The problem here is sheer scale. Radio dissipates, so to communicate you have to tightly focus a beam, which then means you have to choose a target. (Which you may also miss, given how far the beam has to travel before it gets there, but let's assume that that won't happen since it's controllable.) How do you know that target has life? While I certainly expect there to be plenty of life in the galaxy, the galaxy is big. No matter how common life is, our kind of life is going to be spread relatively sparsely. Most places you target a beam at are very likely not to have a civilisation that is capable of receiving and happens to be listening.
The same goes for probes. For someone to stumble across, say, Voyager 2 they would have to somehow have interstellar flight (which I also think is a myth, much as that depresses me) and happen to be right in our vicinity anyway, probably to investigate what on Earth is causing all these weird radio signals and low-quality TV. That's going to be the case for hundreds of thousands of years -- far longer than our civilisation will be around.
I agree about "prime directives". I doubt all that many races would bother. I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't - perhaps officially we'd have something, but it would be ignored at will.
"If there are a significant number of other civilizations and a significant number of those are older than us, then we ought to have detected them as soon as we started listening"
No, because my argument is that any civilisation has effectively a thin shell of accessible radio, followed by what appears to be a radio-hot source for the period in which they even still broadcast to all and sundry. In this case, then we should see radio-hot sources, so the question becomes "why don't we see them?" (With one answer being "they're not broadcasting quite so profligately to the cosmos anymore" -- even we're heading that way.)
A good point about the radio waves. But having skimmed through the article on stellar uplifting, though, it leaves me with the impression it's as technologically absurd as Dyson spheres and ringworlds -- technically it may be possible to overcome the technological barriers, but realistically it seems very unlikely to me. Sorry for just saying "lol", which certainly isn't a sufficient response, but these megaconstructions have always struck me as wildly implausible - they can make for science fiction but to me both the timescale and the resources necessary to undertake them make them look a lot less appealling than they might at first sight.
What would you expect to see? Realistically? We've been listening for about 50 years (less, on a semi-professional basis). That's fifty years. Civilsation on Earth has been going about 5000 or so (very roughly, I'm not in the mood for pointless arguments about what constitutes "civilisation" when we compare Neolithic with Mesolithic, thanks). Mankind has been around for very roughly 100,000. 100,000 years is *nothing*, and yet for almost all of that time we've been totally invisible. It's only in the last 100 years that we've been blasting radio waves out to the cosmos. For the last decade or so, much of that has been encrypted and therefore looks like noise. It may not look like *random* noise, but it looks like noise. How do you expect an alien race, less than ten light years away, to possibly decrypt communications sent in a language they don't speak, through a character set they don't use, through mappings that make no sense to their computers, passed through encryption they don't have a handle on? They can't, it's a foolish belief. Even without encryption, modern digital transmission is refined enough that it's unlikely an alien race would be able to rapidly decode our transmissions, if at all.
So if you accept this line of argument, we've basically transmitted approximately a century's worth of information out to the heavens, in a very thin shell of expanding radiation. That radiation grows horrifically weak very quickly and would be hard to pick up over the Sun's background noise. What we're expecting, if an alien race is to even know of our existence, is that they are at the exact point in their development that they can somehow pick out our unencrypted transmissions above the Sun's natural noise, and then somehow decode those transmissions and make sense of them. Most of those transmissions are crappy 1970s sitcoms, or endless radio adverts. Fortunately no-one will know this, because it relies on there being a civilisation extraordinarily local to us, at exactly the same level of development as us, and actually listening to the outside world. Those chances are excruciatingly poor.
That goes the other way round.
For the rest, Dyson spheres? A myth. Freeman Dyson is close to a legend, but Dyson spheres are not a realitic proposition - not for us, and not for anyone.
Ringworlds? Lol.
I don't even know what is meant by "Stellar uplifting". If it involves doing anything to do with manipulating the Sun... yeah, you go ahead, I'll do something less likely to kill me.
That would be true regardless of whether there was life on other planets or not. No matter how closely those planets resembled Earth, they're not Earth, and while they *might* provide us with every vitamin and protein we need it does seem somewhat unlikely...
