It suggests that smoking pot regularly and heavily is associated with around a 5% increased incidence in lung cancer, but N in the study is pretty small for me to be happy with this number. Its an epidemiological study and hence has the usual problems with confounding -- lots of people smoke pot AND tobacco, use pot AND drink alcohol -- plus the usual difficulties of relying on self-reporting of use. In a sense the article is surprising -- in spite of nominally being more toxic, the bump in risk appears smaller than it is for tobacco, something I've read about in other research articles as well. Tobacco appears to be uniquely bad for you, worse than "just smoke" including pot smoke. It could be that pot has some anti-inflammatory activity (reported here and there as part of its possible "medical benefits") that partially offsets the smoke-related damage, since cancer, like most cardiovascular disease, appears to be associated with inflammatory response.
Documentation? Seriously, just spouting bullshit doesn't prove anything at all. And bullshit articles with completely fake graphs culled from the internet are no better. If you want facts, you can try reading actual medical journal articles:
From the abstract: The LD50 for dogs is 3 grams of PURE THC per kilogram of body weight. I have a body mass a bit over 100 kg, so the likely LD50 for me would be roughly 300 grams. The most potent varieties of pot on the market are around 1/4 THC (reportedly, I still have a bit of a hard time believing that on a pure sanity check basis, but hey, let's go with it). That means I'd have to ingest 4x300 grams or 1.2 kilograms of not just any pot, but the very "best" (most unbelievably potent) pot on the planet in order to get a dose with a 50% chance of killing me. A person with a body mass of 50 kg would still need well over a pound of the very best pot, and would need to smoke it all (or eat it all) so quickly that the body couldn't metabolize it away before it depressed his/her CNS to a lethal degree.
If one directly eats concentrated THC or a product like "butter" that is half THC or better, one "could" ingest a lethal dose, but all in all, THC is slightly safer than caffeine. People die every year from caffeine overdoses, caused not by drinking coffee or tea but by taking large number of caffeine pills, which concentrates it to a far higher level than one can ever manage drinking a naturally caffeinated beverage.
So please -- no, there are not "many" fatalities related to marijuana use. There are pretty much zero fatalities from THC poisoning from marijuana use per se. I suppose there could be a fatality or three from people who chug a pint of melted concentrated marijuana butter, but that isn't marijuana "use", that is specifically ingesting THC as a drug in mind-numbingly stupid quantities, as stupid as downing a bottle of No-Doz to stay awake to study for a test the next day. If you want to argue that there are highway deaths or accidental deaths attributable to marijuana use, that isn't what this study is looking at and has nothing to do with LD50, but again it is difficult to get meaningful statistics (with controls for confounding factors) to support this with actual numbers. For example, in Washington state, which recently legalized pot, there has been a corresponding increase in the percentage of people involved in fatal accidents that have measurable THC in their systems. Specifically, authorities in Washington recorded 436 fatal crashes in 2013, and determined that drivers involved in 40 crashes tested positive for THC, the active chemical in marijuana, according to the study. In 2014 they found that of 462 fatal crashes, 85 drivers tested positive for THC.
BUT, correlation is not causality -- it is reasonable to assume that legal weed is smoked by more people than smoked illegal weed, more frequently, so that the number of people with detectable THC in their systems has increased (THC is detectable weeks after ingestion). The main question is, has the number of traffic fatalities itself increased since legalization, and the delta indicated in this study isn't even a statistically significant change. These numbers completely ignore confounding factors -- such as what percentage of the THC users had blood alcohol levels in excess of the legal limits, what the population of the state has done in the meantime, how the number of registered drivers has changed, changes in the available roadway, and "normal statistical variation" in the number of traffic fatalities. The number itself is nearly meaningless.
With that said, I don't doubt that there are some surplus deaths due to accidents caused by people being too high to drive and driving anyway, or using power tools while high, etc. But even there, pot is almost certainly far safer than alcohol and a long list of prescription or over the counter drugs.
No, the truth is more that a semi-common hallucination for pot heads to have is thinking they're dying. A non-zero amount of these idiots will actually call emergency services while freaking out. The weed isn't significantly more dangerous physically if you exclude possible long-term lung damage, it's just a lot more likely to freak you out to the point your dumb ass calls the cops on yourself.
Really? Do you have any documentation of that? I can't recall ever having had that particular hallucination, nor do I know anybody that has (at least, that they've communicated with me. Indeed, I can't recall anybody at all ever -- ever -- seeking emergency medical treatment because they got high smoking pot. Some complete neophyte, smoking for the first time, maybe could freak out, or somebody who was fed brownies and didn't know that they were getting a huge dose of weed along with them, sure, but both of those are special cases and not "pot heads" calling EMS because they think they are dying.
Pot is one of the safest "mind altering/illegal" substances on the planet. There is no lethal dose -- you'd be dying of smoke inhalation, not from the effects of the drug, if you tried to kill yourself with it. There are no long term effects -- if you quit, it clears out of your system end of story. There isn't even a particularly solid link between weed and e.g. lung cancer, although it wouldn't surprise anybody if smoke of any sort is a factor in inflammation, which in turn is a factor in cancer. As pointed out above, the metric of "chose to visit the ER" is just plain silly, and the levels they are reporting for this are pretty absurd -- one in 200.
Did none of those 200 have, say, something to drink as well? Alcohol as a confounding factor would all by itself explain the difference. Is all of the pot that they were smoking JUST pot, or was some of it laced with opium, or cheap weed mixed with cheaper spice to simulate "good" weed? There are zero controls, they are relying on self-reported statistics about stuff everybody lies about (in an ER, are you going to admit that you just used a felonious schedule 1 substance that you might still be holding out in your car or house, or are you going to claim that your meth-induced DTs are due to smoking weed?), and whether or not you go to the ER, tripping balls on serious hallucinogens is a hell of a lot more dangerous than getting high on pot and listening to music while gaming with friends. Your odds of self-inflicted or accidental injury are (IMO) orders of magnitude higher once you have completely disassociated your head from reality with a hefty dose of a real hallucinogen, where it is difficult to ingest enough pot to get a hallucinogenic experience in the most common ways of using it (although if you eat a pile of hash brownies or pot chile you can manage it, sure). If you try it via smoking it you'll just fall asleep before you actually hallucinate, or more likely, stop smoking because you are as relaxed and high as you care to be.
You'll do better by buying and wearing a recording pulse oximeter to bed. If you have obstructive sleep apnea (which is pretty common, especially in older people) you typically stop breathing as your throat closes when you relax in real sleep. This drops your O2 saturation, which triggers a reflex that wakes you up. So your O2 sat oscillates up and down all night long, and you live tired all of the time because the only real sleep you get happens when your head and throat are in a "just right" position. Sleep apnea is dangerous both acutely and chronically -- inadequate sleep is associated with weight gain, heart disease, and more. The "pulse" part is also useful, as one can often identify periods of REM vs deep sleep as one's pulse varies somewhat, smoothing out during deep sleep cycles, bouncing around a bit with the arousal of REM.
There are other causes of bad sleep, of course -- restless legs syndrome, anxiety, etc. and these may be characterized more by movements and tossing and turning and not so much by oxygen, but a pulse oximeter might be almost as useful as a fitbit or whatever for detecting that via the pulse variations.
Personally I find the word "retard" a bit offensive, as I had a brother with Down's syndrome who really was a retard. So instead of that word, let's be more specific and less pejorative.
In order to judge either the ethics of belief or the quantitative quality of belief, one needs an ordinal system of ranking belief(s) and belief systems. These need not be complex -- they can be as simple as: "It is best to believe the most that which you can doubt the least, given the evidence and the (Bayesian) network of interdependent evidence-supported best beliefs". That is the common-sense basis of the scientific ontology, as described in essence in Richard Cox's monograph on probable inference and E. T. Jaynes much more thorough book on probability theory as the logic of science.
Then there is the axiomatic basis of ALL world religions: "The scriptural basis for this religion is true, no matter how badly it conflicts with beliefs derived from evidence and common sense." This axiom PRECEDES any discussion of God(s) and any specifics concerning science, history, miracles, ethics, assertions of prior cause or posterior consequence, or use of terms that have no objective or verifiable meaning as if they had meaning. In most cases, you will find this axiom explicitly stated in the scriptural doctrine itself, making it the moral equivalent of the Godellian knot: "This sentence is true, and while I'm at it, God exists." This is in essence the old Jedi mind trick -- These aren't the droids you are looking for...
So, let's go down through a short list:
Science: Law of conservation of mass-energy implies no actual creation, only rearrangement of already existing "stuff". Never observed to be violated, probably the strongest single principle in physics today, basis of First Law of thermodynamics.
Religion: God -- a term that describes a presumably sentient being capable of self-willed action -- created this stuff. How, where, when, out of what all optional and variable with specific religion.
Science: As an observational truth supported by literally everything we know, it is absurdly impossible for a living complex organism to die really truly dead, sit around in non-freezing temperatures for three days, and come back to life. The second law of thermodynamics (among many, many other things) guarantees it in the specific sense that it is very, very, very....very very improbable. Nor is blindness cured by rubbing filthy mud and bacteria-laden spit into human or animal eyes. Nor is madness or disease caused by devils. Nor can water be changed to wine. Nor can the Earth stop spinning for a few hours. Nor can one think, feel, experience without a brain (complex pre-existing mechanism) to think with.
Religion: God can and has made all of the above happen and it is all true, because it is described in scripture and hence must be so (see first premise). Evidence not required. Instead, faith -- the opposite of evidence-driven best belief -- is required. To believe in the impossible and contradictory without evidence is held to be a religious virtue even as it is the ultimate scientific vice.
I could go on, and on, and on, but why bother? The point is that epistemologically, science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. In order to believe in God one has to have faith, belief without evidence, belief in things that openly contradict the evidence and plain old common sense. If I suggest that Krishna is a myth and not a real avatar of a mythical deific superbeing, the trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, the Hindu trinity representing the splitting of a monist pandeist being into its creative, enduring, and destructive components including us) you would look at his presumed behavior and acts and scripturally described miracles and say "Ha, those are all impossible, there is NO GOOD REASON to think that Hinduism is true" and you would sensibly enough withhold "believing" it. Even if Pope Francis and all the saints suggest that the Judeo-Christian-
Because in that case it will delete/etc long before/home and/usr (both typically mounts). Deleting/etc makes it quite likely, although not certain, that the system will crash before it actually damages the contents of/home,/usr and/var. That makes it too easy to recover with a partial reinstall without losing any actual data beyond the system's ssh keys and any work that went in to setting up printers or the like.
Most of which I learned, long ago, the hard way. It is probably less of an issue with the elf dynamic loader than it is with a.out and/etc/ld.so.cache, but/etc is used for many things. Removing/boot is probably not super likely to leave you stable as well.
The one I recall is an email spammed to a typical Linux User that says something like:
Dear Sir or Madam:
This email is the infection vector for a Linux virus! Please follow the instructions below. Do not break the chain, or you will have twenty years of bad luck and all of your hair will fall out as well! No fair making a backup copy of your user directory(s) first!
a) First, please forward this email to all of your friends. If you have no friends, forward it to anyone you know well enough to send email to. Sending it to company mailing list servers especially recommended!
b) When this step is completed, please login as root and enter the following string into a terminal window:
At some point this last step will render your system unusable as it deletes the dynamic library cache, and you will be forced to reinstall it in order to use it.
Thank you for your cooperation. We each must do our part to make users of Microsoft products feel better about the oozing pustulated orifice of an operating system that they are coerced into buying preinstalled on their computers.
