at the WF near me, you don't need to use a self checkout machine to get this interaction (minus the Robocop bit). There are signs up saying something about "don't make our employees put things in bags for you to save them from repetitive stress injuries". And the employees give you the evil eye if you don't Comply Immediately With the Sign. So, you get to pay more for your food while getting less service.
I hear this a fair amount, and am puzzled. As a physics professor, I'm trying to teach students problem solving skills (usually the engineering and science students). As an astronomy professor, I'm trying to teach students (usually the non-scientists taking the survey astro courses) how to apply the scientific method to figure out what's going on up there and have a functioning BS detector when it comes to pseudoscience.
The definitions I've heard of this "Critical Thinking" meme seem to indicate that these are the sort "top of the learning pyramid" skills that go with "Critical Thinking", but somehow science remains a mindless technical skill in the eyes of many.
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
Doesn't work. People evaluating your publication record (your dept. head, your dean, someone reading your CV when you apply for the next job) know which journals are junk pay-to-win rags, and not only discount those items, but then figure you don't know what the heck you are talking about since you even had those useless items on your CV.
Had you read the summary (not even TFA), you'd see that the "victims" are "the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries". Not "the most expensive schools".
Funding agencies are even more discriminating. When your program has only 10-20% of the funds available needed to fund the incoming proposals, crap like this doesn't even make the first cut in a grant application. Why? There's not enough money available to fund the really good proposals. Go ahead, make my life as a proposal reviewer easier by giving me an excuse to move one of the huge stack to the "do not fund" pile.
If any industry needs disruption, it's the education industry.
Maybe: but if you want to make that argument, make one that holds water.
Nope, here's the real one: http://vaticanobservatory.org/...
A testbed for a number of advanced telescope building techniques that have since gone on to play big roles in the current generation of optical scopes. And, still doing good research in its own right.
What this is, I suspect, is the Catholic leadership realizing that the window of ignorance is just about to close on their fingers, so they're scrambling a bit to retrench a little further outside of their normal run of indoctrination.
Hmm. Your statement makes sense only if considered in super-slo-motion. From the summary (not even TFA), the Vatican Observatory has been around for more than 100 years. Lemaitre was one of the early people working out the connections between GR and cosmology. likely before anyone on slashdot was even born.
Reading over these comments as a whole (many of which are completely over the top, the one I'm replying to is merely inaccurate), I'm sad that Slashdotters are so ready to respond to something by slinging mud rather than considering the topic of discussion: a cool conference on cosmology. Come on people. Grow up. You can not like a religion. Or any religion. But then slamming people on unrelated topics because they don't agree with your own personal dogma..... wait. Isn't that one of the very same complaints many people have against organized religion? At least try to be consistent.
I'm pretty sure that's what the O-1A visas are designed for:
That does like a better fit. And I know we didn't have to deal with a lottery, or the widely-publicized "time for the lottery now!" deadline (which, by the way, is not compatible with an academic hiring schedule).
So I just went back in my email and poked around: the name being bandied about with the University HR folks was definitely H1-B. Maybe they helpfully translated that into an O-1A, thinking "stupid head in the clouds faculty, can't even get an alphabet soup form name right".
Techie tunnel vision: H1B's are used for many other purposes than getting cheap IT help from India. My interaction with the program has been "just hired a new theoretical physics professor, who happens to not hold US citizenship". How to get him permission to work at a US university? Get an H1B.
In that case, it was pretty easy to prove there wasn't a US national who could fill the job better than the foreigner: we had just done an exhaustive search to find the best applicant.. Sounds like it was working as designed: don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I wish I could trust "academic experts". I really do. But all my experiences with academia and academics have been very disappointing.
The first problem can be summed up with the old saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, research.". That's exactly what we see in academia: those who couldn't cut it outside of academia with their bachelor's degree end up back in academic circles, often for the rest of their lives. Academia provides a safe playpen for those who were below the standards of the real world.
Wait.... you're saying you can work in academic research with a Bachelor's? Or you mean that people who can't hack it in the real world go to grad school?