With no offense to an AC on Slashdot, and acknowledging that I also do not agree with Loeb's conclusions in this paper (even describing some of it as "calculations" is stretching the word somewhat), I can confirm that Loeb is an extremely capable cosmologist who has contributed far more to science than I ever have (and, I would guess, than you ever have either - though obviously I might be wrong on that one) and than most people ever have. He's one of the people I'd say would understand the anthropic principle.
I'm not sure what he was intending to accomplish here, but in general his output is of the highest quality.
Relativity has little to do with dark matter or dark energy -- the matter content is irrelevant, since relativity only really dictates the geometry; basically you have an equation G=T, where G is the geometry and T the matter; what that matter *is* is something for someone else to worry about. It has absolutely damn all to do with the Higgs. The Higgs field is a part of the standard model of particle physics that gives fundamental particles their mass. It has absolutely nothing to do with relativity at all; if it did, we would already have a quantum field theory that was general relativistic in nature, and we'd all be laughing. Or crying, since many of us would now be out of a job.
Quantum electrodynamics throws out infinities as a matter of course. This worried a lot of people, and then "renormalisation" was invented. It basically says "if you see a number multiplying an infinity, just write it as another number". The best example is the electron mass. What we see is actually m_electron * infinity. So we "renormalise it", and say that m_electron is actually m_bare electron * infinity.
It was either Feynman or Schwinger - probably both - who expressed serious doubts about the mathematical validity of renormalisation. Thing is, as they also acknowledged, it works. QED is the most accurate theory we currently possess, so despite the air of bullshit that surrounds renormalisation something's obviously working fine.
The issue comes when you have theories that are non-renormalisable, so you can't ditch the infinities this way. Quantising general relativity typically leads to a non-renormalisable theory. That's where all our problems have been for the last sixty years...
Certainly not saying it's not a problem that should be solved. Of course it damn well should, I absolutely agree with you. The attitudes of Western Europe to their inner cities is reprehensible, and so far as I can see (from a position of basically ignorance; I've spent some time in Chicago but am otherwise ignorant of American cities firsthand) the attitude of America is even worse. Given its GDP and its GDP per capita, the USA should be able to raise standards across the board and particularly in its cities. Thing is that really isn't very easy to do, and it takes more than just money. Even so, that's obviously not an excuse for not trying. The same statement applies to Britain, which is also very wealthy per capita, and to France and Germany, which are even more so.
My point is more that firstly we can't use "they chose city states to skew the averages" as an excuse, because removing the city states reveals they very clearly did not; but secondly that there's no new cause for panic. We already knew that inner cities are an issue. This merely confirms something we already knew. In the medium term, while (hopefully) the problems in our systems can start being addressed, we don't have to worry about the Far East suddenly devouring us or our civilisations collapsing, since we still produce more than enough highly-motivated, highly-educated people to keep the countries going, and even more than enough who may not have gone through the education system perfectly but who are more than capable of adapting to new challenges in jobs, retraining, or re-entering education later.
Also, the appearance of Canada so high in the list might give the rest of us English-speakers a measure of hope. Hell, they're basically a Frankenstein of the USA and the UK anyway, and they seem to be doing fine.
(Disclaimer: I've also spent quite a lot of time at Canadian universities from Toronto across to Halifax. I'm not all that impressed by their high school system so their results surprise me, and lead me to think I may have harshly judged it. I'm also quite a big fan of Canada. If it werent' so damned cold I'd be very happy to move there.)
This is a totally fair point, so let's remove the Chinese cities and leave only genuinely independent states. City states count as independent states. Then we end up with
Singapore Taiwan South Korea Japan Liechtenstein Switzerland Netherlands Estonia Finland Canada
If our pride is still hurt, and I note that Britain, Germany and Norway aren't on the list yet so mine certainly is, we can go further and decide that we won't count city states either (though that's a step that isn't really very well justified at all.) Then we're left with
Taiwan South Korea Japan Switzerland Netherlands Estonia Finland Canada Poland Belgium
Alas, I'd have to find another reason to cut out a state before Germany finally popped into the top ten, and I'd have to cut out every single one of these somehow before the UK even came in at number 10. We'd have to lose all those *again* before the USA finally appears in the list.