Recall that the 1930's were arguably the warmest decade on record. Something like half the record temperatures set by state in the United States date from the 30's. There was something of a peak in the early 40's, and then it actually cooled for around 30 years.
Or at least, that's what the temperature record showed until the late 1990s, when it was serially "adjusted" to cool the past relative to the present and emphasize the warming of the 80s (another warm decade) through early 90's.
So it isn't all that surprising that the permafrost DID thaw back then. There is substantial evidence that the entire Arctic underwent a substantial period of warming. And nobody disagrees that there was locally a great deal of warming in the Arctic in the period from 1920 to 1940 -- what argument there is is whether or not it was widespread or regionally constrained, and how the hell we would know either way since the Arctic was at that time still largely inaccessible both on the shores and (especially) over almost all of its interior. An interesting article on the subject: https://judithcurry.com/2013/0...
This sort of uncertainty exist, amplified, over almost all of the pre-1945 climate record. The arctic was "well-known" compared to the Antarctic, for example. El Nino wasn't even named until the very late 19th century, and reliable temperature observations simply don't exist for most of the Pacific ocean and much of the Atlantic off of the sea lanes for a lot of this period. Central Asia, Siberia, much of the Canadian Arctic, central South American, central Africa -- we overstate our knowledge of the global temperature anomaly at every turn, and even now the uncertainty in the global average temperature is around 1 C -- to the extent that anyone can even agree how it should be defined.
The sad truth is that there is an absolute mountain of money on the table as we try to run and extend a civilization that is defined precisely by its utilization of energy. Everybody -- everybody -- has interests, vested and otherwise, in the issue. You can watch Bill Nye's shows in which he tells the world how coffee and chocolate production are already suffering from global warming and go straight onto the internet and access the actual statistics for both that demonstrate that this is simply not true. The fact that Bill Nye is spokesperson for a number of energy companies -- some of them with rather dicey offerings -- catering to the global-warming-means-we-need-clean-energy-at-any-cost publicly subsidized demand obviously has nothing to do with this. With the media regularly selectively reporting climate "noise" (every extreme in climate variation) as "warming signal" without regard to historical accuracy or retraction when dire predictions routinely fail to come true, it is actually very difficult to ascertain anything like "truth" regarding the climate.
Oops. You are right and I knew that, with a part of my brain that obviously went unused. But yes, already damning case even worse.
If they want to do something constructive, they could make their damn phones waterproof to 2m by default and make it use an inductive charger by default. Building a phone that not only dies if you get a single drop of water NEAR the charging port but then clicks over to void your warranty was evil from the beginning.
t's really weird how people who know NOTHING about PHYSICS assume they can make decisions about technology.
I teach physics. In fact, I teach electrodynamics, off and on. Is it possible to charge a cell phone with wireless technology? Sure. All you need is a big enough tesla coil and a big enough loop and the ability to rectify broadband noise. If you are radiating a couple of hundred watts you can probably pull a watt out of it if you aren't too far away. Of course, you can also cook a hot dog if it isn't too far away.
Now let's consider 802.11 signals. The signal strength is limited to 1 watt by the FCC, but IEEE specs peg it at 23 to 24 dBm (200-250 mW). One whole watt is 30 dBm in decibels(milliwatt), and you can get an effective gain of 6 dBm (x4) or 4 watts with the antenna:
Most wireless receivers operate with signal power (coming into the receiver antenna) in the ballpark of -10 dBm to -100 dBm, where at the low end of that range one is likely down in the noise. That is (translating to power) 100 microwatts down to 10^{-13} watts (10^{-10} milliwatts). If one takes the average cell phone's surface area -- maybe 50 or 60 cm^2 -- and compare it to the radiating solid angle of a transmitter just 50 cm away, it is a very small fraction -- order of 50 to 50^2 or order of 1%. So if one starts with 200 mW and receive it with 100% efficiency around a half meter away, one would be lucky to get more than around 1 mW. USB cell phone wall chargers, OTOH, typically use 1 to 2 W, and still take hours to charge a discharged phone. We could anticipate charging times of order 1000 hours, then, at a mW trickle.
The one place and way this MIGHT work, then, is if one places the phone ON the 802.11 transmitter, just outside of the antenna, close enough that the phone subtends at least 1/10 of its radiation pattern. Assuming a 36 dBm antenna signal strength (4 W), picking up 0.4W, with maybe 0.1 to 0.2 W usable power input after accounting for RMS power and efficiencies, you would be to the point where one might be able to recharge a partially discharged phone in a day.
The big question is then, who would want to do this? A normal 23 dBm transmitter would take weeks to charge the phone even sitting on top of it, and the phone itself would be sucking up the signal you need for your devices to operate. It would still take all day to charge instead of a few hours. It would (probably) cost more than existing "charging pads" that do the same thing and charge your phone wirelessly through induction and an inverter. It would interfere with your 802.11 device and likely reduce its effectiveness at the purpose for which it was intended. It's like "hey, we can build an antenna so that if we put your phone in the microwave oven, it will recharge it really quickly, if we shield the phone and don't mind possibly ruining the microwave". Sure, but why would we, when wall-warts and a cable cost $15, when solar chargers that actually work and don't leach power from 802.11 devices cost less than $100, etc?
The one thing you will NOT be able to do is to recharge your phone from across the room, or keep your phone charged by just sitting in the same room as an 802.11 transmitter. You'd need a phased array of antennae a half-meter wide to get enough directional concentration across a room, and it would make your transmitter pretty much useless as an actual transmitter for 802.11 devices long before that. Even if you pulled ALL the power from a 23 dBm transmitter the numbers just don't make sense for this.
Here is a really cool fact that you can use to impress chicks at cocktail parties: A magnetic force and an electrical force are the SAME THING. The only difference is your inertial frame of reference. Let's say you have two parallel copper wires with current flowing through them. The negative charge in the electrons and the positive charge in the copper nuclei should cancel each other out, and there should be no force between them. BUT THERE IS. This is magnetism. But it is really just plain only electrical attraction because the electrons are moving, so their inertial reference frame is different from the reference frame of the copper nuclei. A moving reference frame has a Lorentz contraction, so the copper nuclei "see" more electrons per length of wire, resulting in an attraction.
No. Magnetic and electrical force and energy aren't exactly "the same thing". The magnetic and electric field are both components of the second rank field strength tensor, the Lorentz force in electromagnetic theory is not just the Lorentz transform of the Coulomb force, and magnetic and electric field energies are independently summed when assembling the total electromagnetic field energy density. Finally, good luck describing electron spin and the resultant intrinsic magnetic dipole moment in terms of a Lorentz transformation of the bare Coulomb field of the (point) charge -- there is no rotating frame or mass moving around mass.
There are basically two different ways to discuss them. One way is to stop talking about electric and magnetic fields independently at all and only work with the electromagnetic field (strength tensor) where the electric and magnetic components are NOT THE SAME and do NOT HAVE THE SAME SYMMETRY. The other way is to pretend (as most intro books do, because usually it works pretty well if you're considering low velocities and coarse-grain-averaged "smooth" charge/current densities) that E and B are ordinary vectors and write down Maxwell's equations. There are FOUR of them -- two if you go with the covariant field strength tensor formulation, and you cannot write them all down in terms of a single vector field (or the resultant force).
F_e = qE (F, E vectors) F_b = q v x B (F, v, B vectors)
The electrostatic force obeys Newton's third law. The magnetic force (with the cross product) does not,. and one has to work very hard indeed to find the missing energy and momentum in the electromagnetic field when two charged particles interact in the general case.
Sadly, I haven't found that knowing graduate level electrodynamics well enough to teach it impresses chicks at cocktail parties.
Seriously? When I see Jupiter (which is coming up right around dark, the brightest thing in the sky to the west besides this week's full moon) it doesn't seem that scary. Why do you cringe? Venus is quite beautiful as well. With my 10" scope I can take Saturn -- easily seen with the naked eye -- and magnify it to where we can see its rings and moons. As for meteors, I remember lying out on a dry lake bed far from city lights during one of the better meteor showers -- can't recall any more which one -- and seeing an absolute rain of them, two or three per second, for hours. Quite the opposite of a cringe-worthy experience.
You must be a very delicate soul, if tiny lights in the sky make you cringe, or if other people talking about seeing the tiny lights makes you cringe.
People who lived paycheck to paycheck had NO health insurance. This was the problem obamacare was trying to fix. Something like 20% of the population of the United States has no insurance or terrible insurance. You can try to pretend that this isn't true, you can assert loudly that it is "their choice" not to buy insurance, but -- remember, they are living PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK or on NO PAYCHECK AT ALL. If they chop out $200 to $300 each month (or far, far more) for insurance, you're just saying that they have a choice between eating, or wearing shoes, or living somewhere other than under a highway overpass, and health insurance.
My wife is a physician and has been taking care of these patients for her whole career. Your "free market" solution for most of her career was this: If an indigent patient (or one who lived paycheck to paycheck, or one who just couldn't/wouldn't afford to pay) walked in to see her, she could see the patient, accept whatever medicare (elderly) or medicaid) (poor) payments they might qualify for -- well under the market value of her billable time -- or just see them pro bono, which she might well do for a patient she'd been seeing who lost their job. Hospitals were in an even worse state. If somebody walked in off the street into a hospital ER, they were LEGALLY OBLIGATED to take care of them, whether or not they could pay. Even a very small hospital/ER visit costs a lot of money, and medicare/medicaid (if it pays or paid anything at all) payed only a small fraction of the actual cost of the visit.
Your "free market" pre-obamacare solution was thus to screw the physicians and hospitals and nurses by simultaneously requiring them to provide medical treatment to people who couldn't afford it and exploiting their good nature on top of that for people living on the edge of the poverty who -- at best -- could only afford to pay something much less than the cost of the service and cannot possibly afford even the cheapest health insurance. And before you even start, let me assure you that for a physician in pretty much any practice, overhead is AT LEAST 2/3 of their billing, maybe a little bit more, so a free patient isn't just a matter of a physician contributing a bit of time, it is contributing their own time and PAYING their nurses, receptionists, PAs, for the lab (and any labs they order) and of course there is the building itself and all utilities all paid OUT OF POCKET -- directly eating into their income. This isn't a zero sum break even games, they lose money for underbilling and collectable accounts, and medicare/medicaid doesn't even pay for the overhead on the visits they supposedly pay for. So yeah, in order not to go broke WHILE working 60-65 hour weeks for half of what they would be making in a "free" market, they charge 30% more to everybody else (more like 100% in hospitals, where hospital ERs are the most expensive possible way to deliver routine health care). Guess what! You've socialized medicine, but in the worst possible way, the least fair way. And the saddest thing of all is that people don't even realize that this has happened, and yammer on about free markets and how having competitive insurance plans is somehow optimal and can take care of everybody that needs -- is mandated in law -- to be taken care of.
Obamacare didn't fix this problem, of course. It did, however, make it a lot better, and more fair, in that by increasing the number of the insured and directly subsidizing insurance for the working poor who previously had to rely on the charity of doctors or hospitals to get medical treatment or routine well-patient care, they passed the costs on to the people of the US collectively instead of forcing the physicians and hospitals individually to do what they insisted that they do, at a loss. And I'm not just talking the unemployed, I'm largely talking about precisely those living paycheck to paycheck, often working several jobs because employers don't want to have to provide benefits and only let them work 30 hours a week (each). I have
OK, so if you install windows 10 (compared to almost anything else) you save no money at all. If you installed it last year, you saved no money. If you install it this year, you STILL save no money! Hmmmm
0_2016 x 0.28 = 0_2017
OMG! They are telling the truth! Microsoft 10 this year saves you 28% more than it did last year, because 28% of nothing is still nothing!
