Yes. I purposefully keep my desktop clean, and almost exclusively use the start menu to access my programs. I do not like clutter, and only use my desktop for a couple of widgets and temporary file storage.
The start menu is vastly, vastly better for multitasking than a desktop: the desktop is already hidden by the programs that are already open, and I don't want to have to go back to it just to open a new program.
So no, I think the Windows 8 UI is a stupid attempt to bring a user interface that is okay for the tablet into the desktop/laptop space where it absolutely does not belong.
This is quite incorrect. Granted, the press release was positively horrid. Here's the basic gist of the findings: our current understanding of the effect of CO2 on the climate is between 2C-5C temperature forcing per doubling of CO2 (with 3C being the most likely). This new study claims a result closer to 2C.
So basically, the predicted claim of this study is that global warming should progress along the lower limit of current projections. Except that in reality, warming since 2000 has progressed very close to the middle of projections. That makes the results suspect, to say the least.
As page 24 shows, they rather dramatically underestimate the recent Northern Hemisphere warming, so that's another reason to doubt their results. My bet is that their "simple climate model" was too simple, and their data may have been impacted by using lots of data from before there was enough CO2 for it to be a major climate driver.
I would actually put e-mail at or above tax/health/social security, not because e-mail is more important, but because a hacked e-mail account could, in principle, be used to access those other things.
This is just more Chopra-esque woo. The entire idea amounts to seeing images in clouds: our minds see patterns and similarities all over the place, even when there are none in reality.
No, the laws that govern the formation of structure in the universe really have nothing whatsoever to do with the laws that govern the formation of brains, let alone the Internet. These are three very different kinds of things with three very different mechanisms for building them, and which do very different things. The fact that they are networks or network-like (in the case of the large scale stucture of the universe, which isn't actually a network) is pretty much the only thing that connects them.
Finally, let me just point out that the claim that these networks are "asymptotically similar" is just flagrantly incorrect. The asymptotic state of our universe is completely empty space. It's not a network, or even a semblance of a network: it's vacuum. The appearance of a network that we see today is merely a temporary, transient phenomenon that will go away in time (I'm not sure the exact time scale, but I expect probably tens of billions to trillions of years should do it). There will still be stars and galaxies long after the appearance of the network has been completely wiped away: the universe will become a series of islands separated by vast distances as the filaments collapse into the more massive clusters of galaxies or are stretched to nothingness with the expansion.
So no, this crud should be chucked in the woo bin where it belongs.
Well, income inequality drives wealth inequality, and vice versa. Tackle one, and the other follows.
That said, inheritance taxes really should be extremely high above a certain amount. The ability of the children of rich parents to inherit the wealth of their parents is one of the major things sustaining wealth inequality.
The economic logic is that by reducing the taxes on the rich, you increase their incentives to do better: after all, if they get to keep more of their money, they have more to work towards, right?
Of course, this has no basis whatsoever in reality. You have to get to rather extreme tax rates (around 70%-90%) before the incentives start to become counterproductive.
Having spent a lot of time in traditional education, and a lot of time teaching myself new things on the Internet, no, just throwing computers at kids is not going replace classroom education. The main difference between the two is depth and breadth. With a classroom education, you are confronted with topics that you are unlikely to have ever considered on your own, sometimes out of lack of interest, sometimes because the Internet tends to focus on certain aspects of various topics while ignoring others. You just can't get anything approaching a comprehensive education in any field just by reading things online.
Perhaps even more importantly, a good fraction of education lies in not just learning facts, but in doing: in learning how to research a topic so as to produce a compelling argument, in learning how to solve problems, in learning how to perform laboratory experiments. These experiences are irreplaceable.
But perhaps most crucially: most people just aren't self-motivated enough to educate themselves. And even for those that are, it isn't easy to do it yourself.
It will do literally nothing. Sound waves simply add. You can't get rid of sound waves by adding a bunch of random sound waves. The sound waves you don't want will pass right through. Now, if you simply have a white noise generator in your house, so that the ambient volume is higher, that may make it so that your ears have a harder time picking out specific sounds, which will, in turn, make it easier to ignore them.