The thing that gets me about people's responses to these lists is the air of hurt nationalism. It seems people will say "shitty inner-city areas in the USA are dragging down the average". That's totally true. But the USA is coming in below Slovakia, which has shitty inner-city areas, and Russia, which these days is very little *but* shitty inner-city areas once you're outside of Petersburg and Moscow. Most (indeed all) the European nations have some horrible shitty inner-city areas, too. Unfortunately for humanity, the USA does not hold a monopoly on shitty inner-city schools bringing down the averages.
The other point is that these tests are indicative, and not much more than that, and in nations with the populations of France, the UK and particularly the USA, you don't *need* an extremely highly-educated workforce to be more than able to keep an edge and keep ahead. You only need enough to fill positions needing high education and high skill, and otherwise people who may not do so well in these tests are more than capable enough to fill in the gaps. (Or, come to that, learn on the job anyway.) So the USA can still more than fill its various three-letter agencies and its universities and its technology firms, as can the UK, as can France. A nation like Liechtenstein, with its 35,000 inhabitants, is less likely to be able to rely on the long tail to do that.
None of this should be taken as an argument for complacence - Lord knows I'd like our education system(s) dramatically improved - but I don't think being "mid-table" (as the UK, the USA and France all are) is a cause for any new concern.
Liechtenstein (8th): 35,000 Switzerland (9th): 8m Estonia (11th): 1.3m Finland (12th): 5.4m
Liechtenstein would be debatable to people who seem to think city states can't be nations, but I'm sure no-one would argue that Switzerland, Estonia and Finland aren't nations. Nations with fairly extensive rural and urban areas, too. Switzerland is roughly requivalent to Hong Kong and Estonia and Finland are rather smaller.
To be fair, at least one of my "jokes" was modded down and it deserved to be because it was woefully unfunny.
On the other hand, my posting history does at least show I've occasionally attempted to clarify or explain various parts of cosmology that are within the bounds of my expertise (as a professional cosmologist of some seven or eight years post-doctoral experience). I think I'm allowed to make the occasional comment that I really wish I hadn't because it's simply not funny.
Yeah I know, and I shouldn't have been so snide in my reply. My issue is mainly that people hear "Fortran" and think FORTRAN 77 and then repeat a load of jokes their professors taught them which they'd originally learned in 1985 (when they were valid). FORTRAN 77 is a horrible language and I hate it when I have to dig through some of the ugly code I've ended up having to use from it. It's not so much that people don't like FORTRAN 77 that winds me up - that's a perfectly understandable attitude because it is horrible; have fun with implicit typing and common blocks with variables renamed and names reused, and see the mess you'll quickly find yourself in - but that they carry on throwing mockery around that basically shows nothing but their own ignorance.
That said, the first time I tried to get F03 (actually I think it was F08) to act as a fully object-oriented language it was a frustrating procedure - but in the end when you see how they've fitted the syntax into what they had from F95 it makes some sense. And of course not every language has to be object oriented anyway...
Not used Arch since about 2008 or so. I was really quite fond of it, but I don't think I went through too many kernel upgrades. Didn't *seem* to break anything that often.
Oh, I've got gfortran on the machine - v4.9.0. But I don't find that Code::Blocks works well in OSX at all - maybe it's just my display, but the dialog boxes are everywhere, menus are sized bigger than the screen etc. Eclipse works OK in OSX; I just don't get on with it or Photran very well. NetBeans doesn't seem to have good Fortran support (though I'd be very happy to be proven wrong) and I've never got XCode hanging all that well with Fortran but in fairness haven't tried since I upgraded to Mavericks.
What I'm looking for is a decent IDE: code completion, object (or symbol) browsers, graphical debugging, the ability to jump from the use of a function to its definition (and declaration if it's held in an interface), etc. The only thing I've found in Fortran that's basically what I want is Code::Blocks but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to play happily with my Mac, which is why when I'm working on the OSX side I use command line and Emacs the way God intended.
If your Fortran developers have any good advice I'd be very happy to hear it. I'm not beholden to any one IDE or operating system...