Speaking as someone who a) serves on graduate admissions committees; and b) advises many graduating bachelor's recipients, it's usually exactly the opposite. It takes a great student to get into grad school, and so the less-great students go get a job somewhere. That's a generalization, of course: great students can go get a job too: but a bad student certainly isn't getting into grad school. Caveat - this is physics. Other fields may differ, but all the sciences I'm familiar with operate in similar fashion. Get further from physical science, get different results. But wait, climate science is pretty closely tied to several physical science, and that's what triggered your post, right? Not sociology.
The fourth problem is when you take all of the above and add money into the mix. That's when everything really goes to hell. This is a sure-fire way for even the sciences, which are generally among the least-inept of the academic subjects, to become highly politicized. It's no longer just about inept people doing inept research. Now it's about inept people doing inept research but always finding the "correct" results for politicians who need to legitimize otherwise illegitimate practices like carbon taxes and excessive and costly regulation.
Huh. I review many proposals and papers and have served on funding panels, and can honestly say that I've never seen this in action. You have seen this in action, then.... how and where? I've been pretty impressed with how well funding in my field works, for the most part.
So when such a flawed system provides results or information for my consideration, I have to take what they're saying with a very, very, very big spoonful of salt grains. None of it can be trusted, from the individual level all the way through to entire fields of study.
Then there's an awful lot of the physics I teach and research that you apparently don't trust: from F=ma through E=mc^2 to quarks and neutrinos. Which begs the question: what the heck DO you trust?
While I agree that those voting against the bill should be congratulated, one name jumped out at me:
Sanford, Mark SC 1st
... a gold-plated example of familiy-values guy who would hate to have his own browsing history of questions like "is the Appalachian Trail in Argentina?" exposed.
I suppose that this at least means he learned something.
Well, that may not be entirely true. The Casimir effect and Hawking radiation are both potential examples of "negative energy".
... and the total potential+kinetic energy of a solar system. Or an atom. Energy is so often a sum game where negative energies happen all the time.
But, that's not the case here. If an ADC-based sensor is reading a "negative" amount, it's either an error condition (as it sounds like here) or a bad calibration (pedestal subtraction).
Kudos to the kid for noticing it! Thumbs down to the BBC writer for venturing into negative-energy land in two wrong senses at the same time.
Samsung. No thank you! You put more than enough crapware on your phones as it is and with verizon all that shit is locked down unless I want to root a phone. Please DO NOT put more crapware on my phone.
This++
Can't uninstall it. Can't permanently disable it. All you can do is remember to go in there and force stop on two seperate services every time you reboot the phone, or every time it decides you really want it turned back on and something does it for you.
And it's not just any crapware, it's wireless remote payment crapware. What could possibly go wrong?
Learn just a LITTLE physics and you will see that YOU are wrong (and TFA).
There is no frequency that does not absorb over atmospheric distances, plus when it hits any solid object.
There are only frequencies with LOWER absorption, which is meaningless for these kinds of path lengths.
I've learned a little bit of physics, and while technically true, what you say is misleading. Visible light, for example, doesn't absorb very much in air (yeah sure, there's some). The air is "optically thin" at visible wavelengths, which means more light is getting through from space to us than not: 75% of the energy integrated over all wavelengths gets down here: most of what's not getting through isn't the visible bits (yay for the ozone layer).
So, if they can shift energy to come out at 10 microns, which is in a clear bit of the spectrum almost as nice as around 5000 angstroms (visible light), what they say is right: 10 micron IR radiated upwards is mostly checking out back into space.
Just make sure you're not putting the fancy new film under solid objects, go read about the laws of thermodynamics, solve your favorite radiative transfer equation, and *poof*: cooler thing than you had started with.
"will occupy a spot that crosses the Cincinnati and Kentucky border"
Odd, one's city and the other's a state. And the border between them is a river - hard to build an airport across a river.
I was wondering about that. Not being able to read the paywalled part, my conclusion was: Riverboats are returning! Delivery by paddle wheel, more nostalgic than drones.
Seriously though, seems a good move since CVG used to be a Delta hub, but isn't anymore: there's way more airport there than is being used.
Interesting that the 3rd generation of SYNC (out since 2016 I think) is based on QNX and appears to very well received.
