I'm confused. I do agree that coyotes probably do a lot raping, and that most of them are probably Mexicans. So you are saying that you don't think that the Mexican immigrants are rapists? So you actually disagree with Trump? Or are you trying to say that Trump did not mean that the immigrants are rapists?
You are right, by the way, about my predictive power. I did think Hillary would win.
It was not one poorly worded statement. He repeated it several times. His VP repeated it. His whole campaign was built around scapegoating Mexicans. He didn't mean that "some" rapists are crossing the border. He meant that generically the Mexicans crossing the border are rapists, but "some" are good people. This is textbook hate speech: insulting and inspiring hatred against a national group.
As for all that raping, the report says that
Rape can be perpetrated by anyone along the way, including guides, fellow migrants, bandits or government officials, according to Fusion. Sometimes sex is used as a form of payment, when women and girls don’t have money to pay bribes.
So no Mexican immigrants doing raping (note that the report is talking about Central American immigrants, not Mexican immigrants. Even then, I'd bet that most of the raping is done by corrupt policemen, not fellow migrants). Of course, you are not going to let mere facts change your opinion that Mexicans are rapists, are you?
And if you are genuinely concerned about stopping the raping, as opposed to just insulting Mexicans, I have bad news for you. Trump has no intention of actually building a wall. He knows it is a stupid idea. An unwatched wall doesn't stop anyone. And the manpower that would be required to watch the whole US-Mexico border is just insane. And even the mosted watched border in the world, the one between Israel and Palestine, has tunnels being dug beneath it every now and then.
Do you want to know a simple way to stop all that raping overnight? Open the border. No more people smugglers, no more corrupt policemen, no more vulnerable people alone in the desert.
I don't actually believe you are interested, because this hateful quote has been repeated ad nauseum. You'd have to be living under a rock to miss it. But just in case you are being sincere, here it is:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
It's hard to be more clear than he was. He is directly saying that Mexican immigrants are rapists. Some of them he assumes to be good people, implying that most aren't.
Want to get rid of most hate speech? Just delete Trump's account. Calling Mexicans rapists is the textbook definition of hate speech. They won't have the balls to do it, though.
That would be personal vengeance; like using the NSA to discover shit about his opponents in order to discredit them. But he would never do anything in terms of political economy (like raising taxes, or persecuting tax dodgers), because he would personally lose money from that.
I actually agree with your sentiment, I just disagree with the person: Trump is wealthy and powerful. Why would he do anything against the wealthy and powerful?
The "new" thing does not need to be a theory, I grant you that. In Milikan's case, it was the experimental discovery of the electron. In Rutherford's case, it was the experimental discovery of alpha particles. But still, you are subestimating the difficulty of the experiment: it was not a summer project by an undergrad, but 3 years of solid work by an accomplished physicists. Read about it, it's rather interesting.
I'm skeptical about your history of STM, do you have a citation for it? By the time it was invented tunnelling was rather well-understood, so I find it difficult to believe that they could get the theory that wrong. Also, the very fact that several groups were considering the idea puts it solidly on the camp of "possible but probably very hard" experiments, not on the camp of "impossible even in principle according to every theory ever written" that the EM drive belongs to.
I'm talking about experiments about fundamental physics. You are talking about technological applications. We are not communicating. The only exception is the Milikan oil drop experiment. I have no beef with that, it is relatively simple to do (I actually did it in university. It does require well made equipment, and a lot of patience to track the damn drops, but it is nothing outrageous). The thing is that it was testing a relatively new theory at the time (charge quantization), and it is natural that a new theory can suddenly open the floodgates to simple, cheap experiments. An even better example would be the bending of light due to gravity: that required only an eclipse and a telescope.
But the EM drive is not based in any theory; the one that applies to the setup is plain old classical electrodynamics. Do you really want to disprove classical electrodynamics with a simple EM cavity? Come on. A big part of doing science (which I actually do for a living) is choosing what ideas are worth experimenting. The reason is very simple: scarce funding and scarce manpower. And the EM drive is not worth a single cent or second.