Barring that, noise cancelling headphones or double-pane windows, as others have mentioned, are going to be your best bets. And double-pane windows are good for heating/cooling anyway.
As an aside, I'm also rather skeptical that noise cancellation for the entire apartment could ever be practical. The problem is the waveform bouncing off the various walls and other features of the apartment is going to be too complex to accurately measure or cancel. And then what about the sounds you do want to hear?
The difference is frequency. Sure, one spill like this every few million years might not be that unexpected. But what happens when we get one major spill ever decade or two?
From what little I know of biology, I'm almost certain they're used for fuel, meaning eventually broken down into a combination of H2O and CO2. There may be a few steps along the way, where the bacteria incorporate some of the hydrocarbons in their membranes for a short time, or break the longer hydrocarbon chains into shorter chains, releasing the smaller molecules back into the water for other bacteria to gobble up. But eventually it's basically all going to become H2O and CO2.
But to get into the nitty gritty of it, the article you linked says that it's "twice the Exxon Valdez spill each year," and that is likely spread out over a wide area and released in small amounts that are less likely to clump. Also, consider the magnitude: the Exxon Valdez spill between 260,000 and 750,000 barrels of oil. So if we take the high estimate, that's perhaps 1.5 million barrels of oil that normally spill into the Gulf of Mexico each year, likely spread over a wide area.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was around 4.9 million barrels of oil, all released in a short time (much less than a year), all in the same place. No, spills of this magnitude do not happen naturally (except perhaps in exceedingly rare circumstances). Yes, it is highly damaging to the ecosystem of parts of the Gulf.
I only block ads for two reasons:
1. The ads are particularly obnoxious. I really despise the in-text ads that pop up when you mouse over a particular word in the text, for instance.
2. I despise the website's business model. The Huffington Post, for example, makes millions of dollars but doesn't pay most of its bloggers a cent. Sometimes there's good content there, so I'll only click through if I have an adblocker enabled for the site.
But for other sites I usually let the ads load. From time to time I'll even click the ads just to support the website, if it's a website I like. I almost never see an ad I'm actually interested in, however.
The temperature of space is 2.725K. That's quite cold. Now, there are some particles in space that are at much higher temperatures. Obviously the particles streaming from the Sun are quite hot, for example. But their very low density means that they don't have all that much impact on the temperatures of objects in our solar system. For most objects in our solar system, that's set just by the thermal radiation from the Sun, and what the objects in question do with said radiation (how much they absorb and how much they emit).
There's also the point to be made that high-efficient power transmission over long distances requires high voltage, and there is always some loss in converting to/from the high voltage power for transmission. I'm reasonably sure that there would be far less required in terms of voltage/frequency conversion with superconducting lines. At any rate, we could still reduce long-distance power transmission costs by improving the grid with current technologies, even without room temperature superconductors.
In practice, you can cool satellites pretty darned far. WMAP is cooled to 90K passively. Planck is cooled to 50K passively. So yes, it is very possible to cool satellites to within the superconductivity range of modern high-temperature superconductors.
The problem actually has nothing to do with the Post Office's business model. The USPS makes quite significant profits. The problem, instead, has to do with Republican legislation put into law in 2006 built with the very purpose of killing the USPS: the USPS has to forward-pay the benefits of its employees *for 75 years into the future*. See here: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/
So basically, we shouldn't have to deal with this. But the Republicans want to kill the post office.
These days, it seems to me that the place to read a large variety of in-depth, thought-provoking writing for general audiences lies in the blogosphere. Of course, the blogosphere varies tremendously in content and in quality, and I really have no clue how much this compares in terms of volume with previous ideas. But I strongly suspect the author is concerned only with the popular news media, and ignoring new media (well, it looks like new media is mentioned and dismissed in a single sentence). But I don't think there is any real problem with a lack of good, in-depth, well thought out ideas.
