I think that the worries expressed betray a double standard. How does it make sense to worry about high-SAT women "ignoring the health dangers" of forced ovulation, when you don't worry about low-SAT women ignoring the same dangers and getting a tenth of the money for the ordeal? To be clear: these people don't want women to stop donating eggs. They don't want high-SAT women donating eggs for a lot of money. But the risk in each donation is the same!
In any case, an egg donor will suddenly get a quick and large pile of money. I think the real question should be: How will the money be spent? If the donor gets $50,000 and uses it to help pay for three semesters of her Princeton tuition, I don't see a problem. If another donor, who is not in college, spends $5,000 on shoes and handbags, I don't see a great deal of good having been done.
I know someone who has donated an egg, and she was actually pretty sick for a part of the procedure. Smart women in Princeton, who have other options, will not want to undergo something like this unless you offer them more money. That just seems like a fact. But if the people who want the eggs have the money, and their satisfaction is increased by the knowledge that their donor is academically talented, and the donor herself will use the money to develop her talents further, it's a clear case of "everyone wins."
So why does the American Society for Reproductive Medicine need to shit on this optimal outcome? I think they should be encouraging it!
If Iraqis bulldozed your house and herded you into a refugee camp, would you be so sure that they're doing the right thing? I mean, you attacked them...
I don't think you're really helping the Israeli cause by suggesting that victors of wars deserve spoils unconditionally, because there are many states who are stronger than Israel, and many more that will be. If you suggest that all it takes to legitimately rule the Holy Land is to take it by arms, that cuts both ways.
The Wikipedia is a good place to start, but there are easily-accessible answers to your remaining questions. Start with this presentation to the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering. You'll learn that one of the weaknesses of this reactor design is that there is no way to build a lab-scale prototype, because the fuel "log" needs to be a certain minimum size for the reaction wave to propagate.
I say Bless Bill Gates for helping to arrange a bigger laboratory, so that this technology can finally get a fair test.
I know that you're trying to be amusing, but there is something really dickish about your comment. Bill Gates is one of very few people in the world who is trying to do the best he can for the least among us. The Gates Foundation has been amazingly effective at matching its resources to where there is real need. They actually do research. You may think that saving people's lives and being a real fucking superhero is boring. Fuck you. You're in denial that it's also within your power to save people's lives. It's actually quite cheap. But I guess something like that is just too boring for you. Sorry, but that means you're a dick.
I don't know too much about the physics of photography, but it seems to me that the real problem in the picture quality of tiny cameras is that the lenses are terrible. Improving the sensors just means that we'll get very accurate digital representations of blurry images, produced by tiny, dirty lenses with minuscule, fixed focal lengths. Even as things stand now, a older camera with good optics and a 5MP sensor produces much better images than a new camera with cheap optics and a 12MP sensor. It seems to me that sensor isn't the bottleneck anymore.
The idea is that the fission releases most of its energy as neutrons, and these neutrons would get captured by heavy nuclei, which would then undergo either an alpha or beta decay and end up as something non-radioactive.
Maybe in your ass nobody mentions this, but where my head is, it seems like that's all people ever talk about. And we ran the numbers: The low-hanging fruit has been picked. There is still a lot that we can do to reduce our energy use (better insulation and public transportation are the best places to start) but nobody who actually knows the science has any hope that global energy demand would decrease even on the most optimistic scenarios of energy conservation. Of course we should do it. I'd even say it's necessary. But the notion that it would be sufficient must be stamped out of all conversations, and the people who suggest it must be subject to merciless humiliation as deniers of science.
I always thought that we need robots to build a moonbase before we bother sending people up there again. Here's one robot that might help get the job done. Then again, it seems like a major piece of hardware that will be difficult to transport. But the idea of making stone from dust is a good one. Maybe we should half-inflate a giant balloon so its top is dome-shaped, cover it with layers of moon dirt which would be hardened with this magnesium fixative. Once the stone is thick enough, the dome will be self-supporting and a good radiation shield. The whole process might be done by a single remote-controlled backhoe with a spray-nozzle. This is the kind of cool shit that NASA should be doing.