I use OSX almost all the time I'm not programming and even some of the time I am. (And I'm not trying to hide the fact it's heavily indebted to BSD. Mach itself is indebted to BSD, after all, and Darwin isn't even pure Mach. And as you say the kernel really isn't that important for the user experience.)
if it helps, i program in f03. there are some irritating quirks about the language, but there are about any. c would be a regression for me, given its shitty array handling and lack of easy data hiding. c++ would be the closer comparison, but still has teh shitty array handling. plus, all the libraries i'm dealing with are in fortran and i'm building on previous code in fortran. it's heavily used in science and despite mockery thrown at it by people who've never even bothered looking at it, is a perfectly servicable language.
The Macbook Pro was provided by work. Since I had it more than three years it passed into my ownership. I tend to develop in Fortran, and the tools available in OSX for Fortran development range between the piss poor and the non-existent, whereas Fortran development tools in Linux are at least capable. (On a decent enough machine, Code::Blocks with the IDE for Fortran plug-in is a pretty decent IDE for Fortran development - better than others I've found. For some reason I just don't get on with Eclipse and Photran.) As a result, I put Fedora onto my Macbook so that I can develop natively.
Just different tools for different jobs, really. My Windows desktop has Windows and Fedora on it, my Macbook has OSX and Fedora. Depending what I'm doing I'll stick in Windows or OSX, or I'll reboot into Linux, which I chiefly use as a development environment I've got total control over. The crappy old laptop I've got has Lubuntu. I spend most of my time in OSX and still do a fair bit of my development in it (Aquamacs, out of preference) because I prefer its interface to the alternatives, which don't run as well on the hardware.
(Also, to be pedantic, Darwin isn't BSD but rather a weird kind of Frankenstein between true Mach, which is a microkernel, and BSD, along with what started as much of the FreeBSD userland. Ultimately it's easy to compile up most command-line tools on - even easier if you use MacPorts or Fink - but less easy to compile most graphical interfaces without a bit more effort, and then running through Xquartz etc.)
I don't use Mint anymore myself - chiefly because my normal laptop died and Fedora plays more happily with Macbook's twisted form of EFI, and also partly because I spent so long administering Red Hat and then Fedora Core boxes that Fedora comes more naturally to me - but my anecdotal evidence is different. I didn't see Mint updating slowly at all. I can't say I paid much attention to kernel updates, but other patches came through as regularly as on any other distribution.
For constant kernel updates and the attendent fun wondering if *this* is the update that will break your wifi or graphics support, nothing beats Fedora.
Disclaimer for those taking Slashdot a bit too seriously: Fedora's constant kernel updates have only twice broken my wifi or graphics support, and that's chiefly because of a small latency in the drivers being updated that I wouldn't have noticed had I just waited about twenty minutes. It is irritating plugging the damn machine into the router again (they live in different rooms, and I'm no fan of trailing metre after metre of cable around), but that's the price you pay for updating without thinking.
The universe isn't a structure. By "structure" they mean "gravitationally-bound object". The universe is a conglomeration of objects that are not gravitationally-bound. Phrased another way, a "structure" is governed by a metric which is distinctly non-trivial but which you'd hope would be approximated by a Schwarzschild, whereas the universe as a whole is governed by a Robertson-Walker metric which is as trivial as one can get. Put it another way, a "structure" is virialised, while the universe very much is not.
(On a different note, this is why people asking why Earth isn't pulling itself apart as space expands have missed the point. Space itself is not expanding, even in the normal cosmological model. The space *between virialised structures* is, but in a manner of thinking, a "structure" is disconnected from the universal expansion and is now interacting with itself.)
Anyway, it sounds like quibbling with semantics, but the way they're using the word "structure" is a particular bit of cosmological jargon, by which definition the universe is definitely not a structure. Put it another way, if you look at the universe as a whole it becomes featureless - there are no structures. (In the model; whether this is true in reality is open to question, hence this kind of study.) If you look on a smaller scale, you see the emergence of structure. What looked smooth is now pretty lumpy and stringy. Each of those lumps and strings is what they're meaning as "structure".
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is sheer scale. Radio dissipates, so to communicate you have to tightly focus a beam, which then means you have to choose a target. (Which you may also miss, given how far the beam has to travel before it gets there, but let's assume that that won't happen since it's controllable.) How do you know that target has life? While I certainly expect there to be plenty of life in the galaxy, the galaxy is big. No matter how common life is, our kind of life is going to be spread relatively sparsely. Most places you target a beam at are very likely not to have a civilisation that is capable of receiving and happens to be listening.
