Roughly 5% of the population is mentally retarded (depending on definitions). Several percent have a serious mental illness (~1.5% schizophrenic, ~1% bipolar, ~1% with major depressive disorder,...), so they may not be functioning well enough to answer a pollster's questions. What percentage of people are pulling the pollster's leg? What percentage don't understand English well enough to understand the question? How many are high on drugs when they pick up the phone? What about the fact that polls these days all seem to initiate contact via robo-call, whereas all but an atypical minority of the population presumably hangs up on robo-calls? You can ask pretty much any question you want, and 20% of respondents will give a goofy answer. Who's president? How many letters are there in the alphabet? You'll always get about 20% giving apparently nonsensical answers.
>>>The first amendment does not grant the right to endanger others by means of speech.
>>I guess I missed that part in the first amendment where it says "This does not include factual information that the government doesn't want you to tell people".
>For that, you'll have to look at the Espionage Act, and its amendments in the Sedition act. In summary, it's illegal to aid groups the American government has declared to be enemies.
Er, I guess I missed the day in civics class when we learned that an *act* of congress could override the bill of rights.
There are certain specific exceptions to freedom of speech, including slander, libel, fighting words, and yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. There is no exception for anything as broad as cases where you "endanger others." If there was an exception that broad, then I could have my book suppressed because it advocated having anonymous sex without a condom.
This is a pilot program, Houghton Mifflin and/or Apple are probably subsidizing it.
This may be partly a reaction to California's Free Digital Textbook Initiative. I went to a symposium about the FDTI last summer (more about that symposium here. The people interested enough to come were an odd-bedfellows mixture of free-information enthusiasts, commercial textbook companies, and computer hardware companies. The ones with a really, really strong pecuniary motive for participating are the hardware companies. This is a gigantic potential gold mine for them. From the point of view of the book publishers, it was clear that they were about as enthusiastic about it as they would be about a skunk at a bridal shower, and the only reason they were there was to gauge how horrible the threat was.
This pilot program would then represent the perfect confluence of interests between the publishers and the hardware companies. Once you get rid of the pesky idea of having the textbooks become free, it becomes a wonderful potential gravy train for all of them.
A pilot program is designed to measure the effectiveness of the device and the costs. It is plausible that a reusable digital device loaded with numerous textbooks could be less expensive than the corresponding set of paper textbooks. Also keep in mind that today's $500 iPad will probably be around $250 in a couple of years. and those are retail prices not educational institution prices.
Not so sure about this. My kid just started high school, and she had IIRC 30 lb of books. Since she sometimes walks to and from school, we bought her her own copies of some of her books to keep at home. They were actually surprisingly inexpensive, especially compared to the exploitative cost of college-level textbooks.
But computer companies have a long-established practice of being willing to lose money in order to get impressionable K-12 kids used to their hardware and software, on the theory that the kids will then be loyal customers after they grow up. Apple has done this using educational discounts on their hardware. MS did it in their early history by winking at piracy. Amazon has of course been losing money hand over fist on the Kindle in order to build market share.
That said, you can check for scientific misconduct which will help you know which scientists to trust.
I never suggested that every layperson should interpret raw data correctly. It is not correct that if you aren't able to interpret the raw data correctly then you must trust people who can. For example, I have never seen the raw data on whether fiber consumption correlates negatively with colon cancer. What I do know is that when this link was first hypothesized, it was based purely on theoretical guesswork; there were no data at all. I also know that decades later, the data showed that the link was nonexistent. I have also never seen the raw data from the studies in the 20th century that showed that African-Americans were intellectually inferior to white people. Even though I've never seen the raw data, I knew enough to be very skeptical about those claims, because, for example, it would be very difficult to correct for confounding factors such as differing levels of formal education, differing levels of familiarity with paper-and-pencil tests, and cultural biases.
That said, you can check for scientific misconduct which will help you know which scientists to trust.
Outright scientific misconduct is not the issue. For example, I'm sure the people who "proved" African-Americans to be intellectually inferior were very conscientious in their work, and fully believed their results were correct.
The luminiferous aether was not correct, but it was more correct than the idea that light was only a particle because it explains interference and the double slit experiment. [...]
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
I never claimed that science didn't advance over time. I pointed out that decades after science made a particular advance (the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's theory of relativity), many authoritative sources were writing as if those advances had never taken place.
In comparison to other contemporary sources, I would think that scientists have been less wrong than any other group.
Are you saying (1) that scientists are less wrong about science than other groups, or (2) scientists are less wrong about their field than other professions are about their own fields? 1 is trivial and irrelevant. 2 is false. As a physicist, my experience has been that physicists are wrong quite often. On the other hand, I suspect that plumbers are almost always right about the questions that come up in their work. This is because the work of a plumber is almost all based on applying certain well established rules.
Read the article. It talks specifically about why common sense can't be relied on.
The GP didn't talk about common sense. He talked about educating yourself, informing yourself, and developing a highly refined BS detector based on that education and information. Someone who reaches the level of critical thinking he's describing has developed a very uncommon level of sense. Everyone has a BS detector (common sense). Very few people have a well trained BS detector (uncommon sense).
Also, does this approach work from bacteria to virus to cryptosporidium? My understanding is that the old school iodine tablets don't work on the later and that the military and NGOs have moved to chlorine dioxide based tablets. Much better tasting too. The caveat is that it takes something like 4 hours to kill the crypto compared to something like 15 to 30 minutes for the lesser "bugs".
There are basically two different types of treatment that work on two different types of microorganisms. Iodine and other halogens work great on viruses and bacteria, but not on protozoa such as cryptosporidium and giardia. Filters work great on protozoa (which are physically large) but not on viruses (which are physically small).
Although ClO2 tablets do work on protozoa, they're really not optimal. As you've noted, they take hours to work, which means that many people will run out of patience and drink the water before the protozoa are all dead; the best treatment method in the world won't do any good if users don't find it convenient to use it properly. The other issue with ClO2 tablets is cost. Here in the US, where I buy them for backpacking, they are expensive enough that I consider them a significant cost -- and my yearly income is probably a hundred times greater than people in the areas being targeted with this teabag technology.
