and stupid -- it would actually inhibit competition, not support it.
What the poster INTENDED, I think, is that the ISP (which is really the NN rules are all about, because they ARE granted a de facto near-monopoly over network connection in many if not most locales -- very few places have a choice of (say) four or five ISPs all with their own wires, and even those places are forced to move packets over common backbones belonging to many different companies (do a traceroute to a dozen distant places or services that you might use if you don't believe me) -- not differentiate their treatment of the bottom 3-4 layers on the basis of the toplevel application being run, but applying NN rules to the application layers themselves is IMO clearly inappropriate at the level of an FCC action and an open invitation to enforce a "universal standard" for all of these layers that believe me, you Would Not Like if you had it because OBVIOUSLY that "standard" would be set by Micro$oft and/or Apple or maybe Google and guess who would control it and regulate it and manipulate it to literally squash all competition that didn't PAY them for complying with the top layer "standards" they set...
I personally do agree that including TCP/UDP in the NN rules makes some sense, but that is primarily because the application layer INTERFACE and the transport layer ROUTING are heavily intertwined -- TCP is designed to make a network connection "reliable" by handling out of order deliver, transmission timeouts, and so on, and an ISP who wanted to MIGHT be able to screw around with this within some set or rules applied "strictly" only to the first three layers. Hence a need for "3.5" layers -- basically requiring ISPs to remain in the business of selling connections that provide their clients with an IP address, some level of bandwidth, some guarantee of QoS that is not modulated by the particular use the client makes of the network within the bounds of some Acceptable Use Agreement. In other words, holding them responsible as a public utility like a power company not to constantly turn off the power to, say, a predominantly black neighborhood in order to keep the power on in the white neighborhood next door, or worse, not to keep the power reliably on unless you buy all of your light bulbs and electrical appliances from the power company itself.
At the same time, I am sensitive to the practical realities of networking (I've written network applications and managed networks all the way back to twisted pair networks without any surviving name). If you are running a network, even in a single building, with your very own routers and DHCP server(s) and so on, that network is GOING to have a finite bandwidth. If you have power users in your organization, one of the IS going to be perfectly capable of saturating your network and degrading the QoS to all of your other users -- the sort of
OK, so they did a study comparing young people and old people, where the young people all had smooth skin and high levels of sex hormones, and the old people all were somewhat wrinkled and had lowered levels of sex hormones. The young people remembered more than the old people. Hence, we can obviously conclude that having a smooth skin and a powerful sex drive improves memory.
What's that latin again? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Sounds so much better than in English: correlation is not causality!
Sure, sure, they found similar correspondences in young and old people, but they still miss this point. Both could have the same independent cause, and indeed in the case of the young people it is rather likely that they do, since presumably they don't have atrophied brain parts that usually produce deep sleep but just didn't sleep deeply anyway!
About the best one can do from this from the sound of it is: Not getting good sleep is bad for your memory.
Wow. That's sure news. Nobody even suspected! And some people don't get good sleep because they drink too much coffee in the evening. And others don't get good sleep because they are in pain all the time. And still others don't get good sleep because they have obstructive sleep apnea. And whaddya know -- some of them have atrophy in a part of the brain that helps produce good sleep.
I was going to say something else about this, but I dozed off for a moment there and now I forgot.
But if you are a tech-hating Luddite aging flower child who believes that silicon dioxide crystals with various dopings, worn on the body or just kept in a house, affect your health in beneficial ways, you can't even pretend to convince yourself that you "understand" a cell phone the way you do the channeling of crystal energies with sacred symbols. This creates a state of cognitive dissonance -- what you don't understand you fear and you resent in equal parts. The resentment is made even greater when all of the smart people in the Universe make fun of you for believing in magic, so you retaliate by deliberately disbelieving in double blind, placebo controlled evidence because if you ever let yourself accept that it is the only sound basis for justified belief you'd have to admit that all of your beliefs about the healing powers of herbs and crystals and chanting various mantras (or just garden variety praying to Jesus) are pure bullshit, as they have all failed DBPCStudies, repeatedly, over decades. You also mistrust and resent anyone who actually understands what crystals actually are and how they are put together and knows at least approximately what the word "energy" actually MEANS (as in, knows the dimensions of the quantity and how it is connected to things like fields, interactions, and motion) as they can say things like "cell phones are utterly harmless, except when they catch fire in your pocket or are dropped on your head from a tall building" or "a quartz crystal has no measurable physical field (other than the light reflected from its surface) at length scales much greater than molecular dimensions away, even in the neighborhood of its sharp edges and points, and is utterly incapable of affecting your health (outside of the placebo effect) no matter how many "good intentions" you direct at it or how many mantras you chant".
The really sad thing is that an entire state would incorporate this bullshit into their formal health advice. The only possible basis (assuming actual scientists and physicians were consulted on the matter) for this would have to be some sort of massive conspiracy theory mentality that is convinced that the many studies that have found no link, including studies with a million or so participants:
are the result of a huge government multinational corporation conspiracy intended to conceal negative effects and that the one or two studies that have found some borderline "significant" result as gospel truth that proves that the conspiracy they've always suspected is REAL. Damn that CDC anyway!
