One of the cool things is that this new process results in a flexible photovoltaic. In the paper they show that efficiency is maintained even after repeated bending of the material. Even if the energy collection efficiency is lower than conventional silicon photovoltaics, there are tons of applications for flexible photovoltaics, like having tents coated in the material (both for things like camping, but could also be hugely useful for the military, for temporary tents for disaster relief, and so on...), clothing that generates power, and so on... (Maybe even fanciful things like kites that collect solar and wind power?)
It's not a commercial device yet (and oftentimes these kinds of lab devices just don't scale to mass production that well), but it's an encouraging step towards more robust solar cells, which would aid in the more widespread deployments of solar energy.
You make another very good point. Yes, accountability is key, especially among those with power. The President of the US, and the US government, have a lot of power. Wikilieaks has less power, though being given access to all kinds of leaked information of course gives them some measure of power.
But in the real world, we cannot count on absolutes. In particular we cannot set up systems that are so absolute that they become inflexible and incapable of dealing with the frailties of humanity (which include corruption, pride, shame, greed, etc.)
I fully agree that there is something unseemly about Wikileaks being in no way accountable. And yet that very freedom is what enables it to do any kind of good at all: only a truly free agent will have the ability to publish all of those things that the powers-that-be want to keep hidden.
I'm not advocating anarchy or a complete disregard for the rule of law. The government does a decent job; there are checks-and-balances; and accountability of those in power is crucial. But all that is not enough. We also need a mechanism for action when all those checks-and-balances fail (and we know from experience that they will indeed fail). Wikileaks is part of that mechanism: a system (of last resort) enabling us to get at necessary truths when the system fails to deliver that information to the public. Like all systems, Wikileaks itself is subject to misuse. That is part of the price we pay... the result of living in an imperfect world. But Wikileaks (I argue) does more good than harm. It is a necessary counterpoint to the power of government.
The reason I think Wikileaks is helpful, on the balance, is of course because I believe in freedom of information, and transparency, and accountability. Yes, there are cases where things "really truly" should be kept secret. But those cases are few and far between, and at present most governments classify information far more than is really necessary. Given that we live in such a world of over-secrecy, things like Wikileaks restore balance, since there are very few things that really shouldn't be public knowledge (and, chances are, people won't even try to leak such things).
The alternative would be that the kind of men and women who use Mechanical Turk are predisposed to answer the question differently along gender lines in a way that average men and women are not, but that seems unlikely.
Hm. Saying "that seems unlikely" doesn't satisfy scientific rigor. In this case, in particular, it seems entirely possible that there is some kind of correlation between math/english abilities (or general intelligence, or political leaning, etc.) and the subset of the population being surveyed. In particular, those being surveyed are: (1) Internet users, (2) Internet users savvy enough to be aware of and participants in the Mechanical Turk service, (3) people who enjoy Mechanical Turk-style work (or are in need of money...),...
As a random example (not saying this is true, just an illustration): imagine that most people who are good at Math are likely to like/use the Internet, but most people who are good at English are not. In such a case, the "smart Math people" will be online but the "smart English people" will not. Thus selecting for Math ability online means selecting for overall intelligence. An offline survey would give then give totally different results.
Again that's just a silly example. Maybe people who are good at English refuse, for some reason, to participate in the Mechanical Turk system (or the opposite; maybe those with the very best language skills are inclined to participate). The point is that biases are very difficult to remove from surveys, which is why so much effort is put into it. Surveys where respondents are self-selected have built-in bias. Surveys online have built-in bias. Surveys where the respondents are paid to answer have built-in bias. This present survey thus has a bunch of bias.
That is not to say the survey results are useless. But it does mean that one should be careful to generalize the results beyond the group being surveyed.
I also worry about this:
But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student.
Now the author is trying to fit the data into his interpretation, rather than letting the data inform his conclusion. He assumes that those who self-report being "excellent" at math really are excellent at math, but that those who self-report "very good" are not really as good as they think. Without any basis for doing so, this imposes a huge bias in the interpretation. (There is even research showing that in some cases those who are most confident of their abilities in fact have the lowest objective capability.)
New modes of information dissemination don't destroy the old ones. People can, and will, still use web sites and RSS feeds and IRC and telephone calls to disseminate information. But why not add Twitter to the mix? And why not establish some simple social rules for each of those communication channels to be used as effectively as possible?
Your argument is almost like saying "Why do we need to establish 'SOS' as shorthand, when people can just say 'please help us!'. And why do ships bother using flags and lights to communicate to each other, when they can just yell at one another."
I'm not arguing that Twitter is a world-changing paradigm-shift. But it's not useless. It's fast and easy to use and bridges different communication modes (text messaging, the web, RSS, etc.). That's why it has been helpful in emergency circumstances; because people were able to update their Twitters status very quickly and easily, even from a mobile device... yet the answer was broadcast across the web, enabling everyone to share in the knowledge.
The "National Security" argument is valid, but it is all too easy for it to be abused. Especially considering that we cannot properly judge the usage. We just have to accept when told "this is secret and I can't explain why it needs to be secret."
Wikileaks would throw all of this out and make themselves (the collective leakers) the sole arbiter of what is in the national interest and what is not with respect to keeping secrets.
Wikileaks is not the "sole arbiter" and they do not paint themselves as such. Publicizing leaked information has been a staple of investigative journalism for a long, long time. And it is generally acknowledged that this is one of the most beneficial things that journalism does for a democratic society: publicize the failures and corruptions of "the system"... particularly in those cases where "the system" is gaming itself to keep that information hidden.
Wikileaks is thus an extension of tried-and-true techniques of leaking scandal, applied to a digital age. It fits in nicely with journalistic infrastructure, providing a way to get information out to the public in cases where entrenched powers would like to hide it.
So what wikileaks does is to substitute the judgment of a system, made of up of untold knowledgeable individuals, with the judgment of one or two cranks with an ax to grind. The cranks may be right sometimes, but I think more often that not they will be wrong.
I disagree. The "leaked information journalism" network (of which Wikileaks is a part) is another system made up of untold individuals, using their judgment to decide what to leak and publicize, and what not to. You say the system doesn't work on average. Can you point to a large number of things that were leaked and were damaging to National Security, without having a significant benefit with respect to democracy and stamping-out corruption? How does the number of such 'mistakes' compare to the number of 'legitimate leaks,' where the information really had no right to be suppressed?
Another point to consider is that we don't know how many bits of leaked information were not publicized. The people who get hold of the secret data have choices to make. They can publicize it or not (this goes for someone considering uploading to Wikileaks, a journalist, etc.). Actually the fact that very few National-Security-compromising secrets have seen the light of day (troop movements, launch codes, etc.) suggests people are using appropriate discretion in leaking. Most of the things leaked are damaging to some individuals and organizations... but not a matter of security (military or economic or other). In short, they mostly deserve to be leaked.
Again, I think you're going to have to defend your "more often [than] not they will be wrong" claim with specifics. As far as I can tell, information leaking has always been, and will continue to be, a vital portion of maintaining a democracy. Things like FOIA are also good, mind you. But to maintain a democracy we, the individual people making up the nation, must do our part in terms of oversight... which will occasionally mean breaking one set of rules in order to uphold a much more important set of ideals.
I'm no expert, but it seems that RAID1 doesn't provide as much safety as some people think, because corrupted data just gets copied twice, so now you have two copies of the corrupted data. Same with accidental deletion--both copies are gone.
