It's just a Prof that's spent $2 million on a wild goose chase.
Well, given that the USA is spending about $10 million an hour on the war in Iraq and considering that the USA's interest in the Middle East is mostly about energy (specifically oil), I'd have to conclude that solving the USA's energy problems is rather important.
Compared to the cost of the Iraq war, $2 million for some obscure research into energy technology doesn't sound too bad.
Good old Carnot's law. The efficiency is limited by the temperature drop across the device compared to the absolute temperature.
Well, if this Prof's sound-based device actually achieved the maximum Carnot efficiency with no moving parts and a size that could fit into a pocket then that would be a breakthrough worthy of a Nobel prize. Now, given that the Prof (or one of his grad students) is shown heating the thing with a blow torch, I'm guessing that the device doesn't actually come close to the maximum Carnot cycle efficiency.
Still, as long as the Prof is honest and is willing to explore the inherent shortcomings of the technology, there is the potential for him to generate some previously unknown results which would be valuable in solving the USA's energy problems.
Carnot's Theorem applies to heat engines that use a gas to do work.
The "proof" of Carnot's Theorem actually has two parts. First, for the case of heat engines based on compressing ideal gasses, one calculates how much heat has to flow between two different reservoirs in order to do a certain amount of useful work (i.e. the "efficiency"). Second, one shows that if any other heat engine ever had a different "efficiency" then one would be able to construct a perpetual motion device of the second kind.
The argument is basically that, since no one has ever observed either a natural or constructed perpetual motion device, the maximum efficiency of any heat engine must be the same as a heat engine based on ideal gases.
A rigorous proof of the Second Law is difficult because you would have to show that no possible physical system can ever exceed the Carnot efficiency. At this point, there are still a lot of physical systems that can not be modeled exactly.
On the other hand, the "Fluctuation Theorem" goes a long way toward showing that the standard thermodynamic models (e.g. classical and quantum statistical mechanics) obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As I understand it, the Fluctuation Theorem is based on something like time reversal symmetry - that is, classical and quantum statistical mechanics both have something like time reversal symmetry which is the basis for the proof of the Fluctuation Theorem.
Politicos in the White House or elsewhere, have mistakenly typed.org instead of.gov when addressing their emails. The www.whitehouse.org [whitehouse.org] owners are none to happy with Bush's politics, and so routinely forward their emails to Greg Palast, whose reputation is well known.
Actually, it was a.org vrs.com mixup. The White House (.gov) is required to retain email.
OK. Let's see if I can sort this out.
The whitehouse.gov domain is for official presidential business and is carefully archived - no emails to this domain were lost. The whitehouse.com domain is a random "people search" website that is irrelevant. The whitehouse.org site is unfriendly to the Bush administration so it may have forwarded misaddressed whitehouse.gov emails but that would also be irrelevent to this particular story because whitehouse.gov emails are carefully archived anyway.
According the the article, the lost emails that were "found" by Greg Palast were actually intended for georgewbush.com (owned by the Republicans - not archived) but they were mistakenly sent to georgewbush.org and the owners of georgewbush.org forwarded them to Greg Palast.
Quoting Greg Palast from the article:
Karl Rove, people think he's an evil genius, but that's only about half right. I mean, he's not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he and his guys were mistyping their email addresses, sent them to georgewbush.org, instead of dotcom, which is an email domain owned by friends of ours, who shot them right to us.
Our democracy is in great peril as long as these "win at all costs" idiots are in the game.
I'm less concerned about people who want their political party to win at all costs and more concerned about people who want their government to "win" at all costs.
I was watching a documentary recently where some law enforcement representative was defending question "anti-terrorism" tactics on the grounds that it was necessary to preserve freedom in the USA. I thought to myself "Doesn't this law enforcement representative realize that it is the US government itself that is the greatest threat to freedom in the USA?"
The chances that Islamic extremists could successfully take control of the USA and set up an Islamic fundamentalist government in the USA are astronomically small. On the other hand, I'd put the odds of the of the USA government ceasing to become a democracy in the next 50 years at more than 10%. While odds of the USA becoming a (non-Islamic) dictatorship are admittedly low enough that I haven't yet moved to Canada, the odds are high enough that I feel obligated to watch things pretty closely.
Speaking of watching things closely, it's the Bush administrations attempts to avoid oversight that really bother me. Whether it's the PATRIOT Act gag orders or the flaunting of the Presidential Records Act, if the people don't know what the government is doing then the people can't insure that the government is behaving the way they want it to.
I think the most general idea behind science is that the behaviour of the universe can be expressed in a simpler form - basically compressing the information.
That's very close to my definition of science. The way I see it, science is about summarizing and organizing patterns of mutually agreed upon (factual) observations.