But hey, take one or two absolutely marginal results, ignore the fact that these results are scientifically inconsistent and implausible, ignore the absolute certainty that with the p=0.05 standard for "statistical significance" by idiots often in small studies it is a near certainty that you will have opportunities to conclude that:
2W of non-ionizing power, only 1 W MAX of which can be directed towards your body, at frequencies where the energy just doesn't penetrate much into your body. It is about as risky as taking a christmas tree light bulb, putting it in a cell-phone transparent box, and putting that inside your pocket.
I'd sooner believe the connection between high voltage transmission towers and cancer. The power at ground level is again absurdly low, but at least there I can imagine the high voltage arcing into the air at points near the insulators, generating a surplus of ozone, that falls to ground level at some measurable rate and... no, I don't believe that either...
Murdoch is keeping the entities associated with political control, while unloading all of the apolitical entertainment "fluff". I was very curious to see if he would give up Fox News to the uncertain control of Disney, who (after all) has to be at least a little bit responsive to its entertainment audience and who MIGHT not continue to prop up the POTUS when all others (except for the uber-loyal National Enquirer) actually point it out when he lies or tweets an insulting comment about a member of Congress's personal appearance or how awful it is that THEY (if they are a Democrat) are accused of sexual harassment.
This is just one of the things that Madison, and the court, have gotten wrong. The forces do not, in fact, tend to balance out in time because Madison had no concept of the degree of accumulation of wealth that would occur over the next two centuries and how much this would lead to a small oligarchy controlling immense resources and correspondingly acting as a superselector for the actual private citizen's choices. Shockingly, the courts have even recognized corporations themselves as having many of the rights of private citizens, in particular the "right" to petition the government via lobbying. In this way, the entire concept of democracy (republican or not) is subverted, as in the actual constitution corporations are NOT recognized as political entities -- all political power ultimately devolves to we, the people, the citizen. A corporation is not a citizen, nor is it a democracy.
Sadly, the only way we can get out of this at this point is EITHER having a congress that passes laws that muzzle lobbying -- personally I'd prohibit ALL lobbying, as the baby drowned long ago and all that is left is the sewer sludge swamp water of extremists on all sides, fueled by the oligarchs who maintain power as long as they keep wethepeople too distracted to care and too stupid to want to. Then we'd have to have a court that would actually consider the point that corporations are NOT citizens and do NOT have a right to "freedom of speech" -- only individual persons (owners or employees alike!) do, and only to the extent that they are willing to expend their own personal resources on it. OR we'd have to pass an amendment to the constitution specifically limiting the power of corporate entities to participate in or influence government decision making. Frankly I'd prefer the latter, but it will probably require the second American revolution to bring it about.
In the meantime, much as I appreciate the sentiment that corporate lobbying SHOULD be, well, not "treason" but a pretty serious crime, the lobbying part per se is the tip of the iceberg. I could even live with it as long as the real problem is repaired.
Opensecrets (among other places) follows this all the way down to the following brutal fact. It costs an average of around 11 million dollars to run for the Senate. It costs almost 2 million dollars to run for the House. It costs well over 100 million dollars to run for President. Actual donations from private citizens making less than $200,000/year constitute about 6 or 7 PERCENT of this. Well over 90% of the cost of running for office comes not from We, The People, but from corporations, filtered through PACs and the parties themselves, and those corporations are controlled by a tiny handful of the world's wealthiest people.
Nothing illustrates the corruption more clearly than the fact that many -- arguably most -- of the PACs contribute roughly equal amounts to Republicans AND Democrats running against each other. They don't care who wins, regardless of their stated position on whatever "issue" the PAC is supposed to give a shit about.
"You are making a LOT of assumptions there using faulty human logic.
Actually, I'm saying: "If you make a lot of assumptions, the probability that your conclusion is correct goes down to the extent that your assumptions themselves are not certain". Which is, I reiterate, Bayes theorem. The assumptions are called "priors", and one problem with argumentation in general is that one rarely has a sound basis for even assigning a probability TO an assumption like "NASA and the government know there are space aliens but they choose not to release the evidence accompanied by an announcement to that effect". Which is basically what you are asserting, and what the entire movie you offer as "evidence" is asserting.
You are also asserting that our understanding of the laws of physics, specifically the ones that make interstellar travel almost infinitely unlikely (if our understanding is correct) is INcorrect, in a relevant way that enables interstellar travel in reasonable times and for reasonable costs. The point you miss there is that you have absolutely no basis for believing them to be wrong in such a way. Nobody does. There is no evidence for it. There is no coherent argument for it. That doesn't mean that it isn't possible that we are wrong -- of course it is -- it just means that it is the height of absurdity to assign a GREATER degree of belief, not even in a THEORY of FTL travel (or hell, slower than light travel that doesn't require the combined GDP of the entire world to be spent for several decades to send a single tiny ship that might arrive at the NEAREST star in a time frame of centuries), but to the notion itself that it is possible and the hell with physics and experiment and common sense.
As for the movie -- ROTFL. Seriously? Complete with patched in clips of rockets taking off, spiral galaxies, and with the bizarre "Ooo-na! Ooo-na-na-na" music played after each clip and sonorous pronouncement. We simply have different standards as to what constitutes "evidence", specifically reliable and reproducible evidence, evidence that verifies actual hypotheses or theories, evidence that permits one to make predictions.
