Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
And all that would be OK - we're really passionate about what we're doing and a lot of us love the job despite all the pain - but the fact that we're constantly being painted as lazy fat cats that have an easy life, that's too much. This stereotype is slowly destroying American science, because it makes policymakers think they need to put just a little bit more pressure on us. And with this article in Forbes, a line has been crossed. You probably could get away with making covert allusions in mainstream media that black people (or pick whichever majority you want) are lazy, but put it into a high-profile magazine like this and you'll have riots. What you're seeing are outbursts of a pain that's been building up for decades. The stereotype has become an acute threat. If we were farmers, we would drive our tractors to the capital and block all the roads, but since we're academics, we write angry walls of text.
Ricin is not a gas. It's a protein, which makes it difficult to get into gaseous phase without decomposing (at least on a larger scale than a mass spectrometer).
Also, that's quite the assumption you're making there.
Have you ever considered that this kind of bullshit in a high-profile media outlet can be so deeply insulting and outraging that one takes the time to react even if one can barely afford it? Because you know if the general public has the illusion that you're doing almost nothing, your crippling workload will only get worse? What would your wife do if she was #1 and her profession was being painted as having a very light workload and long breaks? If you answer "nothing", then your wife has a very thick skin and no sense of self-preservation.
Actually, since this is predominantly a computer science crowd, let's try to explain it in purely binary terms (or a simplified pure quantum mechanical model if you wish). Every particle in your system is a binary bit; 0 is ground state (low energy) and 1 is excited state (high energy). Now, our kelvin scale is defined so that 0K is all 0s (there's only one state that satisfies this criterion) and +infinity is a 50/50 mix of 0s and 1s (which has the largest number of possible combinations/states:= highest entropy). That worked pretty well for a long time since one never can go higher than 50/50 through ordinary heating. The problems started when people figured out clever tricks to have more 1s than 0s. This is called a population inversion, and LASER and NMR/MRI rely on it. The temperature of such an inverted population would be "beyond infinity", in other words, not representable in the kelvin scale. The solution was to use negative temperatures for these inverted populations: all 1s would be -0K (the fact that -0 is not the same as +0 is not a problem because neither of these states can ever be reached), and the temperature would go down (-1, -2,...) as 0s are introduced, to ultimately reach -infinity at the same 50/50 mix as +infinity (so basically + and - infinity are the same state). This weird system turns out to have mathematically convenient properties. Just to get an idea, if one inverts this temperature scale (ie. define a new new (K^-1) scale that goes with 1/T), the 50/50 state would be 0(K^-1), all 1s is -infinity (K^-1) and all 0s is +infinity (K^-1), so the problems at 0 and infinity are solved.
Remarks: - given the above, I feel it's more correct to state that inverting a population is going through infinity (as opposed to going through zero).
- inverted populations are not stable; when perturbed, they always equilibrate to positive temperature states (and they cannot be maintained through ordinary heating as another reply incorrectly stated, though they can through pumping, as in continuous-wave lasers). This equilibration can, however, take several seconds (in NMR applications) - long enough for practically useful applications.
TL:DR; version: negative temperature matter doesn't contain less energy than 0K; a good deal more in fact.
In the second scenario, Alice may get what she wants sure.... but.... she has what she wanted. Her and Bob are no longer conspirators. In their next meeting, Bob can do it all over again, but Alice now has power over Bob. If Bob doesn't give her what she wants, all she has to do is drop a dime on him. Each transaction gives her more and more power over him, and digs him deeper and deeper into his relationship with his future bunk mate.
Umm... isn't that a bad thing?
So end result? Bob would have to be exceptionally stupid to accept even the first bribe.
It may leave Alice getting off scott free for her behaviour, if it happens, but.... I wager (and it is the claim of those who advocate this) that it prevents more bribes than it lets Alices get off.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? It's not that people/politicians ever go for the quick buck and regret it later... oh, wait!
Interesting... this would mean that my sources arguing that rising insurance costs are an acute problem for the nuclear industry are dead wrong. And on closer inspection, it looks like they are too. Yet again, never trust anything you read on the internets, folks.
Sure as hell there exists no large and generally accepted body of scientific evidence "that you have to get to (and remain at) nearly starvation levels for that to work as a long-term solution". It's the law of conservation of energy: the body consumes a baseline of energy and if your energy uptake is below that baseline (which is still far from starvation), it has to burn fat to make up for the deficit. Pulling up the baseline (regular exercise) also works. All medically/dietary sound weight loss programs work on this basis. As opposed to the high-profile dietary fads that work by disrupting your digestive system or metabolism.
