TFA pops up "Will you all www.zdnet.com to send notifications?" in an article about how the things are so hateful Firefox is rolling out a way to stop them. While they can be easily ignored, I've never once clicked "yes" and can't imagine doing so. Stopping them is a feature I'd enable.
I still do work in particle physics. Yes, I do understand that particles are way easier to be careful with the error propagation on than anything medical. But still, we do spend 90% of the time on any given analysis "embracing uncertainty, quantifying it, and discussing it,", as TFA says. Figuring out the error bars is the hard part, and also usually the part that referees pick at to make sure you did it right.
There's no explanation that I can see on why they would believe that assumption of distribution to be a good one in the first place, though; if they did some research that led them to that assumption, that is probably more interesting than their "closest planet" result.
They did. To quote:
The PCM treats the orbits of two objects as circular, concentric, and coplanar. For our solar system, that’s a pretty reasonable assumption: The eight planets have an average orbital inclination of 2.6 ± 2.2, and the average eccentricity is 0.06 ± 0.06. An object in a circular orbit maintains constant velocity, which means that over a sufficiently long period, it is equally likely to be in any position in that orbit.
Then, they pull out an ephemeris and actually integrate the distances from time point to time point, and that answer is within 1% of their "circles" estimate.
How bout an app that uses SMS as a remote control channel for when you lose your phone? This handy app: https://www.androidlost.com/ is about to get neutered. According to the forums, the author is doing all the right things with respect to applying for exemptions, and is going to get whacked anyway. If an app with this one's long history of good work gets blasted, any indie author is toast.
Hubble is a re-tuned keyhole, turned upward. They've flown 7 or 8 'Hubbles' pointing down, the last new one flew last fucking week
.
While surely Hubble design drew heavily on R&D from DoD recon birds, the Hubble design would make for a really lousy spy satellite, and vice-versa: "re-tuned" is a pretty strong statement.
"Shared some components, for a completely different set of requirements" is a better statement. If nothing else, going so far over budget and off-schedule would have been super-hard if NASA was just buying a COTS Hubble from DoD.
some context here, to fully illustrate my "gullibility" - I've built a prototype air cherenkov array from surplus DoD mirrors. "Some Parts" is a very, very long way from "Scientific Instrument".
Actually, one of the first few patches to Doom was to reduce network utilization. Apparently the early versions were so good at taking down corporate networks (because home networking was but just a glint back in the day) with traffic that workplaces banned its use.
So a later version came out that greatly reduced network utilization so you could at least play it and not take down the network at the same time.
IIRC, the first version used a token ring style "everybody gets all the packets" setup. Then, they realized that Netrek was doing a much better networking job with point to point packets. Us netrek hackers were happy to have contributed to the general video game corruption of the world.
The fastest man made object will be the modern Parker probe at 430,000 mph. That is 0.0006% the speed of light. To get to Alpha Centauri it would take 6810 years. There is no point trying to go to Alpha Centauri. Nothing would make the trip.
There's an ambitious, but possibly feasible concept for this, with R&D happening now: the Breathrough Starshot initiative. Short form: many small probes with solar sails being driven by lasers.
So where does Taiwan sit in the component industry these days? Thinking motherboards and video cards. CPUs, the US. Memory: Korea and Japan (... and Micron here in MN). Drives: Korea, Japan, and MN again (Seagate). At first glance, stuff from Newegg you'd put together yourself seems to have more non-China sources than a lot of the other current Trade War items might. You're not getting away from it entirely, of course, but there at least are options.
My wife registered as preferring one of the parties here in our state. And she has gotten over 100 pieces of mail from that party
I registered as unaffiliated so as not to be a pawn in the gerrymandering wars but that didn't stop me from getting 5 text messages to my cell from the Democrats urging me to vote for their candidates.
A related example of how the public information leaked by the voting rolls in TFA can be used for the power of spam^h^h^h^h^hevil: my wife voted in a primary. Although our state has open primaries and we are both officially un-affliated, one party's heuristics have decided that we're now obviously part of their party's political base. So, we been inundated with junk mail and spam calls made with that assumption, on top of the regular blast of robocalls generated by all sides since we live in "a competitive district". Talk about a dis-incentive to participate in the process.