Again, if you add up all of the assumptions required to believe that space aliens are hanging out in orbit all of the time, but are generally invisible and being hidden from us by BOTH the aliens themselves AND by a mind-numbingly vast trans-world-government conspiracy, where miraculously NOBODY IN THE KNOW has ever outed it (miraculous because truly huge numbers of people would have to be in the know) -- its as silly as believing that the moon landing was done in Hollywood. In fact, the hypothesis that the moon landing WAS done in Hollywood and that we've actually never sent anybody into orbit so that your "evidence" is fake of a fake is probably very slightly more reasonable, and no, I don't believe that either and for the same reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and then they went and discovered that pesky neutron. Oh, and quantum mechanics. And don't forget, quantum field theory, an absolute plethora of particles, neutrinos, and both special and general relativity! But even before these developments drove a stake firmly through the heart of "gravity as electromagnetism in disguise", as you note:
Attempts to unify the two basic forces of the universe, usually by reducing gravitation to electromagnetism, was part of the electromagnetic program, but in spite of much work, no satisfactory solution was found.
Now, of course, just because they didn't find a satisfactory solution doesn't mean that there isn't one. However, in the meantime, solutions that ARE satisfactory have been obtained that describe gravitation as an interaction that is very much not reducible to E&M, or as curvature of space-time by mass-energy that need not be (and in the literal bulk of cases, the quark-quark interactions that govern nucleons and nuclear binding energies, is not) electrodynamic in origin. While I agree that to a large extent particle "mass" is the self-energy of its local field structure and might end up ALL being field energy in the end (once we unify field theory properly and completely), there are more fields than just gravitation and electromagnetism and more elementary particles than just electrons and "nuclei", which is about all that was known in 1904. Also, Maxwell's Equations simply don't have any ROOM for gravitation, with or without magnetic charges (symmetric completion). Whatever the TOE turns out to be, it (almost certainly) isn't "just" going to be MEs classical or quantum or QED tied to ELECTRONS. You see, sir, there are those pesky definitely-not-an-electron neutron, neutrino, muon, quark, photon, gluon, heavy vector boson thingies, many of which we can directly "see" in modern collider experiments, others which we can almost directly infer (quarks BOTH from structure AND from observations of jets).
And then there is the Higgs particle, which has possibly maybe mostly been seen but which awaits a few more sigma and which (sigh) sure, might turn out to be a chimera once again. But it is a pretty compelling theory and it, not MEs, does appear to provide an explanation for mass.
Perpetuation of an old idea in the teeth of all of the evidence accrued in the meantime that it was incorrect requires a sort of wilful blindness and is indeed the sign of either a crackpot or a troll. OR you could just be kidding on the trollish side of things, but reposting an old thing from well over 100 years ago... really?
And a coop is where we can put people after a coup, drinking celebratory champagne from a coupe, after driving them there in our coupe'!
Yeah, but then you get into the question of open vs closed, cyclic vs one-shot, and unknown physics. Not to mention our own impending ordinary death a few hundred billion years before the smallest stars cool. I'd rather worry about the possibility of nuclear war, pandemic disease, global starvation, or the coming ice age. Or squirrels. Squirrels are very worrisome, with their evil little noses and their big furry tails, ravaging the bird feeders and predating on my peach trees right before the peaches are harvestable. Alarming!
And if you forget the fact that the actual source of the free energy being used is Mr. Sun -- for EITHER diesel OR biodiesel (with the only real question being when the sunshine that contributed the energy occurred) -- one could read your words and become quite alarmed!
That's the REALLY funny thing about the whole debate. Outside of nuclear energy, 100% of everything else IS solar energy. Hydro? Really solar. Natural Gas? Solar. Oil-based fuel? Solar. Ethanol? Solar. Bio-whatever? Solar.
Wait, I take that back. If you have a lab that gets electricity from a nuclear power plant and grow your algae or whatever in artificial light, I suppose any resulting energy wouldn't be solar.
What we're really arguing about (well, not "we" because I'm not:-) isn't solar vs something else, it is whether it is easier/cheaper to mine and refine ancient sunlight than it is to commoditize and exploit contemporary sunlight. There isn't any simple answer to this because the costs and benefits of the two aren't constant in time. Even if you leave out the climate change "religion" (either way!) and all discussion of "externalities", PV solar is at this point quite competitive and getting more so as technologies continue to advance. Ethanol based fuels are also becoming increasingly competitive, corn-based or not. Bio-diesel may or may not make sense -- for a friend of mine who collects used cooking oil and uses it for his diesel, it makes a LOT of sense, for example -- but the only real way to decide is to do a fair cost-benefit analysis, not assert that bio-diesel costs more energy to make than you get burning it. That's just nonsense.
And don't forget, if we throw a handful of hops in, we can drink our fuel, if we use barley!
Well, maybe not, but perhaps if we dilute it a bit and don't throw any of that nasty octane in...:-)
Storage is going to be getting more expensive as batteries get bigger and materials become more scarce. Your phone battery degrades, so will your community-sized battery pack. R&D will help things - it usually does, but supply and demand is going to be a killer.