Of course, hmmm, if installing it actually COSTS you money -- if ROI is negative, by the time you finish messing with all of the hassles and broken bits -- are they asserting that you lose EVEN MORE (28% more!) money in 2017 than in 2016?
No argument, but that process will occur independent of the data. Having the data out there at least makes it possible for people TO challenge conclusions based on it. Not just climate change data, although that is an excellent example. For example, the scaling of error bars in HADCRUT4 makes no sense at all, with error estimates in the temperature anomaly from the mid/late1800s being only three times as large as error estimates from the last decade. The error as represented in the DIFFERENCE in the anomaly estimates from the major anomaly products is already as large as their acknowledged error even in the present, making it almost certainly larger now than is acknowledged.
In the mid 1800s, Antarctica was terra incognita. Much of Africa was lightly explored, if explored at all. Central Asia (most of Tibet) was more or less inaccessible. Huge tracts of the Pacific Ocean had little to no systematic observation. El Nino had been neither observed nor named. The number of thermometers representing the globe was perhaps two or three orders of magnitude fewer than today. The quality of the records kept and methodology used and instruments used are nothing like as accurate as they are today. And yet total error then is only a factor of three larger then than now? I don't think so...
But it is not easy, not easy at all, to get the data even if you have the time, the money, and the inclination to challenge this to try to show that this absurdity (for statistically, that is almost certainly what it is, an absurdity, given that in general, error scales like 1/\sqrt{N} as the number of samples increases, with some fairly substantial multiplier for the lack of representation of almost all of the 70% of the Earth that was ocean and the entire continents without a single systematic measurement site or sampled only at a handful of places on the periphery.
God invented double blind, placebo controlled trials for a reason. Pesky humans find it all to easy to fool themselves, to find any patterns that they WANT to be true in pure noise that's all that they have to work with. We also LIKE to pretend that we know all about the Dinosaurs when we write textbooks on them and so on, which works really well until somebody finally makes a few discoveries that demonstrate that we don't even have the major divisions right or probable evolutionary trajectories right over a hundred million years or so (where even the correction may not be right, because we may never FIND the evidence that would let us GET it right difficult as it is to acknowledge it). Proxy-derived data is even worse, and even more susceptible to meddling and selection, since you have to START by making selections and those selections cannot avoid being made with assumptions that may be consciously or unconsciously biased or just plain wrong.
Even reproducibility won't rescue you from sufficiently entrenched bias, because your Bayesian priors that underlie the analysis may be wrong. If they are, it will show up (usually) in subtle ways -- like absurdly small errors signaling the inflation of a less noisy signal selected out of noisy data but reweighted to cover territory it cannot possibly be said to cover (which still happens in Antarctica, BTW) -- but fixing it may not even be possible. You cannot manufacture evidence that no longer exists or never existed in the first place.
Science often, even usually, does correct all of this stuff eventually, but it isn't quite as simple as some people seem to think, that a referee can run off and in ten minutes show that some paper they are refereeing is right or wrong. Lots of what ultimately proves to be crap gets through simply because the referee DOESN'T know what is right or wrong, but the result presented is "reasonable", the methodology clear, and it is up to future research to verify it or disprove it. Which may not happen for years to decades, even for hot button topics. I just read that "Dark Energy" may end up being an artifact of an approximation used in solving
If only I had mod points, I'd add to your +5 still further, sir AC. If only people who ranted above noted that no, it doesn't supercede HIPAA before making absurd allegations that it did, or that the EPA would itself be required to reproduce every piece of science it uses to arrive at its conclusions and rules, starting by reproducing Brahe's observations of planetary motion, Kepler's analysis, and Newton's solution just so it can use the law of gravitation when assessing the environmental impact of falling asteroids.
It is actually HIGH TIME they were held to the basic standard of science, because as it is one cannot even fight its star chamber edicts. Now, is everything it does bad? Of course not -- this bill doesn't mean that either. It just means that when it SAYS something is bad, it has be able to show that it is bad based on actual data that anybody can look at, obtained with methods that are openly published, and it has to show in some equally scientific way that its remedies to the problem (that is now proven to actually exist and be objectively serious) are at least scientifically effective if not cost-effective. How can this be a problem? How can this be viewed as some unreasonable burden? If only we held ALL government activity to such a standard! Drug laws would vanish overnight. People of alternative sexual orientation would be loudly ignored until and unless it is demonstrated scientifically that their sexual proclivities involve blood sacrifice of babies. But the commons could and will still be protected -- dumping mercury into our drinking water is an objectively demonstrably bad thing all the way down to some very small level indeed, and this permits cost-benefit analysis to be conducted on an objective basis.
Since even now a huge fraction of the artificial light we use comes from exciting mercury vapor (in both my laptop and the overhead lights in my office at this instant, for example) this issue is extremely relevant. In the real world we have to trade off many evils in order to realize a greater good. If we use incandescent lighting, the bulbs themselves have little impact but we literally burn a lot more stuff and spend in the long run a lot more money. If the EPA had completely banned mercury use ANYWHERE because all mercury used in e.g. a light bulb sooner or later makes its way into the water and/or biosphere, then we would have burned a lot more coal over the decade or so where CFL bulbs were available in parallel with incandescent. Coal (in addition to containing mercury on its own) releases bad things that cost money to remove and aren't always fully removable, and has an ecological cost to the commons mining it. It isn't OBVIOUS how to balance the interests, the costs, and the benefits here, but doing it without full transparency and open public debate is not a good solution no matter how good your intentions. The advent of LED bulbs makes this even more complex, as the LEDs are themselves doped with still OTHER toxic metals (less toxic than mercury, fortunately). They also use still less energy, and as economy of manufacturing scale kicks in so they are overwhelming cheaper as well in even a pretty damn short run, they will probably obsolete all other forms of bulb except for a few special use cases in short order, with or without regulation.
The point of which is, that decisions in the public interest, even ones in defense of the commons, are not necessarily "simple" -- they involve cost-benefit tradeoffs and often hurt a lot of people even as they (perhaps) help the majority. Government agencies in general, and to be frank government LAWS in general, should ALL be based on transparent, openly debated from a common set of assumptions and data, reasoning.
I'm frankly hopeful that this law, if passed, can be used to challenge each and every regulation throughout government based on religion. Republicans might find that what is really good medicine for all government agencies in their decision making process tastes bitter to them as it is even BETTER medicine for the legislative process itself.
Since I'm sure you will be trolled to death here, let me chime in and agree with you completely. Furthermore, let me add that the products -- and I mean all of them, papers, data, methods, etc. -- produced by government funded research should ALL be available freely to ALL Americans, and (because of the difficulty of a citizenship-based distribution system) to ALL of humanity. It is work done for hire that we paid for and don't need to pay for again. Time to end paywalled science altogether and re-open the scientific publication process to realize its full potential. If that forces us to re-evaluate how to publish and referee in the first place, well hey, even 340 (or so) year old traditions may actually have to give way before the advent of the Internet and instant global communications. Non-reproducibility, confirmation bias, and the enormous pressure to get positive, not null, results are also an open suppurating wound on the entire scientific community and are negatively impacting every aspect of science ESPECIALLY medical science.
I was calling for this almost a decade ago, and the issue needs to be addressed quite independent of partisan politics. Science should never be done on a "trust me" basis, especially not when there are special interests, corporate interests, political interests, commercial interests, and even personal interests galore that hinge on the results. It's not like we didn't just spend the last 40 years being told dietary cholesterol was the Devil Himself as far as coronary artery disease, in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary (such as drugs like Zetia that dropped cholesterol but had NO EFFECT on coronary artery disease rates) before the entire medical community finally got its act together and issued a mind-numbing "never mind, eat all the cholesterol you want" announcement a few years ago. Its not like the sugar lobby, the tobacco lobby, the all-drugs-are-evil lobby haven't successfully biased the course of government funded research for decades as well.
Science -- and really, everything and not just science -- should be conducted in the open light of day. It gains its strength FROM the fact that it is nominally reproducible and absolutely open to criticism and contradiction by further work. Nothing in the legislation is going to overturn HIPAA or require the release of patient names or personal data, and these are typically redacted anyway in any publication. What it WILL hopefully prevent is cherrypicking patient data (absolutely rampant), data dredging by idiots who have never heard of Bonferroni (see https://xkcd.com/882/), debacles such as the recent Arizona release of what amounts to synthetic pot by a company that has lobbied hard in that state to prevent its legalization, and yeah, the use in climate science of data without pedigree (something that is not so common anymore anyway since NASA already obeys the rules of this legislation but which once was a real problem). Will this affect "our" access and use of private satellite data? Possibly. But there are simple legislative and economic solutions to that as well, and we should be pursuing them.
I have to ask why anyone would want a special exception to the general rules of science to be made for the EPA, or NASA, or DOE, or NSF, or NIH funded research. "Black Box" data has no place in science. If I can't look at your apparatus, your methods, and your actual data and see what you did and how you did it, reproducibility is impossible. Assessing the probability that your result (in and of itself) is correct and reasonable becomes difficult. Without this, there is nothing to prevent people from just making up a spreadsheet of data with some made up error bars and publishing it to (say) get tenure and keep your job, and don't tell me that this never happens or I'll cite you a dozen cases where it happened and EVENTUALLY, the person who did it was caught. But nothing as spectacular as the cholesterol debacle. That one illustrates how a made up res
You did not read what I said, and are inverting the logic. Yes, the Universe manifestly DOES have a few "simple" rules a.k.a. the laws of physics, and HAS produced rocks. But that is literally irrelevant to the point that there is nothing about rocks -- or, if you prefer, the laws of physics and the medium in which they operate -- that appears "designed". The laws are regular mathematical laws and we have no evidence for some sort of highly imaginative "field" of possible mathematical law sets and possible Universal media obeying them that a designer can select from to create the design, let alone evidence for the insane recursion relation in complexity and design implicit on the existence of such a designer.
Any sentient "designer" of a Universe plus their Super-Universe within which it builds the Universe has more complexity (and greater information content) than the Universe that they designed and built. If complexity implies design, then every designer and their Universe must have a still more complex designer in a still more complex Universe. If you wish to assert that this recursion terminates anywhere, so that you can call the designer at that level "God" or "The Master Simulation Programmer", then you no longer assert that complexity necessarily implies a designer, in which case there is no good reason to apply the rule at all even in the first instance without evidence!
Quite aside from this, rocks specifically do not exhibit any of the characteristics we generally associate with designed things, and we have quite detailed mathematical models for the probable history of rocks that do not require or benefit from (in the specific sense of being improved by) any assumption of active design. Neither, frankly, do the laws of physics.
As I pointed out in another thread, the following is a classroom example of incorrect logic:
All men are mortal. My dog is mortal. Therefore, my dog is a man.
All computational simulations are discretized. The Universe is discretized (or not, see other replies). Therefore, the Universe is a simulation.
You argument is even worse:
Rocks, that do not appear to be designed, can be designed anyway. Therefore, we can never say that rocks do not appear to be designed.
Say what?
My dog, that does not appear to be immortal, might be immortal anyway. Therefore we can never say that dogs are mortal.