The reason why discoveries are made with expensive experiments is that the cheap experiments have already been done. Seriously. Since they are cheap, they are tried first. And they are done over and over again to extract all possible papers from some experimental setup. Competing groups copy the experimental setup, replicate the results, and do their own variations. The likelihood that there is something left to explore with a simple, cheap experimental setup is just too low.
And this people are doing experiments with the simplest, cheapest device ever: an electromagnetic cavity. This has been tested to death for more than a century. And they are claiming that they are using it to overturn the most basic laws of physics we have, while giving zero theoretical explanation of why it should work? Come on. I am indeed claiming with all the arrogance, without even looking at their paper, that it doesn't work. It cannot work. It is just too stupid.
To make me change my mind, they would need to get their paper published in a serious scientific journal. Then I will begin to wonder if they have made an interesting mistake and read the paper.
Unlike you, I do actual scientific research. And let me tell you something: you don't get anywhere if you are constantly worrying about the basics. You need to build from a solid base, you cannot hope to build the whole edifice of science on your on.
I proved that the square root of two is irrational. Once. In high school. Then I stopped worrying about it, and use that and other number-theoretical results in my research uncritically.
There are people who do research on basic logic and foundations of mathematics. I respect them, but I'm not one of them. I do research on the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Separating graphite layers does not contradict our basic understanding of physics. I don't have any problem with doing it with scotch tape. Ditto for hunting axions: it is an extension of known theories, not a breakdown of our fundamental theories (that is speculated to happen at high energies). But even hunting axions is already much harder than building this stupid EM drive: they had to make a very specialized very sensitive apparatus, for the simple reason that if axions were easy to detect they would have already been detected.
Large Extra Dimensions, on the other hand, is another story: there is no half-way decent theoretical model that predicts them, they are just pure speculation. And they were predict to show up at the LHC scale, with the prediction now changed to just above LHC scale, since they did not show up. And doing that is free, since there is no model to build, you just need to throw some numbers in the air.
Contrast this with fundamental discretization, which is expected to happen for good theoretical reasons, and there are actually some speculative theories (string theory and loop quantum gravity) that implement it.
Once a girl seriously argued with me that since we "don't understand quantum mechanics", then maybe even basic logic and mathematics is not correct, so we shouldn't be sure of anything, not even that the square root of two is irrational.
This is ridiculous. Conservation of momentum is valid in both quantum field theory and general relativity, there are an appropriate versions of Noether's theorem for them. And I don't see why are you harking about the Casimir effect: it doesn't violate conservation of momentum either.
Your suggestion that conservation of momentum might fail because of some fundamental discretization of space is also insane: first of all this is just speculative physics at this stage. Second, everyone that does speculate about it agrees that to probe the existence of this discretization would require particle collisions with energy around the Planck energy, about 10^28 eV. For comparison, the maximum we can do now, in the LHC, is to collide particles with energy of 10^13 eV.
To think that some lame tabletop experiment using only classical electrodynamics, running at most at 80 watts, somehow magically found a way to probe phenomena from an energy scale 15 orders of magnitude larger than the LHC scale, just shows a complete lack of knowledge of all the science involved. At the very least, it would show that the whole particle physics community are complete idiots for spending billions of euros in the LHC, while even more revolutionary science could by done on spare change by Eagleworks.
Or to hack the devices proactively. The ones that are already part of the botnet have probably been secured, but if we routinely scan the internet for new devices and do the stupid attacks (default passwords, open ports, long-patched vulnerabilities) we can take control of these things ourselves and then destroy them, or at least change the damn password.
It will certainly piss off the owner of some connected fridge, but at least it will make them do something about it. It is not as if they care that their "smart" devices are a part of a botnet.
And if this is done often enough, people will start realizing that they need to buy devices that have some minimal security if they don't want to get immediately pwned.
I think you are confusing the very rare very energetic cosmic rays with the constant background of low energy cosmic rays you have in space. Nobody cares about the first kind, because they are so rare, the second is what worries people planning manned missions. Both are very tough to shield against, anyway.