Probably not. Actually there is a very good chance that they are going to get a lot cheaper as they stop using relatively scarce materials. At least if you believe any reasonable fraction of what is being reported in various media, such as:
https://www.designnews.com/ele...
Bill Joy is in the category of folks I'd generally classify as Not An Idiot, so this -- among many other threads and research avenues -- are likely to drop the cost of batteries to roughly 1/10th of what they are now, with better operational characteristics to boot.
Every night, huh? I see what you did there, sir....:-)
What is this "consequence to your karma" stuff? Aside from the fact that the post is obviously inappropriate religious trolling and entirely off topic (especially for a first post) and hence EARNS some bad karma, we are WAY down in the thread at this point and nobody cares.
Look, poster human who allegedly is trying to convert people to Islam: The Quran is a violent -- incredibly violent, almost maximally violent as far as comparative religious mythology is concerned -- inconsistent, absurd collection of assertions. Its only -- only -- possible claim to being perfect truth is that it claims, as often as possible "This document is perfect truth". Here, look, I can make the same claim -- "This post is perfect truth". Do you now believe it? No, you judge it on the basis of certain common-sense comparisons to your prior beliefs and your life experience, that is, the EVIDENCE for how the world works. If you completely lacked this common sense base, you'd do things like walk off of buildings because you disbelieve in gravity, burn your hands on the red hot stove the third or fourth time just because the red coils are pretty, be unable to drive your car or operate simple machinery.
Having read the Quran cover to cover multiple times, it is a purely extortionist document. Count the number of times Allah threatens to burn up unbelievers. My favorite -- where he details how he will hold unbelievers in the fire and burn off their skin, then magically regrow their skin back so he can iterate, burning their skin off in an unterminated do-loop for the rest of eternity. It isn't ever "believe this because it makes the most sense and is in perfect correspondence with your experience of the world and the evidence of your senses" it is "believe this because if you don't I will HURT YOU FOREVER!" It's like Muhammed took the hell meme from Christianity -- where it is really only barely expressed in a few places and is itself inconsistent and silly and quite possibly an add-on from long after Jesus lived, IF Jesus as a unitary entity and not a syncretic creation ever lived -- and said "That's the ticket! If they won't believe this crap straight up, I'll scare the robes right off of them with all of the horrific stuff Allah will do to them if they call me a liar!"
The beauty of evidence-based reasoning is that it is self-correcting and anybody can use it. You don't need angels dictating to you in caves, you don't need angels showing you golden tablets, you don't need mystic poets or prophets or seers. You don't have to be beloved by God (if God exists) or selected by God (if God exists) or be brainwashed into considering some documentary collection to be the one authority on how the Universe REALLY works BEYOND QUESTION at the expense of completely turning off your critical reasoning facility when examining certain aspects of the world. Anybody can play. Yes, you probably need an IQ on the high side of 85 or 90, but that's enough to have a fair bit of common sense and to be able to learn not to play with fire or walk off of tall buildings.
"Science" is just the collection of beliefs about the real world that are supported by a mostly consistent network of evidence and evidence supported beliefs. Like a belief in the law of gravitation -- gravity doesn't CARE what you believe -- as you grow up and drop things (including yourself) it will teach you what it is, and you can either learn or not learn and if you walk off a cliff in the future it and the laws of physics, chemistry and biology that govern your material existence will cause you to splat at the bottom and cease as an organized named biological entity quite independent of your beliefs. Using those laws you can infer the age of the Universe and conclude that documents that assert that the Universe is (say) 6000 years old are absurdly wrong. Using simple common sense and math you can conclude that documents that assert that there was a big flood that covered the entire surface of the world from a rain that lasted 40 days and nights, and that
But there are even more shallow gravity wells in the asteroid belt, and plenty of water there as well. A single asteroid may contain more water than all the oceans of earth [space.com].
This didn't seem right to me, and it's not. Reading the very article you linked in to defend this assertion, the asteroid in question contains more FRESH water than all of the LAKES AND RIVERS on Earth. About five times as much fresh water, but only 1/7 of the total water combined. There is a lot of water in the Earth's oceans.
This doesn't really affect your conclusions -- as you say, there is a lot of water available on some asteroids or various moons in the solar system that have much shallower gravity wells than the Earth or Mars -- but that said, no need to exaggerate.
Enormously well said, sir.
We can teach drivers not to start the car engine with the car in "drive" because they might run someone over, or we can just design the car not to start except in park.
We can also design cars to be incapable of driving faster than 30 miles per hour, because that is determined (by a committee of "experts", of course) to be the maximum "safe" speed that embraces 99% of all drivers on the road.
We'd all just pay for this safety. Pay in time. Pay in convenience. Pay in no longer having any possibility of "racing" a car or pushing the performance envelope for cars. Pay in no longer permitting anybody, anywhere, to design a car that does NOT have the speed governor built right in, and use all of the other crap that the CoE decided was necessary for even a raging drunk to be safe behind the wheel, including the car-surround baby bumpers and reinforced passenger compartment and feature that won't let the car start without all passengers wearing a kevlar vest and safety helmet.