If all you want is multiple copies of your data, then really what you want is an automated incremental backup system, that copies your files to a second hard drive, and ideally keeps a few older copies so that if a file gets accidentally deleted or somehow corrupted, you have a chance to go back and find a usable copy. This is what I do on my system: I keep multiple incremental copies from the last few days/weeks/months. It was easy to set-up (in Linux, mind you). Do hourly syncs if necessary.
Also critical, if the poster is truly concerned about never losing data, is to get some kind of offsite backup. Two hard drives don't do you much good when the computer is stolen or your roof leaks. You need to have a way to regularly copy data offsite (ideally automated over the network, or via external hard drive if you're sufficiently disciplined).
RAID has its uses, to be sure. But if the poster is most worried about never losing important user files, then it seems like what he wants is is the multiple-redundancy of backup, not the immediate failover of RAID.
We are now at the review candidate (RC) stage... which admittedly wasn't included in that original schedule since it's never known how many RCs will be needed or how far along they will be.
They seem to be remarkably on top of things, to me.
Yeah you're right that quote was just about differentiating the contributions from van der Waals and capillary forces. Further in the paper they also explain:
Whereas the instability of ordinary liquid columns is driven by molecular surface tension, possible mechanisms for droplet formation in granular systems include hydrodynamic interactions with the surrounding gas, inelastic grain-grain collisions, and cohesive forces. Hydrodynamic interactions have indeed recently been associated with fluctuations in the profile of streams falling in air 9; however, from experiments across a wide range of ambient pressures down to 0.03 kPa we find that grain-gas interactions do not drive clustering (Supplementary Fig. S1), in agreement with earlier work 6.
The effect as described in the scientific paper relies on van der Waals interaction and also capillary forces. In other words, a significant portion of the force/effect comes from ambient water that coats the particle surfaces, and creates adhesion by bridging between particles when they touch.
So this suggests that sand will act most "liquid-like" (breaking into droplets, flowing, etc.) when there is atmospheric water.
I agree that this kind of data on granular media will have an effect on the interpretation of Mars erosion patterns. But I think it would be simplistic to say that this offers a non-water explanation for the erosion patterns on Mars. In fact it may be further evidence of water and help determine exactly how much water Mars currently has, and previously had. (It's also worth noting that the erosion patterns are now just one of many pieces of evidence we have for there being water on Mars.)
Nope. The researchers thought of that, too. But they ruled-out electrostatic charging. From the article (p. 1111):
In principle, cohesion might arise from a variety of sources, including electrostatic charging, capillary or van der Waals forces.... a
rough estimate of the cohesive strength... gives values of a few nanoNewtons. To compare this to any electrostatic forces present, we obtain the distribution of charges on the grains by applying a uniform electric field perpendicular to the falling stream and tracking individual grain trajectories (see Supplementary Information). For both glass and copper, we find the streams are neutral overall but contain a small fraction of positively and negatively charged grains, up to a roughly q_max = +/- 100,000 electron charges per grain (Supplementary Fig. S2). Still, this gives attractive electrostatic forces a maximum F_max = (1/4*pi*e_0)q_max^2/d^2 ~= 0.1 nN for grains with diameter d = 100 micrometer, too weak to be the dominant
cohesive force. (Here e_0 = 8.85 * 10^-12 C^2 N^-1 m^-2 is the permittivity of free space.) Furthermore, experiments with conductive, silver-coated 100-micrometer-diameter glass spheres produce clusters identical to experiments using uncoated spheres, emphasizing that electrostatic forces do not drive the observed clustering.
(Note that I rewrote the equations in plaintext since Slashdot doesn't support all the necessary characters.)
The researchers did consider the effect of air. In fact, the ambient air has the opposite effect: the drag of the air as the droplets fall rips grains out of the droplets, thus working against whatever effect is aggregating them. In particular the authors say in their article (p. 1111):
For a rough estimate of the cohesive strength we track clusters as they fall and accelerate to a speed at which Stokes drag pulls individual grains off cluster protrusions. Correcting for slight changes in the air viscosity at
reduced pressure, this gives values of a few nanoNewtons.
They then go on to measure more careful the strength of the clustering force, and ascribe it to both Van der Waals interaction and capillary forces. They did perform the experiment as a function of humidity to test the effect of water bridging (capillary forces) and found it to be significant. But they provide further data suggesting that Van der Waals forces also play a role. Again from the article (p. 1112):
It is difficult to distinguish van der Waals from capillary forces because we cannot rule out molecularly thin absorbed films that create tiny bridges between individual asperities24,25. However, we still observe clustering in glass
grains stored under vacuum (0.05 kPa) at low humidity (,1%) and also in grains coated with hydrophobic silane.
The fact that clustering still occurs in vacuum suggests air is not crucial to the effect. The precise scaling they observe (e.g. the size and separation of the clusters as a function of time) is not consistent with simple inelastic collisions, and the effect of air would actually be to breakup the droplets, absent any attractive force. What they instead measured was a weak (but sufficient!) interaction between grains, which they ascribe to surface forces and capillary action.
The previously-held belief in the field was that this breakup into droplets could be explained by inelastic collisions between the grains. That is, all the sand grains are bouncing off each other, but because these collisions are inelastic (the two particles slow down a bit relative to each other with the collision) the grains will, statistically, aggregate into larger structures.
However this new piece of work shows rather strikingly that the origin of the force is a very weak form of surface tension. In other words, the breakup into droplets occurs for the same reason as it does in water and other liquids... it's just the magnitude of the force that is much smaller. In addition to the high-speed photography the Slashdot summary mentions, they also used atomic force microscopy to directly measure the nanometer-scale cohesive forces between particles. In water, surface tension arises from the (rather strong) cohesive forces between water molecules (each water molecule 'sticks' to its neighbors). In sand, it appears that a very weak nano-scale cohesive force is nevertheless enough to generate macro-scale droplets out of micro-scale particles. The cohesive forces in sand arise from the weak Van der Waals forces (weak, but universal, surface attraction), and due to capillary forces. That is, ambient water bridges the sand particles and causes what is effectively an attractive force, which leads to an effective surface tension.
In the paper, they describe how they vary the particle type and ambient conditions, to demonstrate that these two effects are important. For instance varying humidity alters the cohesion and thus droplet formation. Also, altering the sand particles has an effect: e.g. rougher particles cannot stick to each other as much, thereby reducing this effect.
This is a neat piece of work because it involves just "known" physics. It is demonstrating that well-established physical effects (surface forces and capillary forces) can explain phenomena where their effect was previously assumed to be negligible. The surface tension in these granular media are about 100,000 times smaller than water, yet the exact same effects are observed: the surface tension, weak as it is, tries to minimize surface area. Coupled with well-known instabilities, this causes a breakup into droplets.
A no-cost grace period would be a very good idea in any "tax copyright" system.
I've often thought that the protections of copyright should be related to the license the author selected to release the work under. The more "useful" the license is to society-at-large, the greater the protections would be (e.g. length of term). This brings copyright back to the notion of a contract between the public and the artist: the public provides incentives to produce work on the condition that the public benefits in the long term.