At a fundamental level, I don't know if the universe actually exists (I could be in a virtual reality) and I don't even know if I really have human form (I could just be some sort of AI computer program). I do, however, observe/experience things and there are patterns to what I observe. I observe myself to exist and I observe other people (whether they really exist or not) to be like me and I observe these people to observe the same things that I observe (including my existence).
This leads to the concept of mutually agreed upon factual observations. For example, I observe the sun to be at different points in the sky at different times and I observe other people to also make the same observations. Not only that, but there are patterns to where the sun appears in the sky. The sun rises in the east, moves uniformly across the sky and sets in the west. Science, by my definition, would include summarizing and organizing the mutually agreed upon factual observations of the sun, for example.
Of course, some of the patterns are much more fundamental and are only indirectly related to direct observations (e.g. they are inferred). Quantum mechanics would be one example of such a fundamental pattern. These fundamental patterns are, however, still consistent with general definition of science as organizing and summarizing patterns in mutually agreed upon factual observations.
What do employee/employer relationships at Best Buy have to do with democracy? Nobody has subverted representative government here.
People mean a lot of different things when they talk about "democracy".
What I tend to think about is the early history of the USA. Basically, you had bunch of monarchies in Europe with the attitude that "what's good for the king is good for the country". Then, some rather enlightened people in what was to become the USA looked at the situation and concluded that if you let the leaders act in their own best interest then they take just about everything for themselves and leave everyone else with very little.
The way I see it, the key realizatoin was that, unless leaders are subjected to oversight and compelled to act in the best interest of everyone, leaders will instead act in their own best interest to the detriment of everyone else. At the time, these ideas were applied to the leaders of governments.
While there are differences between governments and corporations, there are also fundamental similarities. In theory, one can avoid being subjected to either governments or corporations (e.g. buy a house boat and live out on the ocean). In practice, for a normal life, one must be subject to both governments and corporations. While it is the governments that most directly use force (e.g. polie and military), in practice the governments use their force on behalf of the corporations so there is little practical difference.
If I told you I would give you $10 for a $1 bill, would you take it?
That would depend where the $10 came from. If you were going to get the $10 by charging me $10 extra for my groceries and then only give me the $1 on the condition that I bought a product I didn't have a use for then no.
You talk about this magical FCC auction that's going to net the government $10 billion - but have you thought about where this $10 billion is going to come from? I'll guarantee that the CEO's of the companies buying the spectrum aren't going to be taking it out of their own pay. Instead, these costs will be passed on to advertisers buying television commercials who will pass the costs on to their consumers in the form of higher prices for their products.
Every dollar from the auction that the US government uses to buy someone a TV tuner is a dollar extra that someone is going to be paying for their consumer products.
At some level, I could see the justification for some kind of government compensation if analog TV owners had created the electromagnetic spectrum from their own labor. If digital TV owners were then going to be using this electromagnetic spectrum that analog TV owners had created, it would only be fair for the digital TV owners to compensate analog TV owners. That's a long way from what's happening here though.
What really bothers me is that there is this attitude that if it's not obvious where the money is coming from then the money must have been created out of thin air. Every product or service that a government gives out "for free" represents work done by someone somewhere along the line. If you didn't do work equivalent to what you're getting from the government then you're free riding on someone else who did.
I haven't read the paper, but I don't think this (a thorough comparison) is as hard as you think it is.
What I was referring to was guaranteeing that a particular search method can find the best match. If I understand what you're saying, it may not be that important to guarantee a best match - which is a good point.
With respect to guaranteeing that a search has found a best match, there are two problems. The first problem is that the search method may not reflect what is actually desired. If you want to find the inhibitor that binds most tightly to an enzyme then find the molecule that has the smallest RMS deviation from a rigid alignment to a known inhibitor may not give the tightest binding. The second problem is that even if you restrict yourself to rigid RMS deviation, the only way to guarantee the best RMS deviation is to use that as your search method.
In the general case, all possible pairings must be tried through an exhaustive enumeration.
Why should that be true?
For some measures of 3D similarity there are shortcuts and for other measures there aren't shortcuts. For example, what happens if part of our query molecule is very similar to part of a molecule in the database we are searching? Does that count as a match or not? If the answer is that it does not count as a match, then we could sort our search database by number of atoms - only those molecules that have the same number of atoms as the query need to be considered. If the answer is that it does count as a match then all parts of our query molecule need to be compared to all parts of of every molecule in the database.