This is an argument that is as old as time. If you like working with a fascist language that only permits you do allocate memory through an opaque interface that cheerfully trades off speed for an illusion of security, there are many to choose from. C, it is absolutely true, has comparatively few safety nets, although there are tools and techniques for making it as safe as you like. It is also true that it is difficult to write more efficient code than one can write in C short of coding in assembler, and C allows one to inline assembler for those cases where only assembler will let you access certain systems features (instead of waiting until the CoE decide that they are "safe"). Similarly, even good old Fortran has its place if you are doing massive linear algebra and want to optimize it for bleeding edge CPU features.
Could one modify C a lot more minimally, to make it safer than it is by nature while still not enforcing the OO kool-ade and outright prohibiting the use of malloc and pointers? Sure, probably -- some of the tools out there basically do that. But there are times when one can write code with malloc and pointers that is just plain magic compared to what one can get with OO opaque memory management.
Awww, come on, let the kiddies get rich selling each other rocks...
Yep yep. A book a day (or very close to that) from roughly when I was seven or eight years old until I was 32 and my first son was born (which very much put a damper on that). I was probably the only kid "ever" to go to Duke with a footlocker full of paperbacks that I stacked up on the one meager shelf on the wall of my dorm room so it reached to the ceiling. At the time I had to cut back due to offspring (a period that lasted almost 25 years, and to some extent continues today) I had at least 3000 to 4000 books that I owned personally, mostly paperbacks. I still own maybe half of these. With kids, I was lucky to read 1-2 a week -- a rate equal to that of a "super" reader, especially when they were young, although at various points that rate would go up due to reading them kid's books (the books I'm talking about were almost entirely "adult full length novels" although I shamelessly include Baum and ERB and books that now would be counted as "teen" novels as books of that grade dominated my pre-teen reading.
At this point -- approaching 63 -- I probably read 3 to 5 novels a week, entirely on my kindle book reader on my tablet (or sometimes my phone). Kindle books, especially new writings in SF&F, are often as inexpensive in modern currency as used paperbacks or paperback in general were back in the 60's and early 70's -- I remember well buying new paperbacks for prices ranging from $0.50 to $0.95, and my bitterness as they rose first to $1.95, then $2.95, and then as high as $4.95 over the 70's and 80', much faster than the value of money so they were actually more expensive. I try to spend under $4 for kindle books, and have entire series that I've binge-read that cost $1.99 to $2.99 each (and a few that have cost $0.99 each for full length books, under a dollar again!).
There are, however, two DIFFERENT totals that can describe my lifetime reading. One is the actual total number of books I've read AT LEAST once, without counting rereads. The other is the total number of times I've read any book, including one I've read before, cover to cover. Because I am space and money limited, much of the reading above has been rereads. For example, I've read things like LOTR or the Chronicles of Amber series (books 1 through 9, the original) at least dozens of times, each. Hell, I've read both of them in English dozens of times and in Spanish a time or two. Then there are books that I've read that sucked or that were OK, but I just didn't enjoy them so once was enough (All Quiet on the Western Front, a small mountain of so-called "literature" I was actually forced to read in school, much of it so unremarkable that I can't recall titles or plot). Long ago I decided I like things with "plot", rather than the anecdotal ramblings of period pieces or books that are the moral equivalent of today's reality TV.
I'm guessing that in roughly 55 years of power reading, 30 of that unencumbered, I've read at least ten thousand unique books, and have read "a novel" at least twice that including rereads, making it my average to reread a book twice, although it is a pretty biased average with a smaller set being a lot more than twice, a larger set being twice, and a fairly large set being just once and done.
Why do people -- including my own kids -- not read so much now? Ever so many reasons. TV is a huge one -- I grew up in India in the 60's without TV and it was reading or wandering through the alleys and scrub desert around my house, and I did a fair bit of both. Video games -- I go through phases even now when I will burn a day or ten on the e-cocaine of computer gaming (working on Divinity on Steam as soon as I quit this, but have burned weeks to months of wake-time on WoW, D1 and D2, nethack etc, Baldur's Gate, electronic sudoku, electronic jigsaw puzzles -- and yes, these seriously displace reading). A school system that places no value on reading per se and that forces one to read books that suck (however "intellectual" they may be) instead of stuff that is fun enough to compete with TV, spo
I mean, stupid questions. 50 years ago we had Viet Nam, the cold war, racism that makes the tiny flares of it that we have no seem like a joke by comparison. Women were pretty much chattel. The world teetered on the perpetual brink of nuclear war. Poverty (as a percentage of the population) was rampant worldwide and what COUNTED as poverty was a lot poorer than what is counted as poverty now. A huge fraction of the world's population lived under outright tyrannies and oligarchies without even the fig leaf of democracy. Information was tightly controlled, and communication at long distances was enormously expensive. Medicine was comparatively primitive even in the first world; in the third world it was still the purview of tribal shamans. Life expectancy was much lower. Finally, a major fraction of the technology that makes our lives enormously richer even if one is comparatively "poor" simply didn't exist.
Of course if you were male, white, middle to upper class, living in the first world, or male and upper class in the second and third world, you might have thought it was just peachy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Standard Barleycorns per candle?