I've told a few of the operatives who managed to reach me on the phone: "Do you really think that calling someone on the Do Not Call registry would actually help give your candidate a positive impression?". Been told that they'd take the number of their lists, but that doesn't seem to have happened. It really cheeses me off that politicians wrote themselves a loophole in that otherwise fine bit of legislation.
... and it's been accepted by ApJ letters, so it's almost certainly not.
It literally says:
"On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object in the Solar
System, âOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) was discovered by the
PAN-STARRS1 survey"
The paper is dated November 1st. In 13 days these people have looked at the FIRST EVER INTERSTELLAR OBJECT that we've literally only just been able to detect and come to the conclusion that it can only reasonably be part of an alien civilisation's UFO. With no context, alternative, or data beyond orbit and periodicity.
It's bunk.
Just in case you haven't realized it yet, 1 Nov. 2018 is 1 year and 13 days after 19 October, 2017.
The analysis of the extra orbital acceleration matches a 1/r^2 force. In regular comets, that's solar powered outgassing. Or, solar radiation pressure, if the thing is of the right form factor. No evidence of outgassing has been seen. I'm less clear how you get fit that form factor into the observations, but ok. The bulk of the paper, however, is an interesting analysis of how beat up a thin flat thing might get while traveling through interstellar space, something, say, their Breathrough Prize funders are pretty interested in knowing regardless (go google "Breakthrough Starshot"). The breathless "Alien!" headlines are mostly tacked on by places like Slashdot. The actual title of the paper is "COULD SOLAR RADIATION PRESSURE EXPLAIN ‘OUMUAMUA’S PECULIAR ACCELERATION?" (all caps coming from the journal's latex format, not me).
Read more carefully before spraying out "bunk" accusations. You'd make a really bad referee, good thing this paper got some decent ones instead.
I'm not rich because of Red Hat but I have gotten paid. Sadly I was a broke teenager when their IPO happened and the people I strongly advised to get in on it didn't listen.
This! Note that , although they didn't have to, RH did offer contributors the chance to join the IPO at the time. ALL contributors, not just their inside people. I didn't because I was a broke postdoc at the time, but wanted to: less to make money eventually, but because it'd be cool to own a share of a company that has produced stuff I use daily in the work that I get paid for.
as the consensus amongst the right is that taking from others in the name of science is fine for Kea, I must assume they've no problems with the Feds taking everything past the first five million from the rich. It's just religion after that and we're all agreed that religion has no value. What's wrong with taking nothing?
wait, what?
Why does everything have to be reduced to a right/left dung throwing fest? I'd be shocked if the astronomical community designing/building/using the scope voted much differently than 1/3 R and 2/3 D. But, hey, you've got to have only two boxes to cram any policy decision into, so go ahead.
Challenges: safe, light storage tanks. That's quite challenging, they couldn't find enough backing to figure out how to produce it at scale:
https://www.caranddriver.com/n...
Which is too bad, because:
Wins: much more efficient at storing inrush energy from regenerative braking than the batteries in your electric hybrid. Batteries are bad at dealing efficiently with lots of current at once. Compressed air: it's jut thermodynamic efficiency, something humans have industrialized for a couple centuries now. Also, far less nasty to build than batteries. Remember, your Prius is only saving the earth around where you're driving it: the environmental cost to make the thing is substantial to the neighborhood around the rare earth mines.
So, I'd say: safe, efficient pretty good: but tooling up to make it profitable, not so much. Not profitable is different than those other things.
Here's what Trump wrote on this Twitter:
"The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones. Except that I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News!"
Yeah, no shit... not to mention, alcohol has driven a lot more people apart than it has brought together.
Actually, there's an archaeological case to be made that the switch from humans as hunter-gatherers to humans as farmers was because of beer. At least, this is one interpretation of the fact that evidence of brewing is a common feature of many of the earliest farming communities. And thus, bringing everyone together in this "civilization" thing.
