Practicing medical doctors are significantly less intelligent and educated than research scientists, so your example simply proves the inverse correlation between intelligence/education and faith. In addition, MDs have to function within a different sort of communities - the people they interact with professionally are not, on average, their academic or intellectual peers. MDs are thus likely to feel pressure to conform in order to ensure their economic survival, which includes claiming to have faith, regardless of their true beliefs.
I also hope that you don't take this as confirmation that education and faith are not compatible.
Education is not compatible with the sort of faith that the average Christian has. Unfortunately, more sophisticated perspectives on faith aren't easily accessible (and besides, aren't often up to snuff). Under questioning, many otherwise intelligent and educated Christians demonstrate that they're simply ignorant when it comes to the philosophical foundations and limitations of their faith. In that sense, faith is a way to plug the gaps in one's understanding of various aspects of the world, in a way that makes one feel good about it. It's the god of the gaps applied at a slightly different level.
I'd like to point out that scientific naturalism is as much a faith-based (one might even say religious) worldview as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or anything else.
Not true. Applying the scientific method gives proven results in areas which religion does not. Religion is not a workable substitute for science in these areas.
Personally, I believe in logic. But it's a belief, and it will never be more than that.
It certainly won't ever be more than that, if you never educate yourself out of your woeful misunderstanding of Gödel's theorem.
Other posters have provided some good responses, but there's another angle which I don't think has been mentioned.
Gödel showed that certain kinds of formal systems have certain limits. However, those limits are clearly defined. You still know that if you are able to prove a conclusion within a consistent system, that the proof is correct within that system (and vice versa for disproof).
You seem to be confusing this result of Gödel's with the relationship between the system and the model of the systems, e.g. the real-world thing that the system or a proof is supposed to apply to. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem doesn't say anything about that. If you look at a proof as a set of formulae within a formal system - which is just a made-up language with a strict set of rules - you can say definitively that a proof's conclusion is true, at least to the extent that you check each step against the rules (which can sometimes be done by computer, improving the degree of certainty of the correctness check.)
But if you try to apply that proof to something in the real world, you have to perform a mapping between the formal system and the real world. There is room for mistakes here, and if you make a mistake, then a perfectly valid proof can result in an entirely wrong conclusion about the real world. However, this has nothing to do with Gödel. It's similar to the whole thing about lying with statistics: you can have perfectly correct statistics, but if you apply them incorrectly, the result is meaningless & therefore wrong.
However, this isn't a particularly serious problem, as it happens. It's possible to quite rigorously map a logical proof onto the real world. At some level, a certain amount of intuition is involved, but our entire philosophy of anything is based on such intuitional mappings. For example, we routinely map our abstract concept of number onto quantities of objects in the real world. If you add an apple to a group of two other apples, you get a group of three apples. Do you consider this conclusion "maybe valid, maybe not", as you put it? The applications of logic to the real world are just as reliable as our application of integers to the real world.
I also believe you can't dig deep enough to explain everything.
Ah, but some of the most interesting results, like the incompleteness theorem and the uncertainty theorem in quantum mechanics, show that we can determine the exact boundaries of what we can and cannot explain or know, in some cases. The halting problem and Chaitin's constant Omega (which is much more interesting than that link indicates) is another example of this.
More like socialism, where the government provides lots of services that are in the public interest, such as Universal Healthcare.
That's technically correct, but the connection to communism is where the favors which the government extends to companies providing public services cross the line into corruption, which was so rampant under communism. Many of the factors are the same in both the communist and capitalist case, including nepotism, cronyism, politicians looking to supplement their incomes, etc.
In a way, a society which is openly socialist may do a better job of this, because the relationship between the government and companies providing public services is better defined. The problem in the U.S. is that the monopoly service providers are nominally supposed to be free-market competitors, which of course they aren't really. Whenever law attempts to maintain a fiction that doesn't match the reality, trouble ensues.
Welcoming our new insect overlords, I can understand that. Welcoming slimy green new overlords from Sludgebarf 9, sure. Welcoming Sauron, evil overlord from Mordor, is a bit iffy, but I can live with that. Welcoming the Shadows from Z'ha'dum as our new overlords seems cool, especially given that the Minbari's motives are pretty suspect anyway.