So, for example, a work released under a fairly liberal license that permits derivatives (e.g. creative commons or GPL) would be given longer protection (e.g. 14 years) than a work released under a highly restricted license (e.g. "all rights reserved" would get a 10 year protection). There could be a small number of classes (public domain, derivable-with-attribution, all-rights-reserved) and perhaps the default case would be "derivable" unless the artist/company explicitly labels it as "all rights reserved". This appeals to me because it forces everyone (from starving artists to big companies) to explicitly consider the tradeoff between short-term control and length-of-term (whereas right now it is a hard sell to get companies to be free with their content).
My suggested "graded licenses with graded protection" could conceivably be combined with copyright fees, with the fees depending on time and the license (e.g. derivable works get a longer time of no-fee protection).
But again my main worry, even with my own proposal, is that when the laws become complicated, it can be hard for "the little guy" to compete against the big players. Thus I think it is critically necessary for copyright law to be cleaned up. Rather than adding a bunch more exceptions (like fair use), the law should be cut back in scope so that common uses are no longer presumptively illegal. (In a digital age, fixating on "copies" doesn't make sense... it's really "distribution" that is the issue here.)
And I totally agree that current copyright law is out of control.
the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.
But that's just it. We shouldn't be interested in saving reel-to-reel, but rather supporting symphonic music. Similarly, we shouldn't care about saving newspapers, but rather supporting investigative journalism.
We need to decouple investigative journalism from the dead-weight of print media. We need to find a way for journalists to do their thing, and be paid to do it. They can then sell their stories/research/articles to whoever (print media, websites, TV stations, etc.).
[print media are the] only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.
I think what you meant to say was that they were the only ones who could afford to. It is demonstrably no longer the case, if they need government money to survive. As such, we need to find another way to support independent investigative journalists.
I don't have the answer, mind you. It will require some serious thought, debate, trial-and-error, and probably a mix of regulation and free-market-magic. But what I am pretty sure of is that it is wrong-headed to support the print media industry just because they were historically the people who funded investigative journalism. Those days are gone. Let's work towards a useful future.
I'm very much in favor of copyright reform, including shorter terms.
But, while interesting, the "tax copyrights" idea brings in a new set of problems. Like many regulatory systems, it can end up favoring the big players (big business, rich people, etc.) because they are usually best able to game any system you devise (because they have the money and lawyers necessary to "work the system").
The system you describe would restore some balance in the competition between medium and large corporate copyright holders. It is self-correcting: only truly valuable copyrights are maintained, and the rest are freed to the public. But in this system, small players (small businesses, individual creators, struggling artists) are marginalized. For instance the vast majority of amateurs wouldn't bother to (or, really, be able to) register. This means that their creativity would be fair game for massive companies to use as they will. Some content may be so trivial that it doesn't matter. But there is a huge middle ground where the creator won't really be able to pay the fees (because they are not big and powerful enough to monetize it), but it would be grossly unfair to then let big companies monetize the works (even though other big companies could compete by also monetizing it).
There would be innumerable blog posts, essays, photographs, music samples, and so on... that would be unprotected. Again as a copyright reformist I actually think laxer protections are often a good thing. But in the "tax copyright" system the problem is that it becomes asymmetric: the big players can maintain their control but the littler players cannot. The notion of an artist maintaining some measure of artistic integrity, even for a short while, will be gone... unless the artist aggressively monetizes their work so as to pay for the fees (which, in many cases, would result in another kind of "loss of integrity" for the artist).
One can then go back and further tweak the rules (exceptions based on size of work, estimated value, artistic vs. commercial intent, etc.). But adding more and more rules often continues to favor the big players, who have the time to mine the laws for loopholes, argue their cases in court, and lobby for legal tweaks. Meanwhile the little players are left utterly confused by the labyrinthine laws (as is currently the case). My point here is only that these issues are actually quite delicate, and we have to be rather careful with what new system we put in place. Every system will have drawbacks. We need to make sure that the new drawbacks are not worse than the old.
In that vein, I think a more gradual reform is safer. It is also, pragmatically, much more likely to be doable.
I don't think adding another class of "Intellectual Property" will make things more efficient. Just the opposite. And all the usual complaints against Intellectual Property would apply to this "ownership of private information", too. Some problems that come to mind:
1. It would be difficult to define and easy to use such laws to sue to an over-reaching extent.
2. As with many laws, it favors the rich and powerful (people or corporate) because they have the means to sue exhaustively.
3. Corporations are considered legal "persons" in some ways. If such a law applied to corporate information, this could be disastrous.
4. The rich and powerful (e.g. politicians) would use this to block transparency and get away with more than they already do.
5. Much of public knowledge would become illegal, or at least regulated.
6. Transaction costs for any customer interaction would increase dramatically, since even information like a name or address would seem to be implicated.
I'm sure there are plenty of others that could be added to this list. I don't think defining new kinds of ethereal property is the way to go...
The achievements of the lithography industry are absolutely stunning. And if you want to call them a branch of nanotechnology, that's fine too.
But they have not achieved the holy grail of nanotechnology, and the tricks of lithography never will. The holy grail is atomic-level precision; not just in restricted circumstances (e.g. single atomic layers under some constraints), but in the general case. As in, you draw in some CAD program an arbitrary (within physical law) device wherein each atom is specified... and then you get it built. Lithography cannot do this. Synthetic chemistry can do this for a subset of chemical compounds, but can't tackle the general case and certainly can't currently make arbitrary nano-devices with atomic-level precision. You're right that bottom-up approaches like self-assembly also can't currently do this (they are more of a way to assembly precise sub-units into larger assemblies).
This final "true" nanotechnology (Drexler now calls it "molecular nanotechnology" to differentiate it) won't be easy, and may very well require a delicate combination of everything we've learned from of top-down techniques (e.g. lithography) and bottom-up techniques (e.g. synthetic chemistry, self-assembly). Or maybe it require radically new thinking. The point is we don't yet know, so to say that "top down beat bottom up years ago" really misses the point: molecular nanotechnology has not yet been acheived.
In the meantime, our current tricks all have their uses (lithography is great for, e.g. making microchips... whereas self-assembly is great for making, e.g. coatings for pharmaceuticals and fuel-cell membranes).
If everybody participating were able to total up the costs they incur by doing so, and just donate that to the project, you could probably get better results by buying hardware well matched to the task.
Maybe or maybe not. One would have to include in the calculation the cost of building additional computers. One of the ways in which distributed computing is "green" is that it uses computers which have already been built, but would otherwise be idle. In this sense it is re-using resources that have already been committed, rather than requiring totally new equipment to be built, which consumes new resources.
In other words, the newly-built computers would have to be sufficiently more efficient that they fully offset their own production costs, and then some.
As long as we accept that doing the folding is a worthwhile use of resources... the question is a matter of how to do it most efficiently
Indeed. For many computational projects one has to take into the account the likely scaling of computer power and algorithmic power. For instance in principle for a given problem with a given deadline, it can sometimes be cheaper to wait until new computers are on the market, if they will be sufficiently faster (at a given cost) than the older ones. (That is, you may be able to "waste time" and still make your deadline.) Alternately, it may be a total waste of modern computer resources to inefficiently search a given parameter space if we have reason to believe that drastically better algorithms will become available in a few years.
As it turns out, problems like protein folding are very difficult, and we have no reason to believe that dramatically better techniques are on the horizon. So if (as you say) we care about the problem at all, then it would seem that we can justify the energy spent doing those calculations right now on modern general-purpose machines.
We have to be more careful with what we mean by 'size' and 'volume' and such.