One of the most common methods for comparing molecules is to pair atoms in the query molecule with atoms in the molecule from the database and then add up some measure of the distance between the pairs of atoms. The most common measure of distance is root mean square (RMS) deviation. The problem with pair-distance similarity measure is that changing even a single pairing can dramatically change the best alignment (i.e. a rotation and a translation). The consequence of this is that the only way to be sure that the best pairings have been found is to try all possible pairings.
The deeper problem is that it's not clear that a rigid alignment is desirable. Many molecules are quite flexible. In that case, an optimal search would consider all possible pairing and all possible molecular conformations. Obviously, this is quite a large search space. A search algorithm that could find a guaranteed optimal pairing and conformation without exhaustive search would be a huge innovation. That doesn't seem to be what the people in the article have done, though. For that matter, it may even be impossible.
NewScientistTech has a story about a 3D molecular search engine that is over 1,500 times faster than anything previously developed.
The implication both from the summary and from the article itself is that this new search is just as thorough as other search methods but much faster. To prove thoroughness they would have had to show that anything found by other search methods will also be found by their new, much faster, search method. I doubt very much that they were able to do prove this rigorously.
That's not to say that the problem of matching 3D molecular shapes is not important or that their research is not valuable. I would say, though, that it is misleading to claim that they have solved the 3D search problem with a much faster algorithm. There are many different measure of 3D similarity and, for many measures of similarity, the only way to guarantee an optimum match is by exhaustive search.
Note that, in general, every search will be exhaustive in the sense that the query must be compared to every entry in the database. The problem is that many measures of similarity have additional parameters that must be optimized by exhaustive enumeration for each comparison. The classic example is a measure of 3D similarity that pairs each atom in the query with an atom from the structure in the database. In the general case, all possible pairings must be tried through an exhaustive enumeration.
...I'm unaware of any actual problems caused by the electoral vote system that would be eliminated with its removal.
How about situations where the winner of the popular vote doesn't win the election? While it may be difficult to argue that one politician is better than another in an absolute sense, different presidents do lead the USA in different directions. It would be a very different world if Al Gore had been elected president in 2000.
The more fundamental problem with the electoral vote system is that, since the winner of even a slim majority in a state gets all the electoral votes of that state, voters in certain states have much more impact on the outcome of the election than voters in other states. Imagine a system where residents of certain states got multiple votes. It just wouldn't be a fair system but the electoral college is like that.
blockquote>The founders of the United States intentionally avoided letting people vote directly on legislation...
The founders also avoided letting people vote directly for president which, in retrospect, has created more problems than it solved. As a practical matter, letting people vote directly on legislation was simply not possible when the USA was founded.
...in order to avoid mob justice...
Theoretically, that's what the supreme court is for. In practice, mob justice gets through anyway. It wasn't that long ago that the government had a system of laws that helped people in the USA kidnap people from Africa and force them to work for free.
...and ensure that the law was formed by those with at least some training in principles of governance.
Huh? I'm not aware of any requirement for training -experience, maybe, but not training. The more fundamental question is: if ordinary people are incapable of evaluating legislation then how are they supposed to evaluate candidates for the legislature? Appearance? Ability to act "sincere"?
Remember that the U.S. initiative against Iraq...
I'm not remembering that the elected members of the legislature were a voice of restraint.
...they would then turn on that portion of the population which rejected calls for tighter restrictions on whatever matters.
Theoretically, the supreme court requires laws to be applied fairly and equally. Theoretically, they wouldn't be able to hurt one portion of the population without hurting themselves equally. In practice, the supreme court allows things as bizarre as letting the US government ignore the bill of rights in its treatment of non-citizens.
Internet voting is like nuclear power. There are huge advantages but unless you're really careful there is also the potential for major disasters.
Eventually, through the use of Internet voting, it will be possible for people to vote on proposed legislation directly. If there's some issue you care deeply about, e.g. a declaration of war, then you can vote directly. If it's not an issue you care deeply about, you can let your elected representative cast a vote on your behalf. Under the current system your elected representative always gets to cast your vote even when you disagree.
Until the security issues are worked out, governments need to be very very cautious. It wouldn't hurt to start testing and developing Internet voting through things like non-binding opinion polls and possibly certain local elections. It will most likely be decades before Internet voting can be made secure enough to be used in United States federal elections.
This kind of reminds me of property taxes, where someone walks up to your house, says "I reckons she's worth about this much, so you pay me that much", despite the fact that your house is earning you no income...
If your house has no value to you then why do you own a house?
Obviously your house does have value to you and obviously it would have value to other people. Unless you run your house as a public park, other people are denied the value of your house because you own it (and use that ownership to deny them access).
The fundamental distinction that needs to be made is the value of your house itself versus the value of the land your house is on. Somewhere along the line, someone did work to create your house so they had a right to own your house and to (probably indirectly) sell it to you.