I have a 2016 Fusion, and its SYNC is indeed adequate. It's responsive, well laid-out, and the bluetooth pairing does what you want it to with no problems. Voice recognition even works. Wish it had Android Auto (apparently the 2017 models do), as exporting processing of navigation and stuff to your phone seems the right way to go.
On the other hand, my 2013 Subaru's system is complete trash. Getting in the car and trying to select my phone to pair to (after my wife has driven it) is eleven-levels deep into a voice menu that has a hard time understanding you. At least it remembers the pairing on restart, but they weren't thinking about two different drivers at all when "designing" this steaming pile of code.
TFA says it's the same amount of income as the "social security" there in Finland it's replacing (guessing that maps onto some combination of welfare/unemployment/EIC here in the US).
But, TFA doesn't say how UBI is different, other than the name. Any insights?
Now, people are starting to question the position of the NRA that *anybody* regardless of who they are should be able to procure guns
Not their actual position, although waving blanket, false statements like that around is what passes for political discourse these days. Actual fact: the current background check system was actually strongly supported by the gun lobby: people who are convicted felons or legally declared mentally incompetent don't have second amendment rights. Or many other constitutional rights, say for example, voting. The current argument (causing the House to behave like the dysfunctional third world legislative clique it apparently actually is) is over the "sounds good!" legislation of "people on the terror watch list shouldn't be allowed to buy firearms".
Hmm. So, a law in which denies something listed on the bill of rights to people on a secret government list, who can get on that list simply by someone voicing suspicion, with no procedure for getting off the list (or even knowing if/why they're on it)? Pick anything else that's a legal right (voting? free speech? Self-incrimination? Illegal search and seizure?) and swap that in for "gun ownership" in this scenario and watch everyone across the political spectrum freak out. We tried something like this in the 50's with McCarthy when the enemies were Commies instead of Radicals, and are universally ashamed of that fact in hindsight.
Of course the NRA should be objecting to this. I'm shocked that the ACLU, for example, isn't too.
A few years ago when the TBM knocked through the last bit of rock in this tunnel, this cool video of the event might even have been posted on slashdot (can't remember where I ran across it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A similar meme here in the US: "you can buy a gun on the web without a background check! The horror. Must close that loophole."
Any journalists trying to do this for a story would quickly realize that only is possible if buyer and seller are able/willing to meet physically, otherwise the act of shipping the firearm, which must go through a licensed dealer, gets backgrounds checked. And a physical meetup between individuals is pretty hard to regulate with or without an internet.
If you read the article, mainly by looking at the results of passing various laws at the state level. Which is kind of how it should be: we see what works at the state level and (maybe) implement it at the national level.
>
Would be a good way to do a study, yes.
but... there are no laws in any state which address the question I raised... because it's impractical and can't be implemented, without also bringing along a full firearm registry (which is how they collect sales tax on cars sold between private people, we call then "deeds"). And that's a whole different kettle of fish with way more implications than background checks alone.
So, back to my question: how can the techniques allegedly used in the study actually answer the question they purport to answer? If they used the few particularly fascist locales with complete registration (Chicago, DC, NYC, etc) as a template, that's got so many other variables going on that generalizing it to anything else is kinda stupid.
This "make background checks mandatory for private sales" thing sounds good, but won't work. It won't work for the same reason that no one pays sales tax at a garage sale: you're supposed to do so, but there's no way for the government to enforce the sales tax laws on people who don't hold a business license.
The existing background check system works because it's tied to firearm dealers' licenses: they've got to do it to keep their business license.
Ironically, during the Clinton administration the feds went on a "too many people have FFLs, let's make them much more expensive and hard to get!" spree. Which now means that many fewer people participate in the background check system, as a result of another initiative that sounded good to people who have a tenuous connection to reality.
For what it's worth, if you do go buy a firearm on the internet, odds are really good that you're getting a background check anyway. Why? Because to ship a firearm, it's got to go from FFL to FFL. And the FFL in your town handling your shipment is required to do a background check.
