Methanol is also in... wait for it... fruit. Generally quantities larger than you get from consuming aspartame-containing products. Aspartic acid is also likewise found in food in doses two orders of magnitude or more greater than you get with aspartame - in fact it's more commonly consumed than most other amino acids, even essential ones. Which should be expected, as it's an essential to plant metabolism. Not to mention that you're wrong about it being neurotoxic
What "thought" is applied with natural sweeteners? Plants aren't thinking about your health. "Thought" goes into artificial sweeteners.
And did you shop there? Do you think your average guy would find it offputting to shop at such a store?
Again, the issue is not, "does it work?" The issue is, "does it discourage the participation of a gender in the field". And even bigger potential issues about the major downsides of objectification in general.
Most of the natural "good for you" chemicals are that way from pure chance anyway. Those plant-based alkaloids and glycosides are generally there to poison predators, deter infestations, and a whole host of other things that probably don't concern you. But they're designed to be biologically active in animals, affecting some system or another, and when you're not the target species such effects may work out for the good or the bad.
Just like "artificial" chemicals, "natural" chemicals can be mutagenic, teratogenic, carcinogenic, and of course, just outright toxic. They can have immediate effects only or they can bioaccumulate. And not all of them are just "either immediate bad effects or little effects down the road". Some are really insidious with huge poisoning effects but only after a delay. I had thought that alpha-amantin was bad in that it can take up to 24 hours after ingestion to show signs - far too late to pump your stomach before it destroys your internal organs and kills you. But I read about another deadly mushroom toxin (forget the name or the group of mushrooms that it belongs to) which can take several weeks or even months after you eat it before it starts showing (ultimately fatal) symptoms. A really crazy one is Paxillus involutus. You can eat the mushroom for years with no effects. But it has a small chance at any point in time of causing your immune system to start attacking its own red blood cells and kill you. My favorite from the world of plants is the creosote bush. It not only has developed a super-fast, near-surface root system which soaks up water from the surrounding soil fast enough to keep competitors from germinating, it also poisons the soil around it with a compound designed to attack the Burro Bush. Scorched earth tactics from the plant world;) Oh, and yeah, it's poisonous to people too, organ damage and all that.
Alle Ding' sind Gift, und nichts ohn' Gift; allein die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist..
And you're totally sidestepping the point. The issue is not "what works". The issue is, "would you be comfortable having it be the de-facto standard to have sexualized members of your gender used specifically for that purpose at pretty much every booth at pretty much every convention you go to in your field?" Because if the answer is no - and while some men would be, most would not - then clearly you should understand why you're making women uncomfortable by doing so, and how you're discouraging womens' involvement in your particular field.
And this isn't even the worst aspect of it. Most guys would simply be uncomfortable because of a latent homophobia in American society. The real problem is how objectification of a gender encourages discrimination (overt or not), violence, and a whole host of other problems. The more you view a gender as just something to f*** and not a group of people of equal validity to stand on their own merits, even if just subconsciously, the more you're encouraging that.
First off, almost every woman who goes into such a place is made to feel uncomfortable by the presence of booth babes. You're discouraging a gender's involvement in your field, and IMHO, that's not a good thing. In your analogy, "insist on jamming your fingers in" simply means "attending a convention". Secondly, what you write is simply not true. I live in Iceland now. The country's about as sexually open as you can get, and yet strip clubs and ads exploiting women sexually are illegal. It's not because sex is taboo; just the opposite, sex is practically a way to introduce yourself to people here. It's because the country doesn't see it appropriate to stand for sexual exploitation and objectification. It's not in the least bit "gaming of specific attributes".
My sales rep in Detroit explained to me that I was only experiencing two parts of the traditional way a deal is done in Detroit. The first part is over drinks at a bar. The second part is over a super-overpriced dinner. The third part, which was apparently skipped on account of me, is at a strip club.
The wife of a founder of a small auto company was telling me about how their former CMO was submitting strip club receipts as business expenses for reimbursement. At first when I heard that I was shocked, but after experiencing the detroit auto culture for myself, I'm not. Just incredibly disappointed.
You make erroneous assumptions about me. I'm bi. But A) it still really bothers me, and B) let's not play dumb and pretend that your average straight American male is comfortable about seeing sexualized images of other men.
"These are tough times. A man can get a job, he might not look too close at what that job is."