I'm as concerned as the next guy about the effects of the "money primary" destroying the country, but you'll have to explain how legalization of marijuana would go against the interest of "big money". Next, I'd ask what you are smoking, but I think I have a hunch.
$0.03/kWh is only possible for nuclear reactors which have paid off their capital investment already and are only paying for maintenance. Wind power under the same conditions can produce at lower cost than that.
Don't forget insurance costs. It's the main reason why the building of new reactors has been slow even before Fukushima. Because of this, I doubt new reactors with new insurance plans will ever reach $0.03/kWh... They might be safer by design, but I doubt the insurance companies will cut their prices a lot because of this. They're more likely to adapt a "wait and see" attitude.
There's actually variation within the brands as well, and some manufacturers are quite upfront about it. Last time I went to the lighting department of my closest wal-mart, they had a huge lineup of GE CFLs. They were not only diversified by color temperature and form factor, but also by expected lifetime, ie. the expected lifetime is written somewhere on the box and the ones for which it's low are markedly cheaper.
I've been replacing Incandescent bulbs with a wide variety of CFLs since 2003 or so and I always had a tendency to stay away from the cheap stuff. Overall, my failure rates are so low that I can't even make reliable statistics; once I put in a CFL, I usually don't have to replace it anymore. That is, except for one pretty large batch of very cheap GE bulbs, which I bought in 2007 and all of which failed in less that 2 years.
Conclusion: regardless of the brand, stay away from the cheap ones.
NK is no direct threat to the USA and anyone asserting otherwise is a fearmonger. The worse thing they can do is invade the South, which from a purely selfish US-centric point of view would only be a major inconvenience. Only in the hypothetical case that South Korea and its allies cannot repel the attack, it would become a major geopolitical setback.
As a side note, I'd really like to see hard evidence about that 55-gallon drum claim; I don't see the driving force for optimizing the guidance system to that level of precision. I'm not saying it's wrong (I heard it before), just that I'd like to see the evidence.
While I strongly agree with the "clouded judgment" and confirmation bias part, I don't think NK is a very good example at all. Literally all data we have on NK paint a dismal picture. And this shouldn't even be a surprise given all the embargos combined with the fact that the regime is doing its best at shooting itself in the foot at every step.
Also, there's bias in the other direction as well. There's a large and powerful political force in the US that thinks it's in its best interest to keep the population fearful, and that will do everything to paint NK as a direct threat to the US, which it really isn't.
Yeah, and if they had an orbital antimatter weapon, they could simply take out American cities one by one.
Given the mass constrictions of a rocket payload, you can only get multi-MT out of thermonuclear weapons, which NK seems very far from developing. The few nuclear tests they did are widely believed to be pure fission devices, and even those didn't function optimally. This would hint to a crude construction that would be far too heavy to put on top of a missile. At the rate they're advancing, it is far from sure the country will last long enough to ever build a properly functioning 10s-of-kT warhead that can be carried by a missile, leave alone a muti-MT thermonuclear device. They may succeed to develop the required re-entry technology and guidance systems faster (although it's also a difficult problem and they're going very slow on that front as well).
A more credible threat would be for them to develop crude re-entry technology and deliver a very potent chemical or biological weapon to a generally densely populated area such as the northeast (or somehow slip the weapon onto a ship). Of course, given the US's well-known tendency to overreact on domestic terrorism by a factor 30, this would reduce NK to a series of glass craters, so they first have to get really suicidal.
No weakness required, simply the ability to make educated guesses about the data being hashed. As in brute forcing password hashes. Granted, hash functions are used for a host of other applications, but password hashes happen to be pretty high-profile, and most definitely have a requirement that they shouldn't be too fast. You can call GP's claim 3) not generally true, but to call it bullshit is, well, bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
And all that would be OK - we're really passionate about what we're doing and a lot of us love the job despite all the pain - but the fact that we're constantly being painted as lazy fat cats that have an easy life, that's too much. This stereotype is slowly destroying American science, because it makes policymakers think they need to put just a little bit more pressure on us. And with this article in Forbes, a line has been crossed. You probably could get away with making covert allusions in mainstream media that black people (or pick whichever majority you want) are lazy, but put it into a high-profile magazine like this and you'll have riots. What you're seeing are outbursts of a pain that's been building up for decades. The stereotype has become an acute threat. If we were farmers, we would drive our tractors to the capital and block all the roads, but since we're academics, we write angry walls of text.