But, it sure does sounds good to propose such a law: to people who have no clue how things actually work. Which, it turns out, is true of most of the "feel good!" solutions non-gun owners concoct to impose on gun owners. Comes of trying to legislate to match what they see in movies and in cop shows rather than what actually happens in reality. So, I wonder how this study came up with their numbers. Did they just say "hmm, X% of people buying their guns person to person commit a crime, a BG check would magically change that number to 0%"? I suppose it might, if 100% of the people followed the new, easily ignorable law. Considering that they're going and ignoring other, stricter laws to commit their crimes (like, "killing people is illegal"), that sounds rather optimistic.
Thanks - so why don't the charm and the anti-charm go "poof" ?
They do, sort of: this thing doesn't last long at all.
Consider a much more common particle, the neutral pi meson: just two quarks: quark/antiquark pairs of several possible flavors. Also doesn't last long (8e-17s), but extremely well studied.,
That's exactly what scientists should be doing, re-testing long held dogma taking advantage of state of the art equipment. It's a human endeavor, so sometimes they'll make mistakes. The scientists who reported the results presented plenty of caveats, but nobody listened.
Quoting this, as it's an AC zero-karma thing that most will miss, and I don't have mod points today.
This time, AC gets it mostly right. Science is about reproducibility. Opera had a weird result that they didn't understand, so they did what they were supposed to: put it out there for people to crosscheck. For what it's worth, in an emacs buffer open in another window at this very moment, I'm putting the final touches on the paper about one of the results that WAS this crosscheck. (yeah, it's taken us too long to send it to the journal, but it's a) careful, fiddly work that we want to get right; and b) we all know the answer now so enthusiasm for the paper writing process/grind isn't huge).
So, what the parent post got right: this is exactly how science is supposed to work. What the parent post got wrong: everybody (in the field) carefully listened to the caveats. Doing so is how one finds the flaws! Or eliminates possible flaws, as is sometimes the case. It was the media who went tangential on the whole process, not the scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is a second Earth where we can production test ideas like this.
In this case, Mother Nature's already done the alpha test: Mt. Pinatubo. The climate hack works, AND it backs itself out.
Please place the item into the bag.
at the WF near me, you don't need to use a self checkout machine to get this interaction (minus the Robocop bit). There are signs up saying something about "don't make our employees put things in bags for you to save them from repetitive stress injuries". And the employees give you the evil eye if you don't Comply Immediately With the Sign. So, you get to pay more for your food while getting less service.
Critical thinking is not a part of STEM.
I hear this a fair amount, and am puzzled. As a physics professor, I'm trying to teach students problem solving skills (usually the engineering and science students). As an astronomy professor, I'm trying to teach students (usually the non-scientists taking the survey astro courses) how to apply the scientific method to figure out what's going on up there and have a functioning BS detector when it comes to pseudoscience.
The definitions I've heard of this "Critical Thinking" meme seem to indicate that these are the sort "top of the learning pyramid" skills that go with "Critical Thinking", but somehow science remains a mindless technical skill in the eyes of many.
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
Doesn't work. People evaluating your publication record (your dept. head, your dean, someone reading your CV when you apply for the next job) know which journals are junk pay-to-win rags, and not only discount those items, but then figure you don't know what the heck you are talking about since you even had those useless items on your CV.
Had you read the summary (not even TFA), you'd see that the "victims" are "the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries". Not "the most expensive schools".
Funding agencies are even more discriminating. When your program has only 10-20% of the funds available needed to fund the incoming proposals, crap like this doesn't even make the first cut in a grant application. Why? There's not enough money available to fund the really good proposals. Go ahead, make my life as a proposal reviewer easier by giving me an excuse to move one of the huge stack to the "do not fund" pile.
If any industry needs disruption, it's the education industry.
Maybe: but if you want to make that argument, make one that holds water.
Poe's often given credit for writing down the first good explanation of Olber's Paradox. In actual physics textbooks, even.
Nope, here's the real one: http://vaticanobservatory.org/... A testbed for a number of advanced telescope building techniques that have since gone on to play big roles in the current generation of optical scopes. And, still doing good research in its own right.