The problem isn't the girls; it's the position and the culture that accepts that not only is it okay to have such employment positions, but that it's pretty much the standard. Of course from a population of 300 million, half of which are female, a not insignificant percentage of which are in the right age range and attractive, you're going to be able to fill such a position with *someone*. That doesn't mean that they're going to like what they have to do to make money, and we shouldn't be expecting people to like being objectified, and we definitely shouldn't be supporting this objectification. That's the problem.
Thank you. My first experience with "booth babes" was the Detroit Auto Show; having never gone to such an event before, I hadn't expected to see that. I'm honestly surprised that even guys generally don't see anything wrong with it (as evidenced by the fact that the usage of "booth babes" is ubiquitous at such events). Is it really that hard to picture the scenario where the situation is reversed, that it's women that are most of the people who are into what you're into, and everywhere you go at the show/convention there's big burly guys in bikini briefs getting paid to stand around and show off the products to you for no visibly apparent reason related to the product? How comfortable would you be about that?
The problem isn't that there are women who need a job and take what is offered to them, even if it's demeaning, and aren't happy about what they're having to do. The problem is that we have a culture that says, "It's A-Okay to make objectification of people the standard for conventions."
I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.
The overambition is actually quite understandable. Think of what we had gone from, at the start of the 1960s to the Apollo moon landings. This incredible pace of accomplishment was driving people's sci-fi dreams of the future wild, even people in high places. The notion was that, clearly, we're about to become a spacefaring race in a major way, we need a vehicle to haul people and tons of cargo with a rapid launch rate turnaround; that's where the inception of the concept came from. Of course, that was not to happen, and not only due to the fault of the shuttle program.
If the overambition itself wouldn't have doomed the goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, the budget cuts in development (brought about in no small part due to the Vietnam War) certainly did. The sacrifices made in development to accommodate them pretty much ensured that it would not be a reliable, affordable system. Turning to the air force for funding meant adding crossrange capability and even greater cargo capability. Disastrous. The lower level of funding meant less system reuse and higher maintenance on the systems that were to be reused. For example, the early shuttle designs called for a titanium frame which could run hot, instead of the current (cheaper) aluminum frame which can't. Letting the frame get hotter means you can use a simpler, and thus easier to maintain, TPS. Not to mention safer; the Columbia disaster couldn't have happened and there wouldn't be nearly as much metal fatigue concerns.
Again, hindsight is always 20-20, but it's easy to see how the problems came about from overambition and then huge budget cuts in development. And I don't think calling it a jobs program, at least initially, is totally fair. Unlike Ares, which is "let's use as much shuttle hardware as we can to keep the plants open and keep developing it even when there's no longer a niche for it", the Shuttle wasn't heavily based on Saturn hardware. Now, what I think clearly became a jobs program and takes no hindsight to see is that when the Shuttle program went down the tubes, and it clearly had failed at its nominal goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, of not only keeping it running but keeping it as the workhorse of the US spaceflight fleet.
It was too ambitious. It wasn't overbudgeted for what they were trying to accomplish (and after the budget cuts, it was way underbudget for what they were trying to accomplish). They were, however, trying to accomplish too much, and especially for a first-gen.
New Sheperd in all regards hits me as pure naivete. For example, using HTP as an oxidizer. I'm well familiar with the logic here. "Oh, sure, it's got less ISP than LOX, but it's SIMPLER! And ISP isn't everything! We'll go simple and cheap, and get a simple, cheap craft!"
And that logic is wrong.
First off, the lesser issue: ISP may not be everything, but it's huge. The scaling factor for having bad ISP is pretty massive, and your other costs will add up quickly as your craft balloons, everything from your transport costs to your launch liability. People who just discount it like that do a big disservice to themselves.
But the bigger issue: HTP is *not* simpler than LOX. It's a giant pain in the arse. It's explosive, which requires that you have sterile, defect-free tanks and systems with very specific materials requirements and purity constantly maintained. Its explosivity can be greatly reduced by the presence of stabilizers, but therein lies the other problem: the more stable you make it, the less reactive it becomes, and if you're using any sort of catalyst pack (which themselves are full of problems), you tend to clog it. Peroxide vapors from even stabilized HTP are explosive. Stored HTP can become less stable over time, and leaks can be catastrophic (as many people, perhaps most famously in recent years the crew of the Kursk, have learned). Heat can set it off. It's difficult and dangerous to concentrate in terms of oxidizer production. It's illegal to ship in tanker trucks due to its hazardous nature. Etc.