The observable universe is the region of space we can see. The universe has a finite age, so there is a finite distance over which we can see. Any further than that, and light literally hasn't had enough time to reach us. So there is indeed a boundary beyond which we cannot observe. This boundary recedes as time goes on. The universe is ~13.5 billion years old, but because the universe was expanding during all that time, the observable universe is bigger than just 13.5 billion light-years (see comoving distance)... in fact it is 46.5 billion light-years in radius.
Now there is every indication that the universe extends beyond the cosmological horizon. So as the universe ages, we see more and more of the full universe, which is much larger than our observation volume. So how big is the universe as a whole? Our best understanding right now is based on the curvature of spacetime. If spacetime at large scales is curved, then the universe can loop back upon itself and thus the universe is finite. If spacetime is perfectly flat on cosmological scales, then in fact the universe as a whole is infinite in size.
Our best measurements indicate the universe is flat, within error. Our best theories of the origin of the universe, coupled with available data, generically predict that the universe is infinite. So our current best answer is that the universe is infinite in size/volume. A strange result, perhaps, but that's our best understanding of the current data. Now there are indeed errors on our measurements, so our universe could be smaller. But the curvature is so small that it implies our universe contains at least 1000 Hubble volumes (the Hubble volume is the surrounding space beyond which nothing is accessible since matter is receding faster than light). Others have analyzed the night-sky looking for 'repeat patterns' that would be expected for smaller closed universes, and no such patterns have been found.
So the observable universe is finite (but ever-expanding), and the full universe is considerably larger (infinite according to our current best data and theories).
or have found one word (jetpack?) that lets you solve all levels.
The review seems to suggest that solving the levels isn't necessarily the hard part. It's solving them in few moves and with interesting strategies. For instance the review says: "awarded me badges -- achievements for clever word usage".
They have probably pre-assigned "novelty" numbers to a variety of words, based both on general frequency of usage, and also the "capability" of the word. I'm guessing that "jetpack" and "robot" and "laser rifle" will have low point values because they are so useful, whereas "treadmill" and "oasis" and "diorama" will have higher values because their usage is less obvious. The game might even keep track of words you use, and give you fewer points for re-used words, as compared to pulling out something totally new. If this is the case, then a given level will actually get more challenging as you keep replaying it, because you'll have eliminated all of the obvious strategies early on.
The thing is this is a puzzle game. The fun comes not from just getting to the end of the game, but in trying to solve puzzles in new and interesting ways.
Of course that may just be my imagination running wild. I'll have to actually play the game to see if they've calibrated all of this in a fun way.
Indeed. People seem to forget that it is by no means trivial to create a new theory that is even consistent with what we already know (put otherwise, that reduces to quantum field theory and relativity in the appropriate limits). And doing so is only the first step in getting a "better theory". After mere consistency it must make falsifiable predictions that differ from the old theories.
At present there just are not that many approaches that have even been able to maintain consistency with established physics. String theory stands out in that it can reproduce much physics, and can bridge between quantum and relativity... and yet even it is still struggling to make sensible predictions that we can test. Alternatives pop up now and then (e.g. E8 Theory) but have their own set of problems. The fact that string theory has been able to be modified and advanced and is still, after so many years, a candidate (it hasn't been shown to be fundamentally at odds with reality) is as good a sign as we can hope for (but by no means proof).
The major problem with String/F/D/Dn/S/Brane/M/Multiverse/Whatever's-next Theory is that every time someone finds a problem that doesn't fit with experiments/reality they just go and find an excuse and then modify the equations
but then complain:
If a theory has no basis in fact (i.e. no physical reality that can be described) then it is just Math.
If theorists are continually modifying their theories in order to fit with experiment/reality, and rejecting theories that don't fit with experiment/reality, then what's the problem? At that point it's not "just math", it's "math that correctly matches reality and makes predictions", which is the gold-standard in physics.
Now, you may disagree with the particular mathematical formalisms the theorists are investigating, or the particular order in which they are checking them... but I don't understand how you can be upset at them for continually making changes in order to fit their theories with reality. That's what theorists are supposed to do: investigate a wide and wild variety of mathematical theories, and see which ones are able to make useful predictions consistent with experiment.
They just pick their favourite Theory-of-the-day and add an extra dimension here, or there, twist it there, or subtract another infinite from both sides, because the formula is inconveniently looking incorrect at the moment.
Again, this is an objection of procedure. If you can think of a faster way to uncover a mathematical theory consistent with all known experiments, then describe it. Until then, what's wrong with theorists checking a wide variety of theories (adding and subtracting terms/elements/dimensions as they go) until they find one consistent with observed reality?
(And of course, in reality theorists are not performing the random-walk through theory-space you describe. They have very good reasons for checking the equations they do; their analysis is informed by many experimental results, previously-successful theories, and the structure of mathematics itself.)
The holographic principle doesn't mean that the universe has only 2 spatial dimensions, but rather that the universe can be modeled using one less degree of freedom than our view of spacetime would imply. Again, these kinds of theories are not suggesting that our space is two-dimensional, rather they are saying that the 3 dimensions we observe are emergent from a lower-dimensional description. All of the 'information' in a given region of space can be described as being encoded in the surface of said region.
This remarkable, if bizarre, conclusion gains considerable support from the fact that black-hole entropy (and entropy is a measure of information content) is related only to the surface area of the black hole. So this is a case where we know with some confidence that we can indeed reduce all the information about a 3D region of space (the black hole) to an expression that only relies on 2 dimensions (the surface of the black hole). The holographic principle appears in numerous theories that imply that this holds generally for any region of space, not just black holes.
Now, whether you view this is 'just a mathematical trick' or 'a deep insight into the actual structure of the universe' is in some sense a matter of taste. (The same goes for all other physical theories: e.g. do electrons exist or are they just mathematically-useful constructs? How about photons? Gravity waves? Spacetime?) If you take the math seriously then this may mean that our universe is in some sense 'actually' 2-dimensional, with the three spatial dimensions we see being emergent instead of fundamental.
But in no case is the theory saying that there are not 3 spatial dimensions. The predictions it makes are for particles moving through a 3+1 spacetime.
The distinction is important, too. As far as I can tell, Google intended their motto to be an internal shorthand way of saying "let's run the company in a way that doesn't piss off users--give people what they want and make them have a good experience..." Hence "Don't be evil" -- don't do things that will make users say "this company is an asshole" (e.g. forcing lock-in, being "too corporate", nickel and diming customers...). Just read the story of how the motto was coined: it was an attempt by the engineers to remind the corporate types that they shouldn't mistreat customers or forget their quirky roots.
Google never intended their motto to mean that they would single handedly save the world, or even that none of their actions would have both pros and cons. People have unfortunately really latched onto this idea that Google claims to be saintly, and thus attack Google when any of their actions have a negative side.
People are free to complain about the things companies do. But it irks me whenever people twist other people's words to make their point. And the constant misunderstanding of Google's motto is one example of this.
As others have responded, there is a general sense that journalists are not actually delivering news in a way that is honest and thoughtful enough. People turn to bloggers more and more because one can find a blogger who will provide a deep and critical analysis, unhindered by a parent company's aversion to certain topics. There are of course many terrible and biased bloggers, but the point is that there are enough bloggers that those that rise to the top are worthy of listening to.
But I agree that they can't, by and large, do the difficult and expensive research necessary to "break" stories.
But then the solution would seem to be to find a way to fund investigators, without those investigators necessarily being the ones who analyze the data or write the news. We don't need the whole infrastructure of modern newspapers if the only key ingredient is the research.