So if you want low cost combined with good effectiveness, halogens plus filtering really is the one-two punch you want. It sounds like this filter is designed to be used in areas where the water supply is chlorinated, so people who use the filter are basically getting rid of the chlorine taste, killing protozoa, and filtering out some harmful chemicals.
Absolutely amazing. The amount of effort that people are putting out in order to bash a completely optional technology is staggering. [...] If you don't want it, then DON'T BUY IT! Why is this so difficult for these anti-3D trolls to undertstand?
Let me get this straight. You're saying that nobody should ever write a negative review of a product that's optional? And anyone who does is automatically a troll? For example, I suppose that if someone wrote a negative review of Windows ME, they'd automatically be a troll, because nobody is forced to buy Windows ME.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the efforts of those who looks to denigrate this technology, which in its current form is clearly in its infancy, amount to nothing more than trolling.
Hmm...so if it's in its infancy, that means nobody should warn potential buyers away from it? For example, quadraphonic sound was in its infancy in the 70's. Should nobody ever have written a magazine article saying that it wasn't a good idea to buy a home quad system?
You also seem to be assuming that consumers are always offered an array of choices that includes everything they could possibly want, so that every consumer always gets to choose an option that exactly suits his needs (unless he doesn't want the product at all). Some movies are only shown in theaters in 3-d. Your fast food analogy has the same problem, and movie theaters are an egregious example: if I want to buy a 6-ounce soda in a movie theater, I simply can't. (And they will also try their darndest to keep me from bringing in a 6-ounce soda from outside.)
what you've just said is that everyone should test every assertion ever made.
No, I didn't say anything that extreme.
Did you personally test Anthropogenic Global Warming? 'Cause I'm willing to bet you trusted someone else's assertion.
I never said anything about personally testing it. I just said that I didn't automatically accept it because it was stated by an authority figure.
We should test the source, but if they prove to be authoritative, we don't need to distrust everything out-of-hand. If they make mistakes, other authoratative sources will correct them.
Authoritative sources said that Jews and gypsies were genetically inferior to Aryans. By the time Germans heard those authoritative sources contradicted by other authoritative sources, the Jews and gypsies had already been massacred.
You seem to be ignoring the possibility that there is some middle ground: that we can think critically even about scientific claims made by authoritative sources, and base our critical thinking on something less than repeating every experiment personally.
Wired: What about nonscientists? How are we supposed to know what's true?
Simon Singh: Don't come up with a view, find everybody who agrees with it, and then say, "Look at this, I must be right." Start off by saying, "Who do I trust?" On global warming, for example, I happen to trust climate experts, world academies of science, Nobel laureates, and certain science journalists. You have to decide who you trust before you decide what to believe.
This makes me very uncomfortable. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic, but the reason I believe it isn't just that somebody with a Nobel prize said, "global warming is real and anthropogenic." Authoritative scientists told us that margarine was better for us than butter; in that miscegenation laws were necessary for public health; and that electromagnetic waves were not quantized (Bohr's school said this) and that they were vibrations of a luminiferous aether (most textbooks said this, decades after Einstein published relativity). All of those claims turned out to be false. Some of them were extremely harmful to large numbers of people.
I teach physics at a community college for a living. The hardest thing to get my students to do is to think for themselves. Some come in already doing it, some will do it with encouragement, and others are incapable of doing it. Some will do it and come up with conclusions that I consider incorrect. But despite all these difficulties, we're far better off as a society if 10% of the population can think for themselves than we are if 100% accept authoritative opinions on faith.
>>If they're philosophers, then I suspect you will find roughly zero academic philosophers these days who think that proving or disproving the existence of the Christian deity is a meaningful exercise.
>Only true for remarkably large values of zero. A recent survey reported in Philosophy Now magazine identified that roughly 20% of academic philosophers believe in one or more gods, and philosophy of religion is still an active field.
Your statement doesn't contradict my statement. Belief by a modern academic philosopher in one or more gods doesn't imply an opinion that existence of the Christian god can be proved or disproved by the methods of modern academic philosophy. Similarly, belief by a plumber in one or more gods doesn't imply an opinion that existence of the Christian god can be proved or disproved by the methods of plumbing. The existence of academic philosophers actively working on the philosophy of religion also does not imply the existence of academic philosophers who think that it's a meaningful exercise to prove or disprove the existence of the Christian god.
>>It will either find the Higgs, which would be an important confirmation of the standard model, or it won't -- in which case all hell will break loose, and it will be very exciting
>It would be important if we do find the Higgs, but it would hardly cause all hell to break up. Everyone expects to find the higgs, and it wouldn't give us any new insights.
What I said was that if they don't find the Higgs all hell will break loose. There are some pretty solid model-independent arguments that something new has to happen in this energy range. If it's not the Higgs, it's got to be something else, and the other "somethings" are all pretty exotic and not part of the standard model.
If you complain at string theory, then PLEASE state what you are proposing. What is the use in complaining when you have no alternative?
Why does there have to be an alternative? You've done a nice job of laying out the reasons for extreme pessimism about achieving any theory of quantum gravity, basically because we can't probe the Planck scale experimentally. I would propose not to fund any further research into quantum gravity for the foreseeable future.
If you complain about string theory taking so long, then what do you expect?
I expect to go to my grave before there is a theory of quantum gravity.
It has taken 16 years just to do a single experiment (The LHC).
That's a totally bogus analogy. The LHC is virtually guaranteed to tell us some new objective facts about the laws of physics. It will either find the Higgs, which would be an important confirmation of the standard model, or it won't -- in which case all hell will break loose, and it will be very exciting. String theory, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to be anything but a dead end. So far, it is a dead end.
The only way we can make String Theory etc testable is by further research. If you dislike, please propose a better solution rather than just complaining.
I would propose no longer funding research into string theory. Anyone who has gotten used to having funding for a research program would love to have funding for further research. That doesn't mean that they should be guaranteed further funding if their field turns out to be a failure.
>>The fact that many smart people believe in Christianity doesn't automatically mean that there are good, intelligent reasons for believing in Christianity.