But welcoming our broadband-competition-blocking Baby Bell overlords? That's just going too far!
Well that's OK then, since this is much more like communism than capitalism. Think of the Bells as state-run companies whose chiefs are relatives of the party bosses. The details are a little different, but not by much in any practical sense.
Read this page to find out what FPGAs are. VHDL is one of the languages used to program them. The rest of the acronyms don't really matter unless you're serious about getting into the subject.
Wake up! We're not special.. the construction industry has been doing huge projects of equal complexity for centuries. Get past your intellectual snobbery and start working together..
This is a false analogy, in all sorts of ways. That's not to say project management couldn't be improved, but if it was as easy as construction, you wouldn't be seeing many of the problems that we do see.
As one way to understand the difference, what's the equivalent of the halting problem, in construction? In fact, I would argue that anyone who claims that software development is like building construction is part of the problem, since you need an extraordinarily weak grasp of computing theory to believe that this is the case.
Most physical construction solves the same basic problem, and all that varies are various trivial physical properties like dimension, materials, etc. Computer systems solve a much wider variety of problems, including many entirely new ones. It's certainly not true that "every system we can dream of has been built". In fact, where we do see the same problems being solved over and over, we also see a much higher success rate - things like mainstream accounting systems are a good example. In that case, a body of domain-specific knowledge builds up over time, and implementing systems in that area becomes easier as a result. It would be more accurate to compare the construction industry to the industry which develops horizontal-market accounting packages. (Vertical market packages tend to introduce new twists that can put you right back into unexplored territory.)
There's been some discussion of approaches to concurrency recently on the Lambda the Ultimate blog. Erlang is mentioned as well as links to a bunch of other approaches.
Just because you're African, don't assume that means you know everything about Africa. I was born in Africa and mostly grew up there. If you know anything about it beyond the country that you live in, you should know that Africa and its people can be very diverse (although there are also amazing similarities in things like languages in completely different parts of Africa).
I don't remember the name of the tribe that I was thinking of. I've read first-hand reports about this more than once, though. In one case, it was in connection with bodies that are hit by trucks on some of the cross-country highways, and left to rot, and the reaction I mentioned was described as a common response to this. IIRC, this may have been in relatively unpopulated parts of Angola, Zambia, or Congo, or at least somewhere in that region between central and South Africa.
Anyway, more generally, this is not all that unusual. The response to my post by WalksOnDirt is an example. Laughter can be a natural reaction when we encounter something which we can't make sense of. That's why comedians try their best to set up a situation in which their punchline is very unexpected, something that doesn't immediately fit properly. We laugh at things that don't fit - that's a neurological reaction. These kinds of reactions are moderated socially - people may learn not to express anything that could be mistaken for humor in such situations. But that's a cultural thing.
We also use laughter in a lot of ways: in addition to laughing at a funny joke, there's nervous laughter, mean laughter, angry laughter. One way laughter is used is to avert tragedy, and that's the kind of thing I was referring to.
Compare it to its opposite, crying with grief. There are some cultures, including in Africa and Asia, where such crying is very demonstrative. This is a cultural amplification of the basic reaction we have. From what I read, my understanding of the tribe I mentioned was that they had done a similar sort of amplification with the laughter reaction that can occur in tragic and difficult to comprehend situations.
But preoccupation with entertainment at the expense of real goals is something to watch out for.
Sure, but as you point out, this may not actually be happening in any of the cases that have been raised.
In fact, I think space tourism will make people *more* conscious of the things we ought to be doing in space, and more supportive of them.
Exactly! It's things like this, and even more mundane things, that make achieving our "higher purposes" possible at all.
If anything, beyond the goals of a certain amount of scientific exploration of our surroundings, the NASA model of space exploration has been proven to be a failure, when it comes to giving a larger proportion of the human race a stake in space travel. And it's only when people have a stake that there'll be real incentives and enough support for doing anything beyond trips to examine rocks. You don't necessarily achieve higher purposes by aiming straight for them - you have to build a foundation that will support them, first.
A world full of robot puppies and vacuum cleaners is much more likely to result in useful robotics in the end than working in a pure research lab trying to create intelligent robots from day one. Which is more important: Kismet or Aibo? I'd argue the latter.
I agree with this, but in defense of the insensitive, I think many people (especially young people) have no way to fit a disaster of the scale of this tsunami into their frame of reference.
