It's not exactly healthy for the only voices to be heard are those who can afford to make themselves heard, i.e. big businesses. It sounds to me like it's the left who have been silenced, if what you say is true.
Less of an issue with the internet, of course, with its much lower barrier to entry.
That's the way particle physics does things - there are typically several "trigger levels", the first one using very crude quantities that can be determined very quickly. The next level only has to examine the events that survive the first one, and so has time to conduct a more detailed analysis, and so forth. IIRC, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC only stores events at 100 Hz, down from a raw collision rate of 40 MHz.
They don't want to operate them beyond safe limits. They're trying to reverse a decision to prematurely shut down the reactors.
The Chernobyl design was *not* perfectly safe in any sense. Any design which is only safe under a fairly narrow set of conditions is not safe, as faults and mistakes can always happen, and a design must take this into account. Typical nuclear plants do, with lots of redundancy and defence in depth so that even severe failures don't lead to a large release.
10,000 is a very large sample size, and adequate for almost anything. Vista's not *so* rare that it won't show up on a sample of 10,000.
However your point about random sampling is valid, although it would be just as big a problem with a sample of 10 million. This is a self-selected sample, so is highly likely to suffer from this a great deal.
If you think that shooting someone for damaging property is a reasonable response then you can be safely dismissed as a nutjob. If your vehicle is truly essential for work then you should have it fully insured anyway, as there are lots of ways it could be lost, so your claim that destroying it would put you out of work is untrue. So it would boil down to shooting someone because they annoyed you, which is the action of a psychopath, not a reasonable human being.
There's not as much difference as you think. True, magnetic fields are not caused by "charges" as far as we know, unlike electric fields. But there's no theoretical reason why that's not possible. Electric fields can be caused by things other than static electric charges - for example, changing magnetic fields or (hypothetically) a magnetic current - a flow of magnetic monopoles.
The electron does indeed have an electric monopole and magnetic dipole, but there could conceptually be a magnetic monopole - we just haven't seen any. The monopole charge density would be a scalar, just like the electric charge, so I don't know what you're getting at with your "unit vector without a direction" remark.
Order of magnitude estimates are perfectly reasonable, especially given the uncertainties involved here.
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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Coders At Work
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I come from a physics background and most physicists used to, and may still, program in FORTRAN, yet FORTRAN is a terrible programming language.
Ah yes, but in fairness most physicists are terrible programmers:) I'm not excluding myself either, but it stands to reason that someone who uses programming as just one of a multitude of tools to do their job won't be as good at it as someone who's job *is* programming.
Fortran has the virtue of being simple - certainly compared to C++, which has replaced it, at least in particle physics. It's thus less likely that a non-professional programmer will shoot themselves in the foot.
I didn't make any blunder. Scientists decide (well, "discover" really - we don't get to choose our results) the science, politicians decide the policy. I don't see anything contradictory about what I wrote.
You appear to be using the fallacy that because scientists are imperfect and make mistakes or get things wrong means that anyone else's opinion is equally likely to be correct.
The concept of a scientific dictatorship is amusing. Scientists have bugger all power - the real power lies with politicians and businessmen.
Seriously? Every time I've seen something from the CATO institute it's always been the most zealous kind of free market fundamentalism. I can't see how you *can* get more economically right wing than that, nor do I want to.
But a very large upfront use of resources was required to produce it, possibly more than will be saved, even in the very long term. I'm using resources more generally here to include human labour, manufacturing capacity, etc.
There's a difference between something early in its development that's expensive now because of that, and something that can never be made effective, and there's good reason to think that microgeneration is in the latter category.
You mention basic research in your first paragraph, but then talk about product development in the rest. That's not basic research, that's applied research or product development. There's still plenty to discover in the basic sciences. Turning it into products may be more difficult but that's hardly the point.
I'm somewhat used to Slashdot not caring about science unless it can be used to make some cool gadget, but please let's not forget that's not what it's supposed to be about.
I'm not sure where you are, but where I live the conditions for science PhD students aren't that bad. Sure, you get less money than you would going straight to a job in industry, although more like a factor of 2 than the 4-6 you quote. My hours overall were probably similar, but more flexible. The postdoc jobs are again probably not as well paid as industry, but not by anything like your factor 4-6.