>Not in itself it doesn't; you have to look at the arguments. And it turns out that there are arguments on both sides that are a lot more subtle and involved than most non-specialists realise. It gets rather tiresome to see folks treating anybody who disagrees with them as having not thought about the subject with enough care or intelligence, when there are people on both sides of the argument that have put in a degree of care and intelligence that few if any here could match.
What if I say that you have to look at the arguments for the existence of fairies. It turns out that there are arguments on both sides that are a lot more subtle and involved than most non-specialists realize. It gets rather tiresome to see folks treating anybody who disagrees with them as having not thought about the subject with enough care or intelligence, when there are people on both sides of the argument that have put in a degree of care and intelligence that few if any here could match.
You talk about "specialists," as if there was some intellectually rigorous body of knowledge and technique, with underpinnings that experts had agreed on based on objective criteria. What "specialists" would these be? If they're philosophers, then I suspect you will find roughly zero academic philosophers these days who think that proving or disproving the existence of the Christian deity is a meaningful exercise. Ditto for academics who study logic mathematically. If they're theologians, then you're talking about people who have already bought into a certain religion, debating according to principles that are only accepted within their religion.
So causality is bi-directional, i.e. gravity existing in the present day (or even a microsecond after the Big Bang) exerts a force which creates the Big Bang from nothing (or annihilates the universe, depending on the arrow of time)?
That's about right. (I could nitpick a few things, e.g., general relativity doesn't describe gravity as a force.) The fact that causality works equally well in either direction is not anything special about relativity. Newton's laws have the same property.
If you think that because some religious people have stupid reasons for being religious they must all have stupid reasons for being religious then perhaps you should spend a few minutes with a critical thinking primer too.
I would distinguish between stupid ideas and stupid people. There are lots of smart people who have stupid ideas. Linus Pauling got a Nobel prize, so I think that qualifies him as smart in most people's books. But he also was convinced that vitamin C could cure cancer and do all sorts of other wonderful things, and when conclusive evidence showed that vitamin C didn't cure cancer, he wouldn't accept the evidence. He was a smart person who went to his grave stubbornly insisting on a stupid idea.
The fact that many smart people believe in Christianity doesn't automatically mean that there are good, intelligent reasons for believing in Christianity. People who are rational and objective in one area may be unable to think rationally and objectively in other areas. Of course the truth-value of Christianity is hard to define because there are many different brands of Christianity, and many different types of claims made by Christianity (historical, genealogical, moral, metaphysical). But there are certainly some of those claims that are known objectively as of 2010 to be false, such as the historical claims in the Old Testmant that make out the Hebrew tribe to be far older and far more powerful than it actually was. If an intelligent person believes those claims, then that's a case of an intelligent person believing a stupid idea.
The fact that an intelligent person believes in fairies doesn't imply that the existence of fairies isn't a stupid idea. It also doesn't imply that I should spend a lot of time reading books about fairies, because one of them might actually have a really good argument for the existence of fairies, which would finally convince me that I'd been wrong for all these years on the fairy issue.
I'm no physicist (far from it) but the reason you have trouble is that you're still thinking in 1800's physics lessons.
Gravity probably has a lot less to do with mass than you might think.
I am a physicist, but actually I think you did a reasonably good job of summarizing some of the ideas.
The book is not out yet, and Amazon won't let you peek at it using their Look Inside feature, so I don't know exactly what Hawking is really arguing. One thing to watch out for is that when physicists talk about "God," they usually don't mean the anthropomorphic guy named Yahweh who lost a wrestling match with Jacob. They usually mean something more like the deist conception of the watchmaker's God, or simply a shorthand for "the laws of physics." E.g., let's say someone suggests a spaceship drive that violates conservation of momentum. A physicist expressing skepticism of this might say this: If momentum is not conserved, then presumably it would be possible for an isolated particle to change its own momentum. If we then get into a frame of reference where we're initially at rest relative to the particle, we see a particle that is initially at rest and then scoots off in a certain direction. This violates the symmetry of the situation -- how does God decide which way the particle should go? It's really not an argument about Yahweh, it's an argument about mathematical symmetries, with "God" thrown in for color.
One of the biggest achievements of Hawking's early career was the Hawking singularity theorem, which basically allows us to prove (within the assumed framework of classical general relativity) that the Big Bang happened, just by making some relatively crude measurements of the present-day state of the universe and then extrapolating backward. Before Hawking and Penrose proved their respective singularity theorems, there were a lot of physicists who believed that singularities were not physically realistic, and would require some kind of unrealistic symmetry. E.g., they thought that the collapse of a star might not actually produce a black hole, because the infalling particles wouldn't be aimed quite right, would slip past one another and miss. Penrose's theorem proves that the perfect symmetry isn't necessary if you extrapolate present conditions forward to the future collapse of a star into a black hole, and Hawking's proves the same thing when you extrapolate backward to the Big Bang.
Philosophically, this is really not so different from saying that the Big Bang was something that had to happen rather than something that God chose to make happen. If we observe present conditions (apple above the ground) and can predict future events (apple hits the ground), then we don't really see a role for any God other than the deistic God, who simply equals the laws of physics. The equations of general relativity treat the past and the present totally symmetrically (there is no arrow of time built into the equations), so the same argument applies when we look at present conditions and extrapolate backward to see that there really had to be a Big Bang event in the past. In this specific mathematical sense, "God" had no choice about the Big Bang.
This idea that decay rates depend on environmental factors is well known as a fertile field for crackpots. Here's a FAQ I wrote about it.
FAQ: Do rates of nuclear decay depend on environmental factors?
There is one environmental effect that has been scientifically well established for a long time. In the process of electron capture, a proton in the nucleus combines with an inner-shell electron to produce a neutron and a neutrino. This effect does depend on the electronic environment, and in particular, the process cannot happen if the atom is completely ionized.
Other claims of environmental effects on decay rates are crank science, often quoted by creationists in their attempts to discredit evolutionary and geological time scales.
