Hey, folks, gravity waves were already confirmed, the Nobel prize was already awarded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It is funny how experimental physicists get all excited about things that were confirmed by astronomy a while back.
That's an indirect detection. LIGO does direct detection.
Everything else you wrote is spot on, but WIMPs have been ruled out as truly Weakly interacting (where Weak with a capital W means "by the exchange of W or Z bosons) for almost a decade now.
Quite correct. I should have said closely related to the force by which neutrinos interact.
If we don't find anything, how long do we keep looking?
There's a point at which the detectors will get sensitive enough that they start seeing neutrinos, and then the neutrino signal will swamp any Dark Matter signal. This is a couple of generations away in terms of technology development.
Scintillation in liquid Xenon happens when Xe atoms are ionized and temporarily form molecules before returning to a neutral state and emitting photons.
I see reference to WIMPs in the article, so in some ways do we consider Dark Matter to be kind of like a neutrino? All around us but not generally interacting with us?
Yes. The idea is that Dark Matter particles interact via the same force (the Weak Force) as neutrinos. The difference is that Dark Matter must be a much heavier particle than neutrinos in order to explain the astrophysics, because neutrinos don't clump enough under gravity.
There's a reason why this model is taken seriously: it's possible to calculate how such particles are created very early in the Big Bang. It turns out that if the particle responsible for Dark Matter was created in thermal equilibrium in the very early universe, its abundance today depends only on its interaction strength (not, for example, its mass). If you calculate that interaction strength corresponding the Dark Matter abundance implied by astrophysical measurements, you get exactly the same interaction strength as neutrinos. A pretty amazing coincidence!
Why would we expect to see it if we merely multiply the size of the experiment?
Because the event rate scales with the mass of the detector: if you have to wait one hundred years for one event with a 1kg detector, you only have to wait 1 year with a 100kg detector, and a month with a 1000kg detector.
Maybe have an engineer included in the hunt!
Wow! I bet they never thought of having engineers help build the detector! Those silly scientists.
I'd be all for vaccination if combined with sterilization. Otherwise, it leads to eradication not only of diseases, but skews the genetic variation towards a less healthy future population.
But if the diseases are eradicated, then immunity to those diseases no longer provides an evolutionary advantage. Think of smallpox: having a natural immunity to smallpox doesn't incur any advantage at all, since smallpox doesn't exist any more. (Your "allergy" argument here is pure speculation.)
It is widely accepted that traits like compassion, empathy, and cooperation are inherited. Our desire to alleviate the suffering of others is an inherited trait. Our revulsion at seeing a child die unnecessarily is an inherited trait. Things like insulin and vaccines are phenotypic expressions of those underlying behavioral genes. You seem to be willing to sacrifice those traits in favor of a slight reduction in susceptibility to measles, which I think is a really terrible tradeoff.
I believe that the "all lives are sacred" thinking is religious based, and not supported by science. A certain amount of predatory culling leads to fewer regressive genes being propagated, which I believe is good for the species long term. And as long as who gets a vaccine and who doesn't is largely based on what society you grow up in, vaccination seems to me to be a form of eugenics, where the rich get to decide who gets to live and who doesn't. I don't like the taste of that at all.
Wow, you really don't understand evolution at all, do you?
Things like vaccines, insulin, or even eyeglasses or handwashing are beneficial evolutionary adaptations. These are precisely the things that have made our species more successful than our competitors. Caring for our sick and infirm is an adaptation that has made us more successful than our competitors. Cooperation has made us more successful than our competitors, although we are not unique in that trait. Civilization (and the wealth that accompanies it), far from being a form of eugenics, is a beneficial evolutionary adaptation. The list goes on.
Where do you draw the line? What health care do we deny people to ensure that a proper "culling" takes place? Do we not do C-sections? Do we not set broken bones? Do we not rescue drowning people? Seems to me that it smack much more of eugenics to forbid medical treatments because they prevent "culling".
Submissions like this just make those who support vaccines and vaccinations look like total kooks! This submission has the same "holier than thou" attitude that we see from those who push the Rust programming language or those who support systemd
Because people who rant about systemd in response to stories about HPV vaccine don't, even slightly, look like kooks.
One of the NSA's mandates is signals intelligence. Another is information assurance, i.e. making sure our communications infrastructure is secure. Inserting backdoors in crypto hardware represents a pyrrhic victory for the first, and a complete disaster for the second.