And their radiation source is not similar to either kind. They just used some very radioactive isotopes to expose the rats to a nice bath of gamma rays and alpha particles for a few seconds. This is much less energetic than the cosmic rays of the first kind, but much more energetic than the cosmic rays of the second kind.
I said that The Real Dr John specifically was overestimating the danger. He said "until they figure out how to fully shield the spacecraft, this is not practical for humans". And I really don't agree that "~5% increase in death rate" equals "not practical for humans". You have to put things in perspective: just the launch itself has a ~5% probability of killing the astronauts, so while a further 5% increase in the death rate is certainly not welcome, it is one additional danger of an already quite dangerous task. I think you'll find very few astronauts that refuse to take this risk.
That said, of course we need to reduce the radiation exposure as much as we can, because having astronauts who are dead, or with cancer, or with cataracts, or stupid, or with lung problems, or with heart disease is clearly not desirable. Going for extra shielding, as The Real Dr John suggested, is a terrible idea. You need a crazy amount of shielding, on the order of 100 g/cm, to significantly reduce the exposure, so waiting for that to happen is to wait forever. So I think the only plausible solution in the near term is to go fast.
In this respect I find Musk's proposal quite reasonable. He intends to do the trip in 90 days, and rotate the spacecraft to use to fuel tank as a shield during solar flares. NASA calculates that 5% from the 330 mSv in the trip would come from solar flares, so cutting that out and using the shorter trip time already reduces your pessimistic 1070 mSv to 650 mSv, so about 325 mSv per year, already well below the recommended level you quote.
I'm not going to look for their bios, the onus of proof is on you. I have checked the affiliations listed in the paper, and they are oncologists from the University of California. But this doesn't matter at all, as the radiation dose used in the paper is not anything like the radiation from interplanetary space. This is a simple fact, that does not depend on whether the study was made by random potheads, oncologists, NASA scientists, or the second coming of Feynman himself. And you would know this if you would look at the paper itself, where they don't even claim that radiation is similar to what you would experience on a trip to Mars, but instead that they just subjected the rats to a short intense burst.
If you want me to speculate on why they studied the wrong kind of radiation, I can think of two reasons: 1 - It is hard to build a source of low-intensity radiation with similar characteristics to galactic cosmic rays and keep the rats exposed to it for six months. 2 - A given amount of radiation is much more damaging when delivered in a quick burst than when delivered slowly over a period of months. Therefore if they had done the study properly the effects would be much less dramatic, and the news wouldn't make it to the first page of Slashdot.
According to the comic I linked, the allowed dosis for radiation workers in 50 mSv, making the trip to Mars about 7 times it. But this dosis is set to a level that is certainly safe, it doesn't mean that higher than it is certainly unsafe, just that we go into a gray zone where we can't guarantee it's safe, but we do not know whether it is actually dangerous either.
According to this table you need to be subjected to 1000 mSv in a short burst to have a 5% chance of developing a fatal cancer, which would make the 330 mSv over six months seem rather safe. I would be happy, however, if you could find a better source with more detailed information.
I think you are severely overestimating the danger of radiation. NASA measured the radiation dose received in 180 day trip to Mars to be about 330 mSv. This is probably enough to increase long-term cancer risk, but little else. Check the xkcd about radiation.
You are writing an ad hominen attack in response to a comment where I complain that Required Snark was not making any substantive criticism. Isn't the absurdity of this situation too much for you? How about you make, hummm, some... substantive criticism?
But to not leave you completely without response, what makes you think that the researchers who did this study are "NASA people" who "have been in space"? And if I were to take their study seriously, being in space leads to cognitive impairment, so people who have been to space would be more likely to get the key concept in their study wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused. I do agree that coyotes probably do a lot raping, and that most of them are probably Mexicans. So you are saying that you don't think that the Mexican immigrants are rapists? So you actually disagree with Trump? Or are you trying to say that Trump did not mean that the immigrants are rapists?