This is a telling example, because multiplication tables are pure memorization and have no element of understanding. Imagine the same structure for teaching someone to write a good poem, or explain why it's warm in the summer. And yes, these things are just as much a part of education.
I think the problem with universities is that education has already become a grind, and this takes the mind-numbing up a notch. The reason why our students are demanding "clear, well-defined goals" in courses is exactly because they want everything in college to have handrails, explicit structure and a transparent input-output conditionals. And it's true that it's easier to get good grades in such a system. But I think it's completely irresponsible to take someone who has made it through such a system as "college-educated". An educated person has learned to operate flexibly in a system where the input-output structures are opaque, and the quality of their product is what matters. (The real world doesn't care if you took "all the right steps" in the process of making something shoddy, so I don't see why college courses should reward it either.)
While my background is in physics, I now teach courses in philosophy. Now try to imagine applying this XP system to my field! It's not useless; I mean, I do stuff like this already (though I feel dirty about it). I occasionally give quick multiple-choice reading quizzes which make up a tiny portion of the course grade. Students can see "collecting" reading quiz points as XP's. But what really matters to me is that my students reveal an understanding of the issues and are able to have coherent and insightful reactions to these. Maybe a more straightforward way of looking it is this: My students need to be able to horribly embarrass anyone who defends certain dumb ideas, in a wide range of contexts. For example, if my ethics students aren't able to embarrass a smart moral relativist in a conversation, they don't deserve a passing grade for that (small) unit of the course. This objective cannot be divided up into sub-objectives to which you could assign XP's, because there are incredibly many paths for getting to that goal, and for the purpose of grading, I don't care which path they take. It depends on their temperament and talent. I'm not about to impose a structure on how to achieve this goal, and anyone who does is being a terrible educator. Their students will learn to grind out good grades, but... what else? Is it hoped that "incidentally" they will also acquire an understanding of the subject along the way? It seems to me much better to just test their understanding directly, and let them learn how to best match their skills to the available resources so that they achieve that understanding. That's exactly what students should learn in college, and it's also exactly what this XP system circumvents.
Exactly. This seems like a no-brainer. Mozilla explicitly said that this is possible but they'll refuse to do it, because they're fighting a holy war and the users who own a H264 codec and just want the videos to work can fuck off.
You are exactly right in every point you make, and I'm proud to see this sort of pushback on Slashdot, especially as the first comment on that propaganda-laden summary. I only hope that Firefox developers read this and allow Firefox to use a machine's native codecs to decode HTML5 video. Though this is legally and technically possible, they refuse to do it for ideological reasons.
I love the passiv-haus movement. I think it's absolutely brilliant, and I wish it were more widespread. I would definitely want to live in such a house. But a very small percentage of the houses in Europe are new, and there is no way to convert an existing house into a passiv-haus. But yes, I think that subsidizing the difference in costs between ordinary building and building by the passiv-haus code is something that sane governments should do. It makes much more sense than subsidizing photovoltaic panels at a latitude like Germany's.
I agree that those are the best fluorescent lights, but they're still not good. A part of the problem is that there are huge bands of wavelengths where they don't emit light. A real filament emitting 2700K blackbody radiation will include every wavelength and make light that's far less tiring to work in. In my fixtures with multiple bulbs, I always include at least one incandescent bulb to fill in all those colors of light that fluorescents just don't make.
Your point about the "presenile dementia" of Europe is exactly right. But even the Europeans know it, and they're planning for it now while there is time. They stabilized their population. Now if they can start producing all their own energy (hopefully on the model of France) and food, they'll have the basic insurance that no matter how stupid things get in the rest of the world, they will at least have enough to live on sustainably and indefinitely. Europe is retooling and re-imagining its infrastructure to prepare for this "blissful isolationist" future.
