Wouldn't the smart thing then be to simply create a version of the mosquito that is, itself, immune to the infection - and so can't spread it ? That sounds like a low-impact change (though it may be very difficult - I have no expertise in insect immunology). But an anopheles mosquito that can't be infected with the malaria parasite would save lots of lives without removing the mosquito from the ecology.
But we are also subject to those forces. Our own survival is a question of our capacity to coexist with other species which is an absolutely critical survival trait for any species. There's a reason natural ecologies always end up pretty balanced - because things that fuck with the balance always end up going extinct themselves. Lions that are too good at hunting and too greedy starve themselves out of existence. Antelope that breed at too far above replacement rate or are too hard to hunt also starve themselves out of existence.
Remember evolution isn't something on an individual level but on a species level. This lion may be eating that antelope who probably isn't very happy about it - but in species terms the lions and the antelopes have a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Don't need a hybrid - nature has provided. Just off the Austrialian Coast is Rhode Island. Rhode Island has tiger snakes which migrated there over a land bridge during the last ice age and were then trapped. but Rode Island has nothing for snakes to eat -except for one month out of hte year when seabirds nest there. So on Rhode Island the tiger snakes grew bigger - in order to be able to eat bigger birds and get more food during the only month out of twelve when there are any food at all. A typical austrialian tiger snake grows to maybe 2m long... on Rhode Island they can reach 6m. Just go fetch a few from the island and release them on the mainland.
Could be tricky, tiger snakes are extremely venomous and on the island they are particularly agressive (what with being hungry all the time) and they are *everywhere* so watch your step - but once you got some back home, you're all good - and, bonus, it's not even a foreign species.
Seeing as the original meaning is very specific to the field of logic in philosophy - I'm sure it will survive quite intact among philosophers, even if it's meaning outside the subject changes entirely. It's not like we don't know how to deal with words whose scientific and common meanings differ. Compare "weight loss" programs - the best one of those we have is a Soyuz rocket if you use "weight" as a scientist uses it, what we call "weight loss" should really be "mass loss" - but nobody is confused and I've yet to see anybody try to sue weight watchers for not buying them a ticket to the ISS.
If using words of phrases to mean their exact opposite was not common we would not have needed the words "irony" or "sarcasm" (sarcasm is a subtype of irony where the irony is made blatantly obvious through tone). Well there would still be dramatic irony but that is a completely different concept - it refers to a situation where a character's plans are about to be derailed by events unknown to the character but known to the audience and it dates back to ancient Greek times where the "unknown events" were usually the machinations of the gods. Interestingly - *that* meaning of irony is actually a pretty good fit for the common misuse of it and covers practically every one of those not-the-usual-meaning-of-ironic things that Alanis sang about - just replace "machinations of the gods" with "rotten bad luck".
I want to see a youtube clip of some actor in any show or movie ever doing what you just said. As far back as I can remember I have never heard the phrase used without a sarcastic tone of voice and I've been hearing it for well over 30 years. Not in media, nor in conversation, did I ever hear it without the clear sarcastic tone. Your claim that it was laziness which now appears sarcastic demands evidence since all the available evidence suggest the exact opposite - that it started as smirking sarcasm but may have become so commonplace that now it will be understood ironically even with no tonal clue to support that.
Not to mention that the literal meaning of "I could care less" makes no sense - why would anybody, ever, want to inform another person that they have the capacity to be less concerned about something than they are. It makes sense to express your level of concern, It may make sense to express a potentially higher level of concern. But a phrase to express a potentially lower level of concern is utterly useless since there is absolutely no possible scenario where conveying this to anybody would do anything except waste both your time.
Yes... but possibly *only* in that limited context.
A good example is the word 'literally'. Pedants love to complain when people use literally as a form of hyperbole (basically the opposite of it's meaning)...but in fact this usage is so old and well established that it's in the dictionary as one of the meanings of the word. The dictionary definition of "literally" literally includes the meaning "not literally".
Whether your use of the word denotes "in actuality" or "I'm making an obvious exaggeration here" is entirely dependent on context. When followed by a description of an impossible or highly unlikely scenario - it's meant, and understood, and declared by the dictionary to be valid as meaning "no, not really, I'm just exaggerating for humorous or emotional effect".
That's how language works. Human language is not like programming languages with a fixed syntax and vocubular which can only change in official releases - and then to, once again, a completely fixed syntax and vocabulary and is never ambiguous. Human language is owned and controlled by all who speak it and write it - and effectively controlled democratically by what the people choose to do. This can lead to interesting problems if you try to control the process - the French for example try very hard to prevent their language changing as they see that as a critical piece of cultural heritage. So they teach French spelling based on how words were pronounced long ago and never update them to reflect contemporary pronunciation - but the people are not so easily controlled, they talk as they want to. They talk for quick and convenient conveying of information. But since the spelling doesn't get updated the gap between Spoken and Written French have been growing ever wider. You now have a word like Mademoiselle which pretty much everybody pronounces Mamzel.
Then there is another factor that further compounds things. When I was in school I was taught that written and spoken language are different and legitimately so. Writing must be more formal and syntactically correct than spoken language, and spell words as the dictionary says (even if that's behind how you pronounce them) because writing doesn't have the benefit of non-verbal communication and the risk of ambiguity is greater. But since the late 1990s a new pattern, previously non-existent in all human history, has emerged - we now use writing for mere conversation. In the past, almost all writing was semi-formal, even letters to friends - due to the long time before it may be delivered were long, took time to write and were worth following the rules on. Now, most writing is informal and, more specifically, conversational. Chat-rooms and comment boxes are now a mere extension to the pub. The writing that happens in there isn't really 'writing' - it's conversation and so it tends towards following the much more relaxed rules of spoken rather than the more formal rules of written language. But that comes at a price - the non-verbal communications are still missing, which is why we invented emoticons and now emojis - as a way to augment conversations in writing with clues as to the non-verbal cues (such as facial expression and tone) which would have accompanied them if this conversation had taken place down at the pub instead of over whatsapp.