Of course, even if the motivation was Sumerian bros looking for keggers, the useful side effects (steady source of food, source of water that won't kill you because up till recently the only way to get antiseptic water was brew up the alchohol content or boil something (tea, coffeee)) certainly made the farming thing stick.
So (search warrants aside) something the authorities have always done is take mug shots of arrested people. To what extent could FaceID be fooled by holding up a good resolution photograph?
The physics community has had arXiv.org for decades, and yet the world continues to turn.
So my question is: if we put it out right away on the arXiv, does that satisfy the funding agency's "open" requirements? Our mode is to put it in arXiv right away, but also send it off for peer review in APS journals such as Physical Review (which are subscription based, if not as rapacious as the Elsevier journals) that publish the final versions of the articles out weeks/months later.
I guess it all depends on the defintion of "compliant Open Access Platforms" (from TFA).
Such a pity they called it "Parker".
Was "Icarus" already taken?
From TFA:
Eugene Parker published a new theory about how stars release energy. He predicted that the atmospheres of stars like our Sun get so hot that they are continually flowing outward, bathing all the planets around them in particles. Parker came up with the term “solar wind” to describe this phenomenon.
I'm not familiar with the rest of the list, but in MN and WI, the wolves certainly aren't endangered anymore. The state DNRs and the Federal Fish & Wildlife services have taken them off the list for valid "they're so many of them, we have to manage the population" reasons a couple times now: under Obama's watch, not Trump's. Anti-hunting activists sued to put them back on, over the objections of the experts.
It's certainly possible that the conservation officers snuck a reasonable, as-requested-by-the-scientists thing into a list of dodgy requests. But that's not the way it's being reported, so it makes me wonder about the rest of the things being complained about.
Anybody here know the particulars of the other species in the story, or is everyone just going to get wound up to the left or to the right in a partisan tizzy? The article was remarkably free of facts about the animals, just quotes from politicians on both sides
At the baseline and energy where Miniboone operates, numu have not had time to oscillate to nutau. At 10x the energy and 100x the baseline (eg, Nova, MINOS) they do, and this is measured well.
So, that access to the 3rd neutrino state isn't there for this experiment, which is why they're talking about the 2 states in play.
That said: the simple 3+1 neutrino model they propose, which would fit the Miniboone results on its own, is pretty solidly ruled out by a number of other experiments, most recently MINOS and IceCube. What is it then? We'd love to know, but odds are it's not a sterile neutrino.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you said. Just making the point that a) you can counter it to some extent as an individual if you want to; and b) it's not just facebook: the whole series of inter-tubes out there is set up to to make an "opt out" on an individual company's basis kinda pointless. Why is there so much content out there for "free"? Because, as you say, for most people you're not the customer, you're the product. Good luck changing that in congress: I'm not sure regulations will do much more than put lipstick on the pig, it's the way the whole ecosystem runs. Especially given the general level of competence congress exhibits about anything that's not campaign fundraising.
I don't understand why they left him off the hook so easily on this point. They could never collect consent from someone that didn't sign up for FB, so how is data collection could be legal?
Wait - doesn't anyone with an html server collect data on the visits to their pages? And facebook is simply a really fancy pile of webpages, from the perspective of an outside user without an account. So: anyone with apache and webalizer now needs people opting in?
Not that I'm a fan of facebook - I've studiously avoided signing up - but datamining your own server logs for web traffic seems a perfectly legit thing to do. You can "opt out" by never clicking on a facebook link, turning off 3rd party cookies, adblock, noscript, ghostery, etc. Same as with any other dubious website.
Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD
They already do this (not out of legislation, but out of honesty), and have been doing it since way back in 1989 when I was applying for grad school. And the professional societies keep detailed statistics, publishing them regularly. Although please do note that "faculty position" might not be the best metric for success: physics PhDs who go to work as data scientists out-earn their peers in academia by a lot.
Why do people do it? Because they've been at the head of their class up till that point so are confident. really really love what they're doing, and so persist in spite of the odds. Not so different than your average minor league pro athlete. Wonder what the mental health of those guys is like?
Slashdot Mirror
TFA pops up "Will you all www.zdnet.com to send notifications?" in an article about how the things are so hateful Firefox is rolling out a way to stop them. While they can be easily ignored, I've never once clicked "yes" and can't imagine doing so. Stopping them is a feature I'd enable.