Another point to be made is that you can't dumbly compare fractions of media content over time and expect them to compare. The difficulty here is that you might be reaching different groups of people entirely. For instance, the places where you saw thought-provoking essays in the past were generally magazines, many of which were read primarily by people in the middle class and higher, not by poorer people. But these days, even poorer people have no difficulty getting online, so even if the previous magazine readers have moved online for their reading, so have the people who never read magazines in the first place. So even if the number of thought-provoking essays goes down as a fraction of total web content, it may still be reaching no smaller a readership than it did before.
So, in the end, I guess I'll just leave it that I am skeptical.
The problem here is that this idea is only a modification of the way in which gravity falls off with distance. Our current observations completely eliminate that as a possible explanation for our observations of dark matter. Basically, we have observed some systems where the physics of the situation has separated dark matter from normal matter (because normal matter experiences friction, while dark matter does not), and found that the mass surrounds the dark matter, not the normal matter. This kind of observation simply cannot be explained by a simple modification of how gravity falls off with distance. Here is a blog post by a cosmologist detailing the most striking example of this kind of observation: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/21/dark-matter-exists/
In fact, our observations of dark matter to date are so varied that it is incredibly difficult to come up with any alternative models that are able to explain them all. As Sean Carroll noted, the evidence is now quite strong that dark matter really exists.
So I would recommend a little bit of patience. Given past experience, my bet is that this study will be thoroughly taken apart by scientists who actually know what they are doing.
Well, PZ Myers at Pharyngula does do biology-related science periodically. But yes, he doesn't post about science nearly as often as he does about things like creationism and really loony religious behavior.
One of the primary problems with the popular media, is that it tends to be overly-sensationalistic. Every time I read a popular news article, I am extremely skeptical. This is largely because when it is an article about something which I already know quite a lot about, very often I find it is overblown at best, completely wrong at worst.
As a result, these days I try as much as I can to get my science information directly from scientists and science writers whom I trust. And that means blogs. There are three good science blogs sites I know of:
scientopia.org
blogs.discovermagazine.com
scienceblogs.com
Basically, I'd suggest browsing them a bit, finding some particular authors you like, and follow them. I'd particularly suggest Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science for frequent information about general science. I follow Scicurious at Neurotopia for neuroscience and just generally weird stuff. I follow Cosmic Variance mostly for their coverage of high energy physics, as well as the occasional cosmology post. Pharyngula is fun for biology (esp. cephalapod biology) as well as general ranting about the anti-science crowd. MarkCC at Good Math, Bad Math is good for math and programming-related stuff. And there are many, many more.
The really nice thing about blogs is that they form a conversation, so even if there is a mistake in one post, very often it is followed up on later, either by other bloggers or by the same blogger. This fact allows you to trust the information on these blogs much much more strongly than you can ever trust the popular news media. But, of course, this does require that you carefully select which blogs you follow, and are discerning in reading their arguments. If you're able to do that then blogs are by far the most reliable place for news about science for the popular audience.
Meh, in reality you just develop some sufficient tests to ensure that the code behaves properly, and publish the nature and results of those tests in a manner that is sufficient to convince others that the code is working properly. Then, in the event a problem still remains in the code, well, this is why science in general relies upon independent verification of results, so that even if there is an error in the end, others will find it.
Now, for larger projects it is always better to make the code public, and therefore to enforce a degree of readability/maintainability. But for most applications people just aren't that interested in the code: it's more important to get it done than it is to worry about sharing it, because it is highly unlikely that anybody else will want to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I purposefully keep my desktop clean, and almost exclusively use the start menu to access my programs. I do not like clutter, and only use my desktop for a couple of widgets and temporary file storage.
The start menu is vastly, vastly better for multitasking than a desktop: the desktop is already hidden by the programs that are already open, and I don't want to have to go back to it just to open a new program.
So no, I think the Windows 8 UI is a stupid attempt to bring a user interface that is okay for the tablet into the desktop/laptop space where it absolutely does not belong.
