The lack of a universal frame of reference, which makes the idea of an omnipotent observer impossible, is quite the stumbling block regarding relativity. As long as the theory is internally consistent, e.g. two observers agree on whether to things collide, I can accept it, but I can't imagine the effects.
I suppose the bottom line is that it gives testable predictions, which have panned out so far, so it must be correct, as far as we can tell (and assuming a sane definition of "correct").
But you can't say "day 1", it makes no sense in relativity. The people on the 0.99c ship will not agree with the people on the planets about what events take place on day 1, and worse, they will disagree to different degrees depending on the position of the events. The link I gave about the pole-barn paradox explains this better than I can, but the main point is that you're regarding time as much more fixed than it is in relativity.
In order to see the broken causality, you need to take into account an observer moving at a differente velocity. If the events you describe, consider an observer moving from C towards B at 0.99c. In that frame of reference, the superluminal ship will arrive before it leaves. Not "he will see it that way", the time at which the ship arrives is before the time it leaves, for him. It is equivalent to the pole-barn paradox
You need to take into account relativity and its effect on the passing of time. "At the same time" is not well-defined. If two events A and B are outside of each others light cones, there is an observer* who will observe A happening before B, and another observer*, who will observe B happening before A.
So, if you can affect something which is outside of your light cone, e.g. travel faster than light, some observers will observe you affecting something happening before you acted to affect them.
*To be more exact, there is an inertial frame of reference, such that an observer in this frame of reference will observe...
Beta decay is: neutron -> proton + electron + antineutrino.
If you add a neutrino to each side you get: neutron + neutrino -> proton + electron + energy
So is it not plausible that the probability of a nucleus undergoing beta decay is related to the number of neutrinos handy?
It is, but the cross sections of neutrinos with nuclei are ridiculously low. Unless their cross section is much higher for radioactive nuclei than for stable ones, but I don't know enough about the physics involved to even guess whether this is plausible.
this finding would mean that carbon-14 dating is less reliable than previously thought;
That depends on whether the dating is calibrated, at least back to the last ice age we have measurements from dendrochronologically dated wood to tell us how much 14-C we should find in a sample from a given year.
IIRCC current theory's relating to atomic decay, both classic and quantum, state that the decay rate of unstable atoms is totally random and does not change under any normal conditions.
Not quite, k-electron capture are affected by the cross section of the k-electrons with the nucleus, which might be slightly changed by pressure or chemical bonds. This can lead to a change of up to 1%. The fully ionised nucleus would be stable if there is no other decays possible.
Other decay modes should also be affected, as the energy levels of the nucleus is pertubed by the electron-density, but this would be a much smaller effect, as the electron cloud is not directly involved in these decays.
Or you could extract it from the atmosphere, by cooling until everything else is condensed. It will still be more expensive than getting it form natural gas*, but not that much more expensive.
Unless you are considering a time scale in which it can escape the earth's gravity well, but in that case, we have more pressing problems.
* From the numbers a quick google came up with, there seems to be about 2000 times more He in He-rich natural gas than in the atmosphere, but that is not all that determines the prices.
Actually, in human trials spanning hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of subjects, it's been shown to be effective.
If that's not science, I don't know what is.
Bad science? Mostly done without blinding? And when done properly and it doesn't show any effect, twisting the conclusion so that it seems to be working? Usually by saying "the placebo and the treatment shows comparable results, EVEN SHAM ACUPUNCTURE WORKS".
The mechanism of acupuncture is well understood by the practitioners of it
Just what do you mean with "mechanism"? In medicine, that would be a precise, well-defined description of how the treatment achieves its effect. The words used by acupuncture practitioners are not well-defined. They don't even degree on which line of technobabble to use to describe them (though it usually involves a use of the word energy which have nothing to do with what that word means).
, but the terms in which that mechanism is described are different from the terms that western medicine uses.
Yes, because medicine* used terms that have a well-defined meaning, which the people in the field agrees upon.
Further, acupuncture has been proven effective enough for it to be used (and taught) at the best teaching hospitals in the US, including Mass Gen.
The argument from authority is not an argument.