Humor has always been a way to deal with things you don't understand and can't grasp. In Africa, there are tribes in which the normal response to seeing something unimaginably horrifying - like a pile of dead, decaying human bodies - is to laugh. This is not amusement, it's a reaction to the incomprehensible, a way to deal with it. In the West, there's a veneer of cynicism over this response, but in the end joking about something like this is an acknowledgement that there's really not much else to be done about it (aside from actually donating or dropping everything to fly to the affected areas).
That said, people should be more aware that their offhand comments can seem incredibly insensitive to people who are more directly affected.
Next youre going tell me they are using space shuttles for tourists; and advanced cybernetics for robotic pets...
Ladies and gentelmen: The dark side of capitalism.
Why is it the dark side? Making our time on Earth more enjoyable seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Do zeppelins further that more than theme parks, space tourism, or cute robot puppies which bring children happiness?
Re:Can't Imagine this on 60 seconds...
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
Cashing out a few hundred million just makes financial sense, if you own billions of dollars worth of a single stock. There's a distinction between not selling out -- which is what Brin claims -- and being financially smart.
In the end, though, the not selling out stuff is mainly just PR, although it helps that it's backed up by guys who genuinely seem to want to work hard and aren't looking to cash out and retire to a private island as soon as they can.
If they were based on facts, there would be no need to fork anything.
This is naive. Encyclopedias aren't just catalogues of facts. The majority of entries involve someone's interpretation of the item being described. In commercial encyclopedias, the issue of objectivity was addressed by a process involving peer review, editors, and other checks and balances that attempt to prevent obvious abuses in which a contributor gets to promote their own points of view over others.
This has its limits, though. Such processes don't usually remove cultural bias -- think of the difference between CNN and Al-Jazeera. If all the editors and contributors share the same basic ideas and cultural context, a bias will be present that they may not even be aware of -- or if they are aware of it, they all think it's "right", and thus OK to perpetuate in the pages of their encyclopedia (or other media). You see this sort of thing in newspapers and on TV news channels all the time -- the famous liberal bias or conservative bias, depending on whether you're talking about e.g. New York Times vs. the New York Post, or CBS vs. Fox, in which even basic terms used to describe people or events are varyingly pejorative or complimentary depending on the bias of the source. Encyclopedias aren't fundamentally any different -- think of them as a type of really slow newspaper.
"All" Wikipedia does is remove some of these controls. Of course, that can result in various kinds of problems, but it's worth keeping in mind that these same problems exist in regular encyclopedias, and although the controls in those encyclopedias may catch the egregious problems, in many other cases the problems are just better hidden. Wikipedia gives an excellent insight into what postmodernists call socially constructed truth, and should remind us that when it comes to the kind of subjective descriptions that encyclopedias are full of, facts and objectivity are not nearly as simple a matter as some like to think.
Others have already pointed out that your speed estimates are way off. Planes don't land at their cruising speed! The aiming isn't an issue here.
As for lasers tracing a line, I've shone huge green lasers on clouds, when I worked with entertainment lasers. These were the kind that required watercooling, and would require at least a panel van to house them. If visibility is good (no mist or smoke), they don't trace a line that can be seen from any distance. For a few seconds, there's no way the pilot would get a fix - besides, the last thing he'd want to be doing is looking directly towards the source of the beam.
Also, a laser that powerful doesn't need to be pointed right into the eye - read up about laser safety, just being exposed to a small part of the beam for a very short time can do it. In short, this is very doable without major equipment, other than the laser itself, and a way to point it with a sight.
As for the objective, that's a separate question. Some terrorists use shoe bombs, others use anthrax; or you get criminals who go around shooting people from a specially constructed bay in their station wagon, just for kicks (which happened here a few years back). This laser business is about as easy and untraceable a way as you could possible find to interfere with a landing plane.
The reason you can't shoot pilots flying a jumbo jet with a rifle is that bullets don't travel at the speed of light.
Which is precisely why using a laser makes it so easy - the beam goes exactly where you point it, effectively instantly. As for doing the math, you forgot to do the math about beam spread, and you got the target size wrong by many orders of magnitude. Read about lasers blinding people, and you'll find that a beam that lights up a large part of the cockpit can blind someone. All in all, this is a lot easier than you think.