But the jobs just aren't *there* at the moment. Industry jobs leave me with a bit of a sour taste from what I've seen when interviewing and heard from others but I may just have to sell my soul and suck it up.
But you'd have to get an equivalent level of research experience, which the PhD process provides. You could say the whole point of a PhD is a demonstration that you have acquired scientific research skills. And since you usually can't do basic research without one, you have quite the chicken and egg. Product development doesn't require one, but that's a different set of skills.
Most assessments of microgeneration I've seen show that it's inefficient and expensive. Paying back their energy cost in a decade is very poor, and would pretty much guarantee that it will never pay back economically.
The BBC didn't support any of that. They didn't oppose it either, but it's not their job to advocate one political position over another, but to be neutral and objective. I suspect you're assuming that "not supporting x" is equivalent to "supporting the opposite of x".
From watching the BBC it's rare to see any political opinion of its own at all. Contrast that with reading any newspaper, even the reputable ones, where the political bias leaps off the page.
You could say the same about the police force, the NHS, the military...
I think it's essential that there's a news source required to be as honest and bias free as possible, and not commercial in nature. The effect of a badly informed population isn't limited to the uninformed themselves - they can *vote*.
Other people have said this, but compiler bugs do exist. One of the particle physics collaboration I was part of got stung by one - the compiler released with some version of Red Hat (gcc 2.96 IIRC) meant that the event reconstruction software gave wrong answers. Fortunately this was discovered, but not after causing a lot of wasted effort and recalculated results.
Yes, programmer error is *more likely* if you have no evidence either way, but not certain.
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
Probably because the average slashdotter doesn't know anything about science. Scientific facts, maybe, but procedure? No. See any global warming thread for further details.
I can't help but feel you've missed the point. It runs on *steam* - it's hardly a surprise that this isn't the optimum way to go fast. It's a "because we can" thing.
Furthermore, it's design speed is 170 mph, they just haven't achieved its peak performance yet.
A panel of worldly people solely interested in seeking the truth, would be ideal (if possible).
Gosh, what a revolutionary idea. Of course, we'll have to think of a name for this group of people concerned with investigating nature and finding the truth about it. Perhaps something derived from the latin word for knowledge might be appropriate.
What are you talking about? People get grants to study the climate, not to find a particular result.
I despair of this place sometimes. Slashdot may be fine for vaguely geeky computer stuff but when it comes to science it seems it's about as well informed as Ted Stevens is about the internet.
Politicians haven't decided the matter. Climate scientists, the people best qualified to do so, have decided the matter and provided reports to the politicians, who then decide that to do about it. They're elected, so there's your "representative government".
The only way for non-experts to make a meaningful judgement is to become experts. This stuff isn't trivial or it wouldn't have taken so long to come to the conclusion that the scientists have. Many statements by non-experts are full of stuff that *seems* reasonable to a layman but is in fact wrong for various subtle reasons that would only be apparent to an expert. While I have a background as a scientist it's not in climate science, so I wouldn't feel qualified to assess the evidence in depth without spending a lot of time studying it (months at least), certainly more time than the judge would have. And I have a head start in knowing about science in general.
I'd rather have a "dictatorship" by the intellectual elite than rule by corporate influence, populism or wishful thinking.
What a wonderful idea, perhaps it can be extended to other areas. Perhaps I, as a scientist, could try criminal cases, I'm sure I'd be perfectly qualified since apparently science and law are the same thing now.
Lastly, despite your smug use of "capitalistic" as a pejorative term, the fact is without "capitalistic" folks investing in technology none of us would be here on this website having this discussion.
I'm reading this via the World Wide Web (invented by a scientific research facility) on the Internet (government/military project). Yes, capitalists have been involved in shaping the internet we see today - sometimes even for the better - but are not required for technology development, and the fact that they have been involved is merely a reflection of the way our society is organised, not some fundamental requirement. You can hardly credit them for it. And yes, I do think it's regrettable that advertising has such power and influence and consumes such a large amount of wealth.