He et al. (He 2007) claim to have detected a change in rates of beta decay of as much as 11% when samples are rotated in a centrifuge, and say that the effect varies asymmetrically with clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. He believes that there is a mysterious energy field that has both biological and nuclear effects, and that it relates to circadian rhythms. The nuclear effects were not observed when the experimental conditions were reproduced by Ding et al.
Jenkins and Fischbach claim to have observed effects on alpha decay rates correlated with an influence from the sun. They proposed that their results could be tested more dramatically by looking for changes in the rate of alpha decay in radioisotope thermoelectric generators aboard space probes. Such an effect turned out not to exist (Cooper 2009). Undeterred by their theory's failure to pass their own proposed test, they have gone on to publish even kookier ideas, such as a neutrino-mediated effect from solar flares, even though solar flares are a surface phenomenon, whereas neutrinos come from the sun's core. Their latest claims, in 2010, are based on experiments done decades ago by other people, so that Jenkins and Fischbach have no first-hand way of investigating possible sources of systematic error.
Cardone et al. claim to have observed variations in the rate of alpha decay of thorium induced by 20 kHz ultrasound, and claim that this alpha decay occurs without the emission of gamma rays. Ericsson et al. have pointed out multiple severe problems with Cardone's experiments.
It's interesting to compare this quote from the summary
Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.
with your statement
this is still the kind of irresponsible spending that got them into the mess they're currently in.
The quote from the summary makes it sound as if somebody sat in an office, saw all these lay-offs, and nevertheless said, "Aw, hell, screw those laid-off teachers. Let's spend money on a building instead." Your statement shows a clearer awareness of the fact that the decision to build the building was made many years ago, when money seemed to be growing on trees.
I teach physics at a community college where the administration announced to the science faculty in 2004 that the science building's roof was in bad shape, and rather than repairing the roof, they were going to get money from the state to knock the whole building down and replace it with a shiny new building. Note the magic words "money from the state." Also note the year, 2004, which was before the economy went south. The science faculty voted three times (once in 2004 and twice in 2007) against this plan. Hey, you'd think we'd want a nice, shiny new building, right? No, we recognized that it was a poor use of tax money (why not just fix the roof?), and there were a lot of potential problems and risks involved. The board of trustees didn't care, and went ahead and voted to do it. Remember those magic words, "money from the state." Guess what's happening now? We have a shiny new building that we'll start using in 2011, at the same time when professors are getting laid off, and classes are so full some entering freshmen with low registration priority can't get a single class.
There are three things that produce this perverse psychology: (1) Politicians get strokes for showering money on communities during good economic times. They don't care about consequences 5 or 10 years down the road, especially in this age of term limits. (2) K-12 and community college funding used to be local, but now it's mainly at the state level. This makes communities feel that they're getting manna from heaven. They don't consider that they themselves also pay state income tax. (3) California's direct democracy is out of control, setting so many constraints that state legislators can't do reasonable things to balance the budget.
This is utterly meaningless. These aren't graphs of the popularity of the distros, they're graphs of how often people typed their names into a web browser as search terms.
I've had this happen to me, with a copylefted textbook I wrote. I think the situation was simply that the guy who did it knew the book was freely available as a PDF, but didn't realize it was possible to buy a copy in print, so he just set it up on lulu so he could produce one copy for himself. Can't remember if he was complying with all the terms of the license or not. I contacted him about it, he explained what he was trying to do, and we straightened everything out. I think lulu had by default put him as the author, since the book was made on his account, but he wasn't intentionally trying to claim authorship of my work.
Anyway, this seems like the biggest non-story ever. Lulu is a print-on-demand publishing business. They're one of these online businesses that is able to make a profit because they have no human beings paid to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis. I use them for my books, and I'm fairly happy with them, although there have been a few hassles here and there. When you set up a book to be produced and sold by lulu, you upload a pdf and click through on a form that says you agree to a certain contract. The contract says that you have to be the copyright owner. Sounds like whoever put these scans online clicked through the contract, but is violating it. Nobody at lulu reads your book when you upload it. They're not a full-service publishing house with acquisition editors, copy editors, etc. Whoever posted the slashdot story could have just clicked on the "Report This Content to Lulu" link and told them it was a copyright violation, and presumably lulu would have dealt with the issue. But I guess it's more fun to have the story run on slashdot.
I avoid it by using public transportation in DC when I drink but not everyone has that option.
Everyone has the option of not drinking alcohol. Other options include sitting on your sofa at home and pouring some gin in a glass while you watch soap operas.
The people with no options who I really feel sorry for are the people who got killed by drunks. They didn't have the option of living.
Wouldn't being a sound sleeper be a liability in the Darwin game? I would think that waking up when there's unusual stimuli would be something helpful to keep from being lunch for a nocturnal predator.
A human is a pretty big animal. There aren't a lot of predator species that will take down a human, and those that are big enough to prey on humans are usually not very numerous, because they're at the top of the food chain. I do a lot of backpacking in the Sierra, where black bears could theoretically kill and eat a human, but in reality black bears in real wilderness areas (as opposed to places developed enough to have toilets) tend to shy away from humans. If they manage to get your food while you have it out of your bear canister, they will defend it against your attempts to retrieve it, but that's typically about the extent of their aggression. Grizzlies (which are extinct in California) will sometimes bluff-charge a human to let them know who's boss, and rarely they will kill a human, but they're still a relatively minor threat statistically. (People hiking in grizzly country often bring special extra-strength pepper spray.)
I would think that for stone-age hunter-gatherers, being poopy and not alert during the day would be a far bigger problem than risking getting eaten in their sleep by predators.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan to put down Al Qaeda?
Yes.
Our reaction to 9/11 (shredding the Constitution, two pointless wars in the Middle East) has done far more damage to our own country than the 9/11 attacks ever did. Dick Cheney (110,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan) is more of a war criminal than Osama bin Laden (2,995 victims killed on 9/11). Waging war against two countries is not an appropriate or proportionate response to the terrorist actions of a group whose leadership was based in one of those countries (carried out by thugs who were mostly from Saudi Arabia).