What I would love to see is funding made available to quality investigators, who gather together a bunch of information and publicize it, letting the public make of it what they will. With all kinds of source material (interview tapes and footage, detailed notes, photos, documents, etc.), the bloggers of the world would have the original material they need. (And no doubt many of them would find a way to make a living at it...) The question is obviously "who will pay for these investigators?" I don't have an answer, but I submit that this is the question we should be tackling. Not "How do we make newspapers sustainable?" but rather "How do we fund the important piece of news--investigation..."
I don't know if the right answer is public funds, or donations, or some mechanism by which interested parties (journalists, bloggers, citizens, etc.) pay into a fund to support the investigators, or what... But again I think we need to focus on the piece of newspapers that is actually valuable, and let the rest go.
Slashdot Mirror
For those with access, here's the actual paper:
Fan, Zhiyong, Haleh Razavi, Jae-won Do, Aimee Moriwaki, Onur Ergen, Yu-Lun Chueh, Paul W. Leu, et al. "Three-dimensional nanopillar-array photovoltaics on low-cost and flexible substrates." Nature Materials advanced online publication (July 5, 2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat2493.
One of the cool things is that this new process results in a flexible photovoltaic. In the paper they show that efficiency is maintained even after repeated bending of the material. Even if the energy collection efficiency is lower than conventional silicon photovoltaics, there are tons of applications for flexible photovoltaics, like having tents coated in the material (both for things like camping, but could also be hugely useful for the military, for temporary tents for disaster relief, and so on...), clothing that generates power, and so on... (Maybe even fanciful things like kites that collect solar and wind power?)
It's not a commercial device yet (and oftentimes these kinds of lab devices just don't scale to mass production that well), but it's an encouraging step towards more robust solar cells, which would aid in the more widespread deployments of solar energy.
You make another very good point. Yes, accountability is key, especially among those with power. The President of the US, and the US government, have a lot of power. Wikilieaks has less power, though being given access to all kinds of leaked information of course gives them some measure of power.
But in the real world, we cannot count on absolutes. In particular we cannot set up systems that are so absolute that they become inflexible and incapable of dealing with the frailties of humanity (which include corruption, pride, shame, greed, etc.)
I fully agree that there is something unseemly about Wikileaks being in no way accountable. And yet that very freedom is what enables it to do any kind of good at all: only a truly free agent will have the ability to publish all of those things that the powers-that-be want to keep hidden.
I'm not advocating anarchy or a complete disregard for the rule of law. The government does a decent job; there are checks-and-balances; and accountability of those in power is crucial. But all that is not enough. We also need a mechanism for action when all those checks-and-balances fail (and we know from experience that they will indeed fail). Wikileaks is part of that mechanism: a system (of last resort) enabling us to get at necessary truths when the system fails to deliver that information to the public. Like all systems, Wikileaks itself is subject to misuse. That is part of the price we pay... the result of living in an imperfect world. But Wikileaks (I argue) does more good than harm. It is a necessary counterpoint to the power of government.
The reason I think Wikileaks is helpful, on the balance, is of course because I believe in freedom of information, and transparency, and accountability. Yes, there are cases where things "really truly" should be kept secret. But those cases are few and far between, and at present most governments classify information far more than is really necessary. Given that we live in such a world of over-secrecy, things like Wikileaks restore balance, since there are very few things that really shouldn't be public knowledge (and, chances are, people won't even try to leak such things).
The alternative would be that the kind of men and women who use Mechanical Turk are predisposed to answer the question differently along gender lines in a way that average men and women are not, but that seems unlikely.
Hm. Saying "that seems unlikely" doesn't satisfy scientific rigor. In this case, in particular, it seems entirely possible that there is some kind of correlation between math/english abilities (or general intelligence, or political leaning, etc.) and the subset of the population being surveyed. In particular, those being surveyed are: (1) Internet users, (2) Internet users savvy enough to be aware of and participants in the Mechanical Turk service, (3) people who enjoy Mechanical Turk-style work (or are in need of money...), ...
As a random example (not saying this is true, just an illustration): imagine that most people who are good at Math are likely to like/use the Internet, but most people who are good at English are not. In such a case, the "smart Math people" will be online but the "smart English people" will not. Thus selecting for Math ability online means selecting for overall intelligence. An offline survey would give then give totally different results.
Again that's just a silly example. Maybe people who are good at English refuse, for some reason, to participate in the Mechanical Turk system (or the opposite; maybe those with the very best language skills are inclined to participate). The point is that biases are very difficult to remove from surveys, which is why so much effort is put into it. Surveys where respondents are self-selected have built-in bias. Surveys online have built-in bias. Surveys where the respondents are paid to answer have built-in bias. This present survey thus has a bunch of bias.
That is not to say the survey results are useless. But it does mean that one should be careful to generalize the results beyond the group being surveyed.
I also worry about this:
But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student.
Now the author is trying to fit the data into his interpretation, rather than letting the data inform his conclusion. He assumes that those who self-report being "excellent" at math really are excellent at math, but that those who self-report "very good" are not really as good as they think. Without any basis for doing so, this imposes a huge bias in the interpretation. (There is even research showing that in some cases those who are most confident of their abilities in fact have the lowest objective capability.)
Why not?
New modes of information dissemination don't destroy the old ones. People can, and will, still use web sites and RSS feeds and IRC and telephone calls to disseminate information. But why not add Twitter to the mix? And why not establish some simple social rules for each of those communication channels to be used as effectively as possible?
Your argument is almost like saying "Why do we need to establish 'SOS' as shorthand, when people can just say 'please help us!'. And why do ships bother using flags and lights to communicate to each other, when they can just yell at one another."
I'm not arguing that Twitter is a world-changing paradigm-shift. But it's not useless. It's fast and easy to use and bridges different communication modes (text messaging, the web, RSS, etc.). That's why it has been helpful in emergency circumstances; because people were able to update their Twitters status very quickly and easily, even from a mobile device... yet the answer was broadcast across the web, enabling everyone to share in the knowledge.
So, again... Why not?
Wikileaks would throw all of this out and make themselves (the collective leakers) the sole arbiter of what is in the national interest and what is not with respect to keeping secrets.
Wikileaks is not the "sole arbiter" and they do not paint themselves as such. Publicizing leaked information has been a staple of investigative journalism for a long, long time. And it is generally acknowledged that this is one of the most beneficial things that journalism does for a democratic society: publicize the failures and corruptions of "the system"... particularly in those cases where "the system" is gaming itself to keep that information hidden.
Wikileaks is thus an extension of tried-and-true techniques of leaking scandal, applied to a digital age. It fits in nicely with journalistic infrastructure, providing a way to get information out to the public in cases where entrenched powers would like to hide it.
So what wikileaks does is to substitute the judgment of a system, made of up of untold knowledgeable individuals, with the judgment of one or two cranks with an ax to grind. The cranks may be right sometimes, but I think more often that not they will be wrong.
I disagree. The "leaked information journalism" network (of which Wikileaks is a part) is another system made up of untold individuals, using their judgment to decide what to leak and publicize, and what not to. You say the system doesn't work on average. Can you point to a large number of things that were leaked and were damaging to National Security, without having a significant benefit with respect to democracy and stamping-out corruption? How does the number of such 'mistakes' compare to the number of 'legitimate leaks,' where the information really had no right to be suppressed?
