Why?
Do you complain that we need more pregnant men also?
Men aren't capable of becoming pregnant. I however, happen to believe women are just as capable of being good computer scientists as men are.
The fact that only a small minority of computer scientists are women, means that upwards of half our best CS talent is going to waste.
Since it's not in the article, I looked it up. She got her PhD in 1968.
I initially thought that kind of sucked (Cambridge's 'Diploma in Computer Science' has been awarded since 1954), but apparently the first US PhD in CS named as such was in 1965 (University of Pennsylvania).
Unfortunately there is no convenient (or universal) plaintext notation. If you are doing anything serious you probably use latex markup (e.g., \Psi^{*}\Psi) or something similar to render images of your equations. That's well and good for people who just want to read your paper, but for people who want to do a complex search to find very specific bits of contextual information, it is just about useless.
How is this a problem? Equations have names (important ones at least). Topics have names. I don't see how it's a big hindrance to not have a 'plaintext' representation. Most physicists seem to get along just fine.
Not to mention organic chemists, who quite a lot of the time don't even bother to try to name their compounds, rather than just draw the structure. Even if they did name them, it'd be fairly pointless since there's no unambiguous way to name them.
But it is wrong none the less. Casimir has to do with "virtual photons" and not van der waals forces.
Well then you don't know what you're talking about. All electromagnetic interactions occur through virtual photons, regardless of if it's the Casimir effect or just classical electrical charges. Saying 'virtual photons' are involved explains nothing in itself.
What is true is that it's the fluctuations of the quantum field that gives rise to the random charge fluctuations I mentioned. And that is also why it does not contradict the other explanation given.
Besides which, it's a well-known fact that the Casimir effect and van der Waals forces are closely related. You only need to visit the Wikipedia article linked at the top of this page to find that out.
How does this setup possibly count as a "computer"? It's not. It's just a physical process whose input/output, under one interpretation, is isomorphic to that of a computation its user wants to know the result of... oh, I see. Never mind!
I don't have a problem with that definition. But it also means 'quantum computers' shouldn't be called 'computers' either.
Could someone provide a comprehensible description for non-physicists of what the Casimir Force is? I looked it up on Wikipedia (and like all math and physics related articles there) came up with a borderline unintelligible "summary".
It's essentially the same thing as the plain old van der Waals force, which they teach in high school chemistry.
Basically you have two uncharged things close together. Due to tiny fluctuations in their charge distribution, one becomes slightly positive (or negative), inducing an equally tiny opposite charge in the other one, in the area where they're close. The electrical field (capacitance) keeps and reinforces this. So you end up with a slight attractive force between the things, seemingly out of 'nowhere'.
There is precedent now for government to add or subtract - mandate anything it wants from any OS distribution - depending on which way the political winds are blowing.
No, there is not. Microsoft has been found in violation of European anti-trust laws. That was not a political decision. That was a legal decision made by a court.
There is precedent now for forcing monopolistic operating systems to add or subtract components. So? That's hardly a the most powerful remedy in anti-trust cases. You should see what they did to Standard Oil.
All this crap we heard about Bush, and as we speak the UK is threatening to sink because of the weight of all its cameras, and now the EU wants to spy on everyone.
The EU wants the existing wiretap legislation, the one that requires showing cause in court and getting a warrant, to be expanded to also include forms of IP-telephony. The Bush administration wiretapped everyone they felt like, without even bothering to show any cause or get a warrant from that rubber-stamp of a court that is FISA.
Seems pretty obvious that you'd think the criticism of Bush is 'crap' then, since you obviously don't understand the important distinction here. And yes, it's a pretty damn important distinction. Important enough to have been codified into the US Constitution as the Fourth Amendment.
Who's 'big brother' here?
The European governments who want to eavesdrop on suspected criminals after obtaining a court order, or the US and UK governments who are presently listening to everybody in Europe, and have been for quite some time, through ECHELON?
Let's stop right there. There are no general lessons to be had from the LHC. It's an exception, not the rule.
First: 99.9% of scientists are not working at LHC, or any other billion dollar, world-unique facility.
They are working in ordinary labs, with ordinary equipment that's identical or similar to equipment in hundreds of other labs around the world.
Second: Primary data, actual measurement results, are already kept, as a rule.
Third: The vast majority of experiments are never ever reproduced to begin with. You're lucky enough to get cited, really. Most papers don't even get cited apart from by those who wrote them.