Spider's for one. Or at least, pretty much all orb-web spiders EAT mosquitos, don't think they are a sufficiently major food source that the spiders wouldn't survive without them though.
And, for those who don't realize, that ten-thousand isn't just small stuff. It includes the largest living mammal. We didn't discover the Forrest Elephant until the 1950s and even then there was an ongoing debate about whether it's a different species or just African Elephants who live in a forest - in fact, those saying it's a different species were considered a heterodox minority and never got their view into any school textbooks.
We didn't actually prove it really *is* a different species (and now critically endangered - far moreso than African elephants due to their unique and smaller habitat which is rapidly being destroyed on top of usual poaching) until 1998 when DNA testing proved conclusively that forest elephants are not African elephants.
That's a third elephant species discovered so recently that most of./ readers still went to school with textbooks saying there are only two species.
No. That's not a given. Humanity has been in an all-out war of annihilation with insects for thousands, perhaps millions, of years - and we've never once managed to drive a single insect species to extinction.
Insects are a lot more resilient than most other kingdoms and while some have gone extinct in history - never yet by human hands, unlike almost every other kingdom on the planet. We've eradicated at least one virus. We've eradicated more animal species than we can count. Many species of fish. Quite a few moluscs and lots of reptiles (especially several species of giant tortous)... but no insect yet.
It's by no means assured that we could - especially one such as the mosquito family which is incredibly widespread across many continents with huge regions of relatively inaccessible habitat. We've, in the past, managed local eradications of specific mosquito species (Singapore for example used to be a Malaria zone) - but Anopheles lives on. At best we've reduced it's range a bit. And that's just one species - mosquitos are a family of many. Zika is also not like Malaria. Malaria is a parasite that's only carried by one species of Mosquito - Zika a is a virus and potentially able to be carried by almost any of them (especially since virusses can adapt much faster than parasites).
Technically - the claim is that it's accelerating without any mass having been given. And you don't need mass for momentum - you just need SOMETHING. The stuff the sun is 'throwing' at solar sails don't have mass either. But the best hypotheses we have is that they are, in fact, using fuel - it's just that the fuel isn't carried along. It's literally producing (massless) particles from energy - which is expelled producing thrust. Part of the attraction of that hypotheses (which was from a scientist unaffiliated with the project) is that it does, actually conserve momentum.
Having said that - the single biggest problem with current fuels is it's mass. Tsiolkovsky's equation means that your rockets' ability to move you goes down exponentially the more mass you have - and nearly all the mass is fuel. If we can use fuel without mass - then we get a linear rather than exponential decline (or perhaps even no decline) - that's a huge leap forward. We already did it with solar sails - and if they weren't so cumbersome they'd be perfect.
Converting matter into energy and vice versa is hardly groundbreaking physics - and we aren't just talking nuclear, magnetrons do it and we all have one in our homes these days... and guess what the key piece of equipment in an EMDrive is ? A magnetron. The most likely explanation is simply that it's achieved what no previous magnetron has managed - to direct the particles it produces so they are all ejected in the same direction.
But it is hardly the first thrust-without-fuel design. Solar sails offer that as well and they definitely work. They are just cumbersome and impractical. It could be (and current hypotheses seem based on this) that this device exhausts massless particles which changes the entire concept around momentum (not Newtonian but Eisteinian). If true its effectively a lowscale energy-to-matter convertor which uses the resulting matter as 'fuel'. Much like a reverse solar sail. Or there is more subtlety to momentum than we think. A mere century ago we believed only particles with mass can have momentum. Now we know that this is not true and photons for example have momentum. Its not so unthinkable that there is something there that Einstein had missed.
There is nothing about the EMDrive that claims or pretends to violate the law of conservation of energy. In fact, for operation, it requires a constant energy source.
You're dismissing something without even knowing what it the claim about it is.
The claim is thrust without fuel - not thrust without energy. Energy != Fuel.
It still needs an energy source, such as solar, it just doesn't need a material fuel. That's a major weight saving and a significant increase in how long it can operate - a possible way around the tyranny of the rocket equation - but one thing it absolutely is not is a violation of the conservation of energy. Solar sails also produce thrust without fuel and nobody say THEY violate conservation of energy. It's already a proven and physically acceptable fact that it's possible to get thrust without fuel because solar sails exist.
The EMDrive is not a solar sail, but what is claimed about it is NO MORE MIRACULOUS than a solar sail is - it's just technolocally more useful since it doesn't need a huge surface which is flimsy and easy to break and hard to manage and steer and launch.
The only reason it's controversial is because, unlike the solar sail, we don't have an explanation for HOW it creates thrust without fuel - but thrust without fuel is definitely allowed by the known laws of physics, there are craft in space right now that are powered by thrust without fuel and a major project to launch a new one on a long range test mission in the next year.
Very often - science fiction is science in it's larval stage. Some of the most famous examples is the Geostationary satellite - first predicted in science fiction. The submarine was first conceived off by Jules Verne - and, in fact, the first real submarine was named after the submarine in his book which was, in turn, named after the animal that inspired the idea. The fundamental technological design of an enclosed boat with ballasts to allow it to float below the surface was not significantly changed between fiction and reality there.