Another point to consider is that we don't know how many bits of leaked information were not publicized. The people who get hold of the secret data have choices to make. They can publicize it or not (this goes for someone considering uploading to Wikileaks, a journalist, etc.). Actually the fact that very few National-Security-compromising secrets have seen the light of day (troop movements, launch codes, etc.) suggests people are using appropriate discretion in leaking. Most of the things leaked are damaging to some individuals and organizations... but not a matter of security (military or economic or other). In short, they mostly deserve to be leaked.
Again, I think you're going to have to defend your "more often [than] not they will be wrong" claim with specifics. As far as I can tell, information leaking has always been, and will continue to be, a vital portion of maintaining a democracy. Things like FOIA are also good, mind you. But to maintain a democracy we, the individual people making up the nation, must do our part in terms of oversight... which will occasionally mean breaking one set of rules in order to uphold a much more important set of ideals.
I'm no expert, but it seems that RAID1 doesn't provide as much safety as some people think, because corrupted data just gets copied twice, so now you have two copies of the corrupted data. Same with accidental deletion--both copies are gone.
If all you want is multiple copies of your data, then really what you want is an automated incremental backup system, that copies your files to a second hard drive, and ideally keeps a few older copies so that if a file gets accidentally deleted or somehow corrupted, you have a chance to go back and find a usable copy. This is what I do on my system: I keep multiple incremental copies from the last few days/weeks/months. It was easy to set-up (in Linux, mind you). Do hourly syncs if necessary.
Also critical, if the poster is truly concerned about never losing data, is to get some kind of offsite backup. Two hard drives don't do you much good when the computer is stolen or your roof leaks. You need to have a way to regularly copy data offsite (ideally automated over the network, or via external hard drive if you're sufficiently disciplined).
RAID has its uses, to be sure. But if the poster is most worried about never losing important user files, then it seems like what he wants is is the multiple-redundancy of backup, not the immediate failover of RAID.
Not sure what your complaint is exactly...
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 was released on April 27 2009. Just a few days after it was scheduled to be released.
We are now at the review candidate (RC) stage... which admittedly wasn't included in that original schedule since it's never known how many RCs will be needed or how far along they will be.
They seem to be remarkably on top of things, to me.
(Emphasis added.)
For anyone curious, reference 6 is:
Mobius, M. E. Clustering instability in a freely falling granular jet. Phys. Rev. E 74, 051304 (2006). doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.74.051304
If you don't have access to Phys. Rev. E., you can read a preprint of the same paper on ArXiv here.
That paper does measurements down to 0.03 kPa (1/5000 atmospheric pressure), and concludes:
The effect as described in the scientific paper relies on van der Waals interaction and also capillary forces. In other words, a significant portion of the force/effect comes from ambient water that coats the particle surfaces, and creates adhesion by bridging between particles when they touch.
So this suggests that sand will act most "liquid-like" (breaking into droplets, flowing, etc.) when there is atmospheric water.
I agree that this kind of data on granular media will have an effect on the interpretation of Mars erosion patterns. But I think it would be simplistic to say that this offers a non-water explanation for the erosion patterns on Mars. In fact it may be further evidence of water and help determine exactly how much water Mars currently has, and previously had. (It's also worth noting that the erosion patterns are now just one of many pieces of evidence we have for there being water on Mars.)
(Note that I rewrote the equations in plaintext since Slashdot doesn't support all the necessary characters.)
They then go on to measure more careful the strength of the clustering force, and ascribe it to both Van der Waals interaction and capillary forces. They did perform the experiment as a function of humidity to test the effect of water bridging (capillary forces) and found it to be significant. But they provide further data suggesting that Van der Waals forces also play a role. Again from the article (p. 1112):
The fact that clustering still occurs in vacuum suggests air is not crucial to the effect. The precise scaling they observe (e.g. the size and separation of the clusters as a function of time) is not consistent with simple inelastic collisions, and the effect of air would actually be to breakup the droplets, absent any attractive force. What they instead measured was a weak (but sufficient!) interaction between grains, which they ascribe to surface forces and capillary action.
For those with access, the actual scientific article is:
John R. Royer, Daniel J. Evans, Loreto Oyarte, Qiti Guo, Eliot Kapit, Matthias E. MÃbius, Scott R. Waitukaitis & Heinrich M. Jaeger "High-speed tracking of rupture and clustering in freely falling granular streams" Nature, 459, 1110-1113 (25 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08115.
The associated "News and Views" (Summary) is:
Detlef Lohse & Devaraj van der Meer "Granular media: Structures in sand streams" Nature, 459, 1064-1065 (25 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/4591064a
The previously-held belief in the field was that this breakup into droplets could be explained by inelastic collisions between the grains. That is, all the sand grains are bouncing off each other, but because these collisions are inelastic (the two particles slow down a bit relative to each other with the collision) the grains will, statistically, aggregate into larger structures.
However this new piece of work shows rather strikingly that the origin of the force is a very weak form of surface tension. In other words, the breakup into droplets occurs for the same reason as it does in water and other liquids... it's just the magnitude of the force that is much smaller. In addition to the high-speed photography the Slashdot summary mentions, they also used atomic force microscopy to directly measure the nanometer-scale cohesive forces between particles. In water, surface tension arises from the (rather strong) cohesive forces between water molecules (each water molecule 'sticks' to its neighbors). In sand, it appears that a very weak nano-scale cohesive force is nevertheless enough to generate macro-scale droplets out of micro-scale particles. The cohesive forces in sand arise from the weak Van der Waals forces (weak, but universal, surface attraction), and due to capillary forces. That is, ambient water bridges the sand particles and causes what is effectively an attractive force, which leads to an effective surface tension.
In the paper, they describe how they vary the particle type and ambient conditions, to demonstrate that these two effects are important. For instance varying humidity alters the cohesion and thus droplet formation. Also, altering the sand particles has an effect: e.g. rougher particles cannot stick to each other as much, thereby reducing this effect.
This is a neat piece of work because it involves just "known" physics. It is demonstrating that well-established physical effects (surface forces and capillary forces) can explain phenomena where their effect was previously assumed to be negligible. The surface tension in these granular media are about 100,000 times smaller than water, yet the exact same effects are observed: the surface tension, weak as it is, tries to minimize surface area. Coupled with well-known instabilities, this causes a breakup into droplets.
A no-cost grace period would be a very good idea in any "tax copyright" system.
I've often thought that the protections of copyright should be related to the license the author selected to release the work under. The more "useful" the license is to society-at-large, the greater the protections would be (e.g. length of term). This brings copyright back to the notion of a contract between the public and the artist: the public provides incentives to produce work on the condition that the public benefits in the long term.
So, for example, a work released under a fairly liberal license that permits derivatives (e.g. creative commons or GPL) would be given longer protection (e.g. 14 years) than a work released under a highly restricted license (e.g. "all rights reserved" would get a 10 year protection). There could be a small number of classes (public domain, derivable-with-attribution, all-rights-reserved) and perhaps the default case would be "derivable" unless the artist/company explicitly labels it as "all rights reserved". This appeals to me because it forces everyone (from starving artists to big companies) to explicitly consider the tradeoff between short-term control and length-of-term (whereas right now it is a hard sell to get companies to be free with their content).
My suggested "graded licenses with graded protection" could conceivably be combined with copyright fees, with the fees depending on time and the license (e.g. derivable works get a longer time of no-fee protection).