These groups have correctly identified a life-or-death issue affecting real human beings. Nevertheless, they're failing to see the forest for the trees. The reason these people need to hide their identities for fear of being murdered is that there's a war going on around them. The real issue is this: should there be a war in Afghanistan, or should there not be a war in Afghanistan? There was more justification for invading Afghanistan than there was for invading Iraq, but that ain't saying much, considering that the best public justification for the war in Iraq happened when Dick Cheney convinced Bush to get Colin Powell to lie to the UN. According to our own country's intelligence, Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan number in the hundreds. For that reason, we're subjecting millions of people to a brutal war. We're supporting an Afghan regime that is in power because it committed massive fraud in the last election.
I'm a community college teacher. You know what army guys tend to do when they get their limbs blown off in Iraq and Afghanistan? They tend to show up at community colleges, hoping to go on and do something better with their lives. Brave guys. They've been ill-served by people like Bush and Cheney, but they move on. What about the U.S. soldiers who just plain died in Afghanistan? They're easy to forget. I don't see them sitting at the desks in my classroom. What about the innocent civilians getting killed by U.S. drone aircraft in Afghanistan? What about an entire Afghan society that can't make any progress because we invaded their country in order to go after a few terrorists? To me, that's the big picture. Solve that problem, and the problem of names not being redacted by Wikileaks will become a non-issue. That would be the right set of priorities, in my opinion. By the way, one guy who I think really had the right set of priorities is Bradley Manning. He committed a crime by blowing the whistle on war crimes. He's currently in solitary confinement, under suicide watch, in Quantico, Virginia. If you want to send him a letter and lift his spirits, the address is Inmate: Bradley Manning, 3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134. If you want to donate to his legal defense fund, the information is here. (You can verify the donation link via the locked link from the WP article
Slashdot Mirror
Roughly 5% of the population is mentally retarded (depending on definitions). Several percent have a serious mental illness (~1.5% schizophrenic, ~1% bipolar, ~1% with major depressive disorder, ...), so they may not be functioning well enough to answer a pollster's questions. What percentage of people are pulling the pollster's leg? What percentage don't understand English well enough to understand the question? How many are high on drugs when they pick up the phone? What about the fact that polls these days all seem to initiate contact via robo-call, whereas all but an atypical minority of the population presumably hangs up on robo-calls? You can ask pretty much any question you want, and 20% of respondents will give a goofy answer. Who's president? How many letters are there in the alphabet? You'll always get about 20% giving apparently nonsensical answers.
Er, I guess I missed the day in civics class when we learned that an *act* of congress could override the bill of rights.
There are certain specific exceptions to freedom of speech, including slander, libel, fighting words, and yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. There is no exception for anything as broad as cases where you "endanger others." If there was an exception that broad, then I could have my book suppressed because it advocated having anonymous sex without a condom.
This may be partly a reaction to California's Free Digital Textbook Initiative. I went to a symposium about the FDTI last summer (more about that symposium here. The people interested enough to come were an odd-bedfellows mixture of free-information enthusiasts, commercial textbook companies, and computer hardware companies. The ones with a really, really strong pecuniary motive for participating are the hardware companies. This is a gigantic potential gold mine for them. From the point of view of the book publishers, it was clear that they were about as enthusiastic about it as they would be about a skunk at a bridal shower, and the only reason they were there was to gauge how horrible the threat was.
This pilot program would then represent the perfect confluence of interests between the publishers and the hardware companies. Once you get rid of the pesky idea of having the textbooks become free, it becomes a wonderful potential gravy train for all of them.
Not so sure about this. My kid just started high school, and she had IIRC 30 lb of books. Since she sometimes walks to and from school, we bought her her own copies of some of her books to keep at home. They were actually surprisingly inexpensive, especially compared to the exploitative cost of college-level textbooks.
But computer companies have a long-established practice of being willing to lose money in order to get impressionable K-12 kids used to their hardware and software, on the theory that the kids will then be loyal customers after they grow up. Apple has done this using educational discounts on their hardware. MS did it in their early history by winking at piracy. Amazon has of course been losing money hand over fist on the Kindle in order to build market share.
IMO the ultimate geek book on this topic is On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by McGee.
I never suggested that every layperson should interpret raw data correctly. It is not correct that if you aren't able to interpret the raw data correctly then you must trust people who can. For example, I have never seen the raw data on whether fiber consumption correlates negatively with colon cancer. What I do know is that when this link was first hypothesized, it was based purely on theoretical guesswork; there were no data at all. I also know that decades later, the data showed that the link was nonexistent. I have also never seen the raw data from the studies in the 20th century that showed that African-Americans were intellectually inferior to white people. Even though I've never seen the raw data, I knew enough to be very skeptical about those claims, because, for example, it would be very difficult to correct for confounding factors such as differing levels of formal education, differing levels of familiarity with paper-and-pencil tests, and cultural biases.
Outright scientific misconduct is not the issue. For example, I'm sure the people who "proved" African-Americans to be intellectually inferior were very conscientious in their work, and fully believed their results were correct.
I never claimed that science didn't advance over time. I pointed out that decades after science made a particular advance (the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's theory of relativity), many authoritative sources were writing as if those advances had never taken place.
Are you saying (1) that scientists are less wrong about science than other groups, or (2) scientists are less wrong about their field than other professions are about their own fields? 1 is trivial and irrelevant. 2 is false. As a physicist, my experience has been that physicists are wrong quite often. On the other hand, I suspect that plumbers are almost always right about the questions that come up in their work. This is because the work of a plumber is almost all based on applying certain well established rules.
The GP didn't talk about common sense. He talked about educating yourself, informing yourself, and developing a highly refined BS detector based on that education and information. Someone who reaches the level of critical thinking he's describing has developed a very uncommon level of sense. Everyone has a BS detector (common sense). Very few people have a well trained BS detector (uncommon sense).
There are basically two different types of treatment that work on two different types of microorganisms. Iodine and other halogens work great on viruses and bacteria, but not on protozoa such as cryptosporidium and giardia. Filters work great on protozoa (which are physically large) but not on viruses (which are physically small).