People think about household H2O2 solutions and just picture a more powerful version of that. That is not what HTP is like. The Germans and later the US went with HTP a lot early in their rocketry programs. The fact that its usage became greatly curtailed over time should speak volumes.
Basically, HTP is just reinventing a bad wheel. There's one little explored fuel combination that I'd like to see more focus on, personally: LOX/Propane. Propane is of course widely available, cheap, and easy to transport. It's higher ISP than RP1 (LOX/RP1 being a common propellant combination), but the downside when you first look at it in a table is it's much lower density. BUT, at the same temperature as your LOX - aka, they can share a common bulkhead without insulative separation, reducing system mass -- it's actually quite dense. LOX/Propane is also easier to vaporize and ignite.
Ah, SSTOs... It's not that the concept is wrong. It's not even that it's impossible with current fuels and materials. The problem is that it's so *close* to impossible that the difficulty of creating such a craft inevitably leads to big complications.
While that does present a conflict of interests, there is a big double-bind - namely, that these companies are doing development projects that are generally too large and risky for even large private companies to be comfortable gambling on by themselves; for smaller companies, the concept is right out. It'd be hard to get any serious bids at all without helping with development. So yes, what you mentioned is a serious critique, it's not without reason that NASA does development contracts. And it's a cash amplifier, too - landing a NASA contract makes it *much* easier to land other private funding.
IMHO, "looks like the space shuttle" is a pretty flimsy excuse. The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable -- aka, it should have been seen as a testbed for learning rather than a workhorse. This craft seems to have the major lessons learned from the shuttle program down - top mount (lower vibrational load, no debris impacts, etc), single-piece TPS to save on maintenance, much smaller vehicle (the smaller the craft, the higher your surface area to mass ratio, greatly simplifying reentry), lifting body to reduce wing mass, less of the boost phase coming from the orbiter (again, keeping the orbiter smaller and lighter, simplifying reentry), and so forth. Doesn't look half bad to me.
I made good use of this. I tested different CDs/DVDs etc and found that, indeed, he was absolutely correct about varying levels of metalization on them. I chose a Microsoft Office '07 CD, which met the lightbulb test well. It provided a great view of the sun, seemed pretty clear to me, no pain, no lingering after-effects (honestly, I can't even remember which eye I used). Unfortunately for me, due to the combination of drifting clouds and horizon obstructions, I couldn't spot Venus. Oh well! There were some *awesome* lenticular clouds being illuminated by the sun that made it all worth it to watch the sunset this evening even without looking for Venus through a filter.:)
You really think that something can't be a basic tenet of science if you can't test it yourself at home? Really? I mean, no, really?
And a basic tenet is something on which a large amount of other knowledge and understanding is built. So yes, evolution is a basic tenet of science. Without it, entire fields of scientific understanding collapse.
Were you under the impression that those were the only two choices? And if so, why?
And, FYI, if evolution isn't "definitely true", then the term "definitely true" has no meaning. Of course we can't be 100% certain of anything in this world. I can't be 100% certain that there's not an invisible troll standing behind me right now, ready to eat me if I mutter the word "green". But the odds of that happening are so ridiculously low that I have no issue saying the word "green"; I can effectively discount them, classifying things like such an invisible troll as, flatly, "false". Aka, not even worth the time of consideration.
But that's what I'm fuzzy on. So what's to stop a counterfitter from getting one of these bank scanners (for this scheme to be remotely useful, they have to be available for stores, vending machines, and the like... ubiquitous), finding out which measurements for that serial number the bank cares about, and then setting quantum particles in the counterfeit bill that have the correct measurements for the states the bank is going to want to check? Basically, my understanding of what they're doing comes across to me as the equivalent of the bank sending the reader a one-time pad.
1) You act like this is a world where you either have to do something all the time or never. Doing it "most of the time", which is actually quite easy, is good enough. "Easy" as in, scanners in the bill slots of vending machines, in cash drawers in cash registers, etc if they can be made cheap enough. Also note that if these become cheap enough to use even on $1 bills, then they're cheap enough to use on all sorts of things, which means quantum ID tags turning up all over the place. Which means incentive to put readers on ubiquitous devices like smartphones and the like.
2) It's not about uniqueness. It's about whether it passes a validation check. It takes no effort to create a unique MD5 checksum, for example, but I can't randomly create a unique MD5 checksum that's going to match one in someone else's database.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep - it's the dose that makes the poison. :)
Methanol is also in... wait for it... fruit. Generally quantities larger than you get from consuming aspartame-containing products. Aspartic acid is also likewise found in food in doses two orders of magnitude or more greater than you get with aspartame - in fact it's more commonly consumed than most other amino acids, even essential ones. Which should be expected, as it's an essential to plant metabolism. Not to mention that you're wrong about it being neurotoxic
What "thought" is applied with natural sweeteners? Plants aren't thinking about your health. "Thought" goes into artificial sweeteners.