>"Dream big" only works if you also "work hard"
And your basis for assuming they don't know this is... what exactly ? Most of the time - these people are clamoring for exactly that. They want us to be working hard on big goals and not just dream of it. The problem is, you and politicians, no longer dream big because very few voters still do. An actual manned mission to Mars now would almost certainly have to be privately funded by hopefully, a space nutter who is also rich, because NASA simply doesn't have the budget to do it anymore. Are we really satisifed that the moon is the ONLY extra-terrestrial body mankind has ever stood on ? Do we quit here ? Hell we haven't even been there in 40 years. The challenges a mars mission would face and have to overcome are significant, but in 1961 the moon seemed just as difficult - indeed many believed it was beyond what we could possibly achieve technologically in a decade. But we did, with sacrifice, hard work and a lot of money overcome them.
So getting to mars requires a transit window, and a very long time in space - so a LOT of life support, and landing under very difficult conditions with enough fuel to get back - which takes a damn long time yet again and that's barely the start of it. Yes, we know. We know this is not easy - it's, in fact, terribly hard to solve - what we don't believe is that it's insoluble. It will be expensive, it will take time and effort and a lot of dedicated smart people - but this is within the realm of conceivable achievements. A lunar colony is just as viable -different challenges, but we can build on what we learned with the space station... and a much cheaper place to launch from one day. Maybe it will take us a hundred years to get there even if we put in the same amount of effort that whole hundred years we did to land there in ten. So what ? Why not go for it ? The worst case scenario is that we fail, that ultimately we conclude there are problems we simply don't have the means or knowledge to fix yet and may not be able to for centuries. It wouldn't be a loss - we'd have developed thousands of technologies along the way while solving other problems - that will still make the world a better place than it would have been without them. It's still worth it even if we fail.
Right... because attacking people for being enthusiastic about space and calling them "nutters" is exactly what the world needs. Encouraging people to pursue scientific and engineering fields, to dream big, to build bigger are not valuable, right ?
Sorry - but I don't agree. If nothing else - "Space Nutters" are voters who help ensure that space programs still get at least SOME funding - which goes to actual research. Fans are never a bad thing, even if they are not experts on that which they are fans off.
Hardly anybody in the US in 1965 had the slightest idea how orbital mechanics work, or the complexity involved in an orbital rendezvous. As far as most people knew, we were planning to aim a rocket straight at the moon and fire until we got there. But without all those people WANTING it to succeed, do you think NASA would have achieved their goal ? There were 2 presidents after Kennedy before Apollo 11 - and neither of them dared cut the funding for the moon landing project, and not just because of the fear of being beaten there by the Russians - because the hype was on - and hype is valuable.
If anything, it's tragic that the hype hasn't lasted. Today there are pitifully few people left who care about space or science at all. And we see the results - as NASA is forced to hitch rides with the Russians to get to the I.S.S.
Like an aging starlet, the space program can't afford not to be nice to whatever fans it can still manage to keep, however crazy they may look to you.
Seriously - I would choose a conversation with somebody you call a 'space nutter' over a Football-nutter any day of the week. I would much rather contemplate the future of the Cardashians than the Kardashians. This is the most anti-science society we've had in over 200 years... we really, really need to keep every enthusiast we still have out there encouraged.
Fine, and Galileo did not invalidate the (then) well known and universally accepted law (which we today would call something like Aristotle's law of gravity after the scholar who first wrote it down - but lots of people "figured it out" before he did) that heavier objects fall faster than slow ones when he dropped two different weights from the tower of Piza because in the special case where both objects have the same density the heavier one will also be larger and so have more air resistance and a lower terminal velocity when dropped in an atmosphere, though that doesn't account for the special case where the big heavy one is shaped like a dart and the small light one is shaped like a parachute.
Do you see how stupid you sound now ?
And sorry - but while some of Newton's equations remain pretty accurate in a narrow sphere of mechanics - the theories themselves are simply false. Just because the maths work doesn't make the theory true - not when there are clearly visible observations that violate the claims of the theory (and indeed, fails to follow it's maths). 1) Einstein first started working on G.R. after Newtonian mechanics had consistently failed to accurately predict the orbit of Mercury. A small planet, in our solar system, far below light speed and definitely not in the particle realm was not obeying Newton's laws. It never did and as soon as we had sufficient telescopes to follow it properly it was obvious that it didn't. Newton didn't even work for what it was best at. It got the other planets wrong too - just less wrong, less enough that it doesn't matter for most solar-system space travel (most) but nevertheless. In Mercury's case the difference was large enough to be measurable more than a century ago. 2) Newton's theories make specific claims about light which are flat out wrong- claims like that light is not affected by gravity. 3) Newton predicts the existence of the aether, it apparently does not exist.
Nobody want's to take away from Newton. His laws of motion were an absolute breakthrough to solving a set of problems that all the brightest minds in the world had been working on for decades with no success until he did - after years as a recluse obsessed with dead-end alchemy research and spritualism, his early successes in optics long forgotten, he changed the world. For almost 500 years his work expanded knowledge, formed the basis of physics and explained everything we could observe... until we could observe better, and then it was replaced with something that COULD explain those things... something which MUST inevitably be replaced itself since no scientific theory is absolute or complete, I doubt any can ever be. Hell we still can't reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity - and that means BOTH are wrong, we just don't know what they are wrong about yet.
The thing in this case is... what theory ? The problem with the EMDrive is - there's no theory that explains why this design could possibly produce thrust.