Fourth: Very little science is done by re-interpreting existing results. That only applies to the unique cases where the actual experiment can't be reproduced easily.
What happens when five years later it's discovered that a flawed assumption was used in the analysis? Are we going to build another LHC any time soon, to verify the result?
Truth is, you'd still have to rebuild the LHC then, because you didn't test your 'corrected' assumption against the actual machine to show that your 'corrected' results are valid. Until the actual experiment is re-done it'll remain an unanswered question.
At what cost? Would you suggest discarding the data sets of nuclear bomb detonations since they are easily reproduced?
Nobody said results are easily reproduced. But a-bomb tests are hardly representative of the vast majority of scientific results out there.
How about other data sets that may need to be reinterpreted because of errors in the original processing?
That's a scenario that only applies when the test is difficult to reproduce, and the results are limited by processing power rather than measurement accuracy. That's a relatively unusual scenario, since, first: Most experiments are easier to reproduce than that second: methods and measurements improve over time. The much more common scenario is that it's more efficient to simply re-do the experiment with modern equipment and get both more accurate measurements as well as better processing.
How can the results be reproducible if you don't keep the original data?
The relevant results are supposed to be included in the paper, as well as the information necessary to reproduce the work. Most data doesn't fall into that category.
To make an analogy the computer geeks here can relate to: All you need to reproduce the output of a program is the source code and parameters. You don't need the executable, the program's debug log, the compilers object files, etc, etc.
The point is you want to reproduce the general result. You don't usually want to reproduce the exact same experiment with the exact same conditions. Supposedly you already know what happens then.
Obviously you didn't read Tegmarks actual paper then. (the Science article is merely an article about it)
As to Tegmark's claims of to rapid decoherence... he doesn't have a clue how hot or how wet or what other factors might be in play at the microtubule level, so really it's just one guy's opinion...
That's utter bullshit. A single interaction is enough to destroy coherence. That's a fact.
Quantum entanglement can only occur if there are few interactions going on, which means:
Low density, low temperature (few collisions), and in general, few degress of freedom. Every example of quantum entanglement and otherwise 'macroscopic' quantum phenomenon (e.g. superfluid helium and other Bose-Einstein condensates) fall into those categories.
The average rate of intermolecular collisions in any liquid at any temperature is well-known. On the order of 10^-12 seconds. This is significant and measurable.
This is NOT something 'unknown' either to Tegmark or anyone else. It's not open to speculation.
There are thousands of quantum chemists out there, and quite a number of them who apply it to biochemistry.
I'm one of them. I work with solving the Schrödinger equation at this level all the time. So don't tell me we don't have a clue. It's the people who make these wild and speculative claims who tend to be in the dark about both basic chemistry and quantum physics.
'Quantum consciousness' and all that is complete and utter bunk.
There are no quantum-entanglement phenomena going on in the body.
To put it in simple terms: It's too warm, and too wet.
Or in a bit more advanced terms: The decoherence times are FAR too short to have
any chemical effect, much less a biological one.
Almost nobody takes Penrose's ideas seriously, but just for the hell of it,
the cosmologist Max Tegmark did the math a number of years ago to prove it.
Here's a link to an article about that paper that was in Science.
That's not how the Swedish/Scandinavian/German legal system works.
It's a different legal philosophy. The Anglo-American system works essentially by contrasting two alternate realities, the prosecutor's version of events versus the defendant's version of events, and the trial is a decision between the two.
In this legal system, the prosecution and defendants work towards a sort of common reality. Along the way, arguments and evidence gets dropped until they're left with essentially the minimum of differences. *Then*, at the end, the prosecutor formally demands they be sentenced for whatever they think they can reasonably get.
It's common and completely normal in that way for charges to be changed, dropped or added during the trial. It's what remains at the end that matters, not what they were demanding at the start.
Also, district attorneys in Sweden are not elected officials, and a D.A. career is not viewed as a stepping-stone into a political one. So Swedish prosecutors aren't anywhere near as interested in media attention as American ones are.
Lamarck is one of those guys who's name is generally synonymous with bad science (he's about as villified as Darwin is deified).
What? I've heard Larmarck's evolutionary ideas ridiculed but villified?
He wasn't that unscientific. He was just wrong.
Or are you thinking of Lysenko? Now that particular advocate of inherited-acquired-characteristics was indeed a villain, a lousy scientist and a political tool.