The land your house is on is another story entirely. No one produced the land. It was just there. If everyone in the world was born at the same time and given an equal share of the land at birth then there might be some legitimate claim to ownership. As it is, it is very hard to justify individual land ownership as "fair" (that is note to say that using a market system to allocate land has no benefits whatsoever).
Given that not everyone in the world was born at the same time, the most fair system would be for land to be owned collectively by everyone on the planet with a system to allow people to rent the parcels of land for exclusive use from everyone collectively. Such a system is very similar to a "land value tax". For a more detailed discussion of these issues have a look at the wikipedia entries on land value tax and Henry George.
Note that because everyone you be receiving their share of the rent, they could use the rent they received to pay to rent a small piece of land for themselves. If everyone rented an equal share of land then the rent received would exactly cancel the rent payed. It is more likely that certain people would rent larger parcels of land so that everyone else would receive a net income.
Those researchers and academics who are most outspoken and sure they are correct end up being considered as such.
The problem I see with scientific publication is a bit different. The problem is not that the scientific community comes to the wrong consensus. The problem is that the scientific community doesn't come to a consensus at all.
Rather than being due to the peer review process, this problem is due to the whole system of scientific publication. To look successful a scientist has to publish journal articles on a regular basis that are "innovative" (e.g. the articles comes to different conclusions than previous articles). As I see it, what is needed is a collaborative database of research results along the lines of wikipedia. Obviously the database would need a mechanism for scientist to express dissent with the consensus viewpoint but the focus would be on collaborating to achieve a consensus viewpoint.
The key would be to identify consensus where it existed but to avoid forcing a consensus on overly strong conclusions.
Messing things up on a global scale would be difficult but messing up local gradients (right next the power plant) could definitely be a problem.
With respect to ocean gradients on a global scale, the ocean gradients are fundamentally maintained by solar and geothermal heating (and cooling due to energy being radiated into space) so, in general, they would be replenished.
In energy generation, the point of burning a fuel is usually just to create a temperature gradient. Using naturally occurring temperature gradients is certainly attractive.
Existing energy generation technologies generally require a large difference between the high and low temperatures (e.g. steam generation). If economically feasible technologies are developed that can use gradients with smaller temperature differences then even the temperature gradients in the ocean would provide useful energy.
Libel and slander apply to real, individual people, not fictional people or groups.
In a certain sense, I agree about the realness part. Libel and slander are primarily focused on specific accusations. Falsely accusing Mr. X of stealing a television on the 3rd of June is worse than falsely accusing Mr. X of having stolen something at some time in the past or falsely accusing Mr. X of being likely to steal something in the future.
On the other hand, members of ethnic groups are real, individual people. Accusing members of an ethnic group of being likely to steal something in the future is, in fact, accusing real individual people of being likely to seal something in the future.
It's not unworkable, it's immoral. What part of free speech don't you understand?
Libel and slander and not protected speech in the sense that you can get punished for libelous or slanderous speech. Implying that a character's negative traits are due to the character's ethnicity comes very close to libel/slander.
Essentially, you are saying that someone who is a member of that ethnic group has negative traits even when that is not accurate. Speech that inaccurately accuses someone of negative traits is not given the same protections as others forms of speech.
The problem is news producers giving them air play without checking the facts.
There is also a deeper problem with the way news producers structure the news. The news is presented as simple sound bites that are (supposedly) either completely true or completely false.
The objection I have to the news is not that it's "wrong" but that it's "not even wrong". Most of the time the sound bites are so vague that they could be either true or false depending on the interpretation.
Rather that telling celebrities that they are simply "wrong" (and news anchors are, incidentally, celebrities), celebrities need to be encouraged to make more precise statements that correspond to observed facts.
...I'll believe in free will until someone can explain to me the subtleties of massively complex systems with feedback.
Frost forms complex patterns on window panes even though the underlying components of frost (water molecules) interact according to relatively simple rules. Complex behaviors are not necessarily free will.
Any understanding of "free will" will have to take into account existing observations. People are self-aware. People can make predictions about the outcomes (consequences) of various actions. These outcomes can impact other people. People have preferences with respect the predicted (and actual) outcomes. People can influence each other - including collective influences.
Certainly, all these observations are compatible with the laws of physics (by definition). It is the more subtle questions that remain to be answered. If you put two pennies on a table and then "choose" one of the pennies, did you really have a choice? What does it mean to "choose"?
But that's not what he says. cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, because if I think there must be a thing that thinks, and that thing that thinks must exist, because otherwise it couldn't think. At no point does he observe himself or anything else, because all observational data is suspect to Descartes.