The claim that it violates conservation of energy is just not true - it needs an energy source (though that can be solar). What it offers is thrust without fuel, which does not violate conservation of energy but we have no known theories on thrust that predicts this as a possibility.
The construction is public knowledge - so if it was obvious, we ought to know. So far, we lack any explanation for what is apparently being observed, our existing theories do not cover this observation.
So this is actually (potentially): 4) Something observed for the first time, for which we must now start working on an explanation.
Now not so long ago - this happened a LOT. We were constantly having observations we couldn't explain and giving birth to new theories to explain them... now, not so much. It's been a while since there was a genuinely mysterious observation in physics. Physics today is mostly testing still untested predictions of well established theories and mostly confirming them once we have the tech to do the experiments. An experiment without a theory of why ? That's like when Galileo proved that two objects of different mass fall at the same speed (that gravitational acceleration was constant) without us having any concrete theory on the behaviour of gravity, let alone what it is. We wouldn't have the first of those until Newton.
But something like that in the 21st century ? This we are understandably sceptical about. At the same time - the scientific community has been open-minded too. They have put it through it's paces and some phycisists have published tentative hypotheses that may explain the observations. Until those observations is truly confirmed (which may happen now) those hypotheses are mere speculation - and of course we would need new designs using the same principles predicted by those ideas to test them in turn and see if their predictions hold.
It could be the beginning of a major and exciting discovery in physics with far reaching effects, it could be the beginning a much cheaper and more lightweight satelites and probes so we could go explore the solar system and beyond - at least by proxy - more frequently and efficiently, it could be the former while not being practical for the latter after all...
And of course... it could all be a mistake - or deliberate fraud.
We just don't know yet and there isn't enough evidence to form a conclusion either way. But so far at least, the EMDrive guys are doing the right things - they published the specs, no secret-sauce here, they let a respected, independent organisation do lots of tests - and they are (finally) publishing the results in a high quality peer reviewed journal. If nothing else, that reduces the likelihood of fraud - but not of mistakes.
>You mean like penicillin? Or polio vaccine? Or insulin? Which were invented by people who refused to take patents and didn't try to make money out of it? The history of medicine is full of people who came up with important breakthroughs and weren't particularly interested in money.
It gets better. In all of human history only twice have we eradicated a disease - and it's likely we'll eradicate a third this year. All three (including the not-yet-done but likely one) were done by people who had no interest in profiteering off their work. The for-profit medicine industry has never eradicated a disease. Jonas Salk did, Jimmy Carter did (and is about to do it again).
Erm... based on your username, I'm going to assume you were completely high when you wrote that piece of utterly ahistorical crap. Sorry the shutdown was the republican's fault and their demands had NOTHING to do with the Obama-care website, they were demanding the defunding of the entire Obamacare law (effectively repealing it without a repeal).
No president would ever agree to terms that means shutting down his signature legislation because congress is trying to blackmail him - Obama called their bluff believing they were not actually *insane* enough to go ahead with the crazy shutdown plan. What he didn't plan on was that, at this time, the so-called "freedom caucus" (teaparty anti-government nutjobs who somehow got into government as opposed to the backwoods dumptruck graveyards they belong in - these guys made Ron Paul look like a fan of big-government) had enough power over the rest of the republicans to force them into it. Those nutjobs genuinely believe the very existence of the federal government to be an unholy satanic crime against god (no, I'm not exagerating) so they were quite happy to see it all shut down since that was literally the purpose for which they ran: they ran in ORDER to be able to shut down the government. Their only regret about the shutdown is that it ended, they wanted that to be permanent and saw the budget fight as an opportunity to show that it can be done and thought everything would work so much better with it down that voters would demand it become permanent... their experiment failed, it was an unmitigated disaster for the country and the republican party rightfully got blamed.
What really makes this stand out is that the entire freedom caucus at the time was only 44 members - that's about 10% of congress who somehow managed to get all the rest of the republicans so scared that they went ahead with the shutdown despite being relatively sane humans who knew it was a crazy idea. A bit like Paul Ryan "supporting" Trump now.
Sorry pal, you can't just rewrite history to make everything Obama's fault. I know republicans blame him for everything bad that ever happened up to and including 9/11, Hitler and original sin but it just doesn't make sense to blame a president for things that happened before he was elected or against his wishes. You want to be mad at Obama - blame him for the actual bad stuff that DID happen on his watch. Blame him for the extralegal and unconsttutional fuckup known as the drone war, blame him for the expansion of NSA spying on his watch - blame him for having a penis so much bigger than Trumps that he never once felt insecure enough to make it a subject of political debate... but don't make shit up.
>And exactly how do you propose to change that? Do you want FDA employees to work longer hours? Or do you want them to work twice as fast in the same hours? Can you speed them up like a tape recorder?
The first half of his post is classic repulican/libertarian "the state is too big and it's all government's fault" - so I conclude his plan is to do it by cutting the FDA's budget by 60% and firing 80% of their employees. You know because any time any aspect of government is in any way imperfect it's because it's too big and 'starve the beast' will somehow magically make it work better (as opposed to what actually happens which is that ordinary people who rely on public services get viciously fucked over... again).
3-4 percent of the heat of the sun is a massive difference.
The cretacious may be the odd one out - but then nothing alive today was alive then and it's unlikely any of the species on the planet today (which includes us) could have survived in those conditions.
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Wouldn't the smart thing then be to simply create a version of the mosquito that is, itself, immune to the infection - and so can't spread it ? That sounds like a low-impact change (though it may be very difficult - I have no expertise in insect immunology). But an anopheles mosquito that can't be infected with the malaria parasite would save lots of lives without removing the mosquito from the ecology.