Hey, I'm on the wrong side of it already. In some ways, my brain works a lot better than it did when I was young. For example, when I was 18/19 I was getting B's in courses that I know teach. Then, I could barely remember the laws of physics and all of the formulas involved -- largely because I didn't understand them and couldn't derive them. Now I don't even bother preparing if I need to show students how to solve some problem out of an intro physics textbook. I can solve all of them (within statistical noise of "stupid algebra mistakes" or "misreading the problem" which I can still manage at my advanced age). Period. Usually very quickly, with a fully annotated explanation, if necessary accompanied by derivations all the way back to e.g. Newton's Laws and empirical force laws etc.
On the other hand, if I work VERY HARD, I can learn all of the names of the students in a class I teach as long as it isn't a large group lecture class, over the course of a semester. But sadly, I forget their names even when I manage this within a year or two, with at most a very few exceptions. I can learn some things incredibly quickly -- perhaps because I have a well-established matrix of knowledge into which I can insert things, hook them up to things I already know, make sense of them, and thereby remember them in an easily accessible and useful way -- while at the same time I probably do worse at remembering piles of disconnected facts, the sorts of things I would work on "memorizing" back as a callow undergraduate. I still remember going over pages of formulas right before going into an exam, drilling them so I'd remember them long enough to get through the exam (and then promptly forgetting most of them) where what I SHOULD have been doing is learning to DERIVE them all from a tiny set of first principles that I would have used over and over (had I done this) so that I didn't EVER "memorize" them, I would have just plain learned them, as I eventually did, after I started to TEACH them.
That's why I view studies like the top article with a certain degree of skepticism, in spite of the fact that it (apparently) attracts flames. I'm not a neuroscientist, it is true, but I am a friggin' expert on neural networks and predictive modeling and information theory, have actually written a patent application for a "true AI" that I let expire because of a lack of funding more than a lack of ability to implement it, am married to an ex-neuroscientist who is now a physician -- and I used to type all of her neuroscience papers back when she was doing research as she didn't know how to type and I type like the wind. And yes, I teach. I take teaching very seriously. I study teaching, learning, and the brain, and I teach my STUDENTS about the brain and learning as much as possible because as my anecdotes above indicate, there are indeed good ways and bad ways to try to learn things. One of the many things I teach them -- sometimes pretty forcefully -- is that sleep is indeed the time short term memory is turned into long term memory. It is also a time where the brain pulls off some near miraculous background bookkeeping and housecleaning without the active participation of our interior monologue intentional self. We (our brains) actually do "work" in our sleep and a very common experience is to work very hard on something one day, sleep on it, and return to it the next day and just "see" all at once what the solution is, even though one spent NO time actually verbally sequentially reasoning about it while awake in the meantime. I have guided students who are trying to learn physics on four hours of sleep a night (and gradually driving themselves crazy in the process) into sleeping a disciplined MINIMUM of 6 to 8, working towards a minimum of 8, and thereby rescued them from the D or F they were inevitably working themselves towards while damaging their sanity and completely destroying their personal happiness.
Am I a Ph.D. brain researcher? No, but I am a Ph.D. and I do know a fair bit about the brain, memory, a
I'm a member of the post-60 cadre myself, and all I can say is that my memory is indeed failing to some extent. I refuse to state whether or not it is correlated with my sex hormone levels, in part because I possess no good way to measure them. I'm pretty sure, however, that they aren't coming out of my ass.
Since you are already modded up to 5, I'll reply in verbal support. The OSI stack is more of an abstraction after the first 3.5 layers -- the top three layers are all about the software that uses the network, not the network per se, and honestly I think that the idea of applying "net neutrality" to the application, presentation, and session layers is an absurdity as they have never really been a "networking" issue but more a matter of choice of software design at the two ends of the connection. For example, one way of interpreting "neutrality" would be a requirement that the designers of internet-based games write their games to be playable on any top level windowing system in all operating systems -- something like under Steam on steroids. If I wrote a simple game intended to run only under Linux and function only using one particular graphics stack and library set AND wrote it to run over an ISP-run network, I personally could be held in violation of a 7 layer net neutrality law. Imagine Apple, Microsoft, Linux, BSD, OS/2 all being forced by "net neutrality" to make their presentation layers interoperable. A nightmare, impossible to enforce, and stupid -- it would actually inhibit competition, not support it.
What the poster INTENDED, I think, is that the ISP (which is really the NN rules are all about, because they ARE granted a de facto near-monopoly over network connection in many if not most locales -- very few places have a choice of (say) four or five ISPs all with their own wires, and even those places are forced to move packets over common backbones belonging to many different companies (do a traceroute to a dozen distant places or services that you might use if you don't believe me) -- not differentiate their treatment of the bottom 3-4 layers on the basis of the toplevel application being run, but applying NN rules to the application layers themselves is IMO clearly inappropriate at the level of an FCC action and an open invitation to enforce a "universal standard" for all of these layers that believe me, you Would Not Like if you had it because OBVIOUSLY that "standard" would be set by Micro$oft and/or Apple or maybe Google and guess who would control it and regulate it and manipulate it to literally squash all competition that didn't PAY them for complying with the top layer "standards" they set...