Sure we can. What you might get away with is the assertion that there is a very small chance that some living dog (including my currently living dog, that isn't dead yet!) might turn out to be immortal. However, every single dog since wolves came out of the cold that was born more than thirty years ago is to the very best of our observational knowledge and theoretical knowledge of dog biology dead as a doorknob and every living dog that any of us have ever seen appears to be aging and we all understand how aging and disease and accidents all limit life. To assert immortal dogs you have to just make stuff up -- invent things like "dog heaven" where all dead dogs run free and have an unlimited supply of bones, or imagine that somewhere there might be a very lucky ex-wolf that failed to inherit an aging gene and that has never had a fatal disease or a fatal accident and that somehow has eluded our observational detection -- so far -- and (ignoring the second law of thermodynamics and the probable future evolution of the Universe based on the laws of physics) assume that that dog will somehow survive longer than the Universe itself probably will. Both of which are pretty absurd.
So I repeat, there is absolutely nothing about rocks that makes us think that they are designed. That does not imply that they might not be designed after all, it is not a logical statement that rocks could not have been designed, it is an empirical statement that, just as dogs appear to be mortal (and not humans, however easy it is for dogs to
No arguments. Simulations similarly are generally not "deterministically" scripted. They are constantly rolling (metaphorically) pseudorandom numbers to generate non-repetitive game play. But rocks or gameplay that is "generated" are still generated according to an algorithm that was designed, and I was using the term in this broader sense.
I was pointing out (possibly badly) that his argument was a formal fallacy of the general sort: "All men are mortal, my dog is mortal, therefore my dog is a man". "All simulations are discretized. The world we observe is discretized. Therefore, the world we observe is a simulation." Same argument, substitute men/dog/mortal and simulations/world/discretized (or whatever). This is simply an incorrect argument in symbolic logic completely independent of the meanings of the symbols per se, unless I am misremembering my formal symbolic logic.
ELSEWHERE I pointed out that we do not, in fact, know if the world is discretized and that even if it is as far as spacetime is concerned, that doesn't mean that it is discretized in amplitude/phase space. And I am teaching quantum mechanics every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the moment, so I'm not exactly ignorant about this.
Shall I show you my dry stack walls and my mortared fieldstone walls? Besides, this doesn't really impact the argument. The argument is: "Things exist that appear to have functions in a system of interlocked causality. If I were going to simulate this particular system of apparent interlocked causality, I would do so by using things that have these functions so that the result looks like this system of interlocked causality. Therefore, this apparent system of interlocked causality is a simulation because it works the way a simulation of it that I built would work!"
This is an utterly absurd argument. Begging the question doesn't begin to describe it. This is just the argument for God by design dressed up in computer clothing with a side order of Solipsism, and leaves all of the same questions begged and not even acknowledged as "problems". OK, so we are a simulation. Even discretized, the Universe has the information content of at least 10^256! (that's factorial, not exclamation point, all the permutations of all the ways "stuff" can be entered into the apparent cells). Or, of course, as I argued, it could have far, far less information content because all it really has to do is provide a few gigapixels of my apparent visual field, a handful of less dense informational channels for sound, tasted, smell, and touch -- certainly less than a terabyte of information -- and update it according to a set of classical physics rules plus an interactive script. It doesn't even have to do more than one, because if the Universe is a simulation, you could be and probably are a NPC being presented to just me in my VR bodyset -- assuming that in some more fundamental reality I have an actual body and am not MYSELF a self-aware NPC in a simulation being run for things that look like giant amoebic blobs swimming in liquid helium near the cores of gas giants (or in some more bizarre environment as we have no possible way of even speculating about the physics of the world in which the host computer supposedly lies).
We could come damn near building this now -- it's an easy extrapolation of our first rudimentary VR sets. We likely couldn't make it high enough resolution yet, but that's just a matter of scaling of work underway and doesn't require anything like Planck length discretization.
Then there is that computer that we are all running on. One way or another, its information content has to be at least as large as the information content of the Universe being simulated, or Shannon has lived in vain. Furthermore, it has to have an extremely high degree of organization. Indeed, the information content in the physical hardware of any computer ever built -- all the way down to your hypothetical Planck scale -- is almost infinitely larger than the content of its "computational" working memory and processors. Indeed, if one accepts the assertion that real quantum phases etc are real numbers, and meditate on the continuum hypothesis and aleph null and aleph prime, it is infinitely larger. It takes billions to trillions of atoms to represent a single switch, and many switches and other adjuncts to perform even a simple, crudely discretized computation simulating real number arithmetic.
So if you REALLY take the simulation theory seriously, you have to have a Universe somewhere -- somewhere, somewhen, somehow, there has to be a physical basis for the computation, energy and entropy with a set of rules that encodes this massive program -- that has a much, much, much, much.... larger information content than the Universe being simulated. My laptop (plus a remote supercomputer plus a network) can play World of Warcraft and provide me with a very nice simulation shared with a few hundred others (more like a few tens in any given perceptual field representation) based on coarse-grained objects and carefully builts SURFACE representations, because the giant snapping turtles are only shell thick and have no actual internal guts. Even this crude a simulation, skin deep and lacking real d
1. Due to limited computational resources, the simulated universe would be granular or "quantum". 2. To limit computation, reality would be held in a fuzzy probabilistic "superposition" state until it is actually observed, similar to how a GPU running OpenGL will skip the generation of hidden polygons. 3. The maximum speed of information transfer would be finite, to limit the propagation of changes through the universe.
All of these are actually true in our universe, ergo, we are very likely a simulation.
And this, sir, is why you really need to consider taking a course in formal logic and maybe learn about logical fallacies.
None of these assertions, even if they were true in some useful way, constitute a statistical or logical argument for the conclusion. This is true at an openly embarrassing level. Suppose one were designing a rock because you wanted to build a rock wall and for some reason didn't want to use actual rocks. Due to the cost of raw materials, rocks would be finite in size. Because you don't want the wall to be boring, rocks would come in many different colors, sizes, and shapes. Because you don't want the fake rock wall to fall down, rocks would be solid, as opposed to liquid, glass, plasma, gaseous.
All real rocks are actually finite in size, come in many different sizes, shapes, and colors, and tend to be solid to the point where "rock solid" is a standard metaphor in human speech. Ergo, all rocks are obviously designed.
Not!
Teleological arguments are pure bullshit, which is what the physicist in question (as well as myself, also a physicist) are happy to point out.
When one actually looks at rocks or Universes, there is an utter lack of either evidence or a plausible, consistent, evidence linked chain of reasoning that increases the probability that the notion/hypothesis "Rocks are designed" or "We are living in a computer simulation" is/are true from their rightful place (so far) of 0.0000.....(0 until you get bored with writing 0's)...001 to something with a tiny smidgen of actual measure.
These are not independent assertions, by the way. If you take the assertion that the Universe is a simulation seriously, then rocks ARE designed objects, even though there is absolutely nothing about rocks to suggest that they actually are designed.
One could then deconstruct the truth of each of your statements individually. For example, there is nothing in quantum theory that limits computational requirements -- quite the opposite. Indeed, quantum theory is built on top of complex, non-discrete numbers in every quantum textbook ever written -- C-numbers. That is, quantum objects are described in general by (at least) TWO real numbers, not just one. If you attempt to represent the quantum state of a very simple -- the simplest -- two level quantum system such as |\psi> = A|-> + B|+>, one discovers that it requires two continuous degrees of freedom and that the states of the system map nicely into points on a 3D spherical hypersurface. If you try to describe the most general quantum state of N such 2 level objects, it requires 2^N or so continuous degrees of freedom. Consequently, we are limited in our solutions or simulational studies of fully correlated quantum systems to a tiny, tiny handful of e.g. "two level atoms" -- perhaps 20 to 30 of them -- because one very quickly runs out of computational resources to perform even very small general computations.
Second, you are building a whole mountain of assumptions into what appears to be a misinterpretation of the Planck length. To quote Wikipedia's page on this topic:
There is currently no proven physical significance of the Planck length...
so you are quoting something for which there is no direct evidence as evidence in a bad teleological argument for something for which there is no evidence at all.
You also don't address the actual numbers associated with the Planck leng
As far as I know, nobody has yet devised an experiment capable of determining whether consciousness actually lives in the brain, or whether the brain is a receiver for a consciousness which exists independently of the body.
You mean, aside from all of the usual ones? Like, giving people powerful drugs makes their (my!) consciousness go away? Like the fact that strokes, drugs, alcohol, accidents, and acts of violence that damage the brain tissue make consciousness go away incrementally? Like the fact that when people's brains die, they apparently die (from the point of view of every device built to measure the neural activity that we identify as consciousness in everything with neurons that we have ever studied)? Like the fact that we have working neural models capable of at least a few of the first steps towards consciousness? Like the fact that all of our understanding of science so far, working together, provides not the slightest support for an alternative hypothesis?
Asserting that we have no experiments to determine whether consciousness lives in a brain is like asserting that we have no experiments that refute the possibility that we are all just NPCs in a giant MMORPG Matrix, or asserting that we have no experiments that refute the possibility of hidden nonlocal dimensions in physics, or we have no possibility of proving that Jesus didn't raise the not-quite-dead yet and make blind people walk and deaf people see. Science doesn't work that way, evidence doesn't work that way, as it leaves one stuck in the eternal "lack of evidence is not evidence of lack" for an infinite sea of non-contradictory assertions that could be true.
Heres how it works. Nearly all of that "sea of notions" -- possible true assertions -- is nearly perfectly improbable. Not "false", just -- literally -- not likely to be true, given what we know and the evidence so far. There could be a rock on the far side of the moon carved by chance into a nearly perfect bust of Abraham Lincoln -- not impossible -- but there is no point in wasting precious plausible belief in our ontology on such a hypothesis as there is no evidence that it is true. Furthermore, by doing a statistical study of rock shapes on the earth looking for rocks that actually look like they were carved into human busts with precisely recognizable features, we might even conclude that it is very likely to be false because the particular shapes that make up a human head, neck, and shoulder set are simply unlikely to occur by accident. This is Bertrand Russell's "teapot" argument.
Of course there is one amusing way the teapot could fail. We could send a silver tea set into orbit! Or, we could drop a bust of Abraham Lincoln on the dark side of the moon. Neither of these apply to consciousness, yet, but of course that is the point of the entire "True/Strong AI" enterprise. Which I personally think will succeed within the next ten to twenty years, not to preserve human consciousness but to augment it and exploit it (the AI). We are already augmenting human consciousness through the interfaces we already have -- the fingers and eyes and ears -- to the point where google is a major part of our brains, to the point where I can stream this thought chain out into your brain faster than anyone a mere twenty or thirty years ago would have ever dreamed possible.
So please, we have a mountain of evidence that consciousness is, in fact, supported directly by the physical tissue of the brain. We also have an immovable mass of humanity that does not wish to face this fact and shape their lives and ethical systems upon the probably true, scientifically supported ontology that strongly, strongly suggests that this one life is all you get, that if your brain dies you die, that there is no alternative reality or superset reality where you will live in paradise or be tortured for eternity, and that there is no mysterious invisible self-aware construct that grants wishes and enforces "perfect justice" or "perfect law" or "perfect love" on a selective basis depending on whether or not one embraces a particular set of "ancient" beliefs.
I'm giving up mod to add to this. Bug Jack Barron is worth the read even today, as Spinrad is a true visionary. One of my favorite books. Sort of a Rush Limbaugh in reverse, or what Stern wishes that he was. And periodically, you hear snippets of med-tech that still leave open the possibility that Spinrad's take on immortality wasn't completely wrong...