And did you shop there? Do you think your average guy would find it offputting to shop at such a store?
Again, the issue is not, "does it work?" The issue is, "does it discourage the participation of a gender in the field". And even bigger potential issues about the major downsides of objectification in general.
Written better than I could have. Clap, clap.
Most of the natural "good for you" chemicals are that way from pure chance anyway. Those plant-based alkaloids and glycosides are generally there to poison predators, deter infestations, and a whole host of other things that probably don't concern you. But they're designed to be biologically active in animals, affecting some system or another, and when you're not the target species such effects may work out for the good or the bad.
Just like "artificial" chemicals, "natural" chemicals can be mutagenic, teratogenic, carcinogenic, and of course, just outright toxic. They can have immediate effects only or they can bioaccumulate. And not all of them are just "either immediate bad effects or little effects down the road". Some are really insidious with huge poisoning effects but only after a delay. I had thought that alpha-amantin was bad in that it can take up to 24 hours after ingestion to show signs - far too late to pump your stomach before it destroys your internal organs and kills you. But I read about another deadly mushroom toxin (forget the name or the group of mushrooms that it belongs to) which can take several weeks or even months after you eat it before it starts showing (ultimately fatal) symptoms. A really crazy one is Paxillus involutus. You can eat the mushroom for years with no effects. But it has a small chance at any point in time of causing your immune system to start attacking its own red blood cells and kill you. My favorite from the world of plants is the creosote bush. It not only has developed a super-fast, near-surface root system which soaks up water from the surrounding soil fast enough to keep competitors from germinating, it also poisons the soil around it with a compound designed to attack the Burro Bush. Scorched earth tactics from the plant world ;) Oh, and yeah, it's poisonous to people too, organ damage and all that.
Alle Ding' sind Gift, und nichts ohn' Gift; allein die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist..
Aye, apparently I don't know how to copy a link. Link
A great one, although I was expecting to see this XKCD on this thread.
And you're totally sidestepping the point. The issue is not "what works". The issue is, "would you be comfortable having it be the de-facto standard to have sexualized members of your gender used specifically for that purpose at pretty much every booth at pretty much every convention you go to in your field?" Because if the answer is no - and while some men would be, most would not - then clearly you should understand why you're making women uncomfortable by doing so, and how you're discouraging womens' involvement in your particular field.
And this isn't even the worst aspect of it. Most guys would simply be uncomfortable because of a latent homophobia in American society. The real problem is how objectification of a gender encourages discrimination (overt or not), violence, and a whole host of other problems. The more you view a gender as just something to f*** and not a group of people of equal validity to stand on their own merits, even if just subconsciously, the more you're encouraging that.
First off, almost every woman who goes into such a place is made to feel uncomfortable by the presence of booth babes. You're discouraging a gender's involvement in your field, and IMHO, that's not a good thing. In your analogy, "insist on jamming your fingers in" simply means "attending a convention". Secondly, what you write is simply not true. I live in Iceland now. The country's about as sexually open as you can get, and yet strip clubs and ads exploiting women sexually are illegal. It's not because sex is taboo; just the opposite, sex is practically a way to introduce yourself to people here. It's because the country doesn't see it appropriate to stand for sexual exploitation and objectification. It's not in the least bit "gaming of specific attributes".
My sales rep in Detroit explained to me that I was only experiencing two parts of the traditional way a deal is done in Detroit. The first part is over drinks at a bar. The second part is over a super-overpriced dinner. The third part, which was apparently skipped on account of me, is at a strip club.
The wife of a founder of a small auto company was telling me about how their former CMO was submitting strip club receipts as business expenses for reimbursement. At first when I heard that I was shocked, but after experiencing the detroit auto culture for myself, I'm not. Just incredibly disappointed.
You make erroneous assumptions about me. I'm bi. But A) it still really bothers me, and B) let's not play dumb and pretend that your average straight American male is comfortable about seeing sexualized images of other men.
"These are tough times. A man can get a job, he might not look too close at what that job is."
