Doesn't all of your citations only have one laser, that then focuses itself (hence "self-focusing")? Wheres this has two lasers, where one focus the other?
"Science" is the collective name for the methods for acquiring knowledge that has, over the last couple of thousand years, been shown to yield self-consistent results that are confirmable by other ways to get the same information. There might be other methods we haven't thought of yet (and realistically, "science" in a thousand years will include more methods than it does today), but for now, the methods collectively known as "science" are the ones we know work.
That is why the assumption that a method outside of science is not helpful in acquiring knowledge is reasonable.
Once can only assume that other cultures smart enough to make radio transmitters would also have similarly short periods during which inefficient methods would be used.
That would be in the same way that it would be silly to call gold a metal, because it is too soft to replace steel?
This does more or less what an optical fiber does: It keeps light on the right path by using differences in refractive index (though I imagine the exact process is different: Optical fibers use total internal reflection, this probably just uses refraction). An optical fiber has the additional advantage of being able to go around corners, but that is not what makes it an optical fiber; the refractive index profile is.
What about to get the reflected beam back to the starting point (thus "remote sensing", being able to do e.g. a Raman spectrum at a long distance)? Here, you have light scattering in all directions. The optical fiber will make sure that more of it gets back the way the original laser beam came. That could be phrased as "amplification", though I think another word would be more correct.
[...] the ideal virus to use as a biological weapon is a virus with long, mostly asymptomatic infectious phase and a high mortality rate.
No, the ideal biological weapon does not spread from person to person. Any disease that does is guaranteed to infect your own population as well; it is basically a gun you can't aim, or a doomsday device (though not literally, it doesn't kill everybody).
If a male politician said the same thing in jest, he would be labelled as sexist scum, and his career would be more or less over. When a women does says it in jest, it is taken in that spirit. That difference is sexist.
As an educated guess, the study into smallpox has been to figure out out why it is so contagious so that we can build our own great contagion.
Or to figure out why it is so contagious, so we can better treat future diseases that uses the same methods. Without more information, it is hard to tell which end goal is more likely.
Intelligence (as measured by Spearman's g factor) is one of the best predictors for pretty much any measure of success or talent. People who excel at art or sports are also people with high g. The IQ test has one of the highest correlations Spearman's g of any test, so IQ test measures a lot more than how good you are at doing IQ tests.
Isn't this reservation applicable to any drug, or even any interaction? So the optimal choice of action would always be - nothing? If not, then why are the situations were it is not the case different from medical treatments?
Isn't the smell fishy, as in primarily coming from trimethylamine from reduction of trimethylamine oxide? In that case, it would not be that closely linked to oxidation, though it might still correlate with it (as they both increase with storage).
I don't have a citation (well, unless "personal communcation" is accepted). It was stated in a presentation about stability of fish oils, but that is not solid enough for the confidence in my original post. I am sorry for that.
With regard to the manuscript you linked to about how the oxidation state of fish oils affects the lipid profiles, it is a small study (52 participants, 17-18 in each group) and it seems that they did not correct for multiple comparisons (but I might be missing that). Looking at their numbers, it seems that the largest effect is that the group that got the good oil started out with higher blood pressure (systolic and diastolic), lower blood glucose and higher cholesterol, and than normalized on these measures, except for cholesterol, where they more than normalized. I am not even sure this meats the "hypothesis-generating" state.
Part of it is due to the dislike of monopolies, which is founded on the fact that they skew the market to the disadvantage of the non-monopolist. A union is basically monopoly on (a certain type of) work. Saying "no union member will work for you if you employ non-union workers" is equivalent to Microsoft saying "you can only buy Windows if all of the computers you sell comes with Windows installed", the latter of which is illegal. So why should the first be legal?
That does not explain why boycotts are frowned upon.
Fish oil start to stink way before it is actually bad for you. I'm not saying you should eat stinking fish oil tablets, but them stinking should not affect their effect on the body.
The difficulty is updated every 2016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. If the amount resources spent on mining was suddenly reduced extensively, the mining would just go much slower until the next update, so no one would be able to take advantage of that (although it could be problematic for bitcoin, if e.g. the update went from 10 minutes to 100 minutes). After the next difficulty update, the difficulty would be low, but if the mining pools were back up, you would not be able to control bitcoin. Even if the update rate goes to 1 minute, this will only persist for 201,6 minutes, or a few hours.