The same goes for probes. For someone to stumble across, say, Voyager 2 they would have to somehow have interstellar flight (which I also think is a myth, much as that depresses me) and happen to be right in our vicinity anyway, probably to investigate what on Earth is causing all these weird radio signals and low-quality TV. That's going to be the case for hundreds of thousands of years -- far longer than our civilisation will be around.
I agree about "prime directives". I doubt all that many races would bother. I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't - perhaps officially we'd have something, but it would be ignored at will.
Yes, I agree; I didn't consider that and should have.
"If there are a significant number of other civilizations and a significant number of those are older than us, then we ought to have detected them as soon as we started listening"
No, because my argument is that any civilisation has effectively a thin shell of accessible radio, followed by what appears to be a radio-hot source for the period in which they even still broadcast to all and sundry. In this case, then we should see radio-hot sources, so the question becomes "why don't we see them?" (With one answer being "they're not broadcasting quite so profligately to the cosmos anymore" -- even we're heading that way.)
A good point about the radio waves. But having skimmed through the article on stellar uplifting, though, it leaves me with the impression it's as technologically absurd as Dyson spheres and ringworlds -- technically it may be possible to overcome the technological barriers, but realistically it seems very unlikely to me. Sorry for just saying "lol", which certainly isn't a sufficient response, but these megaconstructions have always struck me as wildly implausible - they can make for science fiction but to me both the timescale and the resources necessary to undertake them make them look a lot less appealling than they might at first sight.
mod up.
From the GP, "why we don't see any signs of civilizations other than our own, not just no radio transmissions but no Dyson spheres (and yes, we've looked http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm [fnal.gov], stellar uplifting, ringworlds"
What would you expect to see? Realistically? We've been listening for about 50 years (less, on a semi-professional basis). That's fifty years. Civilsation on Earth has been going about 5000 or so (very roughly, I'm not in the mood for pointless arguments about what constitutes "civilisation" when we compare Neolithic with Mesolithic, thanks). Mankind has been around for very roughly 100,000. 100,000 years is *nothing*, and yet for almost all of that time we've been totally invisible. It's only in the last 100 years that we've been blasting radio waves out to the cosmos. For the last decade or so, much of that has been encrypted and therefore looks like noise. It may not look like *random* noise, but it looks like noise. How do you expect an alien race, less than ten light years away, to possibly decrypt communications sent in a language they don't speak, through a character set they don't use, through mappings that make no sense to their computers, passed through encryption they don't have a handle on? They can't, it's a foolish belief. Even without encryption, modern digital transmission is refined enough that it's unlikely an alien race would be able to rapidly decode our transmissions, if at all.
So if you accept this line of argument, we've basically transmitted approximately a century's worth of information out to the heavens, in a very thin shell of expanding radiation. That radiation grows horrifically weak very quickly and would be hard to pick up over the Sun's background noise. What we're expecting, if an alien race is to even know of our existence, is that they are at the exact point in their development that they can somehow pick out our unencrypted transmissions above the Sun's natural noise, and then somehow decode those transmissions and make sense of them. Most of those transmissions are crappy 1970s sitcoms, or endless radio adverts. Fortunately no-one will know this, because it relies on there being a civilisation extraordinarily local to us, at exactly the same level of development as us, and actually listening to the outside world. Those chances are excruciatingly poor.
That goes the other way round.
For the rest, Dyson spheres? A myth. Freeman Dyson is close to a legend, but Dyson spheres are not a realitic proposition - not for us, and not for anyone.
Ringworlds? Lol.
I don't even know what is meant by "Stellar uplifting". If it involves doing anything to do with manipulating the Sun... yeah, you go ahead, I'll do something less likely to kill me.
That would be true regardless of whether there was life on other planets or not. No matter how closely those planets resembled Earth, they're not Earth, and while they *might* provide us with every vitamin and protein we need it does seem somewhat unlikely...