If you attend a lecture on acupuncture at say, Northwestern Medical School here in Chicago, you'll find that there is no hesitation to use the terms by which the Chinese describe those mechanisms: yin and yang.The problem comes in the language that's used. Systemic language, meta-terms like "yin" and "yang" are not the usual language of medical science. It describes entire systems, entire sets of properties, instead of discrete measurements such as "viral load".
No, they doesn't describe anything, they are precisely honed to be vague enough never to be testable, but sounding well-defined enough to be persuasive.
Because the overlay of western medical terms in relation to these meta-states is not familiar to many people, those people just assume that it "can't be scientific".
If particle physicists can use "charm" and "strangeness" I don't see why there's such a problem with "yin" and "yang".
"Charm" and "strangeness" have precise definitions, "yin" and "yang" hasn't, that's why.
* There is only one medicine, the sciencebased one. Describing it as "western medicine" is an insult to anybody originating from outside of the West.
In addition to the fail at step 3 mentioned in sibling thread, step 6 does not follow. Math might be incomplete in other areas, and be complete in all that is needed to state P=NP.
That there is a problem should be evident from the fact that this proof doesn't use any specifics of P=NP, so it can be used to prove anything undecidable, which is clearly wrong, since there exist proven theorems.
Even for hypothesis which everyone believes to be true, the proof will still change things. For example (IIRC), if the generalized Riemann hypothesis is true, there is an known non-probabilistic algorithm to check whether a number is a prime in polynomial time. Of course, until the hypothesis is proven, you would be stupid to use that algorithm, so the proof would be a big deal (for small values of "a big deal").
Given that UV radiation (which is the highest energy photons coming from solar radiation) is apparently needed as part of the process, this indicates to me that the critical step is highly endothermic.
It doesn't indicate that. The reason the reaction needs light is that it is thermally forbidden, as the molecular orbitals doesn't line up in the right way (they are out of phase). The reason UV-light is needed is that the absorbance band of the molecule is in the UV. The opposite reaction also requires light (though probably of a longer wavelength, as it has 3 conjugated double bonds in stead of 2), and only one of the reactions can be endothermic.
The reaction is probably endothermic, as it exchanges 2 C-C bonds for 1 C=C bond, which have slightly lower bond energy, but this have nothing to do with the light needed.
[...]
iPod shuffles that can't be used with 3rd party headphones because the design doesn't have any buttons on it.
iPhones with recessed headphone jacks that can't work with 3rd party headphones.[...] These problems [...]
I would argue that these are features for Apple, not problems
You can add schools (it can't be healthy for the children to think all day), newspapers (what, and remove the social function of the town crier, people will get socially isolated) and writing (if people could just write things down, they will get forgetful) to that list. (http://www.slate.com/id/2244198)
The most straight-forward interpretation of the situation is that the job of the (US) police is to ensure that somebody gets judged, preferably the guilty part (if convenient). That means that the goal of protecting yourself is best done by not drawing any attention to yourself.
Would it? My understanding is that patents makes it illegal to use the technology in anything in the marketplace. My university has a bachelor-level course where they clean up a protein which is quite expensive because of a patent. They end up throwing away 1000's of dollars worth of it every year as they aren't allowed to sell it. As long as they don't sell it (or give it away, or...), they are allowed to follow the patent, though.
If the situation is the same with software patents, you are allowed to write the code and compile it and run it yourself, you just can't use it for anything you give or sell to others.
Except in Sweden, where they lowered the physical requirements for becoming a firefighter to help even out the gender difference. So now, you can experience BOTH male AND female firefighters who are physically incapable helping you. But hey, gender equality is more important than making sure that people are qualified for their jobs, right?
So, the US did not help did not help Europe after WWII with the Marshall Plan?
Saying that Cuba is doing decent relative to Haiti is correct, but highly irrelevant, as Cuba is doing bad in respect to other countries which were in the same situation, and Haiti is doing abysmal.
But both of that has other causes than foreign aid. Which we agree is most often a bad thing. My take on it (and it might be wrong) is that foreign aid has a tendency to work like natural resources. Normally, the elite would be somewhat dependent on the population, as they have to get tax from them. This (slowly) leads to the state guaranteeing the right of property, which makes it rational for the population to invest in their land, and lifts the people out of poverty. However, if most of the income of the state does not come from the people, the elite are free to treat them as they like. This holds both for natural resources and foreign aid.