All of this is assuming that no other response was done in the two weeks after the DDOS.
Real people don't behave like numbers in an economics text-book. This is easy to see as economists are wrong as often as they are right when they try to predict a future trend.
Take the acting profession in the UK. A poll was recently done of people who consider themselves professional actors - to the extent that they spend UKP 150 on a professional casting website.
The average wage in the UK is UKP 26,500 per annum. Poverty level for a single person with no dependants is said to be below UKP 6600.
Only 2% of actors were earning UKP 20,000 or more.
75% were earning less than £5000.
I don't think that example shows economists being wrong, it just shows people putting value in being an actor, enough to offset the (extremely) low wage. It does show me being wrong - I had not accounted for that possibility. But do you want to prohibit most of these people from being actors in order to increase the wage of the rest? If you don't, then why would you want it for taxis? If you do, I can only say that I disagree, that I think people should be allowed to choose a untraditional life if that makes them happy, but I have no arguments save that.
Why should we have to adapt to the natural level of taxis, rather than manage the level to suit us?
Because the natural level is a Pareto efficient state, which is something we should strive for from a resource allocation point of view. And because it follows from accepting that people are autonomous agents, and have the most knowledge about their own lifes, which is something we should strive for from an ethical point of view.
During the 50's and 60's, sure... we were broadcasting some very powerful signals into space
How powerful? The most powerful signal I can find for the US today is 5 MW, which is within the range of over-the-horizon radars still being operated today. I am not sure that we have stopped sending our most powerful signals.
Out to the geostationary orbit? Not in the last 3.9 billion years. That is 350 times farther out than the limit of space. Anything that removed everything in that bubble would have killed all life on earth. The only event of that magnitude that we have evidence of created the moon.
That equilibrium may be at the poverty level, which wouldn't be good for drivers.
If there are other, more well paid jobs to have, it wont be, as taxi drivers will chose other occupations. If there aren't, that is a much larger problem than the amount of taxis.
It may be at the level where streets are clogged with taxis, which wouldn't be good for other road users.
A taxi is not much more road space consuming per traveler than having a private car. If the equilibrium amount of taxis is where the roads are clogged, road pricing (or even tax on cars or fuel) is a better system to reduce clogging than restricting the number of taxis.
It may be at a level where it's impossible to get a taxi to certain locations or times of day (The famous "I don't go south of the River".)
If there customers paying enough to get south of the river, it wont be. If there isn't, restricting the amount of taxis is only going to make the problem worse.
In fact, that last one sounds like a problem introduced by an artificial limit on the number of taxis. Do you have any examples of it in cities where this is not the case?
What is the difference between demonstrating and picketing? That the intended effect of a demonstration is to spread information, while the intended effect of picketing is to annoy? That picketing takes place at the thing that is being complained about? Or something else?
Yet even so, as X (per-capita gun ownership and frequency of carry) has gone up, Y (violent crime of all sorts) has continued to go down. Therefore: X does not cause Y. Q.E.D.
One time-series is not enough to prove or disprove anything, especially when the data from other countries is so discordant (AFAIK, the US have always had a high level of gun ownership and a high level of violent crime, compared to other developed countries). Do we have county-level statistics for gun ownership and crime over time? That would allow for much more convincing conclusions.
And he does have sex in one of the books (Backwards, I think), though the human(?) girl did not expect the penile spines, and so was rather put off by the whole thing.
That depends very much on what level of crime we are talking about. I would imagine that most crime is at a level where the situation you suggested is not a problem.
Also, I would imagine that a sophicsticated crime syndicate is in at least as much risk of being hacked by rivals and vigilantes as by the government, so unless you are doing it in such a way that they can figure out who you are, such a tripwire might not help much. Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the feds would not employ much sophistication in their hacking, so that the syndicate will know.
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Doesn't all of your citations only have one laser, that then focuses itself (hence "self-focusing")? Wheres this has two lasers, where one focus the other?
"Science" is the collective name for the methods for acquiring knowledge that has, over the last couple of thousand years, been shown to yield self-consistent results that are confirmable by other ways to get the same information. There might be other methods we haven't thought of yet (and realistically, "science" in a thousand years will include more methods than it does today), but for now, the methods collectively known as "science" are the ones we know work.