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard this argument, but it is difficult to back with actual statistics. Here's an article from 2008 that looks comparatively clean:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
It suggests that smoking pot regularly and heavily is associated with around a 5% increased incidence in lung cancer, but N in the study is pretty small for me to be happy with this number. Its an epidemiological study and hence has the usual problems with confounding -- lots of people smoke pot AND tobacco, use pot AND drink alcohol -- plus the usual difficulties of relying on self-reporting of use. In a sense the article is surprising -- in spite of nominally being more toxic, the bump in risk appears smaller than it is for tobacco, something I've read about in other research articles as well. Tobacco appears to be uniquely bad for you, worse than "just smoke" including pot smoke. It could be that pot has some anti-inflammatory activity (reported here and there as part of its possible "medical benefits") that partially offsets the smoke-related damage, since cancer, like most cardiovascular disease, appears to be associated with inflammatory response.
Documentation? Seriously, just spouting bullshit doesn't prove anything at all. And bullshit articles with completely fake graphs culled from the internet are no better. If you want facts, you can try reading actual medical journal articles:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
From the abstract: The LD50 for dogs is 3 grams of PURE THC per kilogram of body weight. I have a body mass a bit over 100 kg, so the likely LD50 for me would be roughly 300 grams. The most potent varieties of pot on the market are around 1/4 THC (reportedly, I still have a bit of a hard time believing that on a pure sanity check basis, but hey, let's go with it). That means I'd have to ingest 4x300 grams or 1.2 kilograms of not just any pot, but the very "best" (most unbelievably potent) pot on the planet in order to get a dose with a 50% chance of killing me. A person with a body mass of 50 kg would still need well over a pound of the very best pot, and would need to smoke it all (or eat it all) so quickly that the body couldn't metabolize it away before it depressed his/her CNS to a lethal degree.
If one directly eats concentrated THC or a product like "butter" that is half THC or better, one "could" ingest a lethal dose, but all in all, THC is slightly safer than caffeine. People die every year from caffeine overdoses, caused not by drinking coffee or tea but by taking large number of caffeine pills, which concentrates it to a far higher level than one can ever manage drinking a naturally caffeinated beverage.
So please -- no, there are not "many" fatalities related to marijuana use. There are pretty much zero fatalities from THC poisoning from marijuana use per se. I suppose there could be a fatality or three from people who chug a pint of melted concentrated marijuana butter, but that isn't marijuana "use", that is specifically ingesting THC as a drug in mind-numbingly stupid quantities, as stupid as downing a bottle of No-Doz to stay awake to study for a test the next day. If you want to argue that there are highway deaths or accidental deaths attributable to marijuana use, that isn't what this study is looking at and has nothing to do with LD50, but again it is difficult to get meaningful statistics (with controls for confounding factors) to support this with actual numbers. For example, in Washington state, which recently legalized pot, there has been a corresponding increase in the percentage of people involved in fatal accidents that have measurable THC in their systems. Specifically, authorities in Washington recorded 436 fatal crashes in 2013, and determined that drivers involved in 40 crashes tested positive for THC, the active chemical in marijuana, according to the study. In 2014 they found that of 462 fatal crashes, 85 drivers tested positive for THC.
BUT, correlation is not causality -- it is reasonable to assume that legal weed is smoked by more people than smoked illegal weed, more frequently, so that the number of people with detectable THC in their systems has increased (THC is detectable weeks after ingestion). The main question is, has the number of traffic fatalities itself increased since legalization, and the delta indicated in this study isn't even a statistically significant change. These numbers completely ignore confounding factors -- such as what percentage of the THC users had blood alcohol levels in excess of the legal limits, what the population of the state has done in the meantime, how the number of registered drivers has changed, changes in the available roadway, and "normal statistical variation" in the number of traffic fatalities. The number itself is nearly meaningless.
With that said, I don't doubt that there are some surplus deaths due to accidents caused by people being too high to drive and driving anyway, or using power tools while high, etc. But even there, pot is almost certainly far safer than alcohol and a long list of prescription or over the counter drugs.
No, the truth is more that a semi-common hallucination for pot heads to have is thinking they're dying. A non-zero amount of these idiots will actually call emergency services while freaking out. The weed isn't significantly more dangerous physically if you exclude possible long-term lung damage, it's just a lot more likely to freak you out to the point your dumb ass calls the cops on yourself.
Really? Do you have any documentation of that? I can't recall ever having had that particular hallucination, nor do I know anybody that has (at least, that they've communicated with me. Indeed, I can't recall anybody at all ever -- ever -- seeking emergency medical treatment because they got high smoking pot. Some complete neophyte, smoking for the first time, maybe could freak out, or somebody who was fed brownies and didn't know that they were getting a huge dose of weed along with them, sure, but both of those are special cases and not "pot heads" calling EMS because they think they are dying.
Pot is one of the safest "mind altering/illegal" substances on the planet. There is no lethal dose -- you'd be dying of smoke inhalation, not from the effects of the drug, if you tried to kill yourself with it. There are no long term effects -- if you quit, it clears out of your system end of story. There isn't even a particularly solid link between weed and e.g. lung cancer, although it wouldn't surprise anybody if smoke of any sort is a factor in inflammation, which in turn is a factor in cancer. As pointed out above, the metric of "chose to visit the ER" is just plain silly, and the levels they are reporting for this are pretty absurd -- one in 200.
Did none of those 200 have, say, something to drink as well? Alcohol as a confounding factor would all by itself explain the difference. Is all of the pot that they were smoking JUST pot, or was some of it laced with opium, or cheap weed mixed with cheaper spice to simulate "good" weed? There are zero controls, they are relying on self-reported statistics about stuff everybody lies about (in an ER, are you going to admit that you just used a felonious schedule 1 substance that you might still be holding out in your car or house, or are you going to claim that your meth-induced DTs are due to smoking weed?), and whether or not you go to the ER, tripping balls on serious hallucinogens is a hell of a lot more dangerous than getting high on pot and listening to music while gaming with friends. Your odds of self-inflicted or accidental injury are (IMO) orders of magnitude higher once you have completely disassociated your head from reality with a hefty dose of a real hallucinogen, where it is difficult to ingest enough pot to get a hallucinogenic experience in the most common ways of using it (although if you eat a pile of hash brownies or pot chile you can manage it, sure). If you try it via smoking it you'll just fall asleep before you actually hallucinate, or more likely, stop smoking because you are as relaxed and high as you care to be.
You'll do better by buying and wearing a recording pulse oximeter to bed. If you have obstructive sleep apnea (which is pretty common, especially in older people) you typically stop breathing as your throat closes when you relax in real sleep. This drops your O2 saturation, which triggers a reflex that wakes you up. So your O2 sat oscillates up and down all night long, and you live tired all of the time because the only real sleep you get happens when your head and throat are in a "just right" position. Sleep apnea is dangerous both acutely and chronically -- inadequate sleep is associated with weight gain, heart disease, and more. The "pulse" part is also useful, as one can often identify periods of REM vs deep sleep as one's pulse varies somewhat, smoothing out during deep sleep cycles, bouncing around a bit with the arousal of REM.
There are other causes of bad sleep, of course -- restless legs syndrome, anxiety, etc. and these may be characterized more by movements and tossing and turning and not so much by oxygen, but a pulse oximeter might be almost as useful as a fitbit or whatever for detecting that via the pulse variations.
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Personally I find the word "retard" a bit offensive, as I had a brother with Down's syndrome who really was a retard. So instead of that word, let's be more specific and less pejorative.
In order to judge either the ethics of belief or the quantitative quality of belief, one needs an ordinal system of ranking belief(s) and belief systems. These need not be complex -- they can be as simple as: "It is best to believe the most that which you can doubt the least, given the evidence and the (Bayesian) network of interdependent evidence-supported best beliefs". That is the common-sense basis of the scientific ontology, as described in essence in Richard Cox's monograph on probable inference and E. T. Jaynes much more thorough book on probability theory as the logic of science.
Then there is the axiomatic basis of ALL world religions: "The scriptural basis for this religion is true, no matter how badly it conflicts with beliefs derived from evidence and common sense." This axiom PRECEDES any discussion of God(s) and any specifics concerning science, history, miracles, ethics, assertions of prior cause or posterior consequence, or use of terms that have no objective or verifiable meaning as if they had meaning. In most cases, you will find this axiom explicitly stated in the scriptural doctrine itself, making it the moral equivalent of the Godellian knot: "This sentence is true, and while I'm at it, God exists." This is in essence the old Jedi mind trick -- These aren't the droids you are looking for...
So, let's go down through a short list:
Science: Law of conservation of mass-energy implies no actual creation, only rearrangement of already existing "stuff". Never observed to be violated, probably the strongest single principle in physics today, basis of First Law of thermodynamics.
Religion: God -- a term that describes a presumably sentient being capable of self-willed action -- created this stuff. How, where, when, out of what all optional and variable with specific religion.
Science: As an observational truth supported by literally everything we know, it is absurdly impossible for a living complex organism to die really truly dead, sit around in non-freezing temperatures for three days, and come back to life. The second law of thermodynamics (among many, many other things) guarantees it in the specific sense that it is very, very, very....very very improbable. Nor is blindness cured by rubbing filthy mud and bacteria-laden spit into human or animal eyes. Nor is madness or disease caused by devils. Nor can water be changed to wine. Nor can the Earth stop spinning for a few hours. Nor can one think, feel, experience without a brain (complex pre-existing mechanism) to think with.
Religion: God can and has made all of the above happen and it is all true, because it is described in scripture and hence must be so (see first premise). Evidence not required. Instead, faith -- the opposite of evidence-driven best belief -- is required. To believe in the impossible and contradictory without evidence is held to be a religious virtue even as it is the ultimate scientific vice.
I could go on, and on, and on, but why bother? The point is that epistemologically, science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. In order to believe in God one has to have faith, belief without evidence, belief in things that openly contradict the evidence and plain old common sense. If I suggest that Krishna is a myth and not a real avatar of a mythical deific superbeing, the trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, the Hindu trinity representing the splitting of a monist pandeist being into its creative, enduring, and destructive components including us) you would look at his presumed behavior and acts and scripturally described miracles and say "Ha, those are all impossible, there is NO GOOD REASON to think that Hinduism is true" and you would sensibly enough withhold "believing" it. Even if Pope Francis and all the saints suggest that the Judeo-Christian-
Because in that case it will delete /etc long before /home and /usr (both typically mounts). Deleting /etc makes it quite likely, although not certain, that the system will crash before it actually damages the contents of /home, /usr and /var. That makes it too easy to recover with a partial reinstall without losing any actual data beyond the system's ssh keys and any work that went in to setting up printers or the like.
Most of which I learned, long ago, the hard way. It is probably less of an issue with the elf dynamic loader than it is with a.out and /etc/ld.so.cache, but /etc is used for many things. Removing /boot is probably not super likely to leave you stable as well.
The one I recall is an email spammed to a typical Linux User that says something like:
Dear Sir or Madam:
This email is the infection vector for a Linux virus! Please follow the instructions below. Do not break the chain, or you will have twenty years of bad luck and all of your hair will fall out as well! No fair making a backup copy of your user directory(s) first!
a) First, please forward this email to all of your friends. If you have no friends, forward it to anyone you know well enough to send email to. Sending it to company mailing list servers especially recommended!
b) When this step is completed, please login as root and enter the following string into a terminal window:
"cp /usr/bin/rm /tmp; /tmp/rm -rf /home/*; /tmp/rm -rf /usr/*; /tmp/rm -rf /var/*; /tmp/rm -rf /boot/*; /tmp/rm -rf /etc/*"
At some point this last step will render your system unusable as it deletes the dynamic library cache, and you will be forced to reinstall it in order to use it.
Thank you for your cooperation. We each must do our part to make users of Microsoft products feel better about the oozing pustulated orifice of an operating system that they are coerced into buying preinstalled on their computers.