The one thing that advocates for crypto backdoors completely fail to understand is that what you gain from the ability to monitor traffic comes at an enormous cost, which is the indroduction of a systemic flaw in our entire information infrastructure, which could potentially have catastrophic consequences. The best reason to oppose backdoors is not because "privacy" or "freedom" (although those may indeed be sufficient), but because backdoors combat a nuisance by making us vulnerable to a truly existential threat.
But if humankind shall prosper in the long run it's necessary. In 500 million years earth won't be habitable.
In 500 million years, our descendants won't be human any more, so no big. The hard limit is in 5 billion years, when the sun goes red giant and fries the planet. But that's a looooong time.
It's Star Wars we're talking about here, not La Strada. The whole problem with the prequels was Lucas taking himself waaaaay too seriously. Star Wars is a Saturday Matinee Samurai Space Opera. Which is what Abrams delivered. Yay!
The condition for science is that it has to be testable in principle, NOT that it has to be testable within the limits of current technology. When Higgs came up with his theory there was no accelerator capable of testing it (although we did not know that at the time). So would that make the Higgs mechanism non-science until the 21st century when we built the LHC? Clearly not.
There's a difference: it was possible long before the LHC to test the Higgs theory for consistency. The Higgs made predictions about how other particles (not the Higgs) would interact with each other. Those could be tested in accelerators which were not energetic enough to produces the Higgs directly.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible. Now, maybe there's a clever way around that, but it would have to be something truly extraordinary. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Some nut like Rossi with a black box isn't going to convince anybody. He's got to explain precisely how it manages to circumvent the Coulomb barrier before his claims, or those of any other cold fusion researcher, are remotely credible.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, folks, gravity waves were already confirmed, the Nobel prize was already awarded:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is funny how experimental physicists get all excited about things that were confirmed by astronomy a while back.
That's an indirect detection. LIGO does direct detection.
If I were on LIGO, I would be righteously pissed at Krauss. If it's true, it's a total douchebag move to grandstand off somebody else's discovery.
Everything else you wrote is spot on, but WIMPs have been ruled out as truly Weakly interacting (where Weak with a capital W means "by the exchange of W or Z bosons) for almost a decade now.
Quite correct. I should have said closely related to the force by which neutrinos interact.
A more directly relevant reference is here.
It's also entirely likely that the person who wrote the summary wrote "molecule" when they meant "atom"...
My software side wonders: Did they build a unit-test and confirm the system will work as designed?
Of fucking course. They calibrate the detector with neutron sources. Do you think they're complete idiots?
If we don't find anything, how long do we keep looking?
There's a point at which the detectors will get sensitive enough that they start seeing neutrinos, and then the neutrino signal will swamp any Dark Matter signal. This is a couple of generations away in terms of technology development.
How does that work?
Scintillation in liquid Xenon happens when Xe atoms are ionized and temporarily form molecules before returning to a neutral state and emitting photons.
I see reference to WIMPs in the article, so in some ways do we consider Dark Matter to be kind of like a neutrino? All around us but not generally interacting with us?
Yes. The idea is that Dark Matter particles interact via the same force (the Weak Force) as neutrinos. The difference is that Dark Matter must be a much heavier particle than neutrinos in order to explain the astrophysics, because neutrinos don't clump enough under gravity.
There's a reason why this model is taken seriously: it's possible to calculate how such particles are created very early in the Big Bang. It turns out that if the particle responsible for Dark Matter was created in thermal equilibrium in the very early universe, its abundance today depends only on its interaction strength (not, for example, its mass). If you calculate that interaction strength corresponding the Dark Matter abundance implied by astrophysical measurements, you get exactly the same interaction strength as neutrinos. A pretty amazing coincidence!
Why would we expect to see it if we merely multiply the size of the experiment?
Because the event rate scales with the mass of the detector: if you have to wait one hundred years for one event with a 1kg detector, you only have to wait 1 year with a 100kg detector, and a month with a 1000kg detector.
Maybe have an engineer included in the hunt!
Wow! I bet they never thought of having engineers help build the detector! Those silly scientists.
As soon as I see the words "rolling release", I swicth to another piece of software.
I'd be all for vaccination if combined with sterilization. Otherwise, it leads to eradication not only of diseases, but skews the genetic variation towards a less healthy future population.
But if the diseases are eradicated, then immunity to those diseases no longer provides an evolutionary advantage. Think of smallpox: having a natural immunity to smallpox doesn't incur any advantage at all, since smallpox doesn't exist any more. (Your "allergy" argument here is pure speculation.)