But again my main worry, even with my own proposal, is that when the laws become complicated, it can be hard for "the little guy" to compete against the big players. Thus I think it is critically necessary for copyright law to be cleaned up. Rather than adding a bunch more exceptions (like fair use), the law should be cut back in scope so that common uses are no longer presumptively illegal. (In a digital age, fixating on "copies" doesn't make sense... it's really "distribution" that is the issue here.)
And I totally agree that current copyright law is out of control.
the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.
But that's just it. We shouldn't be interested in saving reel-to-reel, but rather supporting symphonic music. Similarly, we shouldn't care about saving newspapers, but rather supporting investigative journalism.
We need to decouple investigative journalism from the dead-weight of print media. We need to find a way for journalists to do their thing, and be paid to do it. They can then sell their stories/research/articles to whoever (print media, websites, TV stations, etc.).
[print media are the] only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.
I think what you meant to say was that they were the only ones who could afford to. It is demonstrably no longer the case, if they need government money to survive. As such, we need to find another way to support independent investigative journalists.
I don't have the answer, mind you. It will require some serious thought, debate, trial-and-error, and probably a mix of regulation and free-market-magic. But what I am pretty sure of is that it is wrong-headed to support the print media industry just because they were historically the people who funded investigative journalism. Those days are gone. Let's work towards a useful future.
I'm very much in favor of copyright reform, including shorter terms.
But, while interesting, the "tax copyrights" idea brings in a new set of problems. Like many regulatory systems, it can end up favoring the big players (big business, rich people, etc.) because they are usually best able to game any system you devise (because they have the money and lawyers necessary to "work the system").
The system you describe would restore some balance in the competition between medium and large corporate copyright holders. It is self-correcting: only truly valuable copyrights are maintained, and the rest are freed to the public. But in this system, small players (small businesses, individual creators, struggling artists) are marginalized. For instance the vast majority of amateurs wouldn't bother to (or, really, be able to) register. This means that their creativity would be fair game for massive companies to use as they will. Some content may be so trivial that it doesn't matter. But there is a huge middle ground where the creator won't really be able to pay the fees (because they are not big and powerful enough to monetize it), but it would be grossly unfair to then let big companies monetize the works (even though other big companies could compete by also monetizing it).
There would be innumerable blog posts, essays, photographs, music samples, and so on... that would be unprotected. Again as a copyright reformist I actually think laxer protections are often a good thing. But in the "tax copyright" system the problem is that it becomes asymmetric: the big players can maintain their control but the littler players cannot. The notion of an artist maintaining some measure of artistic integrity, even for a short while, will be gone... unless the artist aggressively monetizes their work so as to pay for the fees (which, in many cases, would result in another kind of "loss of integrity" for the artist).
One can then go back and further tweak the rules (exceptions based on size of work, estimated value, artistic vs. commercial intent, etc.). But adding more and more rules often continues to favor the big players, who have the time to mine the laws for loopholes, argue their cases in court, and lobby for legal tweaks. Meanwhile the little players are left utterly confused by the labyrinthine laws (as is currently the case). My point here is only that these issues are actually quite delicate, and we have to be rather careful with what new system we put in place. Every system will have drawbacks. We need to make sure that the new drawbacks are not worse than the old.
In that vein, I think a more gradual reform is safer. It is also, pragmatically, much more likely to be doable.
I don't think adding another class of "Intellectual Property" will make things more efficient. Just the opposite. And all the usual complaints against Intellectual Property would apply to this "ownership of private information", too. Some problems that come to mind:
1. It would be difficult to define and easy to use such laws to sue to an over-reaching extent.
2. As with many laws, it favors the rich and powerful (people or corporate) because they have the means to sue exhaustively.
3. Corporations are considered legal "persons" in some ways. If such a law applied to corporate information, this could be disastrous.
4. The rich and powerful (e.g. politicians) would use this to block transparency and get away with more than they already do.
5. Much of public knowledge would become illegal, or at least regulated.
6. Transaction costs for any customer interaction would increase dramatically, since even information like a name or address would seem to be implicated.
I'm sure there are plenty of others that could be added to this list. I don't think defining new kinds of ethereal property is the way to go...
The achievements of the lithography industry are absolutely stunning. And if you want to call them a branch of nanotechnology, that's fine too.
But they have not achieved the holy grail of nanotechnology, and the tricks of lithography never will. The holy grail is atomic-level precision; not just in restricted circumstances (e.g. single atomic layers under some constraints), but in the general case. As in, you draw in some CAD program an arbitrary (within physical law) device wherein each atom is specified... and then you get it built. Lithography cannot do this. Synthetic chemistry can do this for a subset of chemical compounds, but can't tackle the general case and certainly can't currently make arbitrary nano-devices with atomic-level precision. You're right that bottom-up approaches like self-assembly also can't currently do this (they are more of a way to assembly precise sub-units into larger assemblies).
This final "true" nanotechnology (Drexler now calls it "molecular nanotechnology" to differentiate it) won't be easy, and may very well require a delicate combination of everything we've learned from of top-down techniques (e.g. lithography) and bottom-up techniques (e.g. synthetic chemistry, self-assembly). Or maybe it require radically new thinking. The point is we don't yet know, so to say that "top down beat bottom up years ago" really misses the point: molecular nanotechnology has not yet been acheived.
In the meantime, our current tricks all have their uses (lithography is great for, e.g. making microchips... whereas self-assembly is great for making, e.g. coatings for pharmaceuticals and fuel-cell membranes).
If everybody participating were able to total up the costs they incur by doing so, and just donate that to the project, you could probably get better results by buying hardware well matched to the task.
Maybe or maybe not. One would have to include in the calculation the cost of building additional computers. One of the ways in which distributed computing is "green" is that it uses computers which have already been built, but would otherwise be idle. In this sense it is re-using resources that have already been committed, rather than requiring totally new equipment to be built, which consumes new resources.
In other words, the newly-built computers would have to be sufficiently more efficient that they fully offset their own production costs, and then some.
As long as we accept that doing the folding is a worthwhile use of resources ... the question is a matter of how to do it most efficiently
Indeed. For many computational projects one has to take into the account the likely scaling of computer power and algorithmic power. For instance in principle for a given problem with a given deadline, it can sometimes be cheaper to wait until new computers are on the market, if they will be sufficiently faster (at a given cost) than the older ones. (That is, you may be able to "waste time" and still make your deadline.) Alternately, it may be a total waste of modern computer resources to inefficiently search a given parameter space if we have reason to believe that drastically better algorithms will become available in a few years.
As it turns out, problems like protein folding are very difficult, and we have no reason to believe that dramatically better techniques are on the horizon. So if (as you say) we care about the problem at all, then it would seem that we can justify the energy spent doing those calculations right now on modern general-purpose machines.
We have to be more careful with what we mean by 'size' and 'volume' and such.
The observable universe is the region of space we can see. The universe has a finite age, so there is a finite distance over which we can see. Any further than that, and light literally hasn't had enough time to reach us. So there is indeed a boundary beyond which we cannot observe. This boundary recedes as time goes on. The universe is ~13.5 billion years old, but because the universe was expanding during all that time, the observable universe is bigger than just 13.5 billion light-years (see comoving distance)... in fact it is 46.5 billion light-years in radius.