With no offense to an AC on Slashdot, and acknowledging that I also do not agree with Loeb's conclusions in this paper (even describing some of it as "calculations" is stretching the word somewhat), I can confirm that Loeb is an extremely capable cosmologist who has contributed far more to science than I ever have (and, I would guess, than you ever have either - though obviously I might be wrong on that one) and than most people ever have. He's one of the people I'd say would understand the anthropic principle.
I'm not sure what he was intending to accomplish here, but in general his output is of the highest quality.
Relativity has little to do with dark matter or dark energy -- the matter content is irrelevant, since relativity only really dictates the geometry; basically you have an equation G=T, where G is the geometry and T the matter; what that matter *is* is something for someone else to worry about. It has absolutely damn all to do with the Higgs. The Higgs field is a part of the standard model of particle physics that gives fundamental particles their mass. It has absolutely nothing to do with relativity at all; if it did, we would already have a quantum field theory that was general relativistic in nature, and we'd all be laughing. Or crying, since many of us would now be out of a job.
Quantum electrodynamics throws out infinities as a matter of course. This worried a lot of people, and then "renormalisation" was invented. It basically says "if you see a number multiplying an infinity, just write it as another number". The best example is the electron mass. What we see is actually m_electron * infinity. So we "renormalise it", and say that m_electron is actually m_bare electron * infinity.
It was either Feynman or Schwinger - probably both - who expressed serious doubts about the mathematical validity of renormalisation. Thing is, as they also acknowledged, it works. QED is the most accurate theory we currently possess, so despite the air of bullshit that surrounds renormalisation something's obviously working fine.
The issue comes when you have theories that are non-renormalisable, so you can't ditch the infinities this way. Quantising general relativity typically leads to a non-renormalisable theory. That's where all our problems have been for the last sixty years...
Certainly not saying it's not a problem that should be solved. Of course it damn well should, I absolutely agree with you. The attitudes of Western Europe to their inner cities is reprehensible, and so far as I can see (from a position of basically ignorance; I've spent some time in Chicago but am otherwise ignorant of American cities firsthand) the attitude of America is even worse. Given its GDP and its GDP per capita, the USA should be able to raise standards across the board and particularly in its cities. Thing is that really isn't very easy to do, and it takes more than just money. Even so, that's obviously not an excuse for not trying. The same statement applies to Britain, which is also very wealthy per capita, and to France and Germany, which are even more so.
My point is more that firstly we can't use "they chose city states to skew the averages" as an excuse, because removing the city states reveals they very clearly did not; but secondly that there's no new cause for panic. We already knew that inner cities are an issue. This merely confirms something we already knew. In the medium term, while (hopefully) the problems in our systems can start being addressed, we don't have to worry about the Far East suddenly devouring us or our civilisations collapsing, since we still produce more than enough highly-motivated, highly-educated people to keep the countries going, and even more than enough who may not have gone through the education system perfectly but who are more than capable of adapting to new challenges in jobs, retraining, or re-entering education later.
Also, the appearance of Canada so high in the list might give the rest of us English-speakers a measure of hope. Hell, they're basically a Frankenstein of the USA and the UK anyway, and they seem to be doing fine.
(Disclaimer: I've also spent quite a lot of time at Canadian universities from Toronto across to Halifax. I'm not all that impressed by their high school system so their results surprise me, and lead me to think I may have harshly judged it. I'm also quite a big fan of Canada. If it werent' so damned cold I'd be very happy to move there.)
This is a totally fair point, so let's remove the Chinese cities and leave only genuinely independent states. City states count as independent states. Then we end up with
Singapore
Taiwan
South Korea
Japan
Liechtenstein
Switzerland
Netherlands
Estonia
Finland
Canada
If our pride is still hurt, and I note that Britain, Germany and Norway aren't on the list yet so mine certainly is, we can go further and decide that we won't count city states either (though that's a step that isn't really very well justified at all.) Then we're left with
Taiwan
South Korea
Japan
Switzerland
Netherlands
Estonia
Finland
Canada
Poland
Belgium
Alas, I'd have to find another reason to cut out a state before Germany finally popped into the top ten, and I'd have to cut out every single one of these somehow before the UK even came in at number 10. We'd have to lose all those *again* before the USA finally appears in the list.