Ricin is not a gas. (...)
True, but it can be powdered small enough to inhale.
He presents evidence that Iran (Hezbollah) is building up a supply of ricin gas in the US,
Which assumption am I making exactly? I was basically trying to summarize the article as I understood it.
That's newsworthy, assuming he isn't completely making everything up.
It's OK, we're all getting old. I'll get off your lawn now.
Ricin is not a gas. It's a protein, which makes it difficult to get into gaseous phase without decomposing (at least on a larger scale than a mass spectrometer).
Also, that's quite the assumption you're making there.
Have you ever considered that this kind of bullshit in a high-profile media outlet can be so deeply insulting and outraging that one takes the time to react even if one can barely afford it? Because you know if the general public has the illusion that you're doing almost nothing, your crippling workload will only get worse? What would your wife do if she was #1 and her profession was being painted as having a very light workload and long breaks? If you answer "nothing", then your wife has a very thick skin and no sense of self-preservation.
Then I'd think something like an asus transformer pad would be the best of both worlds...
Actually, since this is predominantly a computer science crowd, let's try to explain it in purely binary terms (or a simplified pure quantum mechanical model if you wish). Every particle in your system is a binary bit; 0 is ground state (low energy) and 1 is excited state (high energy). Now, our kelvin scale is defined so that 0K is all 0s (there's only one state that satisfies this criterion) and +infinity is a 50/50 mix of 0s and 1s (which has the largest number of possible combinations/states := highest entropy). That worked pretty well for a long time since one never can go higher than 50/50 through ordinary heating. The problems started when people figured out clever tricks to have more 1s than 0s. This is called a population inversion, and LASER and NMR/MRI rely on it. The temperature of such an inverted population would be "beyond infinity", in other words, not representable in the kelvin scale. The solution was to use negative temperatures for these inverted populations: all 1s would be -0K (the fact that -0 is not the same as +0 is not a problem because neither of these states can ever be reached), and the temperature would go down (-1, -2,...) as 0s are introduced, to ultimately reach -infinity at the same 50/50 mix as +infinity (so basically + and - infinity are the same state). This weird system turns out to have mathematically convenient properties. Just to get an idea, if one inverts this temperature scale (ie. define a new new (K^-1) scale that goes with 1/T), the 50/50 state would be 0(K^-1), all 1s is -infinity (K^-1) and all 0s is +infinity (K^-1), so the problems at 0 and infinity are solved.
Remarks: - given the above, I feel it's more correct to state that inverting a population is going through infinity (as opposed to going through zero).
- inverted populations are not stable; when perturbed, they always equilibrate to positive temperature states (and they cannot be maintained through ordinary heating as another reply incorrectly stated, though they can through pumping, as in continuous-wave lasers). This equilibration can, however, take several seconds (in NMR applications) - long enough for practically useful applications.
TL:DR; version: negative temperature matter doesn't contain less energy than 0K; a good deal more in fact.
In the second scenario, Alice may get what she wants sure.... but.... she has what she wanted. Her and Bob are no longer conspirators. In their next meeting, Bob can do it all over again, but Alice now has power over Bob. If Bob doesn't give her what she wants, all she has to do is drop a dime on him. Each transaction gives her more and more power over him, and digs him deeper and deeper into his relationship with his future bunk mate.
Umm... isn't that a bad thing?
So end result? Bob would have to be exceptionally stupid to accept even the first bribe.
It may leave Alice getting off scott free for her behaviour, if it happens, but.... I wager (and it is the claim of those who advocate this) that it prevents more bribes than it lets Alices get off.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? It's not that people/politicians ever go for the quick buck and regret it later... oh, wait!
And it looks like Cheney got punked by the same people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Indirect_nuclear_insurance_subsidy ;)
Interesting... this would mean that my sources arguing that rising insurance costs are an acute problem for the nuclear industry are dead wrong. And on closer inspection, it looks like they are too. Yet again, never trust anything you read on the internets, folks.
BTW, the 0.03$/kWh figure with which this discussion started is dead wrong as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Cost_per_kW.C2.B7h
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=nuclear-power-could-cost-trillions-2009-06-19
Sure as hell there exists no large and generally accepted body of scientific evidence "that you have to get to (and remain at) nearly starvation levels for that to work as a long-term solution". It's the law of conservation of energy: the body consumes a baseline of energy and if your energy uptake is below that baseline (which is still far from starvation), it has to burn fat to make up for the deficit. Pulling up the baseline (regular exercise) also works. All medically/dietary sound weight loss programs work on this basis. As opposed to the high-profile dietary fads that work by disrupting your digestive system or metabolism.