But the USA is also facing the same presenile dementia, and we are absolutely ill-prepared for it. Our people use immense amounts of energy, twice as much per capita as Germans, who still have a higher standard of living. Most of that is based on the "we live in suburbs" infrastructure. The suburbs will die when energy gets really expensive, but if re-housing the suburban emigres will be even more expensive, then they will move to slums and shanty towns, or maybe out into the farmlands where they will grow their own food. Europe always had a head start on the US when it comes to preparedness for expensive energy, and we're only falling further behind. Instead of fixing our own country, we keep trying to "fix" the rest of the world (sometimes with bombs), thinking that if we succeed, we won't have to change anything about ourselves. That's what Americans want to believe, but it's shockingly naive.
Even if it's high speed, I don't think that anyone will want to take the train from China to Europe. Maybe it's a bit of a vanity project. But you have to admit, it's pretty damn cool. I think it would make more sense if the rail connection were not high speed, since most of what's transported will be freight, and moving freight at 350k/h is a big waste of energy. But whatever, it's freaking cool!
I actually agree! But I hope you realize that this is a project that would have to take at least 50 years. Also, it's too much to ask to build self-replicating robots. But the materials for the Martian biosphere have to be mined and processed by robots on Mars, and this will be the greatest technological hurdle. (Those robots, or at least their "sensitive parts" could be made on Earth and shipped.) But you know, designing and building such robots would be a useful thing for us on Earth as well, so I honestly think we should start working on it.
Private rich dudes are stepping up, but they're spending on more important matters. Look at the projects by the Gates foundation, for example. Will anyone tell me that his funding a moon mission would get more "bang for the buck" than what he's actually doing with his money? Only a true sicko really could think that.
My first thought when I read your comment is that it's not really NASA's job to design combustion engines or supersonic locomotives (btw: moronic idea; I see you don't know physics, so look up what a sonic boom is). But there are many cool technologies that we need, with this I will agree.
I figured that it will be private ventures that come up with these. But here's something that Obama could do: He could publish a list of technological benchmarks for technology we need, and offer incentives to any company whose designs meet those benchmarks (say, for an engine or a wind turbine that could run for x hours at y efficiency and could be made for $z). One incentive could be prize money, but another, more lucrative one, would be the promise of a large government contract - say, parts for the new fleet of police cars. When scientists are aiming at a concrete goal and they know that there is a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, they will suddenly find all kinds of new creativity. So yes, I guess I sort of agree with you. We do need "terrestrial" technology and this is one way in which the government could make it happen faster.
While your point makes sense, I actually suspect that you're wrong. If you give grants to people to "think of something cool", they might not come up with much. But when you give them an inspiring and difficult mission which is impossible with any known technology, they will come up with stuff which in retrospect will probably be cooler than if the same money were directly allocated for cool-stuff-finding. In NASA's glory days, geniuses mustered all the intellectual energy they had to make the missions work, and the constraints of budget and physics made them come up with brilliant inventions. I don't think there was a more direct path to those same inventions. I think that this is why there are DARPA challenges: It brings in brilliant engineers and forces them to think outside of the box (but with definite goals). This was one of the (few) ways in which the Cold War had a positive side-effect.
First of all, the amazing Mars rovers (by far the greatest NASA success since Hubble) were designed and built at JPL by NASA scientists. (wiki) And it's exactly projects like this that will get breathing room when the vanity missions about "getting a man to x" get shelved. Compare this mission to the far more expensive ISS when you're wondering about the best way for NASA to add to scientific knowledge.