It was, the volcano reduced the harvest to the point that people starved, and caused them to revolt. But that is only some of the explanation, the inefficiency of the French bureaucracy and their support for the American revolution also played a part.
In school, I was taught (and the school system here is not the best, so take it with a grain of salt) that there are two forms of revolution. The situation you describe, where people are desperate because they can't feed themselves and their families, and the situation the GP describes, where people see the possibility for getting more, but it isn't going fast enough. The French revolution (the one in 1789) is an example of the first, I assume the American is an example of the second (but again, abysmal history teaching).
I was at a conference once where one of the speakers had a really bad english, but just good enough that you could understand it, if you strained. After a while, I tried to stop trying to understand him. I couldn't, short of physically not hearing the speaker, I had no option but to use a lot of mental energy trying to understand him, even though I weren't really interested. The brain really wants to make sense of what the senses tells it.
Or the people who synthesize the protein, test that it folds the right way, test it in vitro, test it in animals, perform phase 0, 1, 2 and 3 human trials. You know, the actually finding out if it can be used as a drug. Coming up with a drug candidate is the easy and cheap part of making a new drug.
There must be different versions, then. I recently saw one which specifically said "piracy is stealing". Perhaps they are different in different regions? It's good to know that the film companies are willing to lie to us.
Yes, who would ever pay to be cured of cancer./sarcasm
Now, there might be more money in a treatment, but if good treatments already exist and is either patented by someone else or the patent has run out, you can make quite a lot of money curing people. Plus, when you start researching a drug, it's not always clear if it will become a cure or a treatment. So, after having used billions of dollars on a drug, only to have it be much more effective then expected, do you expect the medicine companies to just throw away that money, or to make as much money as they can on it?
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of a universal frame of reference, which makes the idea of an omnipotent observer impossible, is quite the stumbling block regarding relativity. As long as the theory is internally consistent, e.g. two observers agree on whether to things collide, I can accept it, but I can't imagine the effects.
I suppose the bottom line is that it gives testable predictions, which have panned out so far, so it must be correct, as far as we can tell (and assuming a sane definition of "correct").
But you can't say "day 1", it makes no sense in relativity. The people on the 0.99c ship will not agree with the people on the planets about what events take place on day 1, and worse, they will disagree to different degrees depending on the position of the events. The link I gave about the pole-barn paradox explains this better than I can, but the main point is that you're regarding time as much more fixed than it is in relativity.
In order to see the broken causality, you need to take into account an observer moving at a differente velocity. If the events you describe, consider an observer moving from C towards B at 0.99c. In that frame of reference, the superluminal ship will arrive before it leaves. Not "he will see it that way", the time at which the ship arrives is before the time it leaves, for him. It is equivalent to the pole-barn paradox
You need to take into account relativity and its effect on the passing of time. "At the same time" is not well-defined. If two events A and B are outside of each others light cones, there is an observer* who will observe A happening before B, and another observer*, who will observe B happening before A.
So, if you can affect something which is outside of your light cone, e.g. travel faster than light, some observers will observe you affecting something happening before you acted to affect them.
*To be more exact, there is an inertial frame of reference, such that an observer in this frame of reference will observe...
Beta decay is: neutron -> proton + electron + antineutrino.
If you add a neutrino to each side you get: neutron + neutrino -> proton + electron + energy
So is it not plausible that the probability of a nucleus undergoing beta decay is related to the number of neutrinos handy?
It is, but the cross sections of neutrinos with nuclei are ridiculously low. Unless their cross section is much higher for radioactive nuclei than for stable ones, but I don't know enough about the physics involved to even guess whether this is plausible.
this finding would mean that carbon-14 dating is less reliable than previously thought;
That depends on whether the dating is calibrated, at least back to the last ice age we have measurements from dendrochronologically dated wood to tell us how much 14-C we should find in a sample from a given year.
IIRCC current theory's relating to atomic decay, both classic and quantum, state that the decay rate of unstable atoms is totally random and does not change under any normal conditions.