Yes, Sweden does NOT have 'double jeopardy' in the US sense.
In the USA, if you're aquitted and the prosecution denied an appeal, that's it. You cannot be prosecuted again.
In Sweden you _can_ be tried for the same crime again if, after the trial and appeals, new evidence comes to light that's deemed to be significant enough to raise substantial doubt that the original verdict would have been different. This has to be very strong evidence.
This isn't an appeal ('överklagan') but rather a re-opening of the court case ('resning').
Oh:( I do hope some Swedish and English speaking geeks take on making a transcript and translating it. To describe my Swedish as bad would be an understatement.
Well, given that English has been a mandatory subject in Swedish schools since the mid-19th century, and is now mandatory starting at the third grade, I doubt it'll be a problem.:)
Here's an example of the English Reading Comprehension part of the Swedish SAT tests. Just to give you an idea of the level of English they're expected to know.
I thought that they had long ago tested the laws (and won) on whether the site was legal and how they couldn't end up in the slammer for this?
Yes, since they haven't actually distributed any copyrighted material themselves, it makes it pretty unclear in terms of the Swedish laws.
It's worth noting that they were operating for years without any action, because the prosecutors were skeptical. The reason they got raided and subsequently prosecuted was due to political pressure coming from the Minister of Justice, who in turn was being pressured by the US government. The Pirate Bay raid led to a political scandal, since Sweden has a separation of powers between the cabinet and executive branch. IOW: A minister cannot tell his department what to do directly. While Minister Bodström wasn't found to have broken the law, it may have been a contributing factor in his party losing the election later that year.
While I'm optimistic about their chances, there are some complicating factors that make it an interesting case. For one thing, they have advertising on the site and have made money off it. Since for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden, it's a question of whether they're indirectly contributing to that crime, and are therefore accessories. I believe that's the prosecution's argument, anyway.
This trial is guaranteed to be unfair even from the start. The EU has released the so called Medina report, already judging the defendants as guilty. The report was issued several weeks ago. This way the judges already know how to judge these individuals, so things are kept simple!
First, I don't see how the report does any such thing. It certainly doesn't address this case specifically.
Second - It's an EU report. It does not have any status in the Swedish legal system. Swedish judges have to follow Swedish law and precedents. If current Swedish law does not 'correctly' implement EU directives, which is what that report is about, then that's a matter for the European Court of Justice. It's certainly not something which is decided in a Tingsrätt (Swedish first-tier court) case.
Except that 'unique' is originally a french word which is where that 'u' sound comes from.
It's not. The French vowel sound is/y/ whereas in English it's the/ju:/ diphthong, in IPA phonetics.
That has to do with the Great Vowel Shift, not with the French origin of the word.
Consider for instance 'moon'. That was originally pronounced with an/o:/ sound. The same sound as the 'o' in the German version, 'mond'.
That vowel sound (which doesn't remain in English) got shifted into/u:/. So English's 'oo' sound is is what most European languages write with 'u' (and what it originally was in English). The existing/u:/ sounds in English, e.g. 'house' (which sounded like "hoose") then had to change to avoid confusion, and became the/au/ diphtong.
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Men aren't capable of becoming pregnant. I however, happen to believe women are just as capable of being good computer scientists as men are.
The fact that only a small minority of computer scientists are women, means that upwards of half our best CS talent is going to waste.
I think that's a pity.
Since it's not in the article, I looked it up. She got her PhD in 1968.
I initially thought that kind of sucked (Cambridge's 'Diploma in Computer Science' has been awarded since 1954), but apparently the first US PhD in CS named as such was in 1965 (University of Pennsylvania).
The field could still use more women though.
How is this a problem? Equations have names (important ones at least). Topics have names. I don't see how it's a big hindrance to not have a 'plaintext' representation. Most physicists seem to get along just fine.
Not to mention organic chemists, who quite a lot of the time don't even bother to try to name their compounds, rather than just draw the structure. Even if they did name them, it'd be fairly pointless since there's no unambiguous way to name them.
Well then you don't know what you're talking about.
All electromagnetic interactions occur through virtual photons, regardless of if it's the Casimir effect or just classical electrical charges. Saying 'virtual photons' are involved explains nothing in itself.
What is true is that it's the fluctuations of the quantum field that gives rise to the random charge fluctuations I mentioned. And that is also why it does not contradict the other explanation given.