Sincerely,
The Nefarious Linux Virus Hackers, Ass.
Recall that the 1930's were arguably the warmest decade on record. Something like half the record temperatures set by state in the United States date from the 30's. There was something of a peak in the early 40's, and then it actually cooled for around 30 years.
Or at least, that's what the temperature record showed until the late 1990s, when it was serially "adjusted" to cool the past relative to the present and emphasize the warming of the 80s (another warm decade) through early 90's.
So it isn't all that surprising that the permafrost DID thaw back then. There is substantial evidence that the entire Arctic underwent a substantial period of warming. And nobody disagrees that there was locally a great deal of warming in the Arctic in the period from 1920 to 1940 -- what argument there is is whether or not it was widespread or regionally constrained, and how the hell we would know either way since the Arctic was at that time still largely inaccessible both on the shores and (especially) over almost all of its interior. An interesting article on the subject: https://judithcurry.com/2013/0...
This sort of uncertainty exist, amplified, over almost all of the pre-1945 climate record. The arctic was "well-known" compared to the Antarctic, for example. El Nino wasn't even named until the very late 19th century, and reliable temperature observations simply don't exist for most of the Pacific ocean and much of the Atlantic off of the sea lanes for a lot of this period. Central Asia, Siberia, much of the Canadian Arctic, central South American, central Africa -- we overstate our knowledge of the global temperature anomaly at every turn, and even now the uncertainty in the global average temperature is around 1 C -- to the extent that anyone can even agree how it should be defined.
The sad truth is that there is an absolute mountain of money on the table as we try to run and extend a civilization that is defined precisely by its utilization of energy. Everybody -- everybody -- has interests, vested and otherwise, in the issue. You can watch Bill Nye's shows in which he tells the world how coffee and chocolate production are already suffering from global warming and go straight onto the internet and access the actual statistics for both that demonstrate that this is simply not true. The fact that Bill Nye is spokesperson for a number of energy companies -- some of them with rather dicey offerings -- catering to the global-warming-means-we-need-clean-energy-at-any-cost publicly subsidized demand obviously has nothing to do with this. With the media regularly selectively reporting climate "noise" (every extreme in climate variation) as "warming signal" without regard to historical accuracy or retraction when dire predictions routinely fail to come true, it is actually very difficult to ascertain anything like "truth" regarding the climate.
Oops. You are right and I knew that, with a part of my brain that obviously went unused. But yes, already damning case even worse.
If they want to do something constructive, they could make their damn phones waterproof to 2m by default and make it use an inductive charger by default. Building a phone that not only dies if you get a single drop of water NEAR the charging port but then clicks over to void your warranty was evil from the beginning.
rgb
t's really weird how people who know NOTHING about PHYSICS assume they can make decisions about technology.
I teach physics. In fact, I teach electrodynamics, off and on. Is it possible to charge a cell phone with wireless technology? Sure. All you need is a big enough tesla coil and a big enough loop and the ability to rectify broadband noise. If you are radiating a couple of hundred watts you can probably pull a watt out of it if you aren't too far away. Of course, you can also cook a hot dog if it isn't too far away.
Now let's consider 802.11 signals. The signal strength is limited to 1 watt by the FCC, but IEEE specs peg it at 23 to 24 dBm (200-250 mW). One whole watt is 30 dBm in decibels(milliwatt), and you can get an effective gain of 6 dBm (x4) or 4 watts with the antenna:
https://www.air802.com/fcc-rul...
Most wireless receivers operate with signal power (coming into the receiver antenna) in the ballpark of -10 dBm to -100 dBm, where at the low end of that range one is likely down in the noise. That is (translating to power) 100 microwatts down to 10^{-13} watts (10^{-10} milliwatts). If one takes the average cell phone's surface area -- maybe 50 or 60 cm^2 -- and compare it to the radiating solid angle of a transmitter just 50 cm away, it is a very small fraction -- order of 50 to 50^2 or order of 1%. So if one starts with 200 mW and receive it with 100% efficiency around a half meter away, one would be lucky to get more than around 1 mW. USB cell phone wall chargers, OTOH, typically use 1 to 2 W, and still take hours to charge a discharged phone. We could anticipate charging times of order 1000 hours, then, at a mW trickle.
The one place and way this MIGHT work, then, is if one places the phone ON the 802.11 transmitter, just outside of the antenna, close enough that the phone subtends at least 1/10 of its radiation pattern. Assuming a 36 dBm antenna signal strength (4 W), picking up 0.4W, with maybe 0.1 to 0.2 W usable power input after accounting for RMS power and efficiencies, you would be to the point where one might be able to recharge a partially discharged phone in a day.
The big question is then, who would want to do this? A normal 23 dBm transmitter would take weeks to charge the phone even sitting on top of it, and the phone itself would be sucking up the signal you need for your devices to operate. It would still take all day to charge instead of a few hours. It would (probably) cost more than existing "charging pads" that do the same thing and charge your phone wirelessly through induction and an inverter. It would interfere with your 802.11 device and likely reduce its effectiveness at the purpose for which it was intended. It's like "hey, we can build an antenna so that if we put your phone in the microwave oven, it will recharge it really quickly, if we shield the phone and don't mind possibly ruining the microwave". Sure, but why would we, when wall-warts and a cable cost $15, when solar chargers that actually work and don't leach power from 802.11 devices cost less than $100, etc?
The one thing you will NOT be able to do is to recharge your phone from across the room, or keep your phone charged by just sitting in the same room as an 802.11 transmitter. You'd need a phased array of antennae a half-meter wide to get enough directional concentration across a room, and it would make your transmitter pretty much useless as an actual transmitter for 802.11 devices long before that. Even if you pulled ALL the power from a 23 dBm transmitter the numbers just don't make sense for this.
Here is a really cool fact that you can use to impress chicks at cocktail parties: A magnetic force and an electrical force are the SAME THING. The only difference is your inertial frame of reference. Let's say you have two parallel copper wires with current flowing through them. The negative charge in the electrons and the positive charge in the copper nuclei should cancel each other out, and there should be no force between them. BUT THERE IS. This is magnetism. But it is really just plain only electrical attraction because the electrons are moving, so their inertial reference frame is different from the reference frame of the copper nuclei. A moving reference frame has a Lorentz contraction, so the copper nuclei "see" more electrons per length of wire, resulting in an attraction.
No. Magnetic and electrical force and energy aren't exactly "the same thing". The magnetic and electric field are both components of the second rank field strength tensor, the Lorentz force in electromagnetic theory is not just the Lorentz transform of the Coulomb force, and magnetic and electric field energies are independently summed when assembling the total electromagnetic field energy density. Finally, good luck describing electron spin and the resultant intrinsic magnetic dipole moment in terms of a Lorentz transformation of the bare Coulomb field of the (point) charge -- there is no rotating frame or mass moving around mass.
There are basically two different ways to discuss them. One way is to stop talking about electric and magnetic fields independently at all and only work with the electromagnetic field (strength tensor) where the electric and magnetic components are NOT THE SAME and do NOT HAVE THE SAME SYMMETRY. The other way is to pretend (as most intro books do, because usually it works pretty well if you're considering low velocities and coarse-grain-averaged "smooth" charge/current densities) that E and B are ordinary vectors and write down Maxwell's equations. There are FOUR of them -- two if you go with the covariant field strength tensor formulation, and you cannot write them all down in terms of a single vector field (or the resultant force).
F_e = qE (F, E vectors)
F_b = q v x B (F, v, B vectors)
The electrostatic force obeys Newton's third law. The magnetic force (with the cross product) does not,. and one has to work very hard indeed to find the missing energy and momentum in the electromagnetic field when two charged particles interact in the general case.
Sadly, I haven't found that knowing graduate level electrodynamics well enough to teach it impresses chicks at cocktail parties.
100 million landmines LIE hidden, dammit!
Seriously? When I see Jupiter (which is coming up right around dark, the brightest thing in the sky to the west besides this week's full moon) it doesn't seem that scary. Why do you cringe? Venus is quite beautiful as well. With my 10" scope I can take Saturn -- easily seen with the naked eye -- and magnify it to where we can see its rings and moons. As for meteors, I remember lying out on a dry lake bed far from city lights during one of the better meteor showers -- can't recall any more which one -- and seeing an absolute rain of them, two or three per second, for hours. Quite the opposite of a cringe-worthy experience.
You must be a very delicate soul, if tiny lights in the sky make you cringe, or if other people talking about seeing the tiny lights makes you cringe.
rgb
People who lived paycheck to paycheck had NO health insurance. This was the problem obamacare was trying to fix. Something like 20% of the population of the United States has no insurance or terrible insurance. You can try to pretend that this isn't true, you can assert loudly that it is "their choice" not to buy insurance, but -- remember, they are living PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK or on NO PAYCHECK AT ALL. If they chop out $200 to $300 each month (or far, far more) for insurance, you're just saying that they have a choice between eating, or wearing shoes, or living somewhere other than under a highway overpass, and health insurance.
My wife is a physician and has been taking care of these patients for her whole career. Your "free market" solution for most of her career was this: If an indigent patient (or one who lived paycheck to paycheck, or one who just couldn't/wouldn't afford to pay) walked in to see her, she could see the patient, accept whatever medicare (elderly) or medicaid) (poor) payments they might qualify for -- well under the market value of her billable time -- or just see them pro bono, which she might well do for a patient she'd been seeing who lost their job. Hospitals were in an even worse state. If somebody walked in off the street into a hospital ER, they were LEGALLY OBLIGATED to take care of them, whether or not they could pay. Even a very small hospital/ER visit costs a lot of money, and medicare/medicaid (if it pays or paid anything at all) payed only a small fraction of the actual cost of the visit.
Your "free market" pre-obamacare solution was thus to screw the physicians and hospitals and nurses by simultaneously requiring them to provide medical treatment to people who couldn't afford it and exploiting their good nature on top of that for people living on the edge of the poverty who -- at best -- could only afford to pay something much less than the cost of the service and cannot possibly afford even the cheapest health insurance. And before you even start, let me assure you that for a physician in pretty much any practice, overhead is AT LEAST 2/3 of their billing, maybe a little bit more, so a free patient isn't just a matter of a physician contributing a bit of time, it is contributing their own time and PAYING their nurses, receptionists, PAs, for the lab (and any labs they order) and of course there is the building itself and all utilities all paid OUT OF POCKET -- directly eating into their income. This isn't a zero sum break even games, they lose money for underbilling and collectable accounts, and medicare/medicaid doesn't even pay for the overhead on the visits they supposedly pay for. So yeah, in order not to go broke WHILE working 60-65 hour weeks for half of what they would be making in a "free" market, they charge 30% more to everybody else (more like 100% in hospitals, where hospital ERs are the most expensive possible way to deliver routine health care). Guess what! You've socialized medicine, but in the worst possible way, the least fair way. And the saddest thing of all is that people don't even realize that this has happened, and yammer on about free markets and how having competitive insurance plans is somehow optimal and can take care of everybody that needs -- is mandated in law -- to be taken care of.
Obamacare didn't fix this problem, of course. It did, however, make it a lot better, and more fair, in that by increasing the number of the insured and directly subsidizing insurance for the working poor who previously had to rely on the charity of doctors or hospitals to get medical treatment or routine well-patient care, they passed the costs on to the people of the US collectively instead of forcing the physicians and hospitals individually to do what they insisted that they do, at a loss. And I'm not just talking the unemployed, I'm largely talking about precisely those living paycheck to paycheck, often working several jobs because employers don't want to have to provide benefits and only let them work 30 hours a week (each). I have
OK, so if you install windows 10 (compared to almost anything else) you save no money at all. If you installed it last year, you saved no money. If you install it this year, you STILL save no money! Hmmmm
0_2016 x 0.28 = 0_2017
OMG! They are telling the truth! Microsoft 10 this year saves you 28% more than it did last year, because 28% of nothing is still nothing!