This is quite incorrect. Granted, the press release was positively horrid. Here's the basic gist of the findings: our current understanding of the effect of CO2 on the climate is between 2C-5C temperature forcing per doubling of CO2 (with 3C being the most likely). This new study claims a result closer to 2C.
So basically, the predicted claim of this study is that global warming should progress along the lower limit of current projections. Except that in reality, warming since 2000 has progressed very close to the middle of projections. That makes the results suspect, to say the least.
Furthermore, here's a presentation of the results:
http://www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/CLP/seminars/120812001.pdf
As page 24 shows, they rather dramatically underestimate the recent Northern Hemisphere warming, so that's another reason to doubt their results. My bet is that their "simple climate model" was too simple, and their data may have been impacted by using lots of data from before there was enough CO2 for it to be a major climate driver.
I would actually put e-mail at or above tax/health/social security, not because e-mail is more important, but because a hacked e-mail account could, in principle, be used to access those other things.
Why would you think that? The incoming Congress could simply add a single sentence to any bill stating that it repeals this one. Bam, moratorium over.
This is just more Chopra-esque woo. The entire idea amounts to seeing images in clouds: our minds see patterns and similarities all over the place, even when there are none in reality.
No, the laws that govern the formation of structure in the universe really have nothing whatsoever to do with the laws that govern the formation of brains, let alone the Internet. These are three very different kinds of things with three very different mechanisms for building them, and which do very different things. The fact that they are networks or network-like (in the case of the large scale stucture of the universe, which isn't actually a network) is pretty much the only thing that connects them.
Finally, let me just point out that the claim that these networks are "asymptotically similar" is just flagrantly incorrect. The asymptotic state of our universe is completely empty space. It's not a network, or even a semblance of a network: it's vacuum. The appearance of a network that we see today is merely a temporary, transient phenomenon that will go away in time (I'm not sure the exact time scale, but I expect probably tens of billions to trillions of years should do it). There will still be stars and galaxies long after the appearance of the network has been completely wiped away: the universe will become a series of islands separated by vast distances as the filaments collapse into the more massive clusters of galaxies or are stretched to nothingness with the expansion.
So no, this crud should be chucked in the woo bin where it belongs.
Well, income inequality drives wealth inequality, and vice versa. Tackle one, and the other follows.
That said, inheritance taxes really should be extremely high above a certain amount. The ability of the children of rich parents to inherit the wealth of their parents is one of the major things sustaining wealth inequality.
The economic logic is that by reducing the taxes on the rich, you increase their incentives to do better: after all, if they get to keep more of their money, they have more to work towards, right? Of course, this has no basis whatsoever in reality. You have to get to rather extreme tax rates (around 70%-90%) before the incentives start to become counterproductive.
Power is back on now for midtown, at least. I'm not sure how far south power was turned on.
Having spent a lot of time in traditional education, and a lot of time teaching myself new things on the Internet, no, just throwing computers at kids is not going replace classroom education. The main difference between the two is depth and breadth. With a classroom education, you are confronted with topics that you are unlikely to have ever considered on your own, sometimes out of lack of interest, sometimes because the Internet tends to focus on certain aspects of various topics while ignoring others. You just can't get anything approaching a comprehensive education in any field just by reading things online.
Perhaps even more importantly, a good fraction of education lies in not just learning facts, but in doing: in learning how to research a topic so as to produce a compelling argument, in learning how to solve problems, in learning how to perform laboratory experiments. These experiences are irreplaceable.
But perhaps most crucially: most people just aren't self-motivated enough to educate themselves. And even for those that are, it isn't easy to do it yourself.
It will do literally nothing. Sound waves simply add. You can't get rid of sound waves by adding a bunch of random sound waves. The sound waves you don't want will pass right through. Now, if you simply have a white noise generator in your house, so that the ambient volume is higher, that may make it so that your ears have a harder time picking out specific sounds, which will, in turn, make it easier to ignore them.