The problem isn't the girls; it's the position and the culture that accepts that not only is it okay to have such employment positions, but that it's pretty much the standard. Of course from a population of 300 million, half of which are female, a not insignificant percentage of which are in the right age range and attractive, you're going to be able to fill such a position with *someone*. That doesn't mean that they're going to like what they have to do to make money, and we shouldn't be expecting people to like being objectified, and we definitely shouldn't be supporting this objectification. That's the problem.
That comment totally wins Slashdot today. Your prize is in the mail.
Thank you. My first experience with "booth babes" was the Detroit Auto Show; having never gone to such an event before, I hadn't expected to see that. I'm honestly surprised that even guys generally don't see anything wrong with it (as evidenced by the fact that the usage of "booth babes" is ubiquitous at such events). Is it really that hard to picture the scenario where the situation is reversed, that it's women that are most of the people who are into what you're into, and everywhere you go at the show/convention there's big burly guys in bikini briefs getting paid to stand around and show off the products to you for no visibly apparent reason related to the product? How comfortable would you be about that?
The problem isn't that there are women who need a job and take what is offered to them, even if it's demeaning, and aren't happy about what they're having to do. The problem is that we have a culture that says, "It's A-Okay to make objectification of people the standard for conventions."
I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.
The overambition is actually quite understandable. Think of what we had gone from, at the start of the 1960s to the Apollo moon landings. This incredible pace of accomplishment was driving people's sci-fi dreams of the future wild, even people in high places. The notion was that, clearly, we're about to become a spacefaring race in a major way, we need a vehicle to haul people and tons of cargo with a rapid launch rate turnaround; that's where the inception of the concept came from. Of course, that was not to happen, and not only due to the fault of the shuttle program.
If the overambition itself wouldn't have doomed the goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, the budget cuts in development (brought about in no small part due to the Vietnam War) certainly did. The sacrifices made in development to accommodate them pretty much ensured that it would not be a reliable, affordable system. Turning to the air force for funding meant adding crossrange capability and even greater cargo capability. Disastrous. The lower level of funding meant less system reuse and higher maintenance on the systems that were to be reused. For example, the early shuttle designs called for a titanium frame which could run hot, instead of the current (cheaper) aluminum frame which can't. Letting the frame get hotter means you can use a simpler, and thus easier to maintain, TPS. Not to mention safer; the Columbia disaster couldn't have happened and there wouldn't be nearly as much metal fatigue concerns.
Again, hindsight is always 20-20, but it's easy to see how the problems came about from overambition and then huge budget cuts in development. And I don't think calling it a jobs program, at least initially, is totally fair. Unlike Ares, which is "let's use as much shuttle hardware as we can to keep the plants open and keep developing it even when there's no longer a niche for it", the Shuttle wasn't heavily based on Saturn hardware. Now, what I think clearly became a jobs program and takes no hindsight to see is that when the Shuttle program went down the tubes, and it clearly had failed at its nominal goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, of not only keeping it running but keeping it as the workhorse of the US spaceflight fleet.
It was too ambitious. It wasn't overbudgeted for what they were trying to accomplish (and after the budget cuts, it was way underbudget for what they were trying to accomplish). They were, however, trying to accomplish too much, and especially for a first-gen.
New Sheperd in all regards hits me as pure naivete. For example, using HTP as an oxidizer. I'm well familiar with the logic here. "Oh, sure, it's got less ISP than LOX, but it's SIMPLER! And ISP isn't everything! We'll go simple and cheap, and get a simple, cheap craft!"
And that logic is wrong.
First off, the lesser issue: ISP may not be everything, but it's huge. The scaling factor for having bad ISP is pretty massive, and your other costs will add up quickly as your craft balloons, everything from your transport costs to your launch liability. People who just discount it like that do a big disservice to themselves.
But the bigger issue: HTP is *not* simpler than LOX. It's a giant pain in the arse. It's explosive, which requires that you have sterile, defect-free tanks and systems with very specific materials requirements and purity constantly maintained. Its explosivity can be greatly reduced by the presence of stabilizers, but therein lies the other problem: the more stable you make it, the less reactive it becomes, and if you're using any sort of catalyst pack (which themselves are full of problems), you tend to clog it. Peroxide vapors from even stabilized HTP are explosive. Stored HTP can become less stable over time, and leaks can be catastrophic (as many people, perhaps most famously in recent years the crew of the Kursk, have learned). Heat can set it off. It's difficult and dangerous to concentrate in terms of oxidizer production. It's illegal to ship in tanker trucks due to its hazardous nature. Etc.