They'll just have to suck our DNA out of crab lice trapped in fossilized lube.
But we are also subject to those forces. Our own survival is a question of our capacity to coexist with other species which is an absolutely critical survival trait for any species. There's a reason natural ecologies always end up pretty balanced - because things that fuck with the balance always end up going extinct themselves. Lions that are too good at hunting and too greedy starve themselves out of existence. Antelope that breed at too far above replacement rate or are too hard to hunt also starve themselves out of existence.
Remember evolution isn't something on an individual level but on a species level. This lion may be eating that antelope who probably isn't very happy about it - but in species terms the lions and the antelopes have a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Don't need a hybrid - nature has provided. Just off the Austrialian Coast is Rhode Island. Rhode Island has tiger snakes which migrated there over a land bridge during the last ice age and were then trapped. but Rode Island has nothing for snakes to eat -except for one month out of hte year when seabirds nest there. So on Rhode Island the tiger snakes grew bigger - in order to be able to eat bigger birds and get more food during the only month out of twelve when there are any food at all. A typical austrialian tiger snake grows to maybe 2m long... on Rhode Island they can reach 6m. Just go fetch a few from the island and release them on the mainland.
Could be tricky, tiger snakes are extremely venomous and on the island they are particularly agressive (what with being hungry all the time) and they are *everywhere* so watch your step - but once you got some back home, you're all good - and, bonus, it's not even a foreign species.
Island Giantism for the win !
Seeing as the original meaning is very specific to the field of logic in philosophy - I'm sure it will survive quite intact among philosophers, even if it's meaning outside the subject changes entirely.
It's not like we don't know how to deal with words whose scientific and common meanings differ. Compare "weight loss" programs - the best one of those we have is a Soyuz rocket if you use "weight" as a scientist uses it, what we call "weight loss" should really be "mass loss" - but nobody is confused and I've yet to see anybody try to sue weight watchers for not buying them a ticket to the ISS.
If using words of phrases to mean their exact opposite was not common we would not have needed the words "irony" or "sarcasm" (sarcasm is a subtype of irony where the irony is made blatantly obvious through tone). Well there would still be dramatic irony but that is a completely different concept - it refers to a situation where a character's plans are about to be derailed by events unknown to the character but known to the audience and it dates back to ancient Greek times where the "unknown events" were usually the machinations of the gods.
Interestingly - *that* meaning of irony is actually a pretty good fit for the common misuse of it and covers practically every one of those not-the-usual-meaning-of-ironic things that Alanis sang about - just replace "machinations of the gods" with "rotten bad luck".
I want to see a youtube clip of some actor in any show or movie ever doing what you just said.
As far back as I can remember I have never heard the phrase used without a sarcastic tone of voice and I've been hearing it for well over 30 years. Not in media, nor in conversation, did I ever hear it without the clear sarcastic tone.
Your claim that it was laziness which now appears sarcastic demands evidence since all the available evidence suggest the exact opposite - that it started as smirking sarcasm but may have become so commonplace that now it will be understood ironically even with no tonal clue to support that.
Not to mention that the literal meaning of "I could care less" makes no sense - why would anybody, ever, want to inform another person that they have the capacity to be less concerned about something than they are. It makes sense to express your level of concern, It may make sense to express a potentially higher level of concern. But a phrase to express a potentially lower level of concern is utterly useless since there is absolutely no possible scenario where conveying this to anybody would do anything except waste both your time.
Yes... but possibly *only* in that limited context.
A good example is the word 'literally'. Pedants love to complain when people use literally as a form of hyperbole (basically the opposite of it's meaning)...but in fact this usage is so old and well established that it's in the dictionary as one of the meanings of the word.
The dictionary definition of "literally" literally includes the meaning "not literally".
Whether your use of the word denotes "in actuality" or "I'm making an obvious exaggeration here" is entirely dependent on context. When followed by a description of an impossible or highly unlikely scenario - it's meant, and understood, and declared by the dictionary to be valid as meaning "no, not really, I'm just exaggerating for humorous or emotional effect".
That's how language works. Human language is not like programming languages with a fixed syntax and vocubular which can only change in official releases - and then to, once again, a completely fixed syntax and vocabulary and is never ambiguous. Human language is owned and controlled by all who speak it and write it - and effectively controlled democratically by what the people choose to do.
This can lead to interesting problems if you try to control the process - the French for example try very hard to prevent their language changing as they see that as a critical piece of cultural heritage. So they teach French spelling based on how words were pronounced long ago and never update them to reflect contemporary pronunciation - but the people are not so easily controlled, they talk as they want to. They talk for quick and convenient conveying of information. But since the spelling doesn't get updated the gap between Spoken and Written French have been growing ever wider. You now have a word like Mademoiselle which pretty much everybody pronounces Mamzel.
Then there is another factor that further compounds things. When I was in school I was taught that written and spoken language are different and legitimately so. Writing must be more formal and syntactically correct than spoken language, and spell words as the dictionary says (even if that's behind how you pronounce them) because writing doesn't have the benefit of non-verbal communication and the risk of ambiguity is greater.
But since the late 1990s a new pattern, previously non-existent in all human history, has emerged - we now use writing for mere conversation. In the past, almost all writing was semi-formal, even letters to friends - due to the long time before it may be delivered were long, took time to write and were worth following the rules on.
Now, most writing is informal and, more specifically, conversational. Chat-rooms and comment boxes are now a mere extension to the pub. The writing that happens in there isn't really 'writing' - it's conversation and so it tends towards following the much more relaxed rules of spoken rather than the more formal rules of written language.