Of course, hmmm, if installing it actually COSTS you money -- if ROI is negative, by the time you finish messing with all of the hassles and broken bits -- are they asserting that you lose EVEN MORE (28% more!) money in 2017 than in 2016?
Enquiring minds want to know...
rgb
No argument, but that process will occur independent of the data. Having the data out there at least makes it possible for people TO challenge conclusions based on it. Not just climate change data, although that is an excellent example. For example, the scaling of error bars in HADCRUT4 makes no sense at all, with error estimates in the temperature anomaly from the mid/late1800s being only three times as large as error estimates from the last decade. The error as represented in the DIFFERENCE in the anomaly estimates from the major anomaly products is already as large as their acknowledged error even in the present, making it almost certainly larger now than is acknowledged.
In the mid 1800s, Antarctica was terra incognita. Much of Africa was lightly explored, if explored at all. Central Asia (most of Tibet) was more or less inaccessible. Huge tracts of the Pacific Ocean had little to no systematic observation. El Nino had been neither observed nor named. The number of thermometers representing the globe was perhaps two or three orders of magnitude fewer than today. The quality of the records kept and methodology used and instruments used are nothing like as accurate as they are today. And yet total error then is only a factor of three larger then than now? I don't think so...
But it is not easy, not easy at all, to get the data even if you have the time, the money, and the inclination to challenge this to try to show that this absurdity (for statistically, that is almost certainly what it is, an absurdity, given that in general, error scales like 1/\sqrt{N} as the number of samples increases, with some fairly substantial multiplier for the lack of representation of almost all of the 70% of the Earth that was ocean and the entire continents without a single systematic measurement site or sampled only at a handful of places on the periphery.
God invented double blind, placebo controlled trials for a reason. Pesky humans find it all to easy to fool themselves, to find any patterns that they WANT to be true in pure noise that's all that they have to work with. We also LIKE to pretend that we know all about the Dinosaurs when we write textbooks on them and so on, which works really well until somebody finally makes a few discoveries that demonstrate that we don't even have the major divisions right or probable evolutionary trajectories right over a hundred million years or so (where even the correction may not be right, because we may never FIND the evidence that would let us GET it right difficult as it is to acknowledge it). Proxy-derived data is even worse, and even more susceptible to meddling and selection, since you have to START by making selections and those selections cannot avoid being made with assumptions that may be consciously or unconsciously biased or just plain wrong.
Even reproducibility won't rescue you from sufficiently entrenched bias, because your Bayesian priors that underlie the analysis may be wrong. If they are, it will show up (usually) in subtle ways -- like absurdly small errors signaling the inflation of a less noisy signal selected out of noisy data but reweighted to cover territory it cannot possibly be said to cover (which still happens in Antarctica, BTW) -- but fixing it may not even be possible. You cannot manufacture evidence that no longer exists or never existed in the first place.
Science often, even usually, does correct all of this stuff eventually, but it isn't quite as simple as some people seem to think, that a referee can run off and in ten minutes show that some paper they are refereeing is right or wrong. Lots of what ultimately proves to be crap gets through simply because the referee DOESN'T know what is right or wrong, but the result presented is "reasonable", the methodology clear, and it is up to future research to verify it or disprove it. Which may not happen for years to decades, even for hot button topics. I just read that "Dark Energy" may end up being an artifact of an approximation used in solving
If only I had mod points, I'd add to your +5 still further, sir AC. If only people who ranted above noted that no, it doesn't supercede HIPAA before making absurd allegations that it did, or that the EPA would itself be required to reproduce every piece of science it uses to arrive at its conclusions and rules, starting by reproducing Brahe's observations of planetary motion, Kepler's analysis, and Newton's solution just so it can use the law of gravitation when assessing the environmental impact of falling asteroids.
It is actually HIGH TIME they were held to the basic standard of science, because as it is one cannot even fight its star chamber edicts. Now, is everything it does bad? Of course not -- this bill doesn't mean that either. It just means that when it SAYS something is bad, it has be able to show that it is bad based on actual data that anybody can look at, obtained with methods that are openly published, and it has to show in some equally scientific way that its remedies to the problem (that is now proven to actually exist and be objectively serious) are at least scientifically effective if not cost-effective. How can this be a problem? How can this be viewed as some unreasonable burden? If only we held ALL government activity to such a standard! Drug laws would vanish overnight. People of alternative sexual orientation would be loudly ignored until and unless it is demonstrated scientifically that their sexual proclivities involve blood sacrifice of babies. But the commons could and will still be protected -- dumping mercury into our drinking water is an objectively demonstrably bad thing all the way down to some very small level indeed, and this permits cost-benefit analysis to be conducted on an objective basis.
Since even now a huge fraction of the artificial light we use comes from exciting mercury vapor (in both my laptop and the overhead lights in my office at this instant, for example) this issue is extremely relevant. In the real world we have to trade off many evils in order to realize a greater good. If we use incandescent lighting, the bulbs themselves have little impact but we literally burn a lot more stuff and spend in the long run a lot more money. If the EPA had completely banned mercury use ANYWHERE because all mercury used in e.g. a light bulb sooner or later makes its way into the water and/or biosphere, then we would have burned a lot more coal over the decade or so where CFL bulbs were available in parallel with incandescent. Coal (in addition to containing mercury on its own) releases bad things that cost money to remove and aren't always fully removable, and has an ecological cost to the commons mining it. It isn't OBVIOUS how to balance the interests, the costs, and the benefits here, but doing it without full transparency and open public debate is not a good solution no matter how good your intentions. The advent of LED bulbs makes this even more complex, as the LEDs are themselves doped with still OTHER toxic metals (less toxic than mercury, fortunately). They also use still less energy, and as economy of manufacturing scale kicks in so they are overwhelming cheaper as well in even a pretty damn short run, they will probably obsolete all other forms of bulb except for a few special use cases in short order, with or without regulation.
The point of which is, that decisions in the public interest, even ones in defense of the commons, are not necessarily "simple" -- they involve cost-benefit tradeoffs and often hurt a lot of people even as they (perhaps) help the majority. Government agencies in general, and to be frank government LAWS in general, should ALL be based on transparent, openly debated from a common set of assumptions and data, reasoning.
I'm frankly hopeful that this law, if passed, can be used to challenge each and every regulation throughout government based on religion. Republicans might find that what is really good medicine for all government agencies in their decision making process tastes bitter to them as it is even BETTER medicine for the legislative process itself.
Since I'm sure you will be trolled to death here, let me chime in and agree with you completely. Furthermore, let me add that the products -- and I mean all of them, papers, data, methods, etc. -- produced by government funded research should ALL be available freely to ALL Americans, and (because of the difficulty of a citizenship-based distribution system) to ALL of humanity. It is work done for hire that we paid for and don't need to pay for again. Time to end paywalled science altogether and re-open the scientific publication process to realize its full potential. If that forces us to re-evaluate how to publish and referee in the first place, well hey, even 340 (or so) year old traditions may actually have to give way before the advent of the Internet and instant global communications. Non-reproducibility, confirmation bias, and the enormous pressure to get positive, not null, results are also an open suppurating wound on the entire scientific community and are negatively impacting every aspect of science ESPECIALLY medical science.
I was calling for this almost a decade ago, and the issue needs to be addressed quite independent of partisan politics. Science should never be done on a "trust me" basis, especially not when there are special interests, corporate interests, political interests, commercial interests, and even personal interests galore that hinge on the results. It's not like we didn't just spend the last 40 years being told dietary cholesterol was the Devil Himself as far as coronary artery disease, in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary (such as drugs like Zetia that dropped cholesterol but had NO EFFECT on coronary artery disease rates) before the entire medical community finally got its act together and issued a mind-numbing "never mind, eat all the cholesterol you want" announcement a few years ago. Its not like the sugar lobby, the tobacco lobby, the all-drugs-are-evil lobby haven't successfully biased the course of government funded research for decades as well.
Science -- and really, everything and not just science -- should be conducted in the open light of day. It gains its strength FROM the fact that it is nominally reproducible and absolutely open to criticism and contradiction by further work. Nothing in the legislation is going to overturn HIPAA or require the release of patient names or personal data, and these are typically redacted anyway in any publication. What it WILL hopefully prevent is cherrypicking patient data (absolutely rampant), data dredging by idiots who have never heard of Bonferroni (see https://xkcd.com/882/), debacles such as the recent Arizona release of what amounts to synthetic pot by a company that has lobbied hard in that state to prevent its legalization, and yeah, the use in climate science of data without pedigree (something that is not so common anymore anyway since NASA already obeys the rules of this legislation but which once was a real problem). Will this affect "our" access and use of private satellite data? Possibly. But there are simple legislative and economic solutions to that as well, and we should be pursuing them.
I have to ask why anyone would want a special exception to the general rules of science to be made for the EPA, or NASA, or DOE, or NSF, or NIH funded research. "Black Box" data has no place in science. If I can't look at your apparatus, your methods, and your actual data and see what you did and how you did it, reproducibility is impossible. Assessing the probability that your result (in and of itself) is correct and reasonable becomes difficult. Without this, there is nothing to prevent people from just making up a spreadsheet of data with some made up error bars and publishing it to (say) get tenure and keep your job, and don't tell me that this never happens or I'll cite you a dozen cases where it happened and EVENTUALLY, the person who did it was caught. But nothing as spectacular as the cholesterol debacle. That one illustrates how a made up res
You did not read what I said, and are inverting the logic. Yes, the Universe manifestly DOES have a few "simple" rules a.k.a. the laws of physics, and HAS produced rocks. But that is literally irrelevant to the point that there is nothing about rocks -- or, if you prefer, the laws of physics and the medium in which they operate -- that appears "designed". The laws are regular mathematical laws and we have no evidence for some sort of highly imaginative "field" of possible mathematical law sets and possible Universal media obeying them that a designer can select from to create the design, let alone evidence for the insane recursion relation in complexity and design implicit on the existence of such a designer.
Any sentient "designer" of a Universe plus their Super-Universe within which it builds the Universe has more complexity (and greater information content) than the Universe that they designed and built. If complexity implies design, then every designer and their Universe must have a still more complex designer in a still more complex Universe. If you wish to assert that this recursion terminates anywhere, so that you can call the designer at that level "God" or "The Master Simulation Programmer", then you no longer assert that complexity necessarily implies a designer, in which case there is no good reason to apply the rule at all even in the first instance without evidence!
Quite aside from this, rocks specifically do not exhibit any of the characteristics we generally associate with designed things, and we have quite detailed mathematical models for the probable history of rocks that do not require or benefit from (in the specific sense of being improved by) any assumption of active design. Neither, frankly, do the laws of physics.
As I pointed out in another thread, the following is a classroom example of incorrect logic:
All men are mortal.
My dog is mortal.
Therefore, my dog is a man.
All computational simulations are discretized.
The Universe is discretized (or not, see other replies).
Therefore, the Universe is a simulation.
You argument is even worse:
Rocks, that do not appear to be designed, can be designed anyway.
Therefore, we can never say that rocks do not appear to be designed.
Say what?
My dog, that does not appear to be immortal, might be immortal anyway.
Therefore we can never say that dogs are mortal.