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It's not exactly healthy for the only voices to be heard are those who can afford to make themselves heard, i.e. big businesses. It sounds to me like it's the left who have been silenced, if what you say is true.
Less of an issue with the internet, of course, with its much lower barrier to entry.
That's the way particle physics does things - there are typically several "trigger levels", the first one using very crude quantities that can be determined very quickly. The next level only has to examine the events that survive the first one, and so has time to conduct a more detailed analysis, and so forth. IIRC, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC only stores events at 100 Hz, down from a raw collision rate of 40 MHz.
They don't want to operate them beyond safe limits. They're trying to reverse a decision to prematurely shut down the reactors.
The Chernobyl design was *not* perfectly safe in any sense. Any design which is only safe under a fairly narrow set of conditions is not safe, as faults and mistakes can always happen, and a design must take this into account. Typical nuclear plants do, with lots of redundancy and defence in depth so that even severe failures don't lead to a large release.
10,000 is a very large sample size, and adequate for almost anything. Vista's not *so* rare that it won't show up on a sample of 10,000.
However your point about random sampling is valid, although it would be just as big a problem with a sample of 10 million. This is a self-selected sample, so is highly likely to suffer from this a great deal.
If you think that shooting someone for damaging property is a reasonable response then you can be safely dismissed as a nutjob. If your vehicle is truly essential for work then you should have it fully insured anyway, as there are lots of ways it could be lost, so your claim that destroying it would put you out of work is untrue. So it would boil down to shooting someone because they annoyed you, which is the action of a psychopath, not a reasonable human being.
There's not as much difference as you think. True, magnetic fields are not caused by "charges" as far as we know, unlike electric fields. But there's no theoretical reason why that's not possible. Electric fields can be caused by things other than static electric charges - for example, changing magnetic fields or (hypothetically) a magnetic current - a flow of magnetic monopoles.
The electron does indeed have an electric monopole and magnetic dipole, but there could conceptually be a magnetic monopole - we just haven't seen any. The monopole charge density would be a scalar, just like the electric charge, so I don't know what you're getting at with your "unit vector without a direction" remark.
Order of magnitude estimates are perfectly reasonable, especially given the uncertainties involved here.
I come from a physics background and most physicists used to, and may still, program in FORTRAN, yet FORTRAN is a terrible programming language.
Ah yes, but in fairness most physicists are terrible programmers :) I'm not excluding myself either, but it stands to reason that someone who uses programming as just one of a multitude of tools to do their job won't be as good at it as someone who's job *is* programming.
Fortran has the virtue of being simple - certainly compared to C++, which has replaced it, at least in particle physics. It's thus less likely that a non-professional programmer will shoot themselves in the foot.
I didn't make any blunder. Scientists decide (well, "discover" really - we don't get to choose our results) the science, politicians decide the policy. I don't see anything contradictory about what I wrote.
You appear to be using the fallacy that because scientists are imperfect and make mistakes or get things wrong means that anyone else's opinion is equally likely to be correct.
The concept of a scientific dictatorship is amusing. Scientists have bugger all power - the real power lies with politicians and businessmen.
Seriously? Every time I've seen something from the CATO institute it's always been the most zealous kind of free market fundamentalism. I can't see how you *can* get more economically right wing than that, nor do I want to.
But a very large upfront use of resources was required to produce it, possibly more than will be saved, even in the very long term. I'm using resources more generally here to include human labour, manufacturing capacity, etc.
There's a difference between something early in its development that's expensive now because of that, and something that can never be made effective, and there's good reason to think that microgeneration is in the latter category.
You mention basic research in your first paragraph, but then talk about product development in the rest. That's not basic research, that's applied research or product development. There's still plenty to discover in the basic sciences. Turning it into products may be more difficult but that's hardly the point.
I'm somewhat used to Slashdot not caring about science unless it can be used to make some cool gadget, but please let's not forget that's not what it's supposed to be about.
I'm not sure where you are, but where I live the conditions for science PhD students aren't that bad. Sure, you get less money than you would going straight to a job in industry, although more like a factor of 2 than the 4-6 you quote. My hours overall were probably similar, but more flexible. The postdoc jobs are again probably not as well paid as industry, but not by anything like your factor 4-6.