But that comes at a price - the non-verbal communications are still missing, which is why we invented emoticons and now emojis - as a way to augment conversations in writing with clues as to the non-verbal cues (such as facial expression and tone) which would have accompanied them if this conversation had taken place down at the pub instead of over whatsapp.
Spider's for one. Or at least, pretty much all orb-web spiders EAT mosquitos, don't think they are a sufficiently major food source that the spiders wouldn't survive without them though.
Sorry -I love spiders.
And, for those who don't realize, that ten-thousand isn't just small stuff. It includes the largest living mammal. We didn't discover the Forrest Elephant until the 1950s and even then there was an ongoing debate about whether it's a different species or just African Elephants who live in a forest - in fact, those saying it's a different species were considered a heterodox minority and never got their view into any school textbooks.
We didn't actually prove it really *is* a different species (and now critically endangered - far moreso than African elephants due to their unique and smaller habitat which is rapidly being destroyed on top of usual poaching) until 1998 when DNA testing proved conclusively that forest elephants are not African elephants.
That's a third elephant species discovered so recently that most of ./ readers still went to school with textbooks saying there are only two species.
Mosquito's track their pray by the CO2 they breath out. This is why smokers get bit less often - they breath out less pure CO2.
No. That's not a given. Humanity has been in an all-out war of annihilation with insects for thousands, perhaps millions, of years - and we've never once managed to drive a single insect species to extinction.
Insects are a lot more resilient than most other kingdoms and while some have gone extinct in history - never yet by human hands, unlike almost every other kingdom on the planet. We've eradicated at least one virus. We've eradicated more animal species than we can count. Many species of fish. Quite a few moluscs and lots of reptiles (especially several species of giant tortous)... but no insect yet.
It's by no means assured that we could - especially one such as the mosquito family which is incredibly widespread across many continents with huge regions of relatively inaccessible habitat. We've, in the past, managed local eradications of specific mosquito species (Singapore for example used to be a Malaria zone) - but Anopheles lives on. At best we've reduced it's range a bit.
And that's just one species - mosquitos are a family of many. Zika is also not like Malaria. Malaria is a parasite that's only carried by one species of Mosquito - Zika a is a virus and potentially able to be carried by almost any of them (especially since virusses can adapt much faster than parasites).
Technically - the claim is that it's accelerating without any mass having been given. And you don't need mass for momentum - you just need SOMETHING. The stuff the sun is 'throwing' at solar sails don't have mass either. But the best hypotheses we have is that they are, in fact, using fuel - it's just that the fuel isn't carried along. It's literally producing (massless) particles from energy - which is expelled producing thrust. Part of the attraction of that hypotheses (which was from a scientist unaffiliated with the project) is that it does, actually conserve momentum.
Having said that - the single biggest problem with current fuels is it's mass. Tsiolkovsky's equation means that your rockets' ability to move you goes down exponentially the more mass you have - and nearly all the mass is fuel. If we can use fuel without mass - then we get a linear rather than exponential decline (or perhaps even no decline) - that's a huge leap forward. We already did it with solar sails - and if they weren't so cumbersome they'd be perfect.
Converting matter into energy and vice versa is hardly groundbreaking physics - and we aren't just talking nuclear, magnetrons do it and we all have one in our homes these days... and guess what the key piece of equipment in an EMDrive is ? A magnetron. The most likely explanation is simply that it's achieved what no previous magnetron has managed - to direct the particles it produces so they are all ejected in the same direction.
But it is hardly the first thrust-without-fuel design. Solar sails offer that as well and they definitely work. They are just cumbersome and impractical.
It could be (and current hypotheses seem based on this) that this device exhausts massless particles which changes the entire concept around momentum (not Newtonian but Eisteinian).
If true its effectively a lowscale energy-to-matter convertor which uses the resulting matter as 'fuel'. Much like a reverse solar sail.
Or there is more subtlety to momentum than we think. A mere century ago we believed only particles with mass can have momentum. Now we know that this is not true and photons for example have momentum. Its not so unthinkable that there is something there that Einstein had missed.
There is nothing about the EMDrive that claims or pretends to violate the law of conservation of energy. In fact, for operation, it requires a constant energy source.
You're dismissing something without even knowing what it the claim about it is.
The claim is thrust without fuel - not thrust without energy. Energy != Fuel.
It still needs an energy source, such as solar, it just doesn't need a material fuel. That's a major weight saving and a significant increase in how long it can operate - a possible way around the tyranny of the rocket equation - but one thing it absolutely is not is a violation of the conservation of energy. Solar sails also produce thrust without fuel and nobody say THEY violate conservation of energy. It's already a proven and physically acceptable fact that it's possible to get thrust without fuel because solar sails exist.
The EMDrive is not a solar sail, but what is claimed about it is NO MORE MIRACULOUS than a solar sail is - it's just technolocally more useful since it doesn't need a huge surface which is flimsy and easy to break and hard to manage and steer and launch.
The only reason it's controversial is because, unlike the solar sail, we don't have an explanation for HOW it creates thrust without fuel - but thrust without fuel is definitely allowed by the known laws of physics, there are craft in space right now that are powered by thrust without fuel and a major project to launch a new one on a long range test mission in the next year.
>And no: Science Fiction is fiction
Very often - science fiction is science in it's larval stage. Some of the most famous examples is the Geostationary satellite - first predicted in science fiction. The submarine was first conceived off by Jules Verne - and, in fact, the first real submarine was named after the submarine in his book which was, in turn, named after the animal that inspired the idea. The fundamental technological design of an enclosed boat with ballasts to allow it to float below the surface was not significantly changed between fiction and reality there.