That is why the assumption that a method outside of science is not helpful in acquiring knowledge is reasonable.
Once can only assume that other cultures smart enough to make radio transmitters would also have similarly short periods during which inefficient methods would be used.
For information transmission, yes. For other uses of EM radiation, not so much.
That would be in the same way that it would be silly to call gold a metal, because it is too soft to replace steel?
This does more or less what an optical fiber does: It keeps light on the right path by using differences in refractive index (though I imagine the exact process is different: Optical fibers use total internal reflection, this probably just uses refraction). An optical fiber has the additional advantage of being able to go around corners, but that is not what makes it an optical fiber; the refractive index profile is.
What about to get the reflected beam back to the starting point (thus "remote sensing", being able to do e.g. a Raman spectrum at a long distance)? Here, you have light scattering in all directions. The optical fiber will make sure that more of it gets back the way the original laser beam came. That could be phrased as "amplification", though I think another word would be more correct.
[...] the ideal virus to use as a biological weapon is a virus with long, mostly asymptomatic infectious phase and a high mortality rate.
No, the ideal biological weapon does not spread from person to person. Any disease that does is guaranteed to infect your own population as well; it is basically a gun you can't aim, or a doomsday device (though not literally, it doesn't kill everybody).
If a male politician said the same thing in jest, he would be labelled as sexist scum, and his career would be more or less over. When a women does says it in jest, it is taken in that spirit. That difference is sexist.
As an educated guess, the study into smallpox has been to figure out out why it is so contagious so that we can build our own great contagion.
Or to figure out why it is so contagious, so we can better treat future diseases that uses the same methods. Without more information, it is hard to tell which end goal is more likely.
Intelligence (as measured by Spearman's g factor) is one of the best predictors for pretty much any measure of success or talent. People who excel at art or sports are also people with high g. The IQ test has one of the highest correlations Spearman's g of any test, so IQ test measures a lot more than how good you are at doing IQ tests.
I would think if they took recent Nobel Prize winners in the hard sciences, they would be trending above average and by a margin.
IIRC, if you want to win a Nobel prize, having an IQ over 120 is paramount, but anything above that does not give you any further advantage.
Isn't this reservation applicable to any drug, or even any interaction? So the optimal choice of action would always be - nothing? If not, then why are the situations were it is not the case different from medical treatments?
Isn't the smell fishy, as in primarily coming from trimethylamine from reduction of trimethylamine oxide? In that case, it would not be that closely linked to oxidation, though it might still correlate with it (as they both increase with storage).
I don't have a citation (well, unless "personal communcation" is accepted). It was stated in a presentation about stability of fish oils, but that is not solid enough for the confidence in my original post. I am sorry for that.
With regard to the manuscript you linked to about how the oxidation state of fish oils affects the lipid profiles, it is a small study (52 participants, 17-18 in each group) and it seems that they did not correct for multiple comparisons (but I might be missing that). Looking at their numbers, it seems that the largest effect is that the group that got the good oil started out with higher blood pressure (systolic and diastolic), lower blood glucose and higher cholesterol, and than normalized on these measures, except for cholesterol, where they more than normalized. I am not even sure this meats the "hypothesis-generating" state.
Part of it is due to the dislike of monopolies, which is founded on the fact that they skew the market to the disadvantage of the non-monopolist. A union is basically monopoly on (a certain type of) work. Saying "no union member will work for you if you employ non-union workers" is equivalent to Microsoft saying "you can only buy Windows if all of the computers you sell comes with Windows installed", the latter of which is illegal. So why should the first be legal?
That does not explain why boycotts are frowned upon.
Fish oil start to stink way before it is actually bad for you. I'm not saying you should eat stinking fish oil tablets, but them stinking should not affect their effect on the body.
The difficulty is updated every 2016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. If the amount resources spent on mining was suddenly reduced extensively, the mining would just go much slower until the next update, so no one would be able to take advantage of that (although it could be problematic for bitcoin, if e.g. the update went from 10 minutes to 100 minutes). After the next difficulty update, the difficulty would be low, but if the mining pools were back up, you would not be able to control bitcoin. Even if the update rate goes to 1 minute, this will only persist for 201,6 minutes, or a few hours.
All of this is assuming that no other response was done in the two weeks after the DDOS.