I'm not an expert on Descartes but the way to make it work is
I observe myself to think. My definition of existing is such that thinking is existing (but existing is not necessarily thinking). Therefore I observe myself to exist."
As insightful as your post is, it yet fails to incorporate the soul into the debate.
Not necessarily. It fails to incorporate an indivisible and immortal human soul.
Imagine that your soul is not indivisible. When you interact with someone part of your soul breaks off and merges with the other person's souls and part of their soul breaks of and merges with your soul. Even when you watch someone on television, part of their soul (and the soul of the person who wrote their script) merges with your own soul. When you have a (biological) child part of your soul is passed onto your child.
When you die, the part of your soul associated with you body ceases to exist but the parts of your soul that were passed on to your children and the other people you interacted with over the course of your life continue to live on.
...when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality.
A "measurement" is really just a particular interaction (or chains of interactions). The current model of quantum physics includes randomness. Whether a particular interaction occurs can only be expressed as a probability. Randomness does not, however, imply free will. A computer program can include a random number generator making its behavior non-deterministic but that doesn't mean the computer program has free will. Just because a person's behavior can only be expressed in terms of probabilities does not mean that the person has "free will". The person's behavior will ultimately be dictated by random chance (among other things).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, given that the USA is spending about $10 million an hour on the war in Iraq and considering that the USA's interest in the Middle East is mostly about energy (specifically oil), I'd have to conclude that solving the USA's energy problems is rather important.
Compared to the cost of the Iraq war, $2 million for some obscure research into energy technology doesn't sound too bad.
Well, if this Prof's sound-based device actually achieved the maximum Carnot efficiency with no moving parts and a size that could fit into a pocket then that would be a breakthrough worthy of a Nobel prize. Now, given that the Prof (or one of his grad students) is shown heating the thing with a blow torch, I'm guessing that the device doesn't actually come close to the maximum Carnot cycle efficiency.
Still, as long as the Prof is honest and is willing to explore the inherent shortcomings of the technology, there is the potential for him to generate some previously unknown results which would be valuable in solving the USA's energy problems.
The "proof" of Carnot's Theorem actually has two parts. First, for the case of heat engines based on compressing ideal gasses, one calculates how much heat has to flow between two different reservoirs in order to do a certain amount of useful work (i.e. the "efficiency"). Second, one shows that if any other heat engine ever had a different "efficiency" then one would be able to construct a perpetual motion device of the second kind.
The argument is basically that, since no one has ever observed either a natural or constructed perpetual motion device, the maximum efficiency of any heat engine must be the same as a heat engine based on ideal gases.
A rigorous proof of the Second Law is difficult because you would have to show that no possible physical system can ever exceed the Carnot efficiency. At this point, there are still a lot of physical systems that can not be modeled exactly.
On the other hand, the "Fluctuation Theorem" goes a long way toward showing that the standard thermodynamic models (e.g. classical and quantum statistical mechanics) obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As I understand it, the Fluctuation Theorem is based on something like time reversal symmetry - that is, classical and quantum statistical mechanics both have something like time reversal symmetry which is the basis for the proof of the Fluctuation Theorem.
OK. Let's see if I can sort this out.
The whitehouse.gov domain is for official presidential business and is carefully archived - no emails to this domain were lost. The whitehouse.com domain is a random "people search" website that is irrelevant. The whitehouse.org site is unfriendly to the Bush administration so it may have forwarded misaddressed whitehouse.gov emails but that would also be irrelevent to this particular story because whitehouse.gov emails are carefully archived anyway.
According the the article, the lost emails that were "found" by Greg Palast were actually intended for georgewbush.com (owned by the Republicans - not archived) but they were mistakenly sent to georgewbush.org and the owners of georgewbush.org forwarded them to Greg Palast.
Quoting Greg Palast from the article:
Karl Rove, people think he's an evil genius, but that's only about half right. I mean, he's not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he and his guys were mistyping their email addresses, sent them to georgewbush.org, instead of dotcom, which is an email domain owned by friends of ours, who shot them right to us.
I'm less concerned about people who want their political party to win at all costs and more concerned about people who want their government to "win" at all costs.
I was watching a documentary recently where some law enforcement representative was defending question "anti-terrorism" tactics on the grounds that it was necessary to preserve freedom in the USA. I thought to myself "Doesn't this law enforcement representative realize that it is the US government itself that is the greatest threat to freedom in the USA?"
The chances that Islamic extremists could successfully take control of the USA and set up an Islamic fundamentalist government in the USA are astronomically small. On the other hand, I'd put the odds of the of the USA government ceasing to become a democracy in the next 50 years at more than 10%. While odds of the USA becoming a (non-Islamic) dictatorship are admittedly low enough that I haven't yet moved to Canada, the odds are high enough that I feel obligated to watch things pretty closely.