Besides which, it's a well-known fact that the Casimir effect and van der Waals forces are closely related. You only need to visit the Wikipedia article linked at the top of this page to find that out.
No, that's to account for residual static charges, which are something else.
Similarly, grounding doesn't stop the vdW force either.
It's a different way of looking at it, but it doesn't contradict the other explanations.
I don't have a problem with that definition. But it also means 'quantum computers' shouldn't be called 'computers' either.
It's essentially the same thing as the plain old van der Waals force, which they teach in high school chemistry. Basically you have two uncharged things close together. Due to tiny fluctuations in their charge distribution, one becomes slightly positive (or negative), inducing an equally tiny opposite charge in the other one, in the area where they're close. The electrical field (capacitance) keeps and reinforces this. So you end up with a slight attractive force between the things, seemingly out of 'nowhere'.
No, there is not. Microsoft has been found in violation of European anti-trust laws. That was not a political decision. That was a legal decision made by a court.
There is precedent now for forcing monopolistic operating systems to add or subtract components. So? That's hardly a the most powerful remedy in anti-trust cases. You should see what they did to Standard Oil.
The EU wants the existing wiretap legislation, the one that requires showing cause in court and getting a warrant, to be expanded to also include forms of IP-telephony. The Bush administration wiretapped everyone they felt like, without even bothering to show any cause or get a warrant from that rubber-stamp of a court that is FISA.
Seems pretty obvious that you'd think the criticism of Bush is 'crap' then, since you obviously don't understand the important distinction here. And yes, it's a pretty damn important distinction. Important enough to have been codified into the US Constitution as the Fourth Amendment.
Who's 'big brother' here?
The European governments who want to eavesdrop on suspected criminals after obtaining a court order, or the US and UK governments who are presently listening to everybody in Europe, and have been for quite some time, through ECHELON?
Let's stop right there. There are no general lessons to be had from the LHC. It's an exception, not the rule.
First: 99.9% of scientists are not working at LHC, or any other billion dollar, world-unique facility. They are working in ordinary labs, with ordinary equipment that's identical or similar to equipment in hundreds of other labs around the world.
Second: Primary data, actual measurement results, are already kept, as a rule.
Third: The vast majority of experiments are never ever reproduced to begin with. You're lucky enough to get cited, really. Most papers don't even get cited apart from by those who wrote them.
Fourth: Very little science is done by re-interpreting existing results. That only applies to the unique cases where the actual experiment can't be reproduced easily.
Truth is, you'd still have to rebuild the LHC then, because you didn't test your 'corrected' assumption against the actual machine to show that your 'corrected' results are valid. Until the actual experiment is re-done it'll remain an unanswered question.
Nobody said results are easily reproduced. But a-bomb tests are hardly representative of the vast majority of scientific results out there.
That's a scenario that only applies when the test is difficult to reproduce, and the results are limited by processing power rather than measurement accuracy. That's a relatively unusual scenario, since, first: Most experiments are easier to reproduce than that second: methods and measurements improve over time. The much more common scenario is that it's more efficient to simply re-do the experiment with modern equipment and get both more accurate measurements as well as better processing.
The relevant results are supposed to be included in the paper, as well as the information necessary to reproduce the work. Most data doesn't fall into that category.
To make an analogy the computer geeks here can relate to: All you need to reproduce the output of a program is the source code and parameters. You don't need the executable, the program's debug log, the compilers object files, etc, etc.
The point is you want to reproduce the general result. You don't usually want to reproduce the exact same experiment with the exact same conditions. Supposedly you already know what happens then.
What's most important to keep is quite simple and obvious really:
The results. The published papers, etc.
It's an important and distinctive feature of Science that results are reproducible.
That's utter bullshit. A single interaction is enough to destroy coherence. That's a fact.
Quantum entanglement can only occur if there are few interactions going on, which means:
Low density, low temperature (few collisions), and in general, few degress of freedom. Every example of quantum entanglement and otherwise 'macroscopic' quantum phenomenon (e.g. superfluid helium and other Bose-Einstein condensates) fall into those categories.
The average rate of intermolecular collisions in any liquid at any temperature is well-known. On the order of 10^-12 seconds. This is significant and measurable.
This is NOT something 'unknown' either to Tegmark or anyone else. It's not open to speculation.
There are thousands of quantum chemists out there, and quite a number of them who apply it to biochemistry.