You are right, by the way, about my predictive power. I did think Hillary would win.
Please, show me how the context changes its meaning.
It was not one poorly worded statement. He repeated it several times. His VP repeated it. His whole campaign was built around scapegoating Mexicans. He didn't mean that "some" rapists are crossing the border. He meant that generically the Mexicans crossing the border are rapists, but "some" are good people. This is textbook hate speech: insulting and inspiring hatred against a national group.
As for all that raping, the report says that
Rape can be perpetrated by anyone along the way, including guides, fellow migrants, bandits or government officials, according to Fusion. Sometimes sex is used as a form of payment, when women and girls don’t have money to pay bribes.
So no Mexican immigrants doing raping (note that the report is talking about Central American immigrants, not Mexican immigrants. Even then, I'd bet that most of the raping is done by corrupt policemen, not fellow migrants). Of course, you are not going to let mere facts change your opinion that Mexicans are rapists, are you?
And if you are genuinely concerned about stopping the raping, as opposed to just insulting Mexicans, I have bad news for you. Trump has no intention of actually building a wall. He knows it is a stupid idea. An unwatched wall doesn't stop anyone. And the manpower that would be required to watch the whole US-Mexico border is just insane. And even the mosted watched border in the world, the one between Israel and Palestine, has tunnels being dug beneath it every now and then.
Do you want to know a simple way to stop all that raping overnight? Open the border. No more people smugglers, no more corrupt policemen, no more vulnerable people alone in the desert.
Your discourse is so weird that I'm actually unsure of whether you are a pro-Trump troll or a pro-Hillary troll.
I don't actually believe you are interested, because this hateful quote has been repeated ad nauseum. You'd have to be living under a rock to miss it. But just in case you are being sincere, here it is:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
It's hard to be more clear than he was. He is directly saying that Mexican immigrants are rapists. Some of them he assumes to be good people, implying that most aren't.
Want to get rid of most hate speech? Just delete Trump's account. Calling Mexicans rapists is the textbook definition of hate speech. They won't have the balls to do it, though.
That would be personal vengeance; like using the NSA to discover shit about his opponents in order to discredit them. But he would never do anything in terms of political economy (like raising taxes, or persecuting tax dodgers), because he would personally lose money from that.
I actually agree with your sentiment, I just disagree with the person: Trump is wealthy and powerful. Why would he do anything against the wealthy and powerful?
The "new" thing does not need to be a theory, I grant you that. In Milikan's case, it was the experimental discovery of the electron. In Rutherford's case, it was the experimental discovery of alpha particles. But still, you are subestimating the difficulty of the experiment: it was not a summer project by an undergrad, but 3 years of solid work by an accomplished physicists. Read about it, it's rather interesting.
I'm skeptical about your history of STM, do you have a citation for it? By the time it was invented tunnelling was rather well-understood, so I find it difficult to believe that they could get the theory that wrong. Also, the very fact that several groups were considering the idea puts it solidly on the camp of "possible but probably very hard" experiments, not on the camp of "impossible even in principle according to every theory ever written" that the EM drive belongs to.
I'm talking about experiments about fundamental physics. You are talking about technological applications. We are not communicating. The only exception is the Milikan oil drop experiment. I have no beef with that, it is relatively simple to do (I actually did it in university. It does require well made equipment, and a lot of patience to track the damn drops, but it is nothing outrageous). The thing is that it was testing a relatively new theory at the time (charge quantization), and it is natural that a new theory can suddenly open the floodgates to simple, cheap experiments. An even better example would be the bending of light due to gravity: that required only an eclipse and a telescope.
But the EM drive is not based in any theory; the one that applies to the setup is plain old classical electrodynamics. Do you really want to disprove classical electrodynamics with a simple EM cavity? Come on. A big part of doing science (which I actually do for a living) is choosing what ideas are worth experimenting. The reason is very simple: scarce funding and scarce manpower. And the EM drive is not worth a single cent or second.