Not quite, k-electron capture are affected by the cross section of the k-electrons with the nucleus, which might be slightly changed by pressure or chemical bonds. This can lead to a change of up to 1%. The fully ionised nucleus would be stable if there is no other decays possible.
Other decay modes should also be affected, as the energy levels of the nucleus is pertubed by the electron-density, but this would be a much smaller effect, as the electron cloud is not directly involved in these decays.
Or you could extract it from the atmosphere, by cooling until everything else is condensed. It will still be more expensive than getting it form natural gas*, but not that much more expensive.
Unless you are considering a time scale in which it can escape the earth's gravity well, but in that case, we have more pressing problems.
* From the numbers a quick google came up with, there seems to be about 2000 times more He in He-rich natural gas than in the atmosphere, but that is not all that determines the prices.
Actually, in human trials spanning hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of subjects, it's been shown to be effective.
If that's not science, I don't know what is.
Bad science? Mostly done without blinding? And when done properly and it doesn't show any effect, twisting the conclusion so that it seems to be working? Usually by saying "the placebo and the treatment shows comparable results, EVEN SHAM ACUPUNCTURE WORKS".
The mechanism of acupuncture is well understood by the practitioners of it
Just what do you mean with "mechanism"? In medicine, that would be a precise, well-defined description of how the treatment achieves its effect. The words used by acupuncture practitioners are not well-defined. They don't even degree on which line of technobabble to use to describe them (though it usually involves a use of the word energy which have nothing to do with what that word means).
, but the terms in which that mechanism is described are different from the terms that western medicine uses.
Yes, because medicine* used terms that have a well-defined meaning, which the people in the field agrees upon.
Further, acupuncture has been proven effective enough for it to be used (and taught) at the best teaching hospitals in the US, including Mass Gen.
The argument from authority is not an argument.
If you attend a lecture on acupuncture at say, Northwestern Medical School here in Chicago, you'll find that there is no hesitation to use the terms by which the Chinese describe those mechanisms: yin and yang.The problem comes in the language that's used. Systemic language, meta-terms like "yin" and "yang" are not the usual language of medical science. It describes entire systems, entire sets of properties, instead of discrete measurements such as "viral load".
No, they doesn't describe anything, they are precisely honed to be vague enough never to be testable, but sounding well-defined enough to be persuasive.
Because the overlay of western medical terms in relation to these meta-states is not familiar to many people, those people just assume that it "can't be scientific".
If particle physicists can use "charm" and "strangeness" I don't see why there's such a problem with "yin" and "yang".
"Charm" and "strangeness" have precise definitions, "yin" and "yang" hasn't, that's why.
* There is only one medicine, the sciencebased one. Describing it as "western medicine" is an insult to anybody originating from outside of the West.
In addition to the fail at step 3 mentioned in sibling thread, step 6 does not follow. Math might be incomplete in other areas, and be complete in all that is needed to state P=NP.
That there is a problem should be evident from the fact that this proof doesn't use any specifics of P=NP, so it can be used to prove anything undecidable, which is clearly wrong, since there exist proven theorems.
Even for hypothesis which everyone believes to be true, the proof will still change things. For example (IIRC), if the generalized Riemann hypothesis is true, there is an known non-probabilistic algorithm to check whether a number is a prime in polynomial time. Of course, until the hypothesis is proven, you would be stupid to use that algorithm, so the proof would be a big deal (for small values of "a big deal").
Given that UV radiation (which is the highest energy photons coming from solar radiation) is apparently needed as part of the process, this indicates to me that the critical step is highly endothermic.
It doesn't indicate that. The reason the reaction needs light is that it is thermally forbidden, as the molecular orbitals doesn't line up in the right way (they are out of phase). The reason UV-light is needed is that the absorbance band of the molecule is in the UV. The opposite reaction also requires light (though probably of a longer wavelength, as it has 3 conjugated double bonds in stead of 2), and only one of the reactions can be endothermic.
The reaction is probably endothermic, as it exchanges 2 C-C bonds for 1 C=C bond, which have slightly lower bond energy, but this have nothing to do with the light needed.