Barring that, noise cancelling headphones or double-pane windows, as others have mentioned, are going to be your best bets. And double-pane windows are good for heating/cooling anyway.
As an aside, I'm also rather skeptical that noise cancellation for the entire apartment could ever be practical. The problem is the waveform bouncing off the various walls and other features of the apartment is going to be too complex to accurately measure or cancel. And then what about the sounds you do want to hear?
The difference is frequency. Sure, one spill like this every few million years might not be that unexpected. But what happens when we get one major spill ever decade or two?
From what little I know of biology, I'm almost certain they're used for fuel, meaning eventually broken down into a combination of H2O and CO2. There may be a few steps along the way, where the bacteria incorporate some of the hydrocarbons in their membranes for a short time, or break the longer hydrocarbon chains into shorter chains, releasing the smaller molecules back into the water for other bacteria to gobble up. But eventually it's basically all going to become H2O and CO2.
Sorry, but this, "It's a natural phenomenon!" argument just does not fly. A really, really simple way to see why this argument cannot be remotely reasonable is to look at pictures like the one posted on this article:
http://www.allword-news.co.uk/tag/louisiana-fish-deaths-raise-oil-spill-questions/
But to get into the nitty gritty of it, the article you linked says that it's "twice the Exxon Valdez spill each year," and that is likely spread out over a wide area and released in small amounts that are less likely to clump. Also, consider the magnitude: the Exxon Valdez spill between 260,000 and 750,000 barrels of oil. So if we take the high estimate, that's perhaps 1.5 million barrels of oil that normally spill into the Gulf of Mexico each year, likely spread over a wide area.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was around 4.9 million barrels of oil, all released in a short time (much less than a year), all in the same place. No, spills of this magnitude do not happen naturally (except perhaps in exceedingly rare circumstances). Yes, it is highly damaging to the ecosystem of parts of the Gulf.
So, one tenth the speed of Google Fiber? Makes me almost wish I lived in Kansas City...
I only block ads for two reasons:
1. The ads are particularly obnoxious. I really despise the in-text ads that pop up when you mouse over a particular word in the text, for instance.
2. I despise the website's business model. The Huffington Post, for example, makes millions of dollars but doesn't pay most of its bloggers a cent. Sometimes there's good content there, so I'll only click through if I have an adblocker enabled for the site.
But for other sites I usually let the ads load. From time to time I'll even click the ads just to support the website, if it's a website I like. I almost never see an ad I'm actually interested in, however.
The temperature of space is 2.725K. That's quite cold. Now, there are some particles in space that are at much higher temperatures. Obviously the particles streaming from the Sun are quite hot, for example. But their very low density means that they don't have all that much impact on the temperatures of objects in our solar system. For most objects in our solar system, that's set just by the thermal radiation from the Sun, and what the objects in question do with said radiation (how much they absorb and how much they emit).
There's also the point to be made that high-efficient power transmission over long distances requires high voltage, and there is always some loss in converting to/from the high voltage power for transmission. I'm reasonably sure that there would be far less required in terms of voltage/frequency conversion with superconducting lines. At any rate, we could still reduce long-distance power transmission costs by improving the grid with current technologies, even without room temperature superconductors.
In practice, you can cool satellites pretty darned far. WMAP is cooled to 90K passively. Planck is cooled to 50K passively. So yes, it is very possible to cool satellites to within the superconductivity range of modern high-temperature superconductors.
The problem actually has nothing to do with the Post Office's business model. The USPS makes quite significant profits. The problem, instead, has to do with Republican legislation put into law in 2006 built with the very purpose of killing the USPS: the USPS has to forward-pay the benefits of its employees *for 75 years into the future*. See here:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/
So basically, we shouldn't have to deal with this. But the Republicans want to kill the post office.