Re:Quantum Physics is Like 15th Century Astronomy
on
Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 1
Note how the Stanford link was written with the help of the authors of the article in question, and even refereed by the main author.
It seems so pointless replying to Anonymous Cowards, but for the ever-important/. record, the above quote seems incorrect. The Stanford Encyclopedia page was written by Guido Bacciagaluppi, and refereed by David Wallace. Neither of these were the author of either the Nature article, or the paper referenced by Nature. The encyclopedia entry credits one of the authors of the paper, Zurek, as helping to shape his understanding of decoherence over the years. That's not surprising, since Zurek is a major figure in this field.
None of this calls the objectivity of the encyclopedia entry into question.
On the macro scale, the idea of raster-based laser TV is a non-starter, because that horizontal & vertical arrangement of mirrors and the motors which drive them can't even remotely compete with the electrically-controlled magnetic field which modulates the electron beam in your TV CRT. You get a horribly flickering, low resolution picture at best. Notice that the laser light shows which use this technique are invariably vector-based, rather than raster based, and they flicker a lot too, especially on larger images (images that take longer to trace).
On a smaller scale, the DLP chips in many projectors are actually an array of microscopic mirrors controllable by a piezoelectric effect (or some such), and those work pretty well for systems based on ordinary light. So I suppose you could use laser light as the input to that. That could be interesting -- sounds like a/. project waiting to happen, all it needs is someone willing to sacrifice a DLP projector in the name of science!
But QM still works astoundingly well. I can't imagine it will ever be shown wrong. Incomplete, sure, but not wrong.
There are different ways to be wrong. A decent mathematician today could easily work out a perfectly accurate theory of planetary orbits in which the Earth is at the center of the solar system. The predictions about orbits would all be perfectly correct. Like the epicycle-dependent orbital theories developed by the old astronomers, the system would be ridiculously complicated, but it would appear to be a perfect fit with observation. Would such a theory be wrong or right?
In light of this, all we can say about QM is that QM is right in the sense that it's an accurate model of certain phenomena. It could still be entirely "wrong" in the sense that it might be misleading us about the phenomena which it models, analogous to the way in which a theory of epicyclic orbits would mislead us about the solar system's structure.
Note that I'm not drawing any conclusions about QM in this respect, I'm just saying that the idea that QM could turn out to be wrong in some important ways is quite feasible.
Re:Quantum Physics is Like 15th Century Astronomy
on
Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 3, Informative
QM accounts for the data to ridiculous accuracy and the only problem is accepting the interpretation. and that's a problem with humans, not QM.
No, it seems more like a problem with current theory. QM is very accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't give the whole picture, even in its own domain. Theories about the causes of decoherence - collapse of superposed states - are still very much under development, which explains why there's so much confusion about the subject.
The naive and typically anthropomorphic idea that human or conscious observation has something to do with decoherence hasn't been credible for a long, long, time, and Nature (the magazine) deserves to have its ass kicked for allowing an abstract to pit its argument against such a nonsensical straw man. For an update on the most credible current work, a good starting point is The Role of Decoherence in Quantum Theory.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all in the punctuation.
Education is not compatible with the sort of faith that the average Christian has. Unfortunately, more sophisticated perspectives on faith aren't easily accessible (and besides, aren't often up to snuff). Under questioning, many otherwise intelligent and educated Christians demonstrate that they're simply ignorant when it comes to the philosophical foundations and limitations of their faith. In that sense, faith is a way to plug the gaps in one's understanding of various aspects of the world, in a way that makes one feel good about it. It's the god of the gaps applied at a slightly different level.
It certainly won't ever be more than that, if you never educate yourself out of your woeful misunderstanding of Gödel's theorem.
Other posters have provided some good responses, but there's another angle which I don't think has been mentioned.
Gödel showed that certain kinds of formal systems have certain limits. However, those limits are clearly defined. You still know that if you are able to prove a conclusion within a consistent system, that the proof is correct within that system (and vice versa for disproof).
You seem to be confusing this result of Gödel's with the relationship between the system and the model of the systems, e.g. the real-world thing that the system or a proof is supposed to apply to. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem doesn't say anything about that. If you look at a proof as a set of formulae within a formal system - which is just a made-up language with a strict set of rules - you can say definitively that a proof's conclusion is true, at least to the extent that you check each step against the rules (which can sometimes be done by computer, improving the degree of certainty of the correctness check.)