Speaking of watching things closely, it's the Bush administrations attempts to avoid oversight that really bother me. Whether it's the PATRIOT Act gag orders or the flaunting of the Presidential Records Act, if the people don't know what the government is doing then the people can't insure that the government is behaving the way they want it to.
That's very close to my definition of science. The way I see it, science is about summarizing and organizing patterns of mutually agreed upon (factual) observations.
At a fundamental level, I don't know if the universe actually exists (I could be in a virtual reality) and I don't even know if I really have human form (I could just be some sort of AI computer program). I do, however, observe/experience things and there are patterns to what I observe. I observe myself to exist and I observe other people (whether they really exist or not) to be like me and I observe these people to observe the same things that I observe (including my existence).
This leads to the concept of mutually agreed upon factual observations. For example, I observe the sun to be at different points in the sky at different times and I observe other people to also make the same observations. Not only that, but there are patterns to where the sun appears in the sky. The sun rises in the east, moves uniformly across the sky and sets in the west. Science, by my definition, would include summarizing and organizing the mutually agreed upon factual observations of the sun, for example.
Of course, some of the patterns are much more fundamental and are only indirectly related to direct observations (e.g. they are inferred). Quantum mechanics would be one example of such a fundamental pattern. These fundamental patterns are, however, still consistent with general definition of science as organizing and summarizing patterns in mutually agreed upon factual observations.
People mean a lot of different things when they talk about "democracy".
What I tend to think about is the early history of the USA. Basically, you had bunch of monarchies in Europe with the attitude that "what's good for the king is good for the country". Then, some rather enlightened people in what was to become the USA looked at the situation and concluded that if you let the leaders act in their own best interest then they take just about everything for themselves and leave everyone else with very little.
The way I see it, the key realizatoin was that, unless leaders are subjected to oversight and compelled to act in the best interest of everyone, leaders will instead act in their own best interest to the detriment of everyone else. At the time, these ideas were applied to the leaders of governments.
While there are differences between governments and corporations, there are also fundamental similarities. In theory, one can avoid being subjected to either governments or corporations (e.g. buy a house boat and live out on the ocean). In practice, for a normal life, one must be subject to both governments and corporations. While it is the governments that most directly use force (e.g. polie and military), in practice the governments use their force on behalf of the corporations so there is little practical difference.
That would depend where the $10 came from. If you were going to get the $10 by charging me $10 extra for my groceries and then only give me the $1 on the condition that I bought a product I didn't have a use for then no.
You talk about this magical FCC auction that's going to net the government $10 billion - but have you thought about where this $10 billion is going to come from? I'll guarantee that the CEO's of the companies buying the spectrum aren't going to be taking it out of their own pay. Instead, these costs will be passed on to advertisers buying television commercials who will pass the costs on to their consumers in the form of higher prices for their products.
Every dollar from the auction that the US government uses to buy someone a TV tuner is a dollar extra that someone is going to be paying for their consumer products.
At some level, I could see the justification for some kind of government compensation if analog TV owners had created the electromagnetic spectrum from their own labor. If digital TV owners were then going to be using this electromagnetic spectrum that analog TV owners had created, it would only be fair for the digital TV owners to compensate analog TV owners. That's a long way from what's happening here though.
What really bothers me is that there is this attitude that if it's not obvious where the money is coming from then the money must have been created out of thin air. Every product or service that a government gives out "for free" represents work done by someone somewhere along the line. If you didn't do work equivalent to what you're getting from the government then you're free riding on someone else who did.
What I was referring to was guaranteeing that a particular search method can find the best match. If I understand what you're saying, it may not be that important to guarantee a best match - which is a good point.
With respect to guaranteeing that a search has found a best match, there are two problems. The first problem is that the search method may not reflect what is actually desired. If you want to find the inhibitor that binds most tightly to an enzyme then find the molecule that has the smallest RMS deviation from a rigid alignment to a known inhibitor may not give the tightest binding. The second problem is that even if you restrict yourself to rigid RMS deviation, the only way to guarantee the best RMS deviation is to use that as your search method.
For some measures of 3D similarity there are shortcuts and for other measures there aren't shortcuts. For example, what happens if part of our query molecule is very similar to part of a molecule in the database we are searching? Does that count as a match or not? If the answer is that it does not count as a match, then we could sort our search database by number of atoms - only those molecules that have the same number of atoms as the query need to be considered. If the answer is that it does count as a match then all parts of our query molecule need to be compared to all parts of of every molecule in the database.