People think about household H2O2 solutions and just picture a more powerful version of that. That is not what HTP is like. The Germans and later the US went with HTP a lot early in their rocketry programs. The fact that its usage became greatly curtailed over time should speak volumes.
Basically, HTP is just reinventing a bad wheel. There's one little explored fuel combination that I'd like to see more focus on, personally: LOX/Propane. Propane is of course widely available, cheap, and easy to transport. It's higher ISP than RP1 (LOX/RP1 being a common propellant combination), but the downside when you first look at it in a table is it's much lower density. BUT, at the same temperature as your LOX - aka, they can share a common bulkhead without insulative separation, reducing system mass -- it's actually quite dense. LOX/Propane is also easier to vaporize and ignite.
Ah, SSTOs... It's not that the concept is wrong. It's not even that it's impossible with current fuels and materials. The problem is that it's so *close* to impossible that the difficulty of creating such a craft inevitably leads to big complications.
While that does present a conflict of interests, there is a big double-bind - namely, that these companies are doing development projects that are generally too large and risky for even large private companies to be comfortable gambling on by themselves; for smaller companies, the concept is right out. It'd be hard to get any serious bids at all without helping with development. So yes, what you mentioned is a serious critique, it's not without reason that NASA does development contracts. And it's a cash amplifier, too - landing a NASA contract makes it *much* easier to land other private funding.
IMHO, "looks like the space shuttle" is a pretty flimsy excuse. The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable -- aka, it should have been seen as a testbed for learning rather than a workhorse. This craft seems to have the major lessons learned from the shuttle program down - top mount (lower vibrational load, no debris impacts, etc), single-piece TPS to save on maintenance, much smaller vehicle (the smaller the craft, the higher your surface area to mass ratio, greatly simplifying reentry), lifting body to reduce wing mass, less of the boost phase coming from the orbiter (again, keeping the orbiter smaller and lighter, simplifying reentry), and so forth. Doesn't look half bad to me.
I made good use of this. I tested different CDs/DVDs etc and found that, indeed, he was absolutely correct about varying levels of metalization on them. I chose a Microsoft Office '07 CD, which met the lightbulb test well. It provided a great view of the sun, seemed pretty clear to me, no pain, no lingering after-effects (honestly, I can't even remember which eye I used). Unfortunately for me, due to the combination of drifting clouds and horizon obstructions, I couldn't spot Venus. Oh well! There were some *awesome* lenticular clouds being illuminated by the sun that made it all worth it to watch the sunset this evening even without looking for Venus through a filter. :)
You really think that something can't be a basic tenet of science if you can't test it yourself at home? Really? I mean, no, really?
And a basic tenet is something on which a large amount of other knowledge and understanding is built. So yes, evolution is a basic tenet of science. Without it, entire fields of scientific understanding collapse.
Were you under the impression that those were the only two choices? And if so, why?
And, FYI, if evolution isn't "definitely true", then the term "definitely true" has no meaning. Of course we can't be 100% certain of anything in this world. I can't be 100% certain that there's not an invisible troll standing behind me right now, ready to eat me if I mutter the word "green". But the odds of that happening are so ridiculously low that I have no issue saying the word "green"; I can effectively discount them, classifying things like such an invisible troll as, flatly, "false". Aka, not even worth the time of consideration.
But that's what I'm fuzzy on. So what's to stop a counterfitter from getting one of these bank scanners (for this scheme to be remotely useful, they have to be available for stores, vending machines, and the like... ubiquitous), finding out which measurements for that serial number the bank cares about, and then setting quantum particles in the counterfeit bill that have the correct measurements for the states the bank is going to want to check? Basically, my understanding of what they're doing comes across to me as the equivalent of the bank sending the reader a one-time pad.
1) You act like this is a world where you either have to do something all the time or never. Doing it "most of the time", which is actually quite easy, is good enough. "Easy" as in, scanners in the bill slots of vending machines, in cash drawers in cash registers, etc if they can be made cheap enough. Also note that if these become cheap enough to use even on $1 bills, then they're cheap enough to use on all sorts of things, which means quantum ID tags turning up all over the place. Which means incentive to put readers on ubiquitous devices like smartphones and the like.
2) It's not about uniqueness. It's about whether it passes a validation check. It takes no effort to create a unique MD5 checksum, for example, but I can't randomly create a unique MD5 checksum that's going to match one in someone else's database.
3) See #1.
Science is precisely about accepting what empirical evidence tells you, even when it contradicts with your personal beliefs on the subject.