>"Dream big" only works if you also "work hard"
And your basis for assuming they don't know this is... what exactly ? Most of the time - these people are clamoring for exactly that. They want us to be working hard on big goals and not just dream of it. The problem is, you and politicians, no longer dream big because very few voters still do. An actual manned mission to Mars now would almost certainly have to be privately funded by hopefully, a space nutter who is also rich, because NASA simply doesn't have the budget to do it anymore. Are we really satisifed that the moon is the ONLY extra-terrestrial body mankind has ever stood on ? Do we quit here ? Hell we haven't even been there in 40 years. The challenges a mars mission would face and have to overcome are significant, but in 1961 the moon seemed just as difficult - indeed many believed it was beyond what we could possibly achieve technologically in a decade. But we did, with sacrifice, hard work and a lot of money overcome them.
So getting to mars requires a transit window, and a very long time in space - so a LOT of life support, and landing under very difficult conditions with enough fuel to get back - which takes a damn long time yet again and that's barely the start of it. Yes, we know. We know this is not easy - it's, in fact, terribly hard to solve - what we don't believe is that it's insoluble. It will be expensive, it will take time and effort and a lot of dedicated smart people - but this is within the realm of conceivable achievements.
A lunar colony is just as viable -different challenges, but we can build on what we learned with the space station... and a much cheaper place to launch from one day.
Maybe it will take us a hundred years to get there even if we put in the same amount of effort that whole hundred years we did to land there in ten. So what ? Why not go for it ? The worst case scenario is that we fail, that ultimately we conclude there are problems we simply don't have the means or knowledge to fix yet and may not be able to for centuries. It wouldn't be a loss - we'd have developed thousands of technologies along the way while solving other problems - that will still make the world a better place than it would have been without them. It's still worth it even if we fail.
Right... because attacking people for being enthusiastic about space and calling them "nutters" is exactly what the world needs. Encouraging people to pursue scientific and engineering fields, to dream big, to build bigger are not valuable, right ?
Sorry - but I don't agree. If nothing else - "Space Nutters" are voters who help ensure that space programs still get at least SOME funding - which goes to actual research. Fans are never a bad thing, even if they are not experts on that which they are fans off.
Hardly anybody in the US in 1965 had the slightest idea how orbital mechanics work, or the complexity involved in an orbital rendezvous. As far as most people knew, we were planning to aim a rocket straight at the moon and fire until we got there. But without all those people WANTING it to succeed, do you think NASA would have achieved their goal ? There were 2 presidents after Kennedy before Apollo 11 - and neither of them dared cut the funding for the moon landing project, and not just because of the fear of being beaten there by the Russians - because the hype was on - and hype is valuable.
If anything, it's tragic that the hype hasn't lasted. Today there are pitifully few people left who care about space or science at all. And we see the results - as NASA is forced to hitch rides with the Russians to get to the I.S.S.
Like an aging starlet, the space program can't afford not to be nice to whatever fans it can still manage to keep, however crazy they may look to you.
Seriously - I would choose a conversation with somebody you call a 'space nutter' over a Football-nutter any day of the week. I would much rather contemplate the future of the Cardashians than the Kardashians. This is the most anti-science society we've had in over 200 years... we really, really need to keep every enthusiast we still have out there encouraged.
Fine, and Galileo did not invalidate the (then) well known and universally accepted law (which we today would call something like Aristotle's law of gravity after the scholar who first wrote it down - but lots of people "figured it out" before he did) that heavier objects fall faster than slow ones when he dropped two different weights from the tower of Piza because in the special case where both objects have the same density the heavier one will also be larger and so have more air resistance and a lower terminal velocity when dropped in an atmosphere, though that doesn't account for the special case where the big heavy one is shaped like a dart and the small light one is shaped like a parachute.
Do you see how stupid you sound now ?
And sorry - but while some of Newton's equations remain pretty accurate in a narrow sphere of mechanics - the theories themselves are simply false. Just because the maths work doesn't make the theory true - not when there are clearly visible observations that violate the claims of the theory (and indeed, fails to follow it's maths).
1) Einstein first started working on G.R. after Newtonian mechanics had consistently failed to accurately predict the orbit of Mercury. A small planet, in our solar system, far below light speed and definitely not in the particle realm was not obeying Newton's laws. It never did and as soon as we had sufficient telescopes to follow it properly it was obvious that it didn't. Newton didn't even work for what it was best at. It got the other planets wrong too - just less wrong, less enough that it doesn't matter for most solar-system space travel (most) but nevertheless. In Mercury's case the difference was large enough to be measurable more than a century ago.
2) Newton's theories make specific claims about light which are flat out wrong- claims like that light is not affected by gravity.
3) Newton predicts the existence of the aether, it apparently does not exist.
Nobody want's to take away from Newton. His laws of motion were an absolute breakthrough to solving a set of problems that all the brightest minds in the world had been working on for decades with no success until he did - after years as a recluse obsessed with dead-end alchemy research and spritualism, his early successes in optics long forgotten, he changed the world. For almost 500 years his work expanded knowledge, formed the basis of physics and explained everything we could observe... until we could observe better, and then it was replaced with something that COULD explain those things... something which MUST inevitably be replaced itself since no scientific theory is absolute or complete, I doubt any can ever be.
Hell we still can't reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity - and that means BOTH are wrong, we just don't know what they are wrong about yet.
The thing in this case is ... what theory ?