Sure we can. What you might get away with is the assertion that there is a very small chance that some living dog (including my currently living dog, that isn't dead yet!) might turn out to be immortal. However, every single dog since wolves came out of the cold that was born more than thirty years ago is to the very best of our observational knowledge and theoretical knowledge of dog biology dead as a doorknob and every living dog that any of us have ever seen appears to be aging and we all understand how aging and disease and accidents all limit life. To assert immortal dogs you have to just make stuff up -- invent things like "dog heaven" where all dead dogs run free and have an unlimited supply of bones, or imagine that somewhere there might be a very lucky ex-wolf that failed to inherit an aging gene and that has never had a fatal disease or a fatal accident and that somehow has eluded our observational detection -- so far -- and (ignoring the second law of thermodynamics and the probable future evolution of the Universe based on the laws of physics) assume that that dog will somehow survive longer than the Universe itself probably will. Both of which are pretty absurd.
So I repeat, there is absolutely nothing about rocks that makes us think that they are designed. That does not imply that they might not be designed after all, it is not a logical statement that rocks could not have been designed, it is an empirical statement that, just as dogs appear to be mortal (and not humans, however easy it is for dogs to
No arguments. Simulations similarly are generally not "deterministically" scripted. They are constantly rolling (metaphorically) pseudorandom numbers to generate non-repetitive game play. But rocks or gameplay that is "generated" are still generated according to an algorithm that was designed, and I was using the term in this broader sense.
I was pointing out (possibly badly) that his argument was a formal fallacy of the general sort: "All men are mortal, my dog is mortal, therefore my dog is a man". "All simulations are discretized. The world we observe is discretized. Therefore, the world we observe is a simulation." Same argument, substitute men/dog/mortal and simulations/world/discretized (or whatever). This is simply an incorrect argument in symbolic logic completely independent of the meanings of the symbols per se, unless I am misremembering my formal symbolic logic.
ELSEWHERE I pointed out that we do not, in fact, know if the world is discretized and that even if it is as far as spacetime is concerned, that doesn't mean that it is discretized in amplitude/phase space. And I am teaching quantum mechanics every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the moment, so I'm not exactly ignorant about this.
Shall I show you my dry stack walls and my mortared fieldstone walls? Besides, this doesn't really impact the argument. The argument is: "Things exist that appear to have functions in a system of interlocked causality. If I were going to simulate this particular system of apparent interlocked causality, I would do so by using things that have these functions so that the result looks like this system of interlocked causality. Therefore, this apparent system of interlocked causality is a simulation because it works the way a simulation of it that I built would work!"
This is an utterly absurd argument. Begging the question doesn't begin to describe it. This is just the argument for God by design dressed up in computer clothing with a side order of Solipsism, and leaves all of the same questions begged and not even acknowledged as "problems". OK, so we are a simulation. Even discretized, the Universe has the information content of at least 10^256! (that's factorial, not exclamation point, all the permutations of all the ways "stuff" can be entered into the apparent cells). Or, of course, as I argued, it could have far, far less information content because all it really has to do is provide a few gigapixels of my apparent visual field, a handful of less dense informational channels for sound, tasted, smell, and touch -- certainly less than a terabyte of information -- and update it according to a set of classical physics rules plus an interactive script. It doesn't even have to do more than one, because if the Universe is a simulation, you could be and probably are a NPC being presented to just me in my VR bodyset -- assuming that in some more fundamental reality I have an actual body and am not MYSELF a self-aware NPC in a simulation being run for things that look like giant amoebic blobs swimming in liquid helium near the cores of gas giants (or in some more bizarre environment as we have no possible way of even speculating about the physics of the world in which the host computer supposedly lies).
We could come damn near building this now -- it's an easy extrapolation of our first rudimentary VR sets. We likely couldn't make it high enough resolution yet, but that's just a matter of scaling of work underway and doesn't require anything like Planck length discretization.
Then there is that computer that we are all running on. One way or another, its information content has to be at least as large as the information content of the Universe being simulated, or Shannon has lived in vain. Furthermore, it has to have an extremely high degree of organization. Indeed, the information content in the physical hardware of any computer ever built -- all the way down to your hypothetical Planck scale -- is almost infinitely larger than the content of its "computational" working memory and processors. Indeed, if one accepts the assertion that real quantum phases etc are real numbers, and meditate on the continuum hypothesis and aleph null and aleph prime, it is infinitely larger. It takes billions to trillions of atoms to represent a single switch, and many switches and other adjuncts to perform even a simple, crudely discretized computation simulating real number arithmetic.
So if you REALLY take the simulation theory seriously, you have to have a Universe somewhere -- somewhere, somewhen, somehow, there has to be a physical basis for the computation, energy and entropy with a set of rules that encodes this massive program -- that has a much, much, much, much.... larger information content than the Universe being simulated. My laptop (plus a remote supercomputer plus a network) can play World of Warcraft and provide me with a very nice simulation shared with a few hundred others (more like a few tens in any given perceptual field representation) based on coarse-grained objects and carefully builts SURFACE representations, because the giant snapping turtles are only shell thick and have no actual internal guts. Even this crude a simulation, skin deep and lacking real d
1. Due to limited computational resources, the simulated universe would be granular or "quantum".
2. To limit computation, reality would be held in a fuzzy probabilistic "superposition" state until it is actually observed, similar to how a GPU running OpenGL will skip the generation of hidden polygons.
3. The maximum speed of information transfer would be finite, to limit the propagation of changes through the universe.
All of these are actually true in our universe, ergo, we are very likely a simulation.
And this, sir, is why you really need to consider taking a course in formal logic and maybe learn about logical fallacies.
None of these assertions, even if they were true in some useful way, constitute a statistical or logical argument for the conclusion. This is true at an openly embarrassing level. Suppose one were designing a rock because you wanted to build a rock wall and for some reason didn't want to use actual rocks. Due to the cost of raw materials, rocks would be finite in size. Because you don't want the wall to be boring, rocks would come in many different colors, sizes, and shapes. Because you don't want the fake rock wall to fall down, rocks would be solid, as opposed to liquid, glass, plasma, gaseous.
All real rocks are actually finite in size, come in many different sizes, shapes, and colors, and tend to be solid to the point where "rock solid" is a standard metaphor in human speech. Ergo, all rocks are obviously designed.
Not!
Teleological arguments are pure bullshit, which is what the physicist in question (as well as myself, also a physicist) are happy to point out.
When one actually looks at rocks or Universes, there is an utter lack of either evidence or a plausible, consistent, evidence linked chain of reasoning that increases the probability that the notion/hypothesis "Rocks are designed" or "We are living in a computer simulation" is/are true from their rightful place (so far) of 0.0000.....(0 until you get bored with writing 0's)...001 to something with a tiny smidgen of actual measure.
These are not independent assertions, by the way. If you take the assertion that the Universe is a simulation seriously, then rocks ARE designed objects, even though there is absolutely nothing about rocks to suggest that they actually are designed.
One could then deconstruct the truth of each of your statements individually. For example, there is nothing in quantum theory that limits computational requirements -- quite the opposite. Indeed, quantum theory is built on top of complex, non-discrete numbers in every quantum textbook ever written -- C-numbers. That is, quantum objects are described in general by (at least) TWO real numbers, not just one. If you attempt to represent the quantum state of a very simple -- the simplest -- two level quantum system such as |\psi> = A|-> + B|+>, one discovers that it requires two continuous degrees of freedom and that the states of the system map nicely into points on a 3D spherical hypersurface. If you try to describe the most general quantum state of N such 2 level objects, it requires 2^N or so continuous degrees of freedom. Consequently, we are limited in our solutions or simulational studies of fully correlated quantum systems to a tiny, tiny handful of e.g. "two level atoms" -- perhaps 20 to 30 of them -- because one very quickly runs out of computational resources to perform even very small general computations.
Second, you are building a whole mountain of assumptions into what appears to be a misinterpretation of the Planck length. To quote Wikipedia's page on this topic:
There is currently no proven physical significance of the Planck length...
so you are quoting something for which there is no direct evidence as evidence in a bad teleological argument for something for which there is no evidence at all.
You also don't address the actual numbers associated with the Planck leng
As far as I know, nobody has yet devised an experiment capable of determining whether consciousness actually lives in the brain, or whether the brain is a receiver for a consciousness which exists independently of the body.
You mean, aside from all of the usual ones? Like, giving people powerful drugs makes their (my!) consciousness go away? Like the fact that strokes, drugs, alcohol, accidents, and acts of violence that damage the brain tissue make consciousness go away incrementally? Like the fact that when people's brains die, they apparently die (from the point of view of every device built to measure the neural activity that we identify as consciousness in everything with neurons that we have ever studied)? Like the fact that we have working neural models capable of at least a few of the first steps towards consciousness? Like the fact that all of our understanding of science so far, working together, provides not the slightest support for an alternative hypothesis?
Asserting that we have no experiments to determine whether consciousness lives in a brain is like asserting that we have no experiments that refute the possibility that we are all just NPCs in a giant MMORPG Matrix, or asserting that we have no experiments that refute the possibility of hidden nonlocal dimensions in physics, or we have no possibility of proving that Jesus didn't raise the not-quite-dead yet and make blind people walk and deaf people see. Science doesn't work that way, evidence doesn't work that way, as it leaves one stuck in the eternal "lack of evidence is not evidence of lack" for an infinite sea of non-contradictory assertions that could be true.
Heres how it works. Nearly all of that "sea of notions" -- possible true assertions -- is nearly perfectly improbable. Not "false", just -- literally -- not likely to be true, given what we know and the evidence so far. There could be a rock on the far side of the moon carved by chance into a nearly perfect bust of Abraham Lincoln -- not impossible -- but there is no point in wasting precious plausible belief in our ontology on such a hypothesis as there is no evidence that it is true. Furthermore, by doing a statistical study of rock shapes on the earth looking for rocks that actually look like they were carved into human busts with precisely recognizable features, we might even conclude that it is very likely to be false because the particular shapes that make up a human head, neck, and shoulder set are simply unlikely to occur by accident. This is Bertrand Russell's "teapot" argument.
Of course there is one amusing way the teapot could fail. We could send a silver tea set into orbit! Or, we could drop a bust of Abraham Lincoln on the dark side of the moon. Neither of these apply to consciousness, yet, but of course that is the point of the entire "True/Strong AI" enterprise. Which I personally think will succeed within the next ten to twenty years, not to preserve human consciousness but to augment it and exploit it (the AI). We are already augmenting human consciousness through the interfaces we already have -- the fingers and eyes and ears -- to the point where google is a major part of our brains, to the point where I can stream this thought chain out into your brain faster than anyone a mere twenty or thirty years ago would have ever dreamed possible.
So please, we have a mountain of evidence that consciousness is, in fact, supported directly by the physical tissue of the brain. We also have an immovable mass of humanity that does not wish to face this fact and shape their lives and ethical systems upon the probably true, scientifically supported ontology that strongly, strongly suggests that this one life is all you get, that if your brain dies you die, that there is no alternative reality or superset reality where you will live in paradise or be tortured for eternity, and that there is no mysterious invisible self-aware construct that grants wishes and enforces "perfect justice" or "perfect law" or "perfect love" on a selective basis depending on whether or not one embraces a particular set of "ancient" beliefs.
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I'm giving up mod to add to this. Bug Jack Barron is worth the read even today, as Spinrad is a true visionary. One of my favorite books. Sort of a Rush Limbaugh in reverse, or what Stern wishes that he was. And periodically, you hear snippets of med-tech that still leave open the possibility that Spinrad's take on immortality wasn't completely wrong...
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