I admit that there is great value in evenutally establishing human settlements off the Earth, but these will have to be huge, in order to be self-sufficient. Robots will have to build them before the humans arrive. This is what we should be aiming at. Until we get to that point, it makes little sense to be sending humans to the moon or Mars. What I want is a good robotic sample-return mission to/from Mars. After that, we should resume artificial biosphere research, because that's what Mars needs if anyone serious is to go there.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the worries expressed betray a double standard. How does it make sense to worry about high-SAT women "ignoring the health dangers" of forced ovulation, when you don't worry about low-SAT women ignoring the same dangers and getting a tenth of the money for the ordeal? To be clear: these people don't want women to stop donating eggs. They don't want high-SAT women donating eggs for a lot of money. But the risk in each donation is the same!
In any case, an egg donor will suddenly get a quick and large pile of money. I think the real question should be: How will the money be spent? If the donor gets $50,000 and uses it to help pay for three semesters of her Princeton tuition, I don't see a problem. If another donor, who is not in college, spends $5,000 on shoes and handbags, I don't see a great deal of good having been done.
I know someone who has donated an egg, and she was actually pretty sick for a part of the procedure. Smart women in Princeton, who have other options, will not want to undergo something like this unless you offer them more money. That just seems like a fact. But if the people who want the eggs have the money, and their satisfaction is increased by the knowledge that their donor is academically talented, and the donor herself will use the money to develop her talents further, it's a clear case of "everyone wins."
So why does the American Society for Reproductive Medicine need to shit on this optimal outcome? I think they should be encouraging it!
If Iraqis bulldozed your house and herded you into a refugee camp, would you be so sure that they're doing the right thing? I mean, you attacked them...
I don't think you're really helping the Israeli cause by suggesting that victors of wars deserve spoils unconditionally, because there are many states who are stronger than Israel, and many more that will be. If you suggest that all it takes to legitimately rule the Holy Land is to take it by arms, that cuts both ways.
This is the correct link to the video mentioned above.
I say Bless Bill Gates for helping to arrange a bigger laboratory, so that this technology can finally get a fair test.
I know that you're trying to be amusing, but there is something really dickish about your comment. Bill Gates is one of very few people in the world who is trying to do the best he can for the least among us. The Gates Foundation has been amazingly effective at matching its resources to where there is real need. They actually do research. You may think that saving people's lives and being a real fucking superhero is boring. Fuck you. You're in denial that it's also within your power to save people's lives. It's actually quite cheap. But I guess something like that is just too boring for you. Sorry, but that means you're a dick.
I don't know too much about the physics of photography, but it seems to me that the real problem in the picture quality of tiny cameras is that the lenses are terrible. Improving the sensors just means that we'll get very accurate digital representations of blurry images, produced by tiny, dirty lenses with minuscule, fixed focal lengths. Even as things stand now, a older camera with good optics and a 5MP sensor produces much better images than a new camera with cheap optics and a 12MP sensor. It seems to me that sensor isn't the bottleneck anymore.
The idea is that the fission releases most of its energy as neutrons, and these neutrons would get captured by heavy nuclei, which would then undergo either an alpha or beta decay and end up as something non-radioactive.
Maybe in your ass nobody mentions this, but where my head is, it seems like that's all people ever talk about. And we ran the numbers: The low-hanging fruit has been picked. There is still a lot that we can do to reduce our energy use (better insulation and public transportation are the best places to start) but nobody who actually knows the science has any hope that global energy demand would decrease even on the most optimistic scenarios of energy conservation. Of course we should do it. I'd even say it's necessary. But the notion that it would be sufficient must be stamped out of all conversations, and the people who suggest it must be subject to merciless humiliation as deniers of science.
I always thought that we need robots to build a moonbase before we bother sending people up there again. Here's one robot that might help get the job done. Then again, it seems like a major piece of hardware that will be difficult to transport. But the idea of making stone from dust is a good one. Maybe we should half-inflate a giant balloon so its top is dome-shaped, cover it with layers of moon dirt which would be hardened with this magnesium fixative. Once the stone is thick enough, the dome will be self-supporting and a good radiation shield. The whole process might be done by a single remote-controlled backhoe with a spray-nozzle. This is the kind of cool shit that NASA should be doing.
Oh noes! I iz in suprpuzishun!