Real people don't behave like numbers in an economics text-book. This is easy to see as economists are wrong as often as they are right when they try to predict a future trend.
Take the acting profession in the UK. A poll was recently done of people who consider themselves professional actors - to the extent that they spend UKP 150 on a professional casting website.
The average wage in the UK is UKP 26,500 per annum. Poverty level for a single person with no dependants is said to be below UKP 6600.
Only 2% of actors were earning UKP 20,000 or more.
75% were earning less than £5000.
I don't think that example shows economists being wrong, it just shows people putting value in being an actor, enough to offset the (extremely) low wage. It does show me being wrong - I had not accounted for that possibility. But do you want to prohibit most of these people from being actors in order to increase the wage of the rest? If you don't, then why would you want it for taxis? If you do, I can only say that I disagree, that I think people should be allowed to choose a untraditional life if that makes them happy, but I have no arguments save that.
Why should we have to adapt to the natural level of taxis, rather than manage the level to suit us?
Because the natural level is a Pareto efficient state, which is something we should strive for from a resource allocation point of view. And because it follows from accepting that people are autonomous agents, and have the most knowledge about their own lifes, which is something we should strive for from an ethical point of view.
During the 50's and 60's, sure... we were broadcasting some very powerful signals into space
How powerful? The most powerful signal I can find for the US today is 5 MW, which is within the range of over-the-horizon radars still being operated today. I am not sure that we have stopped sending our most powerful signals.
Out to the geostationary orbit? Not in the last 3.9 billion years. That is 350 times farther out than the limit of space. Anything that removed everything in that bubble would have killed all life on earth. The only event of that magnitude that we have evidence of created the moon.
That equilibrium may be at the poverty level, which wouldn't be good for drivers.
If there are other, more well paid jobs to have, it wont be, as taxi drivers will chose other occupations. If there aren't, that is a much larger problem than the amount of taxis.
It may be at the level where streets are clogged with taxis, which wouldn't be good for other road users.
A taxi is not much more road space consuming per traveler than having a private car. If the equilibrium amount of taxis is where the roads are clogged, road pricing (or even tax on cars or fuel) is a better system to reduce clogging than restricting the number of taxis.
It may be at a level where it's impossible to get a taxi to certain locations or times of day (The famous "I don't go south of the River".)
If there customers paying enough to get south of the river, it wont be. If there isn't, restricting the amount of taxis is only going to make the problem worse.
In fact, that last one sounds like a problem introduced by an artificial limit on the number of taxis. Do you have any examples of it in cities where this is not the case?
What is the difference between demonstrating and picketing? That the intended effect of a demonstration is to spread information, while the intended effect of picketing is to annoy? That picketing takes place at the thing that is being complained about? Or something else?
Yet even so, as X (per-capita gun ownership and frequency of carry) has gone up, Y (violent crime of all sorts) has continued to go down. Therefore: X does not cause Y. Q.E.D.
One time-series is not enough to prove or disprove anything, especially when the data from other countries is so discordant (AFAIK, the US have always had a high level of gun ownership and a high level of violent crime, compared to other developed countries). Do we have county-level statistics for gun ownership and crime over time? That would allow for much more convincing conclusions.
it is also possible that most of Theia is here on Earth under the Pacific or something while the moon is made up more of jettisoned Earth pieces.
AFAIK, not according to the computer simulations, which is what backs up the Theia hypothesis.
Or that the original Theia pieces make up the core/underground bits of the Moon with a tasty Earth frosting.
Again, I don't think this is compatible with the simulations.
And he does have sex in one of the books (Backwards, I think), though the human(?) girl did not expect the penile spines, and so was rather put off by the whole thing.
It would be risky to do, considering what it would do to the market for Chinese hardware once it was found out.
Apparently, the NSA is either stupid enough to think that nobody could ever figure them out, or just as stupidly shortsighted as other branches of the US government.
That depends very much on what level of crime we are talking about. I would imagine that most crime is at a level where the situation you suggested is not a problem.
Also, I would imagine that a sophicsticated crime syndicate is in at least as much risk of being hacked by rivals and vigilantes as by the government, so unless you are doing it in such a way that they can figure out who you are, such a tripwire might not help much. Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the feds would not employ much sophistication in their hacking, so that the syndicate will know.