The thing that gets me about people's responses to these lists is the air of hurt nationalism. It seems people will say "shitty inner-city areas in the USA are dragging down the average". That's totally true. But the USA is coming in below Slovakia, which has shitty inner-city areas, and Russia, which these days is very little *but* shitty inner-city areas once you're outside of Petersburg and Moscow. Most (indeed all) the European nations have some horrible shitty inner-city areas, too. Unfortunately for humanity, the USA does not hold a monopoly on shitty inner-city schools bringing down the averages.
The other point is that these tests are indicative, and not much more than that, and in nations with the populations of France, the UK and particularly the USA, you don't *need* an extremely highly-educated workforce to be more than able to keep an edge and keep ahead. You only need enough to fill positions needing high education and high skill, and otherwise people who may not do so well in these tests are more than capable enough to fill in the gaps. (Or, come to that, learn on the job anyway.) So the USA can still more than fill its various three-letter agencies and its universities and its technology firms, as can the UK, as can France. A nation like Liechtenstein, with its 35,000 inhabitants, is less likely to be able to rely on the long tail to do that.
None of this should be taken as an argument for complacence - Lord knows I'd like our education system(s) dramatically improved - but I don't think being "mid-table" (as the UK, the USA and France all are) is a cause for any new concern.
Further to that,
Liechtenstein (8th): 35,000
Switzerland (9th): 8m
Estonia (11th): 1.3m
Finland (12th): 5.4m
Liechtenstein would be debatable to people who seem to think city states can't be nations, but I'm sure no-one would argue that Switzerland, Estonia and Finland aren't nations. Nations with fairly extensive rural and urban areas, too. Switzerland is roughly requivalent to Hong Kong and Estonia and Finland are rather smaller.
What's a ten-grand lass month? Or is that a question you're legally obliged not to answer?
To be fair, at least one of my "jokes" was modded down and it deserved to be because it was woefully unfunny.
On the other hand, my posting history does at least show I've occasionally attempted to clarify or explain various parts of cosmology that are within the bounds of my expertise (as a professional cosmologist of some seven or eight years post-doctoral experience). I think I'm allowed to make the occasional comment that I really wish I hadn't because it's simply not funny.
No it has knot
Actually, I think it's on the knots
Knot Knot :(
Who's there?
Knot
Knot who?
Don't knot
Yeah I know, and I shouldn't have been so snide in my reply. My issue is mainly that people hear "Fortran" and think FORTRAN 77 and then repeat a load of jokes their professors taught them which they'd originally learned in 1985 (when they were valid). FORTRAN 77 is a horrible language and I hate it when I have to dig through some of the ugly code I've ended up having to use from it. It's not so much that people don't like FORTRAN 77 that winds me up - that's a perfectly understandable attitude because it is horrible; have fun with implicit typing and common blocks with variables renamed and names reused, and see the mess you'll quickly find yourself in - but that they carry on throwing mockery around that basically shows nothing but their own ignorance.
That said, the first time I tried to get F03 (actually I think it was F08) to act as a fully object-oriented language it was a frustrating procedure - but in the end when you see how they've fitted the syntax into what they had from F95 it makes some sense. And of course not every language has to be object oriented anyway...
Not used Arch since about 2008 or so. I was really quite fond of it, but I don't think I went through too many kernel upgrades. Didn't *seem* to break anything that often.
Oh, I've got gfortran on the machine - v4.9.0. But I don't find that Code::Blocks works well in OSX at all - maybe it's just my display, but the dialog boxes are everywhere, menus are sized bigger than the screen etc. Eclipse works OK in OSX; I just don't get on with it or Photran very well. NetBeans doesn't seem to have good Fortran support (though I'd be very happy to be proven wrong) and I've never got XCode hanging all that well with Fortran but in fairness haven't tried since I upgraded to Mavericks.
What I'm looking for is a decent IDE: code completion, object (or symbol) browsers, graphical debugging, the ability to jump from the use of a function to its definition (and declaration if it's held in an interface), etc. The only thing I've found in Fortran that's basically what I want is Code::Blocks but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to play happily with my Mac, which is why when I'm working on the OSX side I use command line and Emacs the way God intended.
If your Fortran developers have any good advice I'd be very happy to hear it. I'm not beholden to any one IDE or operating system...