One of the most common methods for comparing molecules is to pair atoms in the query molecule with atoms in the molecule from the database and then add up some measure of the distance between the pairs of atoms. The most common measure of distance is root mean square (RMS) deviation. The problem with pair-distance similarity measure is that changing even a single pairing can dramatically change the best alignment (i.e. a rotation and a translation). The consequence of this is that the only way to be sure that the best pairings have been found is to try all possible pairings.
The deeper problem is that it's not clear that a rigid alignment is desirable. Many molecules are quite flexible. In that case, an optimal search would consider all possible pairing and all possible molecular conformations. Obviously, this is quite a large search space. A search algorithm that could find a guaranteed optimal pairing and conformation without exhaustive search would be a huge innovation. That doesn't seem to be what the people in the article have done, though. For that matter, it may even be impossible.
The implication both from the summary and from the article itself is that this new search is just as thorough as other search methods but much faster. To prove thoroughness they would have had to show that anything found by other search methods will also be found by their new, much faster, search method. I doubt very much that they were able to do prove this rigorously.
That's not to say that the problem of matching 3D molecular shapes is not important or that their research is not valuable. I would say, though, that it is misleading to claim that they have solved the 3D search problem with a much faster algorithm. There are many different measure of 3D similarity and, for many measures of similarity, the only way to guarantee an optimum match is by exhaustive search.
Note that, in general, every search will be exhaustive in the sense that the query must be compared to every entry in the database. The problem is that many measures of similarity have additional parameters that must be optimized by exhaustive enumeration for each comparison. The classic example is a measure of 3D similarity that pairs each atom in the query with an atom from the structure in the database. In the general case, all possible pairings must be tried through an exhaustive enumeration.
How about situations where the winner of the popular vote doesn't win the election? While it may be difficult to argue that one politician is better than another in an absolute sense, different presidents do lead the USA in different directions. It would be a very different world if Al Gore had been elected president in 2000.
The more fundamental problem with the electoral vote system is that, since the winner of even a slim majority in a state gets all the electoral votes of that state, voters in certain states have much more impact on the outcome of the election than voters in other states. Imagine a system where residents of certain states got multiple votes. It just wouldn't be a fair system but the electoral college is like that.
blockquote>The founders of the United States intentionally avoided letting people vote directly on legislation...
The founders also avoided letting people vote directly for president which, in retrospect, has created more problems than it solved. As a practical matter, letting people vote directly on legislation was simply not possible when the USA was founded.
Theoretically, that's what the supreme court is for. In practice, mob justice gets through anyway. It wasn't that long ago that the government had a system of laws that helped people in the USA kidnap people from Africa and force them to work for free.
Huh? I'm not aware of any requirement for training -experience, maybe, but not training. The more fundamental question is: if ordinary people are incapable of evaluating legislation then how are they supposed to evaluate candidates for the legislature? Appearance? Ability to act "sincere"?
I'm not remembering that the elected members of the legislature were a voice of restraint.
Theoretically, the supreme court requires laws to be applied fairly and equally. Theoretically, they wouldn't be able to hurt one portion of the population without hurting themselves equally. In practice, the supreme court allows things as bizarre as letting the US government ignore the bill of rights in its treatment of non-citizens.
Internet voting is like nuclear power. There are huge advantages but unless you're really careful there is also the potential for major disasters.
Eventually, through the use of Internet voting, it will be possible for people to vote on proposed legislation directly. If there's some issue you care deeply about, e.g. a declaration of war, then you can vote directly. If it's not an issue you care deeply about, you can let your elected representative cast a vote on your behalf. Under the current system your elected representative always gets to cast your vote even when you disagree.
Until the security issues are worked out, governments need to be very very cautious. It wouldn't hurt to start testing and developing Internet voting through things like non-binding opinion polls and possibly certain local elections. It will most likely be decades before Internet voting can be made secure enough to be used in United States federal elections.
If your house has no value to you then why do you own a house?
Obviously your house does have value to you and obviously it would have value to other people. Unless you run your house as a public park, other people are denied the value of your house because you own it (and use that ownership to deny them access).
The fundamental distinction that needs to be made is the value of your house itself versus the value of the land your house is on. Somewhere along the line, someone did work to create your house so they had a right to own your house and to (probably indirectly) sell it to you.
The land your house is on is another story entirely. No one produced the land. It was just there. If everyone in the world was born at the same time and given an equal share of the land at birth then there might be some legitimate claim to ownership. As it is, it is very hard to justify individual land ownership as "fair" (that is note to say that using a market system to allocate land has no benefits whatsoever).
Given that not everyone in the world was born at the same time, the most fair system would be for land to be owned collectively by everyone on the planet with a system to allow people to rent the parcels of land for exclusive use from everyone collectively. Such a system is very similar to a "land value tax". For a more detailed discussion of these issues have a look at the wikipedia entries on land value tax and Henry George.