(BTW: Isn't p=0.05 only a 2-sigma result? Ick.)
There's no explanation that I can see on why they would believe that assumption of distribution to be a good one in the first place, though; if they did some research that led them to that assumption, that is probably more interesting than their "closest planet" result.
They did. To quote:
The PCM treats the orbits of two objects as circular, concentric, and coplanar. For our solar system, that’s a pretty reasonable assumption: The eight planets have an average orbital inclination of 2.6 ± 2.2, and the average eccentricity is 0.06 ± 0.06. An object in a circular orbit maintains constant velocity, which means that over a sufficiently long period, it is equally likely to be in any position in that orbit.
Then, they pull out an ephemeris and actually integrate the distances from time point to time point, and that answer is within 1% of their "circles" estimate.
shh! Don't tell the anti-GMO people about this horrible trans-species genetic meddling, or Mother Nature will never hear the end of the protests.
How bout an app that uses SMS as a remote control channel for when you lose your phone? This handy app: https://www.androidlost.com/ is about to get neutered. According to the forums, the author is doing all the right things with respect to applying for exemptions, and is going to get whacked anyway. If an app with this one's long history of good work gets blasted, any indie author is toast.
Hubble is a re-tuned keyhole, turned upward. They've flown 7 or 8 'Hubbles' pointing down, the last new one flew last fucking week
.
While surely Hubble design drew heavily on R&D from DoD recon birds, the Hubble design would make for a really lousy spy satellite, and vice-versa: "re-tuned" is a pretty strong statement.
"Shared some components, for a completely different set of requirements" is a better statement. If nothing else, going so far over budget and off-schedule would have been super-hard if NASA was just buying a COTS Hubble from DoD.
some context here, to fully illustrate my "gullibility" - I've built a prototype air cherenkov array from surplus DoD mirrors. "Some Parts" is a very, very long way from "Scientific Instrument".
Actually, one of the first few patches to Doom was to reduce network utilization. Apparently the early versions were so good at taking down corporate networks (because home networking was but just a glint back in the day) with traffic that workplaces banned its use.
So a later version came out that greatly reduced network utilization so you could at least play it and not take down the network at the same time.
IIRC, the first version used a token ring style "everybody gets all the packets" setup. Then, they realized that Netrek was doing a much better networking job with point to point packets. Us netrek hackers were happy to have contributed to the general video game corruption of the world.
The fastest man made object will be the modern Parker probe at 430,000 mph. That is 0.0006% the speed of light. To get to Alpha Centauri it would take 6810 years. There is no point trying to go to Alpha Centauri. Nothing would make the trip.
There's an ambitious, but possibly feasible concept for this, with R&D happening now: the Breathrough Starshot initiative. Short form: many small probes with solar sails being driven by lasers.
So where does Taiwan sit in the component industry these days? Thinking motherboards and video cards. CPUs, the US. Memory: Korea and Japan (... and Micron here in MN). Drives: Korea, Japan, and MN again (Seagate). At first glance, stuff from Newegg you'd put together yourself seems to have more non-China sources than a lot of the other current Trade War items might. You're not getting away from it entirely, of course, but there at least are options.
My wife registered as preferring one of the parties here in our state. And she has gotten over 100 pieces of mail from that party
I registered as unaffiliated so as not to be a pawn in the gerrymandering wars but that didn't stop me from getting 5 text messages to my cell from the Democrats urging me to vote for their candidates.
A related example of how the public information leaked by the voting rolls in TFA can be used for the power of spam^h^h^h^h^hevil: my wife voted in a primary. Although our state has open primaries and we are both officially un-affliated, one party's heuristics have decided that we're now obviously part of their party's political base. So, we been inundated with junk mail and spam calls made with that assumption, on top of the regular blast of robocalls generated by all sides since we live in "a competitive district". Talk about a dis-incentive to participate in the process.