How are they inherited?
Learned behavior is not evolution.
It is widely accepted that traits like compassion, empathy, and cooperation are inherited. Our desire to alleviate the suffering of others is an inherited trait. Our revulsion at seeing a child die unnecessarily is an inherited trait. Things like insulin and vaccines are phenotypic expressions of those underlying behavioral genes. You seem to be willing to sacrifice those traits in favor of a slight reduction in susceptibility to measles, which I think is a really terrible tradeoff.
People who get HPV should be ashamed. Not for having sex, but for having sex with someone who had sex with someone else.
I feel quite certain that, assuming you ever manage to have sex with anybody, you will become permanently celibate after they leave you.
I believe that the "all lives are sacred" thinking is religious based, and not supported by science. A certain amount of predatory culling leads to fewer regressive genes being propagated, which I believe is good for the species long term. And as long as who gets a vaccine and who doesn't is largely based on what society you grow up in, vaccination seems to me to be a form of eugenics, where the rich get to decide who gets to live and who doesn't. I don't like the taste of that at all.
Wow, you really don't understand evolution at all, do you?
Things like vaccines, insulin, or even eyeglasses or handwashing are beneficial evolutionary adaptations. These are precisely the things that have made our species more successful than our competitors. Caring for our sick and infirm is an adaptation that has made us more successful than our competitors. Cooperation has made us more successful than our competitors, although we are not unique in that trait. Civilization (and the wealth that accompanies it), far from being a form of eugenics, is a beneficial evolutionary adaptation. The list goes on.
Where do you draw the line? What health care do we deny people to ensure that a proper "culling" takes place? Do we not do C-sections? Do we not set broken bones? Do we not rescue drowning people? Seems to me that it smack much more of eugenics to forbid medical treatments because they prevent "culling".
Submissions like this just make those who support vaccines and vaccinations look like total kooks! This submission has the same "holier than thou" attitude that we see from those who push the Rust programming language or those who support systemd
Because people who rant about systemd in response to stories about HPV vaccine don't, even slightly, look like kooks.
And he would have made a great Elrond...
I always wanted to seem him play The Joker. He would have killed it.
LANL is officially dead. Last one out, turn off the lights. (It'll keep glowing on its own for quite some time.)
This.
One of the NSA's mandates is signals intelligence. Another is information assurance, i.e. making sure our communications infrastructure is secure. Inserting backdoors in crypto hardware represents a pyrrhic victory for the first, and a complete disaster for the second.
The one thing that advocates for crypto backdoors completely fail to understand is that what you gain from the ability to monitor traffic comes at an enormous cost, which is the indroduction of a systemic flaw in our entire information infrastructure, which could potentially have catastrophic consequences. The best reason to oppose backdoors is not because "privacy" or "freedom" (although those may indeed be sufficient), but because backdoors combat a nuisance by making us vulnerable to a truly existential threat.
The Internet is probably better off without NAT
Short response: Fuck you.
Long response: I should be the one who decides whether my local network appears to the outside as a single IP address, or multiple. Also, fuck you.
But if humankind shall prosper in the long run it's necessary. In 500 million years earth won't be habitable.
In 500 million years, our descendants won't be human any more, so no big. The hard limit is in 5 billion years, when the sun goes red giant and fries the planet. But that's a looooong time.
*slow clap*
Well done, Sir. Well done.
It's Star Wars we're talking about here, not La Strada. The whole problem with the prequels was Lucas taking himself waaaaay too seriously. Star Wars is a Saturday Matinee Samurai Space Opera. Which is what Abrams delivered. Yay!
Snap Circuits. Yeah, baby.
The condition for science is that it has to be testable in principle, NOT that it has to be testable within the limits of current technology. When Higgs came up with his theory there was no accelerator capable of testing it (although we did not know that at the time). So would that make the Higgs mechanism non-science until the 21st century when we built the LHC? Clearly not.
There's a difference: it was possible long before the LHC to test the Higgs theory for consistency. The Higgs made predictions about how other particles (not the Higgs) would interact with each other. Those could be tested in accelerators which were not energetic enough to produces the Higgs directly.
String theory? Not so much.
What a load of horseshit.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible. Now, maybe there's a clever way around that, but it would have to be something truly extraordinary. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Some nut like Rossi with a black box isn't going to convince anybody. He's got to explain precisely how it manages to circumvent the Coulomb barrier before his claims, or those of any other cold fusion researcher, are remotely credible.