I personally do agree that including TCP/UDP in the NN rules makes some sense, but that is primarily because the application layer INTERFACE and the transport layer ROUTING are heavily intertwined -- TCP is designed to make a network connection "reliable" by handling out of order deliver, transmission timeouts, and so on, and an ISP who wanted to MIGHT be able to screw around with this within some set or rules applied "strictly" only to the first three layers. Hence a need for "3.5" layers -- basically requiring ISPs to remain in the business of selling connections that provide their clients with an IP address, some level of bandwidth, some guarantee of QoS that is not modulated by the particular use the client makes of the network within the bounds of some Acceptable Use Agreement. In other words, holding them responsible as a public utility like a power company not to constantly turn off the power to, say, a predominantly black neighborhood in order to keep the power on in the white neighborhood next door, or worse, not to keep the power reliably on unless you buy all of your light bulbs and electrical appliances from the power company itself.
At the same time, I am sensitive to the practical realities of networking (I've written network applications and managed networks all the way back to twisted pair networks without any surviving name). If you are running a network, even in a single building, with your very own routers and DHCP server(s) and so on, that network is GOING to have a finite bandwidth. If you have power users in your organization, one of the IS going to be perfectly capable of saturating your network and degrading the QoS to all of your other users -- the sort of
OK, so they did a study comparing young people and old people, where the young people all had smooth skin and high levels of sex hormones, and the old people all were somewhat wrinkled and had lowered levels of sex hormones. The young people remembered more than the old people. Hence, we can obviously conclude that having a smooth skin and a powerful sex drive improves memory.
What's that latin again? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Sounds so much better than in English: correlation is not causality!
Sure, sure, they found similar correspondences in young and old people, but they still miss this point. Both could have the same independent cause, and indeed in the case of the young people it is rather likely that they do, since presumably they don't have atrophied brain parts that usually produce deep sleep but just didn't sleep deeply anyway!
About the best one can do from this from the sound of it is: Not getting good sleep is bad for your memory.
Wow. That's sure news. Nobody even suspected! And some people don't get good sleep because they drink too much coffee in the evening. And others don't get good sleep because they are in pain all the time. And still others don't get good sleep because they have obstructive sleep apnea. And whaddya know -- some of them have atrophy in a part of the brain that helps produce good sleep.
I was going to say something else about this, but I dozed off for a moment there and now I forgot.
Sorry.
But if you are a tech-hating Luddite aging flower child who believes that silicon dioxide crystals with various dopings, worn on the body or just kept in a house, affect your health in beneficial ways, you can't even pretend to convince yourself that you "understand" a cell phone the way you do the channeling of crystal energies with sacred symbols. This creates a state of cognitive dissonance -- what you don't understand you fear and you resent in equal parts. The resentment is made even greater when all of the smart people in the Universe make fun of you for believing in magic, so you retaliate by deliberately disbelieving in double blind, placebo controlled evidence because if you ever let yourself accept that it is the only sound basis for justified belief you'd have to admit that all of your beliefs about the healing powers of herbs and crystals and chanting various mantras (or just garden variety praying to Jesus) are pure bullshit, as they have all failed DBPCStudies, repeatedly, over decades. You also mistrust and resent anyone who actually understands what crystals actually are and how they are put together and knows at least approximately what the word "energy" actually MEANS (as in, knows the dimensions of the quantity and how it is connected to things like fields, interactions, and motion) as they can say things like "cell phones are utterly harmless, except when they catch fire in your pocket or are dropped on your head from a tall building" or "a quartz crystal has no measurable physical field (other than the light reflected from its surface) at length scales much greater than molecular dimensions away, even in the neighborhood of its sharp edges and points, and is utterly incapable of affecting your health (outside of the placebo effect) no matter how many "good intentions" you direct at it or how many mantras you chant".
The really sad thing is that an entire state would incorporate this bullshit into their formal health advice. The only possible basis (assuming actual scientists and physicians were consulted on the matter) for this would have to be some sort of massive conspiracy theory mentality that is convinced that the many studies that have found no link, including studies with a million or so participants:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-c...
are the result of a huge government multinational corporation conspiracy intended to conceal negative effects and that the one or two studies that have found some borderline "significant" result as gospel truth that proves that the conspiracy they've always suspected is REAL. Damn that CDC anyway!
But hey, take one or two absolutely marginal results, ignore the fact that these results are scientifically inconsistent and implausible, ignore the absolute certainty that with the p=0.05 standard for "statistical significance" by idiots often in small studies it is a near certainty that you will have opportunities to conclude that:
Green Jelly Beans Cause Acne: https://xkcd.com/882/
and legislate those evil Green Jelly Beans out of existence. In California, at least.
2W of non-ionizing power, only 1 W MAX of which can be directed towards your body, at frequencies where the energy just doesn't penetrate much into your body. It is about as risky as taking a christmas tree light bulb, putting it in a cell-phone transparent box, and putting that inside your pocket.
I'd sooner believe the connection between high voltage transmission towers and cancer. The power at ground level is again absurdly low, but at least there I can imagine the high voltage arcing into the air at points near the insulators, generating a surplus of ozone, that falls to ground level at some measurable rate and ... no, I don't believe that either...
Murdoch is keeping the entities associated with political control, while unloading all of the apolitical entertainment "fluff". I was very curious to see if he would give up Fox News to the uncertain control of Disney, who (after all) has to be at least a little bit responsive to its entertainment audience and who MIGHT not continue to prop up the POTUS when all others (except for the uber-loyal National Enquirer) actually point it out when he lies or tweets an insulting comment about a member of Congress's personal appearance or how awful it is that THEY (if they are a Democrat) are accused of sexual harassment.