The reason why discoveries are made with expensive experiments is that the cheap experiments have already been done. Seriously. Since they are cheap, they are tried first. And they are done over and over again to extract all possible papers from some experimental setup. Competing groups copy the experimental setup, replicate the results, and do their own variations. The likelihood that there is something left to explore with a simple, cheap experimental setup is just too low.
And this people are doing experiments with the simplest, cheapest device ever: an electromagnetic cavity. This has been tested to death for more than a century. And they are claiming that they are using it to overturn the most basic laws of physics we have, while giving zero theoretical explanation of why it should work? Come on. I am indeed claiming with all the arrogance, without even looking at their paper, that it doesn't work. It cannot work. It is just too stupid.
To make me change my mind, they would need to get their paper published in a serious scientific journal. Then I will begin to wonder if they have made an interesting mistake and read the paper.
Unlike you, I do actual scientific research. And let me tell you something: you don't get anywhere if you are constantly worrying about the basics. You need to build from a solid base, you cannot hope to build the whole edifice of science on your on.
I proved that the square root of two is irrational. Once. In high school. Then I stopped worrying about it, and use that and other number-theoretical results in my research uncritically.
There are people who do research on basic logic and foundations of mathematics. I respect them, but I'm not one of them. I do research on the foundations of quantum mechanics.
This paper does not show new physics. It shows a combination of experimental error and wishful thinking.
Separating graphite layers does not contradict our basic understanding of physics. I don't have any problem with doing it with scotch tape. Ditto for hunting axions: it is an extension of known theories, not a breakdown of our fundamental theories (that is speculated to happen at high energies). But even hunting axions is already much harder than building this stupid EM drive: they had to make a very specialized very sensitive apparatus, for the simple reason that if axions were easy to detect they would have already been detected.
Large Extra Dimensions, on the other hand, is another story: there is no half-way decent theoretical model that predicts them, they are just pure speculation. And they were predict to show up at the LHC scale, with the prediction now changed to just above LHC scale, since they did not show up. And doing that is free, since there is no model to build, you just need to throw some numbers in the air.
Contrast this with fundamental discretization, which is expected to happen for good theoretical reasons, and there are actually some speculative theories (string theory and loop quantum gravity) that implement it.
Once a girl seriously argued with me that since we "don't understand quantum mechanics", then maybe even basic logic and mathematics is not correct, so we shouldn't be sure of anything, not even that the square root of two is irrational.
This is ridiculous. Conservation of momentum is valid in both quantum field theory and general relativity, there are an appropriate versions of Noether's theorem for them. And I don't see why are you harking about the Casimir effect: it doesn't violate conservation of momentum either.
Your suggestion that conservation of momentum might fail because of some fundamental discretization of space is also insane: first of all this is just speculative physics at this stage. Second, everyone that does speculate about it agrees that to probe the existence of this discretization would require particle collisions with energy around the Planck energy, about 10^28 eV. For comparison, the maximum we can do now, in the LHC, is to collide particles with energy of 10^13 eV.
To think that some lame tabletop experiment using only classical electrodynamics, running at most at 80 watts, somehow magically found a way to probe phenomena from an energy scale 15 orders of magnitude larger than the LHC scale, just shows a complete lack of knowledge of all the science involved. At the very least, it would show that the whole particle physics community are complete idiots for spending billions of euros in the LHC, while even more revolutionary science could by done on spare change by Eagleworks.
Or to hack the devices proactively. The ones that are already part of the botnet have probably been secured, but if we routinely scan the internet for new devices and do the stupid attacks (default passwords, open ports, long-patched vulnerabilities) we can take control of these things ourselves and then destroy them, or at least change the damn password.
It will certainly piss off the owner of some connected fridge, but at least it will make them do something about it. It is not as if they care that their "smart" devices are a part of a botnet.
And if this is done often enough, people will start realizing that they need to buy devices that have some minimal security if they don't want to get immediately pwned.
Welcoming Russia had more to do with avoiding nuclear apocalypse than anything related to human rights or achieving some scientific goal.