[...]
iPod shuffles that can't be used with 3rd party headphones because the design doesn't have any buttons on it.
iPhones with recessed headphone jacks that can't work with 3rd party headphones.[...]
These problems [...]
I would argue that these are features for Apple, not problems
iOS is the biggest mobile operating system player right now
Android and iOS combined don't even come close to Symbian.
Since it's not a modern mobile OS on just about all those phones the point is irrelevant
Say, that is some nice goal posts you have there. And they move if you need them to. Nifty.
You can add schools (it can't be healthy for the children to think all day), newspapers (what, and remove the social function of the town crier, people will get socially isolated) and writing (if people could just write things down, they will get forgetful) to that list. (http://www.slate.com/id/2244198)
The most straight-forward interpretation of the situation is that the job of the (US) police is to ensure that somebody gets judged, preferably the guilty part (if convenient). That means that the goal of protecting yourself is best done by not drawing any attention to yourself.
Wow, OK, I really thought the bar was bringing things to the marketplace. Thanks.
Would it? My understanding is that patents makes it illegal to use the technology in anything in the marketplace. My university has a bachelor-level course where they clean up a protein which is quite expensive because of a patent. They end up throwing away 1000's of dollars worth of it every year as they aren't allowed to sell it. As long as they don't sell it (or give it away, or...), they are allowed to follow the patent, though.
If the situation is the same with software patents, you are allowed to write the code and compile it and run it yourself, you just can't use it for anything you give or sell to others.
Except in Sweden, where they lowered the physical requirements for becoming a firefighter to help even out the gender difference. So now, you can experience BOTH male AND female firefighters who are physically incapable helping you. But hey, gender equality is more important than making sure that people are qualified for their jobs, right?
So, the US did not help did not help Europe after WWII with the Marshall Plan?
Saying that Cuba is doing decent relative to Haiti is correct, but highly irrelevant, as Cuba is doing bad in respect to other countries which were in the same situation, and Haiti is doing abysmal.
But both of that has other causes than foreign aid. Which we agree is most often a bad thing. My take on it (and it might be wrong) is that foreign aid has a tendency to work like natural resources. Normally, the elite would be somewhat dependent on the population, as they have to get tax from them. This (slowly) leads to the state guaranteeing the right of property, which makes it rational for the population to invest in their land, and lifts the people out of poverty. However, if most of the income of the state does not come from the people, the elite are free to treat them as they like. This holds both for natural resources and foreign aid.
It was, the volcano reduced the harvest to the point that people starved, and caused them to revolt. But that is only some of the explanation, the inefficiency of the French bureaucracy and their support for the American revolution also played a part.
In school, I was taught (and the school system here is not the best, so take it with a grain of salt) that there are two forms of revolution. The situation you describe, where people are desperate because they can't feed themselves and their families, and the situation the GP describes, where people see the possibility for getting more, but it isn't going fast enough. The French revolution (the one in 1789) is an example of the first, I assume the American is an example of the second (but again, abysmal history teaching).
I was at a conference once where one of the speakers had a really bad english, but just good enough that you could understand it, if you strained. After a while, I tried to stop trying to understand him. I couldn't, short of physically not hearing the speaker, I had no option but to use a lot of mental energy trying to understand him, even though I weren't really interested. The brain really wants to make sense of what the senses tells it.
Or the people who synthesize the protein, test that it folds the right way, test it in vitro, test it in animals, perform phase 0, 1, 2 and 3 human trials. You know, the actually finding out if it can be used as a drug. Coming up with a drug candidate is the easy and cheap part of making a new drug.
There must be different versions, then. I recently saw one which specifically said "piracy is stealing". Perhaps they are different in different regions? It's good to know that the film companies are willing to lie to us.
Yes, who would ever pay to be cured of cancer. /sarcasm
Now, there might be more money in a treatment, but if good treatments already exist and is either patented by someone else or the patent has run out, you can make quite a lot of money curing people. Plus, when you start researching a drug, it's not always clear if it will become a cure or a treatment. So, after having used billions of dollars on a drug, only to have it be much more effective then expected, do you expect the medicine companies to just throw away that money, or to make as much money as they can on it?