Although ClO2 tablets do work on protozoa, they're really not optimal. As you've noted, they take hours to work, which means that many people will run out of patience and drink the water before the protozoa are all dead; the best treatment method in the world won't do any good if users don't find it convenient to use it properly. The other issue with ClO2 tablets is cost. Here in the US, where I buy them for backpacking, they are expensive enough that I consider them a significant cost -- and my yearly income is probably a hundred times greater than people in the areas being targeted with this teabag technology.
So if you want low cost combined with good effectiveness, halogens plus filtering really is the one-two punch you want. It sounds like this filter is designed to be used in areas where the water supply is chlorinated, so people who use the filter are basically getting rid of the chlorine taste, killing protozoa, and filtering out some harmful chemicals.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that nobody should ever write a negative review of a product that's optional? And anyone who does is automatically a troll? For example, I suppose that if someone wrote a negative review of Windows ME, they'd automatically be a troll, because nobody is forced to buy Windows ME.
Hmm...so if it's in its infancy, that means nobody should warn potential buyers away from it? For example, quadraphonic sound was in its infancy in the 70's. Should nobody ever have written a magazine article saying that it wasn't a good idea to buy a home quad system?
You also seem to be assuming that consumers are always offered an array of choices that includes everything they could possibly want, so that every consumer always gets to choose an option that exactly suits his needs (unless he doesn't want the product at all). Some movies are only shown in theaters in 3-d. Your fast food analogy has the same problem, and movie theaters are an egregious example: if I want to buy a 6-ounce soda in a movie theater, I simply can't. (And they will also try their darndest to keep me from bringing in a 6-ounce soda from outside.)
No, I didn't say anything that extreme.
I never said anything about personally testing it. I just said that I didn't automatically accept it because it was stated by an authority figure.
Authoritative sources said that Jews and gypsies were genetically inferior to Aryans. By the time Germans heard those authoritative sources contradicted by other authoritative sources, the Jews and gypsies had already been massacred.
You seem to be ignoring the possibility that there is some middle ground: that we can think critically even about scientific claims made by authoritative sources, and base our critical thinking on something less than repeating every experiment personally.
This makes me very uncomfortable. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic, but the reason I believe it isn't just that somebody with a Nobel prize said, "global warming is real and anthropogenic." Authoritative scientists told us that margarine was better for us than butter; in that miscegenation laws were necessary for public health; and that electromagnetic waves were not quantized (Bohr's school said this) and that they were vibrations of a luminiferous aether (most textbooks said this, decades after Einstein published relativity). All of those claims turned out to be false. Some of them were extremely harmful to large numbers of people.
I teach physics at a community college for a living. The hardest thing to get my students to do is to think for themselves. Some come in already doing it, some will do it with encouragement, and others are incapable of doing it. Some will do it and come up with conclusions that I consider incorrect. But despite all these difficulties, we're far better off as a society if 10% of the population can think for themselves than we are if 100% accept authoritative opinions on faith.
>>If they're philosophers, then I suspect you will find roughly zero academic philosophers these days who think that proving or disproving the existence of the Christian deity is a meaningful exercise.
>Only true for remarkably large values of zero. A recent survey reported in Philosophy Now magazine identified that roughly 20% of academic philosophers believe in one or more gods, and philosophy of religion is still an active field.
Your statement doesn't contradict my statement. Belief by a modern academic philosopher in one or more gods doesn't imply an opinion that existence of the Christian god can be proved or disproved by the methods of modern academic philosophy. Similarly, belief by a plumber in one or more gods doesn't imply an opinion that existence of the Christian god can be proved or disproved by the methods of plumbing. The existence of academic philosophers actively working on the philosophy of religion also does not imply the existence of academic philosophers who think that it's a meaningful exercise to prove or disprove the existence of the Christian god.
>>It will either find the Higgs, which would be an important confirmation of the standard model, or it won't -- in which case all hell will break loose, and it will be very exciting
>It would be important if we do find the Higgs, but it would hardly cause all hell to break up. Everyone expects to find the higgs, and it wouldn't give us any new insights.
What I said was that if they don't find the Higgs all hell will break loose. There are some pretty solid model-independent arguments that something new has to happen in this energy range. If it's not the Higgs, it's got to be something else, and the other "somethings" are all pretty exotic and not part of the standard model.
Why does there have to be an alternative? You've done a nice job of laying out the reasons for extreme pessimism about achieving any theory of quantum gravity, basically because we can't probe the Planck scale experimentally. I would propose not to fund any further research into quantum gravity for the foreseeable future.
I expect to go to my grave before there is a theory of quantum gravity.
That's a totally bogus analogy. The LHC is virtually guaranteed to tell us some new objective facts about the laws of physics. It will either find the Higgs, which would be an important confirmation of the standard model, or it won't -- in which case all hell will break loose, and it will be very exciting. String theory, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to be anything but a dead end. So far, it is a dead end.
I would propose no longer funding research into string theory. Anyone who has gotten used to having funding for a research program would love to have funding for further research. That doesn't mean that they should be guaranteed further funding if their field turns out to be a failure.
What if I say that you have to look at the arguments for the existence of fairies. It turns out that there are arguments on both sides that are a lot more subtle and involved than most non-specialists realize. It gets rather tiresome to see folks treating anybody who disagrees with them as having not thought about the subject with enough care or intelligence, when there are people on both sides of the argument that have put in a degree of care and intelligence that few if any here could match.
You talk about "specialists," as if there was some intellectually rigorous body of knowledge and technique, with underpinnings that experts had agreed on based on objective criteria. What "specialists" would these be? If they're philosophers, then I suspect you will find roughly zero academic philosophers these days who think that proving or disproving the existence of the Christian deity is a meaningful exercise. Ditto for academics who study logic mathematically. If they're theologians, then you're talking about people who have already bought into a certain religion, debating according to principles that are only accepted within their religion.
That's about right. (I could nitpick a few things, e.g., general relativity doesn't describe gravity as a force.) The fact that causality works equally well in either direction is not anything special about relativity. Newton's laws have the same property.