I've told a few of the operatives who managed to reach me on the phone: "Do you really think that calling someone on the Do Not Call registry would actually help give your candidate a positive impression?". Been told that they'd take the number of their lists, but that doesn't seem to have happened. It really cheeses me off that politicians wrote themselves a loophole in that otherwise fine bit of legislation.
It's on arxiv. It's almost certainly trash.
... and it's been accepted by ApJ letters, so it's almost certainly not.
It literally says:
"On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object in the Solar System, âOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) was discovered by the PAN-STARRS1 survey"
The paper is dated November 1st. In 13 days these people have looked at the FIRST EVER INTERSTELLAR OBJECT that we've literally only just been able to detect and come to the conclusion that it can only reasonably be part of an alien civilisation's UFO. With no context, alternative, or data beyond orbit and periodicity.
It's bunk.
Just in case you haven't realized it yet, 1 Nov. 2018 is 1 year and 13 days after 19 October, 2017.
The analysis of the extra orbital acceleration matches a 1/r^2 force. In regular comets, that's solar powered outgassing. Or, solar radiation pressure, if the thing is of the right form factor. No evidence of outgassing has been seen. I'm less clear how you get fit that form factor into the observations, but ok. The bulk of the paper, however, is an interesting analysis of how beat up a thin flat thing might get while traveling through interstellar space, something, say, their Breathrough Prize funders are pretty interested in knowing regardless (go google "Breakthrough Starshot"). The breathless "Alien!" headlines are mostly tacked on by places like Slashdot. The actual title of the paper is "COULD SOLAR RADIATION PRESSURE EXPLAIN ‘OUMUAMUA’S PECULIAR ACCELERATION?" (all caps coming from the journal's latex format, not me).
Read more carefully before spraying out "bunk" accusations. You'd make a really bad referee, good thing this paper got some decent ones instead.
I'm not rich because of Red Hat but I have gotten paid. Sadly I was a broke teenager when their IPO happened and the people I strongly advised to get in on it didn't listen.
This! Note that , although they didn't have to, RH did offer contributors the chance to join the IPO at the time. ALL contributors, not just their inside people. I didn't because I was a broke postdoc at the time, but wanted to: less to make money eventually, but because it'd be cool to own a share of a company that has produced stuff I use daily in the work that I get paid for.
as the consensus amongst the right is that taking from others in the name of science is fine for Kea, I must assume they've no problems with the Feds taking everything past the first five million from the rich. It's just religion after that and we're all agreed that religion has no value. What's wrong with taking nothing?
wait, what?
Why does everything have to be reduced to a right/left dung throwing fest? I'd be shocked if the astronomical community designing/building/using the scope voted much differently than 1/3 R and 2/3 D. But, hey, you've got to have only two boxes to cram any policy decision into, so go ahead.
Cars? No, tried that several times over many decades, not safe, not efficient, not very good.
Citroen had a compressed air hybrid, here's the marketing blurb about the core of it: https://www.groupe-psa.com/en/...
Challenges: safe, light storage tanks. That's quite challenging, they couldn't find enough backing to figure out how to produce it at scale: https://www.caranddriver.com/n...
Which is too bad, because: Wins: much more efficient at storing inrush energy from regenerative braking than the batteries in your electric hybrid. Batteries are bad at dealing efficiently with lots of current at once. Compressed air: it's jut thermodynamic efficiency, something humans have industrialized for a couple centuries now. Also, far less nasty to build than batteries. Remember, your Prius is only saving the earth around where you're driving it: the environmental cost to make the thing is substantial to the neighborhood around the rare earth mines.
So, I'd say: safe, efficient pretty good: but tooling up to make it profitable, not so much. Not profitable is different than those other things.
Here's what Trump wrote on this Twitter: "The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones. Except that I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News!"
He tweeted from a hard line? Cool tech!!!
Yeah, no shit... not to mention, alcohol has driven a lot more people apart than it has brought together.
Actually, there's an archaeological case to be made that the switch from humans as hunter-gatherers to humans as farmers was because of beer. At least, this is one interpretation of the fact that evidence of brewing is a common feature of many of the earliest farming communities. And thus, bringing everyone together in this "civilization" thing.