What this is, I suspect, is the Catholic leadership realizing that the window of ignorance is just about to close on their fingers, so they're scrambling a bit to retrench a little further outside of their normal run of indoctrination.
Hmm. Your statement makes sense only if considered in super-slo-motion. From the summary (not even TFA), the Vatican Observatory has been around for more than 100 years. Lemaitre was one of the early people working out the connections between GR and cosmology. likely before anyone on slashdot was even born.
Reading over these comments as a whole (many of which are completely over the top, the one I'm replying to is merely inaccurate), I'm sad that Slashdotters are so ready to respond to something by slinging mud rather than considering the topic of discussion: a cool conference on cosmology. Come on people. Grow up. You can not like a religion. Or any religion. But then slamming people on unrelated topics because they don't agree with your own personal dogma..... wait. Isn't that one of the very same complaints many people have against organized religion? At least try to be consistent.
I'm pretty sure that's what the O-1A visas are designed for:
That does like a better fit. And I know we didn't have to deal with a lottery, or the widely-publicized "time for the lottery now!" deadline (which, by the way, is not compatible with an academic hiring schedule).
So I just went back in my email and poked around: the name being bandied about with the University HR folks was definitely H1-B. Maybe they helpfully translated that into an O-1A, thinking "stupid head in the clouds faculty, can't even get an alphabet soup form name right".
The entire H1B is a scam.
Techie tunnel vision: H1B's are used for many other purposes than getting cheap IT help from India. My interaction with the program has been "just hired a new theoretical physics professor, who happens to not hold US citizenship". How to get him permission to work at a US university? Get an H1B.
In that case, it was pretty easy to prove there wasn't a US national who could fill the job better than the foreigner: we had just done an exhaustive search to find the best applicant.. Sounds like it was working as designed: don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I wish I could trust "academic experts". I really do. But all my experiences with academia and academics have been very disappointing.
The first problem can be summed up with the old saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, research.". That's exactly what we see in academia: those who couldn't cut it outside of academia with their bachelor's degree end up back in academic circles, often for the rest of their lives. Academia provides a safe playpen for those who were below the standards of the real world.
Wait.... you're saying you can work in academic research with a Bachelor's? Or you mean that people who can't hack it in the real world go to grad school?
Speaking as someone who a) serves on graduate admissions committees; and b) advises many graduating bachelor's recipients, it's usually exactly the opposite. It takes a great student to get into grad school, and so the less-great students go get a job somewhere. That's a generalization, of course: great students can go get a job too: but a bad student certainly isn't getting into grad school. Caveat - this is physics. Other fields may differ, but all the sciences I'm familiar with operate in similar fashion. Get further from physical science, get different results. But wait, climate science is pretty closely tied to several physical science, and that's what triggered your post, right? Not sociology.
The fourth problem is when you take all of the above and add money into the mix. That's when everything really goes to hell. This is a sure-fire way for even the sciences, which are generally among the least-inept of the academic subjects, to become highly politicized. It's no longer just about inept people doing inept research. Now it's about inept people doing inept research but always finding the "correct" results for politicians who need to legitimize otherwise illegitimate practices like carbon taxes and excessive and costly regulation.
Huh. I review many proposals and papers and have served on funding panels, and can honestly say that I've never seen this in action. You have seen this in action, then.... how and where? I've been pretty impressed with how well funding in my field works, for the most part.
So when such a flawed system provides results or information for my consideration, I have to take what they're saying with a very, very, very big spoonful of salt grains. None of it can be trusted, from the individual level all the way through to entire fields of study.
Then there's an awful lot of the physics I teach and research that you apparently don't trust: from F=ma through E=mc^2 to quarks and neutrinos. Which begs the question: what the heck DO you trust?
Sanford, Mark SC 1st
... a gold-plated example of familiy-values guy who would hate to have his own browsing history of questions like "is the Appalachian Trail in Argentina?" exposed. I suppose that this at least means he learned something.
Well, that may not be entirely true. The Casimir effect and Hawking radiation are both potential examples of "negative energy".
... and the total potential+kinetic energy of a solar system. Or an atom. Energy is so often a sum game where negative energies happen all the time.