I would distinguish between stupid ideas and stupid people. There are lots of smart people who have stupid ideas. Linus Pauling got a Nobel prize, so I think that qualifies him as smart in most people's books. But he also was convinced that vitamin C could cure cancer and do all sorts of other wonderful things, and when conclusive evidence showed that vitamin C didn't cure cancer, he wouldn't accept the evidence. He was a smart person who went to his grave stubbornly insisting on a stupid idea.
The fact that many smart people believe in Christianity doesn't automatically mean that there are good, intelligent reasons for believing in Christianity. People who are rational and objective in one area may be unable to think rationally and objectively in other areas. Of course the truth-value of Christianity is hard to define because there are many different brands of Christianity, and many different types of claims made by Christianity (historical, genealogical, moral, metaphysical). But there are certainly some of those claims that are known objectively as of 2010 to be false, such as the historical claims in the Old Testmant that make out the Hebrew tribe to be far older and far more powerful than it actually was. If an intelligent person believes those claims, then that's a case of an intelligent person believing a stupid idea.
The fact that an intelligent person believes in fairies doesn't imply that the existence of fairies isn't a stupid idea. It also doesn't imply that I should spend a lot of time reading books about fairies, because one of them might actually have a really good argument for the existence of fairies, which would finally convince me that I'd been wrong for all these years on the fairy issue.
I am a physicist, but actually I think you did a reasonably good job of summarizing some of the ideas.
The book is not out yet, and Amazon won't let you peek at it using their Look Inside feature, so I don't know exactly what Hawking is really arguing. One thing to watch out for is that when physicists talk about "God," they usually don't mean the anthropomorphic guy named Yahweh who lost a wrestling match with Jacob. They usually mean something more like the deist conception of the watchmaker's God, or simply a shorthand for "the laws of physics." E.g., let's say someone suggests a spaceship drive that violates conservation of momentum. A physicist expressing skepticism of this might say this: If momentum is not conserved, then presumably it would be possible for an isolated particle to change its own momentum. If we then get into a frame of reference where we're initially at rest relative to the particle, we see a particle that is initially at rest and then scoots off in a certain direction. This violates the symmetry of the situation -- how does God decide which way the particle should go? It's really not an argument about Yahweh, it's an argument about mathematical symmetries, with "God" thrown in for color.
One of the biggest achievements of Hawking's early career was the Hawking singularity theorem, which basically allows us to prove (within the assumed framework of classical general relativity) that the Big Bang happened, just by making some relatively crude measurements of the present-day state of the universe and then extrapolating backward. Before Hawking and Penrose proved their respective singularity theorems, there were a lot of physicists who believed that singularities were not physically realistic, and would require some kind of unrealistic symmetry. E.g., they thought that the collapse of a star might not actually produce a black hole, because the infalling particles wouldn't be aimed quite right, would slip past one another and miss. Penrose's theorem proves that the perfect symmetry isn't necessary if you extrapolate present conditions forward to the future collapse of a star into a black hole, and Hawking's proves the same thing when you extrapolate backward to the Big Bang.
Philosophically, this is really not so different from saying that the Big Bang was something that had to happen rather than something that God chose to make happen. If we observe present conditions (apple above the ground) and can predict future events (apple hits the ground), then we don't really see a role for any God other than the deistic God, who simply equals the laws of physics. The equations of general relativity treat the past and the present totally symmetrically (there is no arrow of time built into the equations), so the same argument applies when we look at present conditions and extrapolate backward to see that there really had to be a Big Bang event in the past. In this specific mathematical sense, "God" had no choice about the Big Bang.
This idea that decay rates depend on environmental factors is well known as a fertile field for crackpots. Here's a FAQ I wrote about it.
FAQ: Do rates of nuclear decay depend on environmental factors?
There is one environmental effect that has been scientifically well established for a long time. In the process of electron capture, a proton in the nucleus combines with an inner-shell electron to produce a neutron and a neutrino. This effect does depend on the electronic environment, and in particular, the process cannot happen if the atom is completely ionized.
Other claims of environmental effects on decay rates are crank science, often quoted by creationists in their attempts to discredit evolutionary and geological time scales.
He et al. (He 2007) claim to have detected a change in rates of beta decay of as much as 11% when samples are rotated in a centrifuge, and say that the effect varies asymmetrically with clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. He believes that there is a mysterious energy field that has both biological and nuclear effects, and that it relates to circadian rhythms. The nuclear effects were not observed when the experimental conditions were reproduced by Ding et al.
Jenkins and Fischbach claim to have observed effects on alpha decay rates correlated with an influence from the sun. They proposed that their results could be tested more dramatically by looking for changes in the rate of alpha decay in radioisotope thermoelectric generators aboard space probes. Such an effect turned out not to exist (Cooper 2009). Undeterred by their theory's failure to pass their own proposed test, they have gone on to publish even kookier ideas, such as a neutrino-mediated effect from solar flares, even though solar flares are a surface phenomenon, whereas neutrinos come from the sun's core. Their latest claims, in 2010, are based on experiments done decades ago by other people, so that Jenkins and Fischbach have no first-hand way of investigating possible sources of systematic error.
Cardone et al. claim to have observed variations in the rate of alpha decay of thorium induced by 20 kHz ultrasound, and claim that this alpha decay occurs without the emission of gamma rays. Ericsson et al. have pointed out multiple severe problems with Cardone's experiments.
He YuJian et al., Science China 50 (2007) 170.
YouQian Ding et al., Science China 52 (2009) 690.
Jenkins and Fischbach (2008), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283v1
Jenkins and Fischbach (2009), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3156
Jenkins and Fischbach (2010), http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3318
Cooper (2009), http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4248
F. Cardone, R. Mignani, A. Petrucci, Phys. Lett. A 373 (2009) 1956
Ericsson et al., Comment on "Piezonuclear decay of thorium," Phys. Lett. A 373 (2009) 1956, http://arxiv4.library.cornell.edu/abs/0907.0623
Ericsson et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.2141
It's interesting to compare this quote from the summary
with your statement
The quote from the summary makes it sound as if somebody sat in an office, saw all these lay-offs, and nevertheless said, "Aw, hell, screw those laid-off teachers. Let's spend money on a building instead." Your statement shows a clearer awareness of the fact that the decision to build the building was made many years ago, when money seemed to be growing on trees.