Now there is every indication that the universe extends beyond the cosmological horizon. So as the universe ages, we see more and more of the full universe, which is much larger than our observation volume. So how big is the universe as a whole? Our best understanding right now is based on the curvature of spacetime. If spacetime at large scales is curved, then the universe can loop back upon itself and thus the universe is finite. If spacetime is perfectly flat on cosmological scales, then in fact the universe as a whole is infinite in size.
Our best measurements indicate the universe is flat, within error. Our best theories of the origin of the universe, coupled with available data, generically predict that the universe is infinite. So our current best answer is that the universe is infinite in size/volume. A strange result, perhaps, but that's our best understanding of the current data. Now there are indeed errors on our measurements, so our universe could be smaller. But the curvature is so small that it implies our universe contains at least 1000 Hubble volumes (the Hubble volume is the surrounding space beyond which nothing is accessible since matter is receding faster than light). Others have analyzed the night-sky looking for 'repeat patterns' that would be expected for smaller closed universes, and no such patterns have been found.
So the observable universe is finite (but ever-expanding), and the full universe is considerably larger (infinite according to our current best data and theories).
or have found one word (jetpack?) that lets you solve all levels.
The review seems to suggest that solving the levels isn't necessarily the hard part. It's solving them in few moves and with interesting strategies. For instance the review says: "awarded me badges -- achievements for clever word usage".
They have probably pre-assigned "novelty" numbers to a variety of words, based both on general frequency of usage, and also the "capability" of the word. I'm guessing that "jetpack" and "robot" and "laser rifle" will have low point values because they are so useful, whereas "treadmill" and "oasis" and "diorama" will have higher values because their usage is less obvious. The game might even keep track of words you use, and give you fewer points for re-used words, as compared to pulling out something totally new. If this is the case, then a given level will actually get more challenging as you keep replaying it, because you'll have eliminated all of the obvious strategies early on.
The thing is this is a puzzle game. The fun comes not from just getting to the end of the game, but in trying to solve puzzles in new and interesting ways.
Of course that may just be my imagination running wild. I'll have to actually play the game to see if they've calibrated all of this in a fun way.
Indeed. People seem to forget that it is by no means trivial to create a new theory that is even consistent with what we already know (put otherwise, that reduces to quantum field theory and relativity in the appropriate limits). And doing so is only the first step in getting a "better theory". After mere consistency it must make falsifiable predictions that differ from the old theories.
At present there just are not that many approaches that have even been able to maintain consistency with established physics. String theory stands out in that it can reproduce much physics, and can bridge between quantum and relativity... and yet even it is still struggling to make sensible predictions that we can test. Alternatives pop up now and then (e.g. E8 Theory) but have their own set of problems. The fact that string theory has been able to be modified and advanced and is still, after so many years, a candidate (it hasn't been shown to be fundamentally at odds with reality) is as good a sign as we can hope for (but by no means proof).
It turns out that fundamental physics is hard.
but then complain:
If theorists are continually modifying their theories in order to fit with experiment/reality, and rejecting theories that don't fit with experiment/reality, then what's the problem? At that point it's not "just math", it's "math that correctly matches reality and makes predictions", which is the gold-standard in physics.
Now, you may disagree with the particular mathematical formalisms the theorists are investigating, or the particular order in which they are checking them... but I don't understand how you can be upset at them for continually making changes in order to fit their theories with reality. That's what theorists are supposed to do: investigate a wide and wild variety of mathematical theories, and see which ones are able to make useful predictions consistent with experiment.
Again, this is an objection of procedure. If you can think of a faster way to uncover a mathematical theory consistent with all known experiments, then describe it. Until then, what's wrong with theorists checking a wide variety of theories (adding and subtracting terms/elements/dimensions as they go) until they find one consistent with observed reality?
(And of course, in reality theorists are not performing the random-walk through theory-space you describe. They have very good reasons for checking the equations they do; their analysis is informed by many experimental results, previously-successful theories, and the structure of mathematics itself.)
The holographic principle doesn't mean that the universe has only 2 spatial dimensions, but rather that the universe can be modeled using one less degree of freedom than our view of spacetime would imply. Again, these kinds of theories are not suggesting that our space is two-dimensional, rather they are saying that the 3 dimensions we observe are emergent from a lower-dimensional description. All of the 'information' in a given region of space can be described as being encoded in the surface of said region.
This remarkable, if bizarre, conclusion gains considerable support from the fact that black-hole entropy (and entropy is a measure of information content) is related only to the surface area of the black hole. So this is a case where we know with some confidence that we can indeed reduce all the information about a 3D region of space (the black hole) to an expression that only relies on 2 dimensions (the surface of the black hole). The holographic principle appears in numerous theories that imply that this holds generally for any region of space, not just black holes.
Now, whether you view this is 'just a mathematical trick' or 'a deep insight into the actual structure of the universe' is in some sense a matter of taste. (The same goes for all other physical theories: e.g. do electrons exist or are they just mathematically-useful constructs? How about photons? Gravity waves? Spacetime?) If you take the math seriously then this may mean that our universe is in some sense 'actually' 2-dimensional, with the three spatial dimensions we see being emergent instead of fundamental.
But in no case is the theory saying that there are not 3 spatial dimensions. The predictions it makes are for particles moving through a 3+1 spacetime.
Actually, no.
The traditional expression may be "Do No Evil" (as in the wise monkeys stories), but Google's motto is specifically "Don't be evil".
The distinction is important, too. As far as I can tell, Google intended their motto to be an internal shorthand way of saying "let's run the company in a way that doesn't piss off users--give people what they want and make them have a good experience..." Hence "Don't be evil" -- don't do things that will make users say "this company is an asshole" (e.g. forcing lock-in, being "too corporate", nickel and diming customers...). Just read the story of how the motto was coined: it was an attempt by the engineers to remind the corporate types that they shouldn't mistreat customers or forget their quirky roots.
Google never intended their motto to mean that they would single handedly save the world, or even that none of their actions would have both pros and cons. People have unfortunately really latched onto this idea that Google claims to be saintly, and thus attack Google when any of their actions have a negative side.
People are free to complain about the things companies do. But it irks me whenever people twist other people's words to make their point. And the constant misunderstanding of Google's motto is one example of this.
As others have responded, there is a general sense that journalists are not actually delivering news in a way that is honest and thoughtful enough. People turn to bloggers more and more because one can find a blogger who will provide a deep and critical analysis, unhindered by a parent company's aversion to certain topics. There are of course many terrible and biased bloggers, but the point is that there are enough bloggers that those that rise to the top are worthy of listening to.
But I agree that they can't, by and large, do the difficult and expensive research necessary to "break" stories.
But then the solution would seem to be to find a way to fund investigators, without those investigators necessarily being the ones who analyze the data or write the news. We don't need the whole infrastructure of modern newspapers if the only key ingredient is the research.
What I would love to see is funding made available to quality investigators, who gather together a bunch of information and publicize it, letting the public make of it what they will. With all kinds of source material (interview tapes and footage, detailed notes, photos, documents, etc.), the bloggers of the world would have the original material they need. (And no doubt many of them would find a way to make a living at it...) The question is obviously "who will pay for these investigators?" I don't have an answer, but I submit that this is the question we should be tackling. Not "How do we make newspapers sustainable?" but rather "How do we fund the important piece of news--investigation..."
I don't know if the right answer is public funds, or donations, or some mechanism by which interested parties (journalists, bloggers, citizens, etc.) pay into a fund to support the investigators, or what... But again I think we need to focus on the piece of newspapers that is actually valuable, and let the rest go.