I think you are confusing the very rare very energetic cosmic rays with the constant background of low energy cosmic rays you have in space. Nobody cares about the first kind, because they are so rare, the second is what worries people planning manned missions. Both are very tough to shield against, anyway.
And their radiation source is not similar to either kind. They just used some very radioactive isotopes to expose the rats to a nice bath of gamma rays and alpha particles for a few seconds. This is much less energetic than the cosmic rays of the first kind, but much more energetic than the cosmic rays of the second kind.
I said that The Real Dr John specifically was overestimating the danger. He said "until they figure out how to fully shield the spacecraft, this is not practical for humans". And I really don't agree that "~5% increase in death rate" equals "not practical for humans". You have to put things in perspective: just the launch itself has a ~5% probability of killing the astronauts, so while a further 5% increase in the death rate is certainly not welcome, it is one additional danger of an already quite dangerous task. I think you'll find very few astronauts that refuse to take this risk.
That said, of course we need to reduce the radiation exposure as much as we can, because having astronauts who are dead, or with cancer, or with cataracts, or stupid, or with lung problems, or with heart disease is clearly not desirable. Going for extra shielding, as The Real Dr John suggested, is a terrible idea. You need a crazy amount of shielding, on the order of 100 g/cm, to significantly reduce the exposure, so waiting for that to happen is to wait forever. So I think the only plausible solution in the near term is to go fast.
In this respect I find Musk's proposal quite reasonable. He intends to do the trip in 90 days, and rotate the spacecraft to use to fuel tank as a shield during solar flares. NASA calculates that 5% from the 330 mSv in the trip would come from solar flares, so cutting that out and using the shorter trip time already reduces your pessimistic 1070 mSv to 650 mSv, so about 325 mSv per year, already well below the recommended level you quote.
This is simply not true. Short bursts are much more damaging. And since you're the one claiming there is no difference, the onus of proof is on you.
I'm not going to look for their bios, the onus of proof is on you. I have checked the affiliations listed in the paper, and they are oncologists from the University of California. But this doesn't matter at all, as the radiation dose used in the paper is not anything like the radiation from interplanetary space. This is a simple fact, that does not depend on whether the study was made by random potheads, oncologists, NASA scientists, or the second coming of Feynman himself. And you would know this if you would look at the paper itself, where they don't even claim that radiation is similar to what you would experience on a trip to Mars, but instead that they just subjected the rats to a short intense burst.
If you want me to speculate on why they studied the wrong kind of radiation, I can think of two reasons:
1 - It is hard to build a source of low-intensity radiation with similar characteristics to galactic cosmic rays and keep the rats exposed to it for six months.
2 - A given amount of radiation is much more damaging when delivered in a quick burst than when delivered slowly over a period of months. Therefore if they had done the study properly the effects would be much less dramatic, and the news wouldn't make it to the first page of Slashdot.
According to the comic I linked, the allowed dosis for radiation workers in 50 mSv, making the trip to Mars about 7 times it. But this dosis is set to a level that is certainly safe, it doesn't mean that higher than it is certainly unsafe, just that we go into a gray zone where we can't guarantee it's safe, but we do not know whether it is actually dangerous either.
According to this table you need to be subjected to 1000 mSv in a short burst to have a 5% chance of developing a fatal cancer, which would make the 330 mSv over six months seem rather safe. I would be happy, however, if you could find a better source with more detailed information.
I think you are severely overestimating the danger of radiation. NASA measured the radiation dose received in 180 day trip to Mars to be about 330 mSv. This is probably enough to increase long-term cancer risk, but little else. Check the xkcd about radiation.
You are writing an ad hominen attack in response to a comment where I complain that Required Snark was not making any substantive criticism. Isn't the absurdity of this situation too much for you? How about you make, hummm, some... substantive criticism?
But to not leave you completely without response, what makes you think that the researchers who did this study are "NASA people" who "have been in space"? And if I were to take their study seriously, being in space leads to cognitive impairment, so people who have been to space would be more likely to get the key concept in their study wrong.