But if you try to apply that proof to something in the real world, you have to perform a mapping between the formal system and the real world. There is room for mistakes here, and if you make a mistake, then a perfectly valid proof can result in an entirely wrong conclusion about the real world. However, this has nothing to do with Gödel. It's similar to the whole thing about lying with statistics: you can have perfectly correct statistics, but if you apply them incorrectly, the result is meaningless & therefore wrong.
However, this isn't a particularly serious problem, as it happens. It's possible to quite rigorously map a logical proof onto the real world. At some level, a certain amount of intuition is involved, but our entire philosophy of anything is based on such intuitional mappings. For example, we routinely map our abstract concept of number onto quantities of objects in the real world. If you add an apple to a group of two other apples, you get a group of three apples. Do you consider this conclusion "maybe valid, maybe not", as you put it? The applications of logic to the real world are just as reliable as our application of integers to the real world.
Ah, but some of the most interesting results, like the incompleteness theorem and the uncertainty theorem in quantum mechanics, show that we can determine the exact boundaries of what we can and cannot explain or know, in some cases. The halting problem and Chaitin's constant Omega (which is much more interesting than that link indicates) is another example of this.That's technically correct, but the connection to communism is where the favors which the government extends to companies providing public services cross the line into corruption, which was so rampant under communism. Many of the factors are the same in both the communist and capitalist case, including nepotism, cronyism, politicians looking to supplement their incomes, etc.
In a way, a society which is openly socialist may do a better job of this, because the relationship between the government and companies providing public services is better defined. The problem in the U.S. is that the monopoly service providers are nominally supposed to be free-market competitors, which of course they aren't really. Whenever law attempts to maintain a fiction that doesn't match the reality, trouble ensues.
Welcoming our new insect overlords, I can understand that. Welcoming slimy green new overlords from Sludgebarf 9, sure. Welcoming Sauron, evil overlord from Mordor, is a bit iffy, but I can live with that. Welcoming the Shadows from Z'ha'dum as our new overlords seems cool, especially given that the Minbari's motives are pretty suspect anyway.
But welcoming our broadband-competition-blocking Baby Bell overlords? That's just going too far!
Read this page to find out what FPGAs are. VHDL is one of the languages used to program them. The rest of the acronyms don't really matter unless you're serious about getting into the subject.
As one way to understand the difference, what's the equivalent of the halting problem, in construction? In fact, I would argue that anyone who claims that software development is like building construction is part of the problem, since you need an extraordinarily weak grasp of computing theory to believe that this is the case.
Most physical construction solves the same basic problem, and all that varies are various trivial physical properties like dimension, materials, etc. Computer systems solve a much wider variety of problems, including many entirely new ones. It's certainly not true that "every system we can dream of has been built". In fact, where we do see the same problems being solved over and over, we also see a much higher success rate - things like mainstream accounting systems are a good example. In that case, a body of domain-specific knowledge builds up over time, and implementing systems in that area becomes easier as a result. It would be more accurate to compare the construction industry to the industry which develops horizontal-market accounting packages. (Vertical market packages tend to introduce new twists that can put you right back into unexplored territory.)
There's been some discussion of approaches to concurrency recently on the Lambda the Ultimate blog. Erlang is mentioned as well as links to a bunch of other approaches.
Just because you're African, don't assume that means you know everything about Africa. I was born in Africa and mostly grew up there. If you know anything about it beyond the country that you live in, you should know that Africa and its people can be very diverse (although there are also amazing similarities in things like languages in completely different parts of Africa).
I don't remember the name of the tribe that I was thinking of. I've read first-hand reports about this more than once, though. In one case, it was in connection with bodies that are hit by trucks on some of the cross-country highways, and left to rot, and the reaction I mentioned was described as a common response to this. IIRC, this may have been in relatively unpopulated parts of Angola, Zambia, or Congo, or at least somewhere in that region between central and South Africa.