Of course, even if the motivation was Sumerian bros looking for keggers, the useful side effects (steady source of food, source of water that won't kill you because up till recently the only way to get antiseptic water was brew up the alchohol content or boil something (tea, coffeee)) certainly made the farming thing stick.
So (search warrants aside) something the authorities have always done is take mug shots of arrested people. To what extent could FaceID be fooled by holding up a good resolution photograph?
The physics community has had arXiv.org for decades, and yet the world continues to turn.
So my question is: if we put it out right away on the arXiv, does that satisfy the funding agency's "open" requirements? Our mode is to put it in arXiv right away, but also send it off for peer review in APS journals such as Physical Review (which are subscription based, if not as rapacious as the Elsevier journals) that publish the final versions of the articles out weeks/months later.
I guess it all depends on the defintion of "compliant Open Access Platforms" (from TFA).
Whoops, forgot the last line of that post: yes, Icarus is already taken, at least by a neutrino experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as well as a solar sailing spacecraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Such a pity they called it "Parker". Was "Icarus" already taken?
From TFA:
Eugene Parker published a new theory about how stars release energy. He predicted that the atmospheres of stars like our Sun get so hot that they are continually flowing outward, bathing all the planets around them in particles. Parker came up with the term “solar wind” to describe this phenomenon.
He's also done a whole lot with magnetic fields and astrophysics in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, we can name it after an extremely successful astrophysicist, or after a rather-not-so-successful ancient greek kid :)
I'm not familiar with the rest of the list, but in MN and WI, the wolves certainly aren't endangered anymore. The state DNRs and the Federal Fish & Wildlife services have taken them off the list for valid "they're so many of them, we have to manage the population" reasons a couple times now: under Obama's watch, not Trump's. Anti-hunting activists sued to put them back on, over the objections of the experts.
It's certainly possible that the conservation officers snuck a reasonable, as-requested-by-the-scientists thing into a list of dodgy requests. But that's not the way it's being reported, so it makes me wonder about the rest of the things being complained about.
Anybody here know the particulars of the other species in the story, or is everyone just going to get wound up to the left or to the right in a partisan tizzy? The article was remarkably free of facts about the animals, just quotes from politicians on both sides
So, that access to the 3rd neutrino state isn't there for this experiment, which is why they're talking about the 2 states in play.
That said: the simple 3+1 neutrino model they propose, which would fit the Miniboone results on its own, is pretty solidly ruled out by a number of other experiments, most recently MINOS and IceCube. What is it then? We'd love to know, but odds are it's not a sterile neutrino.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you said. Just making the point that a) you can counter it to some extent as an individual if you want to; and b) it's not just facebook: the whole series of inter-tubes out there is set up to to make an "opt out" on an individual company's basis kinda pointless. Why is there so much content out there for "free"? Because, as you say, for most people you're not the customer, you're the product. Good luck changing that in congress: I'm not sure regulations will do much more than put lipstick on the pig, it's the way the whole ecosystem runs. Especially given the general level of competence congress exhibits about anything that's not campaign fundraising.
I don't understand why they left him off the hook so easily on this point. They could never collect consent from someone that didn't sign up for FB, so how is data collection could be legal?
Wait - doesn't anyone with an html server collect data on the visits to their pages? And facebook is simply a really fancy pile of webpages, from the perspective of an outside user without an account. So: anyone with apache and webalizer now needs people opting in?
Not that I'm a fan of facebook - I've studiously avoided signing up - but datamining your own server logs for web traffic seems a perfectly legit thing to do. You can "opt out" by never clicking on a facebook link, turning off 3rd party cookies, adblock, noscript, ghostery, etc. Same as with any other dubious website.
Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD
They already do this (not out of legislation, but out of honesty), and have been doing it since way back in 1989 when I was applying for grad school. And the professional societies keep detailed statistics, publishing them regularly. Although please do note that "faculty position" might not be the best metric for success: physics PhDs who go to work as data scientists out-earn their peers in academia by a lot.
Why do people do it? Because they've been at the head of their class up till that point so are confident. really really love what they're doing, and so persist in spite of the odds. Not so different than your average minor league pro athlete. Wonder what the mental health of those guys is like?