I teach physics at a community college where the administration announced to the science faculty in 2004 that the science building's roof was in bad shape, and rather than repairing the roof, they were going to get money from the state to knock the whole building down and replace it with a shiny new building. Note the magic words "money from the state." Also note the year, 2004, which was before the economy went south. The science faculty voted three times (once in 2004 and twice in 2007) against this plan. Hey, you'd think we'd want a nice, shiny new building, right? No, we recognized that it was a poor use of tax money (why not just fix the roof?), and there were a lot of potential problems and risks involved. The board of trustees didn't care, and went ahead and voted to do it. Remember those magic words, "money from the state." Guess what's happening now? We have a shiny new building that we'll start using in 2011, at the same time when professors are getting laid off, and classes are so full some entering freshmen with low registration priority can't get a single class.
There are three things that produce this perverse psychology: (1) Politicians get strokes for showering money on communities during good economic times. They don't care about consequences 5 or 10 years down the road, especially in this age of term limits. (2) K-12 and community college funding used to be local, but now it's mainly at the state level. This makes communities feel that they're getting manna from heaven. They don't consider that they themselves also pay state income tax. (3) California's direct democracy is out of control, setting so many constraints that state legislators can't do reasonable things to balance the budget.
This is utterly meaningless. These aren't graphs of the popularity of the distros, they're graphs of how often people typed their names into a web browser as search terms.
I've had this happen to me, with a copylefted textbook I wrote. I think the situation was simply that the guy who did it knew the book was freely available as a PDF, but didn't realize it was possible to buy a copy in print, so he just set it up on lulu so he could produce one copy for himself. Can't remember if he was complying with all the terms of the license or not. I contacted him about it, he explained what he was trying to do, and we straightened everything out. I think lulu had by default put him as the author, since the book was made on his account, but he wasn't intentionally trying to claim authorship of my work.
Anyway, this seems like the biggest non-story ever. Lulu is a print-on-demand publishing business. They're one of these online businesses that is able to make a profit because they have no human beings paid to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis. I use them for my books, and I'm fairly happy with them, although there have been a few hassles here and there. When you set up a book to be produced and sold by lulu, you upload a pdf and click through on a form that says you agree to a certain contract. The contract says that you have to be the copyright owner. Sounds like whoever put these scans online clicked through the contract, but is violating it. Nobody at lulu reads your book when you upload it. They're not a full-service publishing house with acquisition editors, copy editors, etc. Whoever posted the slashdot story could have just clicked on the "Report This Content to Lulu" link and told them it was a copyright violation, and presumably lulu would have dealt with the issue. But I guess it's more fun to have the story run on slashdot.
Everyone has the option of not drinking alcohol. Other options include sitting on your sofa at home and pouring some gin in a glass while you watch soap operas.
The people with no options who I really feel sorry for are the people who got killed by drunks. They didn't have the option of living.
A human is a pretty big animal. There aren't a lot of predator species that will take down a human, and those that are big enough to prey on humans are usually not very numerous, because they're at the top of the food chain. I do a lot of backpacking in the Sierra, where black bears could theoretically kill and eat a human, but in reality black bears in real wilderness areas (as opposed to places developed enough to have toilets) tend to shy away from humans. If they manage to get your food while you have it out of your bear canister, they will defend it against your attempts to retrieve it, but that's typically about the extent of their aggression. Grizzlies (which are extinct in California) will sometimes bluff-charge a human to let them know who's boss, and rarely they will kill a human, but they're still a relatively minor threat statistically. (People hiking in grizzly country often bring special extra-strength pepper spray.)
I would think that for stone-age hunter-gatherers, being poopy and not alert during the day would be a far bigger problem than risking getting eaten in their sleep by predators.
Yes.
Our reaction to 9/11 (shredding the Constitution, two pointless wars in the Middle East) has done far more damage to our own country than the 9/11 attacks ever did. Dick Cheney (110,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan) is more of a war criminal than Osama bin Laden (2,995 victims killed on 9/11). Waging war against two countries is not an appropriate or proportionate response to the terrorist actions of a group whose leadership was based in one of those countries (carried out by thugs who were mostly from Saudi Arabia).
These groups have correctly identified a life-or-death issue affecting real human beings. Nevertheless, they're failing to see the forest for the trees. The reason these people need to hide their identities for fear of being murdered is that there's a war going on around them. The real issue is this: should there be a war in Afghanistan, or should there not be a war in Afghanistan? There was more justification for invading Afghanistan than there was for invading Iraq, but that ain't saying much, considering that the best public justification for the war in Iraq happened when Dick Cheney convinced Bush to get Colin Powell to lie to the UN. According to our own country's intelligence, Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan number in the hundreds. For that reason, we're subjecting millions of people to a brutal war. We're supporting an Afghan regime that is in power because it committed massive fraud in the last election.
I'm a community college teacher. You know what army guys tend to do when they get their limbs blown off in Iraq and Afghanistan? They tend to show up at community colleges, hoping to go on and do something better with their lives. Brave guys. They've been ill-served by people like Bush and Cheney, but they move on. What about the U.S. soldiers who just plain died in Afghanistan? They're easy to forget. I don't see them sitting at the desks in my classroom. What about the innocent civilians getting killed by U.S. drone aircraft in Afghanistan? What about an entire Afghan society that can't make any progress because we invaded their country in order to go after a few terrorists? To me, that's the big picture. Solve that problem, and the problem of names not being redacted by Wikileaks will become a non-issue. That would be the right set of priorities, in my opinion. By the way, one guy who I think really had the right set of priorities is Bradley Manning. He committed a crime by blowing the whistle on war crimes. He's currently in solitary confinement, under suicide watch, in Quantico, Virginia. If you want to send him a letter and lift his spirits, the address is Inmate: Bradley Manning, 3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134. If you want to donate to his legal defense fund, the information is here. (You can verify the donation link via the locked link from the WP article