Anyway, more generally, this is not all that unusual. The response to my post by WalksOnDirt is an example. Laughter can be a natural reaction when we encounter something which we can't make sense of. That's why comedians try their best to set up a situation in which their punchline is very unexpected, something that doesn't immediately fit properly. We laugh at things that don't fit - that's a neurological reaction. These kinds of reactions are moderated socially - people may learn not to express anything that could be mistaken for humor in such situations. But that's a cultural thing.
We also use laughter in a lot of ways: in addition to laughing at a funny joke, there's nervous laughter, mean laughter, angry laughter. One way laughter is used is to avert tragedy, and that's the kind of thing I was referring to.
Compare it to its opposite, crying with grief. There are some cultures, including in Africa and Asia, where such crying is very demonstrative. This is a cultural amplification of the basic reaction we have. From what I read, my understanding of the tribe I mentioned was that they had done a similar sort of amplification with the laughter reaction that can occur in tragic and difficult to comprehend situations.
Sure, but as you point out, this may not actually be happening in any of the cases that have been raised.
Exactly! It's things like this, and even more mundane things, that make achieving our "higher purposes" possible at all.
If anything, beyond the goals of a certain amount of scientific exploration of our surroundings, the NASA model of space exploration has been proven to be a failure, when it comes to giving a larger proportion of the human race a stake in space travel. And it's only when people have a stake that there'll be real incentives and enough support for doing anything beyond trips to examine rocks. You don't necessarily achieve higher purposes by aiming straight for them - you have to build a foundation that will support them, first.
A world full of robot puppies and vacuum cleaners is much more likely to result in useful robotics in the end than working in a pure research lab trying to create intelligent robots from day one. Which is more important: Kismet or Aibo? I'd argue the latter.
I agree with this, but in defense of the insensitive, I think many people (especially young people) have no way to fit a disaster of the scale of this tsunami into their frame of reference.
Humor has always been a way to deal with things you don't understand and can't grasp. In Africa, there are tribes in which the normal response to seeing something unimaginably horrifying - like a pile of dead, decaying human bodies - is to laugh. This is not amusement, it's a reaction to the incomprehensible, a way to deal with it. In the West, there's a veneer of cynicism over this response, but in the end joking about something like this is an acknowledgement that there's really not much else to be done about it (aside from actually donating or dropping everything to fly to the affected areas).
That said, people should be more aware that their offhand comments can seem incredibly insensitive to people who are more directly affected.
Cashing out a few hundred million just makes financial sense, if you own billions of dollars worth of a single stock. There's a distinction between not selling out -- which is what Brin claims -- and being financially smart.
In the end, though, the not selling out stuff is mainly just PR, although it helps that it's backed up by guys who genuinely seem to want to work hard and aren't looking to cash out and retire to a private island as soon as they can.
Tell your employer you're interviewing with Google, and negotiate a raise before the interview process is over.
Of course, if you suck, you won't get the job at Google, and your current employer might get pissed at you and fire you. But that's because you suck.
This is naive. Encyclopedias aren't just catalogues of facts. The majority of entries involve someone's interpretation of the item being described. In commercial encyclopedias, the issue of objectivity was addressed by a process involving peer review, editors, and other checks and balances that attempt to prevent obvious abuses in which a contributor gets to promote their own points of view over others.
This has its limits, though. Such processes don't usually remove cultural bias -- think of the difference between CNN and Al-Jazeera. If all the editors and contributors share the same basic ideas and cultural context, a bias will be present that they may not even be aware of -- or if they are aware of it, they all think it's "right", and thus OK to perpetuate in the pages of their encyclopedia (or other media). You see this sort of thing in newspapers and on TV news channels all the time -- the famous liberal bias or conservative bias, depending on whether you're talking about e.g. New York Times vs. the New York Post, or CBS vs. Fox, in which even basic terms used to describe people or events are varyingly pejorative or complimentary depending on the bias of the source. Encyclopedias aren't fundamentally any different -- think of them as a type of really slow newspaper.
"All" Wikipedia does is remove some of these controls. Of course, that can result in various kinds of problems, but it's worth keeping in mind that these same problems exist in regular encyclopedias, and although the controls in those encyclopedias may catch the egregious problems, in many other cases the problems are just better hidden. Wikipedia gives an excellent insight into what postmodernists call socially constructed truth, and should remind us that when it comes to the kind of subjective descriptions that encyclopedias are full of, facts and objectivity are not nearly as simple a matter as some like to think.