This is a telling example, because multiplication tables are pure memorization and have no element of understanding. Imagine the same structure for teaching someone to write a good poem, or explain why it's warm in the summer. And yes, these things are just as much a part of education.
I think the problem with universities is that education has already become a grind, and this takes the mind-numbing up a notch. The reason why our students are demanding "clear, well-defined goals" in courses is exactly because they want everything in college to have handrails, explicit structure and a transparent input-output conditionals. And it's true that it's easier to get good grades in such a system. But I think it's completely irresponsible to take someone who has made it through such a system as "college-educated". An educated person has learned to operate flexibly in a system where the input-output structures are opaque, and the quality of their product is what matters. (The real world doesn't care if you took "all the right steps" in the process of making something shoddy, so I don't see why college courses should reward it either.)
While my background is in physics, I now teach courses in philosophy. Now try to imagine applying this XP system to my field! It's not useless; I mean, I do stuff like this already (though I feel dirty about it). I occasionally give quick multiple-choice reading quizzes which make up a tiny portion of the course grade. Students can see "collecting" reading quiz points as XP's. But what really matters to me is that my students reveal an understanding of the issues and are able to have coherent and insightful reactions to these. Maybe a more straightforward way of looking it is this: My students need to be able to horribly embarrass anyone who defends certain dumb ideas, in a wide range of contexts. For example, if my ethics students aren't able to embarrass a smart moral relativist in a conversation, they don't deserve a passing grade for that (small) unit of the course. This objective cannot be divided up into sub-objectives to which you could assign XP's, because there are incredibly many paths for getting to that goal, and for the purpose of grading, I don't care which path they take. It depends on their temperament and talent. I'm not about to impose a structure on how to achieve this goal, and anyone who does is being a terrible educator. Their students will learn to grind out good grades, but... what else? Is it hoped that "incidentally" they will also acquire an understanding of the subject along the way? It seems to me much better to just test their understanding directly, and let them learn how to best match their skills to the available resources so that they achieve that understanding. That's exactly what students should learn in college, and it's also exactly what this XP system circumvents.
Exactly. This seems like a no-brainer. Mozilla explicitly said that this is possible but they'll refuse to do it, because they're fighting a holy war and the users who own a H264 codec and just want the videos to work can fuck off.
You are exactly right in every point you make, and I'm proud to see this sort of pushback on Slashdot, especially as the first comment on that propaganda-laden summary. I only hope that Firefox developers read this and allow Firefox to use a machine's native codecs to decode HTML5 video. Though this is legally and technically possible, they refuse to do it for ideological reasons.
I love the passiv-haus movement. I think it's absolutely brilliant, and I wish it were more widespread. I would definitely want to live in such a house. But a very small percentage of the houses in Europe are new, and there is no way to convert an existing house into a passiv-haus. But yes, I think that subsidizing the difference in costs between ordinary building and building by the passiv-haus code is something that sane governments should do. It makes much more sense than subsidizing photovoltaic panels at a latitude like Germany's.
I agree that those are the best fluorescent lights, but they're still not good. A part of the problem is that there are huge bands of wavelengths where they don't emit light. A real filament emitting 2700K blackbody radiation will include every wavelength and make light that's far less tiring to work in. In my fixtures with multiple bulbs, I always include at least one incandescent bulb to fill in all those colors of light that fluorescents just don't make.
Your point about the "presenile dementia" of Europe is exactly right. But even the Europeans know it, and they're planning for it now while there is time. They stabilized their population. Now if they can start producing all their own energy (hopefully on the model of France) and food, they'll have the basic insurance that no matter how stupid things get in the rest of the world, they will at least have enough to live on sustainably and indefinitely. Europe is retooling and re-imagining its infrastructure to prepare for this "blissful isolationist" future.