I'm one of them. I work with solving the Schrödinger equation at this level all the time. So don't tell me we don't have a clue. It's the people who make these wild and speculative claims who tend to be in the dark about both basic chemistry and quantum physics.
'Quantum consciousness' and all that is complete and utter bunk.
There are no quantum-entanglement phenomena going on in the body.
To put it in simple terms: It's too warm, and too wet.
Or in a bit more advanced terms: The decoherence times are FAR too short to have any chemical effect, much less a biological one. Almost nobody takes Penrose's ideas seriously, but just for the hell of it, the cosmologist Max Tegmark did the math a number of years ago to prove it.
Here's a link to an article about that paper that was in Science.
That's not how the Swedish/Scandinavian/German legal system works.
It's a different legal philosophy. The Anglo-American system works essentially by contrasting two alternate realities,
the prosecutor's version of events versus the defendant's version of events, and the trial is a decision between the two.
In this legal system, the prosecution and defendants work towards a sort of common reality. Along the way, arguments and evidence gets dropped until they're left with essentially the minimum of differences. *Then*, at the end, the prosecutor formally demands they be sentenced for whatever they think they can reasonably get.
It's common and completely normal in that way for charges to be changed, dropped or added during the trial. It's what remains at the end that matters, not what they were demanding at the start.
Also, district attorneys in Sweden are not elected officials, and a D.A. career is not viewed as a stepping-stone into a political one. So Swedish prosecutors aren't anywhere near as interested in media attention as American ones are.
What? I've heard Larmarck's evolutionary ideas ridiculed but villified?
He wasn't that unscientific. He was just wrong.
Or are you thinking of Lysenko? Now that particular advocate of inherited-acquired-characteristics was indeed a villain, a lousy scientist and a political tool.
The compound is called ageliferin.
Yes, Sweden does NOT have 'double jeopardy' in the US sense.
In the USA, if you're aquitted and the prosecution denied an appeal, that's it. You cannot be prosecuted again.
In Sweden you _can_ be tried for the same crime again if, after the trial and appeals, new evidence comes to light that's deemed to be significant enough to raise substantial doubt that the original verdict would have been different. This has to be very strong evidence.
This isn't an appeal ('överklagan') but rather a re-opening of the court case ('resning').
Well, given that English has been a mandatory subject in Swedish schools since the mid-19th century, and is now mandatory starting at the third grade, I doubt it'll be a problem. :)
Here's an example of the English Reading Comprehension part of the Swedish SAT tests. Just to give you an idea of the level of English they're expected to know.
Yes, since they haven't actually distributed any copyrighted material themselves, it makes it pretty unclear in terms of the Swedish laws.
It's worth noting that they were operating for years without any action, because the prosecutors were skeptical. The reason they got raided and subsequently prosecuted was due to political pressure coming from the Minister of Justice, who in turn was being pressured by the US government. The Pirate Bay raid led to a political scandal, since Sweden has a separation of powers between the cabinet and executive branch. IOW: A minister cannot tell his department what to do directly. While Minister Bodström wasn't found to have broken the law, it may have been a contributing factor in his party losing the election later that year.
While I'm optimistic about their chances, there are some complicating factors that make it an interesting case. For one thing, they have advertising on the site and have made money off it. Since for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden, it's a question of whether they're indirectly contributing to that crime, and are therefore accessories. I believe that's the prosecution's argument, anyway.
First, I don't see how the report does any such thing. It certainly doesn't address this case specifically.
Second - It's an EU report. It does not have any status in the Swedish legal system. Swedish judges have to follow Swedish law and precedents. If current Swedish law does not 'correctly' implement EU directives, which is what that report is about, then that's a matter for the European Court of Justice. It's certainly not something which is decided in a Tingsrätt (Swedish first-tier court) case.
It's not. The French vowel sound is /y/ whereas in English it's the /ju:/ diphthong, in IPA phonetics.
/o:/ sound. The same sound as the 'o' in the German version, 'mond'. /u:/. So English's 'oo' sound is is what most European languages write with 'u' (and what it originally was in English). The existing /u:/ sounds in English, e.g. 'house' (which sounded like "hoose") then had to change to avoid confusion, and became the /au/ diphtong.
That has to do with the Great Vowel Shift, not with the French origin of the word.
Consider for instance 'moon'. That was originally pronounced with an
That vowel sound (which doesn't remain in English) got shifted into