But, that's not the case here. If an ADC-based sensor is reading a "negative" amount, it's either an error condition (as it sounds like here) or a bad calibration (pedestal subtraction).
Kudos to the kid for noticing it! Thumbs down to the BBC writer for venturing into negative-energy land in two wrong senses at the same time.
Samsung. No thank you! You put more than enough crapware on your phones as it is and with verizon all that shit is locked down unless I want to root a phone. Please DO NOT put more crapware on my phone.
This++
Can't uninstall it. Can't permanently disable it. All you can do is remember to go in there and force stop on two seperate services every time you reboot the phone, or every time it decides you really want it turned back on and something does it for you.
And it's not just any crapware, it's wireless remote payment crapware. What could possibly go wrong?
Learn just a LITTLE physics and you will see that YOU are wrong (and TFA). There is no frequency that does not absorb over atmospheric distances, plus when it hits any solid object. There are only frequencies with LOWER absorption, which is meaningless for these kinds of path lengths.
I've learned a little bit of physics, and while technically true, what you say is misleading. Visible light, for example, doesn't absorb very much in air (yeah sure, there's some). The air is "optically thin" at visible wavelengths, which means more light is getting through from space to us than not: 75% of the energy integrated over all wavelengths gets down here: most of what's not getting through isn't the visible bits (yay for the ozone layer).
So, if they can shift energy to come out at 10 microns, which is in a clear bit of the spectrum almost as nice as around 5000 angstroms (visible light), what they say is right: 10 micron IR radiated upwards is mostly checking out back into space.
Just make sure you're not putting the fancy new film under solid objects, go read about the laws of thermodynamics, solve your favorite radiative transfer equation, and *poof*: cooler thing than you had started with.
"will occupy a spot that crosses the Cincinnati and Kentucky border" Odd, one's city and the other's a state. And the border between them is a river - hard to build an airport across a river.
I was wondering about that. Not being able to read the paywalled part, my conclusion was: Riverboats are returning! Delivery by paddle wheel, more nostalgic than drones. Seriously though, seems a good move since CVG used to be a Delta hub, but isn't anymore: there's way more airport there than is being used.
Interesting that the 3rd generation of SYNC (out since 2016 I think) is based on QNX and appears to very well received.
I have a 2016 Fusion, and its SYNC is indeed adequate. It's responsive, well laid-out, and the bluetooth pairing does what you want it to with no problems. Voice recognition even works. Wish it had Android Auto (apparently the 2017 models do), as exporting processing of navigation and stuff to your phone seems the right way to go.
On the other hand, my 2013 Subaru's system is complete trash. Getting in the car and trying to select my phone to pair to (after my wife has driven it) is eleven-levels deep into a voice menu that has a hard time understanding you. At least it remembers the pairing on restart, but they weren't thinking about two different drivers at all when "designing" this steaming pile of code.
TFA says it's the same amount of income as the "social security" there in Finland it's replacing (guessing that maps onto some combination of welfare/unemployment/EIC here in the US). But, TFA doesn't say how UBI is different, other than the name. Any insights?
Now, people are starting to question the position of the NRA that *anybody* regardless of who they are should be able to procure guns
Not their actual position, although waving blanket, false statements like that around is what passes for political discourse these days. Actual fact: the current background check system was actually strongly supported by the gun lobby: people who are convicted felons or legally declared mentally incompetent don't have second amendment rights. Or many other constitutional rights, say for example, voting. The current argument (causing the House to behave like the dysfunctional third world legislative clique it apparently actually is) is over the "sounds good!" legislation of "people on the terror watch list shouldn't be allowed to buy firearms". Hmm. So, a law in which denies something listed on the bill of rights to people on a secret government list, who can get on that list simply by someone voicing suspicion, with no procedure for getting off the list (or even knowing if/why they're on it)? Pick anything else that's a legal right (voting? free speech? Self-incrimination? Illegal search and seizure?) and swap that in for "gun ownership" in this scenario and watch everyone across the political spectrum freak out. We tried something like this in the 50's with McCarthy when the enemies were Commies instead of Radicals, and are universally ashamed of that fact in hindsight. Of course the NRA should be objecting to this. I'm shocked that the ACLU, for example, isn't too.