Read Why a 1 mW Helium-Neon Laser Still Appears Bright a Mile Away and the surrounding text to get an idea of why this is not FUD. A powerful laser projecting a 4-foot spot into the cockpit would easily hit a pilot, and easily blind them.
Others have already pointed out that your speed estimates are way off. Planes don't land at their cruising speed! The aiming isn't an issue here.
As for lasers tracing a line, I've shone huge green lasers on clouds, when I worked with entertainment lasers. These were the kind that required watercooling, and would require at least a panel van to house them. If visibility is good (no mist or smoke), they don't trace a line that can be seen from any distance. For a few seconds, there's no way the pilot would get a fix - besides, the last thing he'd want to be doing is looking directly towards the source of the beam.
Also, a laser that powerful doesn't need to be pointed right into the eye - read up about laser safety, just being exposed to a small part of the beam for a very short time can do it. In short, this is very doable without major equipment, other than the laser itself, and a way to point it with a sight.
As for the objective, that's a separate question. Some terrorists use shoe bombs, others use anthrax; or you get criminals who go around shooting people from a specially constructed bay in their station wagon, just for kicks (which happened here a few years back). This laser business is about as easy and untraceable a way as you could possible find to interfere with a landing plane.
The reason you can't shoot pilots flying a jumbo jet with a rifle is that bullets don't travel at the speed of light.
Which is precisely why using a laser makes it so easy - the beam goes exactly where you point it, effectively instantly. As for doing the math, you forgot to do the math about beam spread, and you got the target size wrong by many orders of magnitude. Read about lasers blinding people, and you'll find that a beam that lights up a large part of the cockpit can blind someone. All in all, this is a lot easier than you think.
It seems so pointless replying to Anonymous Cowards, but for the ever-important /. record, the above quote seems incorrect. The Stanford Encyclopedia page was written by Guido Bacciagaluppi, and refereed by David Wallace. Neither of these were the author of either the Nature article, or the paper referenced by Nature. The encyclopedia entry credits one of the authors of the paper, Zurek, as helping to shape his understanding of decoherence over the years. That's not surprising, since Zurek is a major figure in this field.
None of this calls the objectivity of the encyclopedia entry into question.
On the macro scale, the idea of raster-based laser TV is a non-starter, because that horizontal & vertical arrangement of mirrors and the motors which drive them can't even remotely compete with the electrically-controlled magnetic field which modulates the electron beam in your TV CRT. You get a horribly flickering, low resolution picture at best. Notice that the laser light shows which use this technique are invariably vector-based, rather than raster based, and they flicker a lot too, especially on larger images (images that take longer to trace).
On a smaller scale, the DLP chips in many projectors are actually an array of microscopic mirrors controllable by a piezoelectric effect (or some such), and those work pretty well for systems based on ordinary light. So I suppose you could use laser light as the input to that. That could be interesting -- sounds like a /. project waiting to happen, all it needs is someone willing to sacrifice a DLP projector in the name of science!
There are different ways to be wrong. A decent mathematician today could easily work out a perfectly accurate theory of planetary orbits in which the Earth is at the center of the solar system. The predictions about orbits would all be perfectly correct. Like the epicycle-dependent orbital theories developed by the old astronomers, the system would be ridiculously complicated, but it would appear to be a perfect fit with observation. Would such a theory be wrong or right?
In light of this, all we can say about QM is that QM is right in the sense that it's an accurate model of certain phenomena. It could still be entirely "wrong" in the sense that it might be misleading us about the phenomena which it models, analogous to the way in which a theory of epicyclic orbits would mislead us about the solar system's structure.
Note that I'm not drawing any conclusions about QM in this respect, I'm just saying that the idea that QM could turn out to be wrong in some important ways is quite feasible.
No, it seems more like a problem with current theory. QM is very accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't give the whole picture, even in its own domain. Theories about the causes of decoherence - collapse of superposed states - are still very much under development, which explains why there's so much confusion about the subject.
The naive and typically anthropomorphic idea that human or conscious observation has something to do with decoherence hasn't been credible for a long, long, time, and Nature (the magazine) deserves to have its ass kicked for allowing an abstract to pit its argument against such a nonsensical straw man. For an update on the most credible current work, a good starting point is The Role of Decoherence in Quantum Theory.