But the jobs just aren't *there* at the moment. Industry jobs leave me with a bit of a sour taste from what I've seen when interviewing and heard from others but I may just have to sell my soul and suck it up.
But you'd have to get an equivalent level of research experience, which the PhD process provides. You could say the whole point of a PhD is a demonstration that you have acquired scientific research skills. And since you usually can't do basic research without one, you have quite the chicken and egg. Product development doesn't require one, but that's a different set of skills.
Most assessments of microgeneration I've seen show that it's inefficient and expensive. Paying back their energy cost in a decade is very poor, and would pretty much guarantee that it will never pay back economically.
The BBC didn't support any of that. They didn't oppose it either, but it's not their job to advocate one political position over another, but to be neutral and objective. I suspect you're assuming that "not supporting x" is equivalent to "supporting the opposite of x".
From watching the BBC it's rare to see any political opinion of its own at all. Contrast that with reading any newspaper, even the reputable ones, where the political bias leaps off the page.
You could say the same about the police force, the NHS, the military...
I think it's essential that there's a news source required to be as honest and bias free as possible, and not commercial in nature. The effect of a badly informed population isn't limited to the uninformed themselves - they can *vote*.
Other people have said this, but compiler bugs do exist. One of the particle physics collaboration I was part of got stung by one - the compiler released with some version of Red Hat (gcc 2.96 IIRC) meant that the event reconstruction software gave wrong answers. Fortunately this was discovered, but not after causing a lot of wasted effort and recalculated results.
Yes, programmer error is *more likely* if you have no evidence either way, but not certain.
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
Probably because the average slashdotter doesn't know anything about science. Scientific facts, maybe, but procedure? No. See any global warming thread for further details.
I can't help but feel you've missed the point. It runs on *steam* - it's hardly a surprise that this isn't the optimum way to go fast. It's a "because we can" thing.
Furthermore, it's design speed is 170 mph, they just haven't achieved its peak performance yet.
A panel of worldly people solely interested in seeking the truth, would be ideal (if possible).
Gosh, what a revolutionary idea. Of course, we'll have to think of a name for this group of people concerned with investigating nature and finding the truth about it. Perhaps something derived from the latin word for knowledge might be appropriate.
What are you talking about? People get grants to study the climate, not to find a particular result.
I despair of this place sometimes. Slashdot may be fine for vaguely geeky computer stuff but when it comes to science it seems it's about as well informed as Ted Stevens is about the internet.
Politicians haven't decided the matter. Climate scientists, the people best qualified to do so, have decided the matter and provided reports to the politicians, who then decide that to do about it. They're elected, so there's your "representative government".
The only way for non-experts to make a meaningful judgement is to become experts. This stuff isn't trivial or it wouldn't have taken so long to come to the conclusion that the scientists have. Many statements by non-experts are full of stuff that *seems* reasonable to a layman but is in fact wrong for various subtle reasons that would only be apparent to an expert. While I have a background as a scientist it's not in climate science, so I wouldn't feel qualified to assess the evidence in depth without spending a lot of time studying it (months at least), certainly more time than the judge would have. And I have a head start in knowing about science in general.
I'd rather have a "dictatorship" by the intellectual elite than rule by corporate influence, populism or wishful thinking.
Are they serious? A fucking *law court*?
What a wonderful idea, perhaps it can be extended to other areas. Perhaps I, as a scientist, could try criminal cases, I'm sure I'd be perfectly qualified since apparently science and law are the same thing now.
Lastly, despite your smug use of "capitalistic" as a pejorative term, the fact is without "capitalistic" folks investing in technology none of us would be here on this website having this discussion.
I'm reading this via the World Wide Web (invented by a scientific research facility) on the Internet (government/military project). Yes, capitalists have been involved in shaping the internet we see today - sometimes even for the better - but are not required for technology development, and the fact that they have been involved is merely a reflection of the way our society is organised, not some fundamental requirement. You can hardly credit them for it. And yes, I do think it's regrettable that advertising has such power and influence and consumes such a large amount of wealth.