These days, it seems to me that the place to read a large variety of in-depth, thought-provoking writing for general audiences lies in the blogosphere. Of course, the blogosphere varies tremendously in content and in quality, and I really have no clue how much this compares in terms of volume with previous ideas. But I strongly suspect the author is concerned only with the popular news media, and ignoring new media (well, it looks like new media is mentioned and dismissed in a single sentence). But I don't think there is any real problem with a lack of good, in-depth, well thought out ideas.
Another point to be made is that you can't dumbly compare fractions of media content over time and expect them to compare. The difficulty here is that you might be reaching different groups of people entirely. For instance, the places where you saw thought-provoking essays in the past were generally magazines, many of which were read primarily by people in the middle class and higher, not by poorer people. But these days, even poorer people have no difficulty getting online, so even if the previous magazine readers have moved online for their reading, so have the people who never read magazines in the first place. So even if the number of thought-provoking essays goes down as a fraction of total web content, it may still be reaching no smaller a readership than it did before.
So, in the end, I guess I'll just leave it that I am skeptical.
The problem here is that this idea is only a modification of the way in which gravity falls off with distance. Our current observations completely eliminate that as a possible explanation for our observations of dark matter. Basically, we have observed some systems where the physics of the situation has separated dark matter from normal matter (because normal matter experiences friction, while dark matter does not), and found that the mass surrounds the dark matter, not the normal matter. This kind of observation simply cannot be explained by a simple modification of how gravity falls off with distance. Here is a blog post by a cosmologist detailing the most striking example of this kind of observation:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/21/dark-matter-exists/
In fact, our observations of dark matter to date are so varied that it is incredibly difficult to come up with any alternative models that are able to explain them all. As Sean Carroll noted, the evidence is now quite strong that dark matter really exists.
Give it more than a few hours. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time. And yes, the author of this study is a well-known denialist who has, in the past, put out quite a bit of just plain wrong stuff. For example:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/04/review-of-spencers-great-global-warming-blunder/
So I would recommend a little bit of patience. Given past experience, my bet is that this study will be thoroughly taken apart by scientists who actually know what they are doing.
Well, PZ Myers at Pharyngula does do biology-related science periodically. But yes, he doesn't post about science nearly as often as he does about things like creationism and really loony religious behavior.
One of the primary problems with the popular media, is that it tends to be overly-sensationalistic. Every time I read a popular news article, I am extremely skeptical. This is largely because when it is an article about something which I already know quite a lot about, very often I find it is overblown at best, completely wrong at worst.
As a result, these days I try as much as I can to get my science information directly from scientists and science writers whom I trust. And that means blogs. There are three good science blogs sites I know of:
scientopia.org
blogs.discovermagazine.com
scienceblogs.com
Basically, I'd suggest browsing them a bit, finding some particular authors you like, and follow them. I'd particularly suggest Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science for frequent information about general science. I follow Scicurious at Neurotopia for neuroscience and just generally weird stuff. I follow Cosmic Variance mostly for their coverage of high energy physics, as well as the occasional cosmology post. Pharyngula is fun for biology (esp. cephalapod biology) as well as general ranting about the anti-science crowd. MarkCC at Good Math, Bad Math is good for math and programming-related stuff. And there are many, many more.
The really nice thing about blogs is that they form a conversation, so even if there is a mistake in one post, very often it is followed up on later, either by other bloggers or by the same blogger. This fact allows you to trust the information on these blogs much much more strongly than you can ever trust the popular news media. But, of course, this does require that you carefully select which blogs you follow, and are discerning in reading their arguments. If you're able to do that then blogs are by far the most reliable place for news about science for the popular audience.
Meh, in reality you just develop some sufficient tests to ensure that the code behaves properly, and publish the nature and results of those tests in a manner that is sufficient to convince others that the code is working properly. Then, in the event a problem still remains in the code, well, this is why science in general relies upon independent verification of results, so that even if there is an error in the end, others will find it.
Now, for larger projects it is always better to make the code public, and therefore to enforce a degree of readability/maintainability. But for most applications people just aren't that interested in the code: it's more important to get it done than it is to worry about sharing it, because it is highly unlikely that anybody else will want to use it.