I use OSX almost all the time I'm not programming and even some of the time I am. (And I'm not trying to hide the fact it's heavily indebted to BSD. Mach itself is indebted to BSD, after all, and Darwin isn't even pure Mach. And as you say the kernel really isn't that important for the user experience.)
blah blah blah lol fortran etc
if it helps, i program in f03. there are some irritating quirks about the language, but there are about any. c would be a regression for me, given its shitty array handling and lack of easy data hiding. c++ would be the closer comparison, but still has teh shitty array handling. plus, all the libraries i'm dealing with are in fortran and i'm building on previous code in fortran. it's heavily used in science and despite mockery thrown at it by people who've never even bothered looking at it, is a perfectly servicable language.
The Macbook Pro was provided by work. Since I had it more than three years it passed into my ownership. I tend to develop in Fortran, and the tools available in OSX for Fortran development range between the piss poor and the non-existent, whereas Fortran development tools in Linux are at least capable. (On a decent enough machine, Code::Blocks with the IDE for Fortran plug-in is a pretty decent IDE for Fortran development - better than others I've found. For some reason I just don't get on with Eclipse and Photran.) As a result, I put Fedora onto my Macbook so that I can develop natively.
Just different tools for different jobs, really. My Windows desktop has Windows and Fedora on it, my Macbook has OSX and Fedora. Depending what I'm doing I'll stick in Windows or OSX, or I'll reboot into Linux, which I chiefly use as a development environment I've got total control over. The crappy old laptop I've got has Lubuntu. I spend most of my time in OSX and still do a fair bit of my development in it (Aquamacs, out of preference) because I prefer its interface to the alternatives, which don't run as well on the hardware.
(Also, to be pedantic, Darwin isn't BSD but rather a weird kind of Frankenstein between true Mach, which is a microkernel, and BSD, along with what started as much of the FreeBSD userland. Ultimately it's easy to compile up most command-line tools on - even easier if you use MacPorts or Fink - but less easy to compile most graphical interfaces without a bit more effort, and then running through Xquartz etc.)
Actually these days I've got about six of them. Twice bitten, thrice shy...
I don't use Mint anymore myself - chiefly because my normal laptop died and Fedora plays more happily with Macbook's twisted form of EFI, and also partly because I spent so long administering Red Hat and then Fedora Core boxes that Fedora comes more naturally to me - but my anecdotal evidence is different. I didn't see Mint updating slowly at all. I can't say I paid much attention to kernel updates, but other patches came through as regularly as on any other distribution.
For constant kernel updates and the attendent fun wondering if *this* is the update that will break your wifi or graphics support, nothing beats Fedora.
Disclaimer for those taking Slashdot a bit too seriously: Fedora's constant kernel updates have only twice broken my wifi or graphics support, and that's chiefly because of a small latency in the drivers being updated that I wouldn't have noticed had I just waited about twenty minutes. It is irritating plugging the damn machine into the router again (they live in different rooms, and I'm no fan of trailing metre after metre of cable around), but that's the price you pay for updating without thinking.
The universe isn't a structure. By "structure" they mean "gravitationally-bound object". The universe is a conglomeration of objects that are not gravitationally-bound. Phrased another way, a "structure" is governed by a metric which is distinctly non-trivial but which you'd hope would be approximated by a Schwarzschild, whereas the universe as a whole is governed by a Robertson-Walker metric which is as trivial as one can get. Put it another way, a "structure" is virialised, while the universe very much is not.
(On a different note, this is why people asking why Earth isn't pulling itself apart as space expands have missed the point. Space itself is not expanding, even in the normal cosmological model. The space *between virialised structures* is, but in a manner of thinking, a "structure" is disconnected from the universal expansion and is now interacting with itself.)
Anyway, it sounds like quibbling with semantics, but the way they're using the word "structure" is a particular bit of cosmological jargon, by which definition the universe is definitely not a structure. Put it another way, if you look at the universe as a whole it becomes featureless - there are no structures. (In the model; whether this is true in reality is open to question, hence this kind of study.) If you look on a smaller scale, you see the emergence of structure. What looked smooth is now pretty lumpy and stringy. Each of those lumps and strings is what they're meaning as "structure".
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/data_vis/ is a pretty good website for seeing this kind of difference.