Oh, well. ...
I'm curious. When was being a lobbyist treated as treason (a crime defined in the Constitution)?
Quite the contrary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is just one of the things that Madison, and the court, have gotten wrong. The forces do not, in fact, tend to balance out in time because Madison had no concept of the degree of accumulation of wealth that would occur over the next two centuries and how much this would lead to a small oligarchy controlling immense resources and correspondingly acting as a superselector for the actual private citizen's choices. Shockingly, the courts have even recognized corporations themselves as having many of the rights of private citizens, in particular the "right" to petition the government via lobbying. In this way, the entire concept of democracy (republican or not) is subverted, as in the actual constitution corporations are NOT recognized as political entities -- all political power ultimately devolves to we, the people, the citizen. A corporation is not a citizen, nor is it a democracy.
Sadly, the only way we can get out of this at this point is EITHER having a congress that passes laws that muzzle lobbying -- personally I'd prohibit ALL lobbying, as the baby drowned long ago and all that is left is the sewer sludge swamp water of extremists on all sides, fueled by the oligarchs who maintain power as long as they keep wethepeople too distracted to care and too stupid to want to. Then we'd have to have a court that would actually consider the point that corporations are NOT citizens and do NOT have a right to "freedom of speech" -- only individual persons (owners or employees alike!) do, and only to the extent that they are willing to expend their own personal resources on it. OR we'd have to pass an amendment to the constitution specifically limiting the power of corporate entities to participate in or influence government decision making. Frankly I'd prefer the latter, but it will probably require the second American revolution to bring it about.
In the meantime, much as I appreciate the sentiment that corporate lobbying SHOULD be, well, not "treason" but a pretty serious crime, the lobbying part per se is the tip of the iceberg. I could even live with it as long as the real problem is repaired.
That is the simple fact illustrated here: https://www.opensecrets.org/ne...
and here: https://www.opensecrets.org/ne...
Scroll down to the graphic detailing PAC contributions. To put that graphic in perspective, one has to look at the numbers:
https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
and
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
Opensecrets (among other places) follows this all the way down to the following brutal fact. It costs an average of around 11 million dollars to run for the Senate. It costs almost 2 million dollars to run for the House. It costs well over 100 million dollars to run for President. Actual donations from private citizens making less than $200,000/year constitute about 6 or 7 PERCENT of this. Well over 90% of the cost of running for office comes not from We, The People, but from corporations, filtered through PACs and the parties themselves, and those corporations are controlled by a tiny handful of the world's wealthiest people.
Nothing illustrates the corruption more clearly than the fact that many -- arguably most -- of the PACs contribute roughly equal amounts to Republicans AND Democrats running against each other. They don't care who wins, regardless of their stated position on whatever "issue" the PAC is supposed to give a shit about.
"You are making a LOT of assumptions there using faulty human logic.
Actually, I'm saying: "If you make a lot of assumptions, the probability that your conclusion is correct goes down to the extent that your assumptions themselves are not certain". Which is, I reiterate, Bayes theorem. The assumptions are called "priors", and one problem with argumentation in general is that one rarely has a sound basis for even assigning a probability TO an assumption like "NASA and the government know there are space aliens but they choose not to release the evidence accompanied by an announcement to that effect". Which is basically what you are asserting, and what the entire movie you offer as "evidence" is asserting.
You are also asserting that our understanding of the laws of physics, specifically the ones that make interstellar travel almost infinitely unlikely (if our understanding is correct) is INcorrect, in a relevant way that enables interstellar travel in reasonable times and for reasonable costs. The point you miss there is that you have absolutely no basis for believing them to be wrong in such a way. Nobody does. There is no evidence for it. There is no coherent argument for it. That doesn't mean that it isn't possible that we are wrong -- of course it is -- it just means that it is the height of absurdity to assign a GREATER degree of belief, not even in a THEORY of FTL travel (or hell, slower than light travel that doesn't require the combined GDP of the entire world to be spent for several decades to send a single tiny ship that might arrive at the NEAREST star in a time frame of centuries), but to the notion itself that it is possible and the hell with physics and experiment and common sense.
As for the movie -- ROTFL. Seriously? Complete with patched in clips of rockets taking off, spiral galaxies, and with the bizarre "Ooo-na! Ooo-na-na-na" music played after each clip and sonorous pronouncement. We simply have different standards as to what constitutes "evidence", specifically reliable and reproducible evidence, evidence that verifies actual hypotheses or theories, evidence that permits one to make predictions.
Again, if you add up all of the assumptions required to believe that space aliens are hanging out in orbit all of the time, but are generally invisible and being hidden from us by BOTH the aliens themselves AND by a mind-numbingly vast trans-world-government conspiracy, where miraculously NOBODY IN THE KNOW has ever outed it (miraculous because truly huge numbers of people would have to be in the know) -- its as silly as believing that the moon landing was done in Hollywood. In fact, the hypothesis that the moon landing WAS done in Hollywood and that we've actually never sent anybody into orbit so that your "evidence" is fake of a fake is probably very slightly more reasonable, and no, I don't believe that either and for the same reasons.
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