A few years ago when the TBM knocked through the last bit of rock in this tunnel, this cool video of the event might even have been posted on slashdot (can't remember where I ran across it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A similar meme here in the US: "you can buy a gun on the web without a background check! The horror. Must close that loophole."
Any journalists trying to do this for a story would quickly realize that only is possible if buyer and seller are able/willing to meet physically, otherwise the act of shipping the firearm, which must go through a licensed dealer, gets backgrounds checked. And a physical meetup between individuals is pretty hard to regulate with or without an internet.
Except the BBC picture is of electromagnetism, which is far less of a black art than economics.
If you read the article, mainly by looking at the results of passing various laws at the state level. Which is kind of how it should be: we see what works at the state level and (maybe) implement it at the national level.
>
Would be a good way to do a study, yes.
but... there are no laws in any state which address the question I raised... because it's impractical and can't be implemented, without also bringing along a full firearm registry (which is how they collect sales tax on cars sold between private people, we call then "deeds"). And that's a whole different kettle of fish with way more implications than background checks alone.
So, back to my question: how can the techniques allegedly used in the study actually answer the question they purport to answer? If they used the few particularly fascist locales with complete registration (Chicago, DC, NYC, etc) as a template, that's got so many other variables going on that generalizing it to anything else is kinda stupid.
This "make background checks mandatory for private sales" thing sounds good, but won't work. It won't work for the same reason that no one pays sales tax at a garage sale: you're supposed to do so, but there's no way for the government to enforce the sales tax laws on people who don't hold a business license.
The existing background check system works because it's tied to firearm dealers' licenses: they've got to do it to keep their business license.
Ironically, during the Clinton administration the feds went on a "too many people have FFLs, let's make them much more expensive and hard to get!" spree. Which now means that many fewer people participate in the background check system, as a result of another initiative that sounded good to people who have a tenuous connection to reality.
For what it's worth, if you do go buy a firearm on the internet, odds are really good that you're getting a background check anyway. Why? Because to ship a firearm, it's got to go from FFL to FFL. And the FFL in your town handling your shipment is required to do a background check.
But, it sure does sounds good to propose such a law: to people who have no clue how things actually work. Which, it turns out, is true of most of the "feel good!" solutions non-gun owners concoct to impose on gun owners. Comes of trying to legislate to match what they see in movies and in cop shows rather than what actually happens in reality. So, I wonder how this study came up with their numbers. Did they just say "hmm, X% of people buying their guns person to person commit a crime, a BG check would magically change that number to 0%"? I suppose it might, if 100% of the people followed the new, easily ignorable law. Considering that they're going and ignoring other, stricter laws to commit their crimes (like, "killing people is illegal"), that sounds rather optimistic.
Thanks - so why don't the charm and the anti-charm go "poof" ?
They do, sort of: this thing doesn't last long at all.
Consider a much more common particle, the neutral pi meson: just two quarks: quark/antiquark pairs of several possible flavors. Also doesn't last long (8e-17s), but extremely well studied.,
That's exactly what scientists should be doing, re-testing long held dogma taking advantage of state of the art equipment. It's a human endeavor, so sometimes they'll make mistakes. The scientists who reported the results presented plenty of caveats, but nobody listened.
Quoting this, as it's an AC zero-karma thing that most will miss, and I don't have mod points today.
This time, AC gets it mostly right. Science is about reproducibility. Opera had a weird result that they didn't understand, so they did what they were supposed to: put it out there for people to crosscheck. For what it's worth, in an emacs buffer open in another window at this very moment, I'm putting the final touches on the paper about one of the results that WAS this crosscheck. (yeah, it's taken us too long to send it to the journal, but it's a) careful, fiddly work that we want to get right; and b) we all know the answer now so enthusiasm for the paper writing process/grind isn't huge).
So, what the parent post got right: this is exactly how science is supposed to work. What the parent post got wrong: everybody (in the field) carefully listened to the caveats. Doing so is how one finds the flaws! Or eliminates possible flaws, as is sometimes the case. It was the media who went tangential on the whole process, not the scientists.