I'm as concerned as the next guy about the effects of the "money primary" destroying the country, but you'll have to explain how legalization of marijuana would go against the interest of "big money". Next, I'd ask what you are smoking, but I think I have a hunch.
$0.03/kWh is only possible for nuclear reactors which have paid off their capital investment already and are only paying for maintenance. Wind power under the same conditions can produce at lower cost than that.
Don't forget insurance costs. It's the main reason why the building of new reactors has been slow even before Fukushima. Because of this, I doubt new reactors with new insurance plans will ever reach $0.03/kWh... They might be safer by design, but I doubt the insurance companies will cut their prices a lot because of this. They're more likely to adapt a "wait and see" attitude.
n/t
... which are mostly made in china as well.
There's actually variation within the brands as well, and some manufacturers are quite upfront about it. Last time I went to the lighting department of my closest wal-mart, they had a huge lineup of GE CFLs. They were not only diversified by color temperature and form factor, but also by expected lifetime, ie. the expected lifetime is written somewhere on the box and the ones for which it's low are markedly cheaper.
I've been replacing Incandescent bulbs with a wide variety of CFLs since 2003 or so and I always had a tendency to stay away from the cheap stuff. Overall, my failure rates are so low that I can't even make reliable statistics; once I put in a CFL, I usually don't have to replace it anymore. That is, except for one pretty large batch of very cheap GE bulbs, which I bought in 2007 and all of which failed in less that 2 years.
Conclusion: regardless of the brand, stay away from the cheap ones.
I have a bath in my bathroom, and I take a dump etc in the WC in the *separate* room next to it. More hygienic for a start.
If you suffer from frequent bouts of explosive diarrhoea, then you might want to cut down on the exotic food.
Otherwise, more hygienic how?
Whoosh?
You fool! Never say that!
NK is no direct threat to the USA and anyone asserting otherwise is a fearmonger. The worse thing they can do is invade the South, which from a purely selfish US-centric point of view would only be a major inconvenience. Only in the hypothetical case that South Korea and its allies cannot repel the attack, it would become a major geopolitical setback.
As a side note, I'd really like to see hard evidence about that 55-gallon drum claim; I don't see the driving force for optimizing the guidance system to that level of precision. I'm not saying it's wrong (I heard it before), just that I'd like to see the evidence.
While I strongly agree with the "clouded judgment" and confirmation bias part, I don't think NK is a very good example at all. Literally all data we have on NK paint a dismal picture. And this shouldn't even be a surprise given all the embargos combined with the fact that the regime is doing its best at shooting itself in the foot at every step.
Also, there's bias in the other direction as well. There's a large and powerful political force in the US that thinks it's in its best interest to keep the population fearful, and that will do everything to paint NK as a direct threat to the US, which it really isn't.
Yeah, and if they had an orbital antimatter weapon, they could simply take out American cities one by one.
Given the mass constrictions of a rocket payload, you can only get multi-MT out of thermonuclear weapons, which NK seems very far from developing. The few nuclear tests they did are widely believed to be pure fission devices, and even those didn't function optimally. This would hint to a crude construction that would be far too heavy to put on top of a missile. At the rate they're advancing, it is far from sure the country will last long enough to ever build a properly functioning 10s-of-kT warhead that can be carried by a missile, leave alone a muti-MT thermonuclear device. They may succeed to develop the required re-entry technology and guidance systems faster (although it's also a difficult problem and they're going very slow on that front as well).
A more credible threat would be for them to develop crude re-entry technology and deliver a very potent chemical or biological weapon to a generally densely populated area such as the northeast (or somehow slip the weapon onto a ship). Of course, given the US's well-known tendency to overreact on domestic terrorism by a factor 30, this would reduce NK to a series of glass craters, so they first have to get really suicidal.
Better link.
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
http://xkcd.com/605/
Second, no manufacturer is going to extend a warranty beyond minimum requirements...
No weakness required, simply the ability to make educated guesses about the data being hashed. As in brute forcing password hashes. Granted, hash functions are used for a host of other applications, but password hashes happen to be pretty high-profile, and most definitely have a requirement that they shouldn't be too fast. You can call GP's claim 3) not generally true, but to call it bullshit is, well, bullshit.