But the USA is also facing the same presenile dementia, and we are absolutely ill-prepared for it. Our people use immense amounts of energy, twice as much per capita as Germans, who still have a higher standard of living. Most of that is based on the "we live in suburbs" infrastructure. The suburbs will die when energy gets really expensive, but if re-housing the suburban emigres will be even more expensive, then they will move to slums and shanty towns, or maybe out into the farmlands where they will grow their own food. Europe always had a head start on the US when it comes to preparedness for expensive energy, and we're only falling further behind. Instead of fixing our own country, we keep trying to "fix" the rest of the world (sometimes with bombs), thinking that if we succeed, we won't have to change anything about ourselves. That's what Americans want to believe, but it's shockingly naive.
You think that maybe China will use these trains to ship opium to England? Ha, payback is a bitch!
Even if it's high speed, I don't think that anyone will want to take the train from China to Europe. Maybe it's a bit of a vanity project. But you have to admit, it's pretty damn cool. I think it would make more sense if the rail connection were not high speed, since most of what's transported will be freight, and moving freight at 350k/h is a big waste of energy. But whatever, it's freaking cool!
I actually agree! But I hope you realize that this is a project that would have to take at least 50 years. Also, it's too much to ask to build self-replicating robots. But the materials for the Martian biosphere have to be mined and processed by robots on Mars, and this will be the greatest technological hurdle. (Those robots, or at least their "sensitive parts" could be made on Earth and shipped.) But you know, designing and building such robots would be a useful thing for us on Earth as well, so I honestly think we should start working on it.
One more reason to love Buzz Aldrin! He is exactly right, again!
Private rich dudes are stepping up, but they're spending on more important matters. Look at the projects by the Gates foundation, for example. Will anyone tell me that his funding a moon mission would get more "bang for the buck" than what he's actually doing with his money? Only a true sicko really could think that.
My first thought when I read your comment is that it's not really NASA's job to design combustion engines or supersonic locomotives (btw: moronic idea; I see you don't know physics, so look up what a sonic boom is). But there are many cool technologies that we need, with this I will agree.
I figured that it will be private ventures that come up with these. But here's something that Obama could do: He could publish a list of technological benchmarks for technology we need, and offer incentives to any company whose designs meet those benchmarks (say, for an engine or a wind turbine that could run for x hours at y efficiency and could be made for $z). One incentive could be prize money, but another, more lucrative one, would be the promise of a large government contract - say, parts for the new fleet of police cars. When scientists are aiming at a concrete goal and they know that there is a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, they will suddenly find all kinds of new creativity. So yes, I guess I sort of agree with you. We do need "terrestrial" technology and this is one way in which the government could make it happen faster.
While your point makes sense, I actually suspect that you're wrong. If you give grants to people to "think of something cool", they might not come up with much. But when you give them an inspiring and difficult mission which is impossible with any known technology, they will come up with stuff which in retrospect will probably be cooler than if the same money were directly allocated for cool-stuff-finding. In NASA's glory days, geniuses mustered all the intellectual energy they had to make the missions work, and the constraints of budget and physics made them come up with brilliant inventions. I don't think there was a more direct path to those same inventions. I think that this is why there are DARPA challenges: It brings in brilliant engineers and forces them to think outside of the box (but with definite goals). This was one of the (few) ways in which the Cold War had a positive side-effect.
First of all, the amazing Mars rovers (by far the greatest NASA success since Hubble) were designed and built at JPL by NASA scientists. (wiki) And it's exactly projects like this that will get breathing room when the vanity missions about "getting a man to x" get shelved. Compare this mission to the far more expensive ISS when you're wondering about the best way for NASA to add to scientific knowledge.
I admit that there is great value in evenutally establishing human settlements off the Earth, but these will have to be huge, in order to be self-sufficient. Robots will have to build them before the humans arrive. This is what we should be aiming at. Until we get to that point, it makes little sense to be sending humans to the moon or Mars. What I want is a good robotic sample-return mission to/from Mars. After that, we should resume artificial biosphere research, because that's what Mars needs if anyone serious is to go there.