Note that because everyone you be receiving their share of the rent, they could use the rent they received to pay to rent a small piece of land for themselves. If everyone rented an equal share of land then the rent received would exactly cancel the rent payed. It is more likely that certain people would rent larger parcels of land so that everyone else would receive a net income.
The problem I see with scientific publication is a bit different. The problem is not that the scientific community comes to the wrong consensus. The problem is that the scientific community doesn't come to a consensus at all.
Rather than being due to the peer review process, this problem is due to the whole system of scientific publication. To look successful a scientist has to publish journal articles on a regular basis that are "innovative" (e.g. the articles comes to different conclusions than previous articles). As I see it, what is needed is a collaborative database of research results along the lines of wikipedia. Obviously the database would need a mechanism for scientist to express dissent with the consensus viewpoint but the focus would be on collaborating to achieve a consensus viewpoint.
The key would be to identify consensus where it existed but to avoid forcing a consensus on overly strong conclusions.
Messing things up on a global scale would be difficult but messing up local gradients (right next the power plant) could definitely be a problem.
With respect to ocean gradients on a global scale, the ocean gradients are fundamentally maintained by solar and geothermal heating (and cooling due to energy being radiated into space) so, in general, they would be replenished.
In energy generation, the point of burning a fuel is usually just to create a temperature gradient. Using naturally occurring temperature gradients is certainly attractive.
Existing energy generation technologies generally require a large difference between the high and low temperatures (e.g. steam generation). If economically feasible technologies are developed that can use gradients with smaller temperature differences then even the temperature gradients in the ocean would provide useful energy.
In a certain sense, I agree about the realness part. Libel and slander are primarily focused on specific accusations. Falsely accusing Mr. X of stealing a television on the 3rd of June is worse than falsely accusing Mr. X of having stolen something at some time in the past or falsely accusing Mr. X of being likely to steal something in the future.
On the other hand, members of ethnic groups are real, individual people. Accusing members of an ethnic group of being likely to steal something in the future is, in fact, accusing real individual people of being likely to seal something in the future.
Libel and slander and not protected speech in the sense that you can get punished for libelous or slanderous speech. Implying that a character's negative traits are due to the character's ethnicity comes very close to libel/slander.
Essentially, you are saying that someone who is a member of that ethnic group has negative traits even when that is not accurate. Speech that inaccurately accuses someone of negative traits is not given the same protections as others forms of speech.
There is also a deeper problem with the way news producers structure the news. The news is presented as simple sound bites that are (supposedly) either completely true or completely false.
The objection I have to the news is not that it's "wrong" but that it's "not even wrong". Most of the time the sound bites are so vague that they could be either true or false depending on the interpretation.
Rather that telling celebrities that they are simply "wrong" (and news anchors are, incidentally, celebrities), celebrities need to be encouraged to make more precise statements that correspond to observed facts.
Frost forms complex patterns on window panes even though the underlying components of frost (water molecules) interact according to relatively simple rules. Complex behaviors are not necessarily free will.
Any understanding of "free will" will have to take into account existing observations. People are self-aware. People can make predictions about the outcomes (consequences) of various actions. These outcomes can impact other people. People have preferences with respect the predicted (and actual) outcomes. People can influence each other - including collective influences.
Certainly, all these observations are compatible with the laws of physics (by definition). It is the more subtle questions that remain to be answered. If you put two pennies on a table and then "choose" one of the pennies, did you really have a choice? What does it mean to "choose"?
I'm not an expert on Descartes but the way to make it work is
I observe myself to think. My definition of existing is such that thinking is existing (but existing is not necessarily thinking). Therefore I observe myself to exist."
Not necessarily. It fails to incorporate an indivisible and immortal human soul.
Imagine that your soul is not indivisible. When you interact with someone part of your soul breaks off and merges with the other person's souls and part of their soul breaks of and merges with your soul. Even when you watch someone on television, part of their soul (and the soul of the person who wrote their script) merges with your own soul. When you have a (biological) child part of your soul is passed onto your child.
When you die, the part of your soul associated with you body ceases to exist but the parts of your soul that were passed on to your children and the other people you interacted with over the course of your life continue to live on.
A "measurement" is really just a particular interaction (or chains of interactions). The current model of quantum physics includes randomness. Whether a particular interaction occurs can only be expressed as a probability. Randomness does not, however, imply free will. A computer program can include a random number generator making its behavior non-deterministic but that doesn't mean the computer program has free will. Just because a person's behavior can only be expressed in terms of probabilities does not mean that the person has "free will". The person's behavior will ultimately be dictated by random chance (among other things).