The problem with the EMDrive is - there's no theory that explains why this design could possibly produce thrust.
The claim that it violates conservation of energy is just not true - it needs an energy source (though that can be solar). What it offers is thrust without fuel, which does not violate conservation of energy but we have no known theories on thrust that predicts this as a possibility.
The construction is public knowledge - so if it was obvious, we ought to know. So far, we lack any explanation for what is apparently being observed, our existing theories do not cover this observation.
So this is actually (potentially):
4) Something observed for the first time, for which we must now start working on an explanation.
Now not so long ago - this happened a LOT. We were constantly having observations we couldn't explain and giving birth to new theories to explain them... now, not so much. It's been a while since there was a genuinely mysterious observation in physics. Physics today is mostly testing still untested predictions of well established theories and mostly confirming them once we have the tech to do the experiments.
An experiment without a theory of why ? That's like when Galileo proved that two objects of different mass fall at the same speed (that gravitational acceleration was constant) without us having any concrete theory on the behaviour of gravity, let alone what it is. We wouldn't have the first of those until Newton.
But something like that in the 21st century ? This we are understandably sceptical about. At the same time - the scientific community has been open-minded too. They have put it through it's paces and some phycisists have published tentative hypotheses that may explain the observations. Until those observations is truly confirmed (which may happen now) those hypotheses are mere speculation - and of course we would need new designs using the same principles predicted by those ideas to test them in turn and see if their predictions hold.
It could be the beginning of a major and exciting discovery in physics with far reaching effects, it could be the beginning a much cheaper and more lightweight satelites and probes so we could go explore the solar system and beyond - at least by proxy - more frequently and efficiently, it could be the former while not being practical for the latter after all...
And of course... it could all be a mistake - or deliberate fraud.
We just don't know yet and there isn't enough evidence to form a conclusion either way. But so far at least, the EMDrive guys are doing the right things - they published the specs, no secret-sauce here, they let a respected, independent organisation do lots of tests - and they are (finally) publishing the results in a high quality peer reviewed journal.
If nothing else, that reduces the likelihood of fraud - but not of mistakes.
And in none of them did, or could, humans (or any mammals) have evolved or survived
>You mean like penicillin? Or polio vaccine? Or insulin? Which were invented by people who refused to take patents and didn't try to make money out of it? The history of medicine is full of people who came up with important breakthroughs and weren't particularly interested in money.
It gets better. In all of human history only twice have we eradicated a disease - and it's likely we'll eradicate a third this year. All three (including the not-yet-done but likely one) were done by people who had no interest in profiteering off their work. The for-profit medicine industry has never eradicated a disease. Jonas Salk did, Jimmy Carter did (and is about to do it again).
Erm... based on your username, I'm going to assume you were completely high when you wrote that piece of utterly ahistorical crap.
Sorry the shutdown was the republican's fault and their demands had NOTHING to do with the Obama-care website, they were demanding the defunding of the entire Obamacare law (effectively repealing it without a repeal).
No president would ever agree to terms that means shutting down his signature legislation because congress is trying to blackmail him - Obama called their bluff believing they were not actually *insane* enough to go ahead with the crazy shutdown plan.
What he didn't plan on was that, at this time, the so-called "freedom caucus" (teaparty anti-government nutjobs who somehow got into government as opposed to the backwoods dumptruck graveyards they belong in - these guys made Ron Paul look like a fan of big-government) had enough power over the rest of the republicans to force them into it. Those nutjobs genuinely believe the very existence of the federal government to be an unholy satanic crime against god (no, I'm not exagerating) so they were quite happy to see it all shut down since that was literally the purpose for which they ran: they ran in ORDER to be able to shut down the government. Their only regret about the shutdown is that it ended, they wanted that to be permanent and saw the budget fight as an opportunity to show that it can be done and thought everything would work so much better with it down that voters would demand it become permanent... their experiment failed, it was an unmitigated disaster for the country and the republican party rightfully got blamed.
What really makes this stand out is that the entire freedom caucus at the time was only 44 members - that's about 10% of congress who somehow managed to get all the rest of the republicans so scared that they went ahead with the shutdown despite being relatively sane humans who knew it was a crazy idea. A bit like Paul Ryan "supporting" Trump now.
Sorry pal, you can't just rewrite history to make everything Obama's fault. I know republicans blame him for everything bad that ever happened up to and including 9/11, Hitler and original sin but it just doesn't make sense to blame a president for things that happened before he was elected or against his wishes. You want to be mad at Obama - blame him for the actual bad stuff that DID happen on his watch. Blame him for the extralegal and unconsttutional fuckup known as the drone war, blame him for the expansion of NSA spying on his watch - blame him for having a penis so much bigger than Trumps that he never once felt insecure enough to make it a subject of political debate... but don't make shit up.
>And exactly how do you propose to change that? Do you want FDA employees to work longer hours? Or do you want them to work twice as fast in the same hours? Can you speed them up like a tape recorder?
The first half of his post is classic repulican/libertarian "the state is too big and it's all government's fault" - so I conclude his plan is to do it by cutting the FDA's budget by 60% and firing 80% of their employees. You know because any time any aspect of government is in any way imperfect it's because it's too big and 'starve the beast' will somehow magically make it work better (as opposed to what actually happens which is that ordinary people who rely on public services get viciously fucked over... again).
That's nothing dude... yesterday he drank milk that was 2 days past the USEBY date !
3-4 percent of the heat of the sun is a massive difference.
The cretacious may be the odd one out - but then nothing alive today was alive then and it's unlikely any of the species on the planet today (which includes us) could have survived in those conditions.