Execution in the US is too rare to make much of a dent in organ donation numbers. Under 50 executions took place in the last two years (source); in contrast, there's around 2000~2500 heart transplants in the US annually (see this page for more organs). As for China, from TFA,
Some human rights groups estimate that China puts to death thousands of prisoners annually, but official figures are a state secret, according to BBC correspondents.
TFA is very light on details but does list one reason:
While Dr. Huang did not bring up any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners at the conference, he said that organ donations from prisoners were not ideal because rates of fungal and bacterial infection in prisoner organs were quite high, and affected the long-term survival rates of those who undergo the transplants.
There is no worst blind than the one which do not want to see. US using imperial units is the perfect example of that.
You're arguing against someone because they're stuck in the past when you're stuck on an overgeneralization. The metric system is used in the US in a number of places, notably by medical professionals, scientists, and sometimes engineers. There are actually some decent arguments for Fahrenheit over Celsius (2 sig figs gives good human-scale accuracy vs. 3 with Celsius; the 0-100 range is pretty much the human range; neither are absolute anyway). On the whole, Imperial is used far more often, but certainly not exclusively.
I'd be fine with a change to metric length, speed, mass, and volume. I'm undecided on area and temperature. Whatever sadist made 640 acres to a square mile should be shot. The more complicated units like energy or power are mostly metric already (eg. kWh -- a ridiculous unit if ever there was one).
I don't find what's written terribly objectionable. How it gets applied in practice may be a different matter. Here's the guts of the bill:
...teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.
Since "the Bible doesn't agree" isn't a scientific weakness of evolution, that argument wouldn't belong in the classroom.
...teacher[s] in a public school system of this state [shall not be prohibited] from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.
Fine by me, so long as they really are talking about scientific strengths and weaknesses. The bill specifically addresses the religious controversy:
This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion.
My only worry is that crackpots with Ph.D.'s promoting crazy theories might be considered "scientific" enough to warrant classroom discussion despite being an extreme minority in the scientific community.
A decrease in global average temperature and CO2 observations would falsify the hypothesis. An alien sensor log recording relevant data over the last, say, million years could also hypothetically test (and reject) the "anthropogenic" part. Are you actually asking for human-obtainable data that could falsify the hypothesis? As far as I'm aware, that's not what most people mean when they bring up the falsifiability criterion.
But it isn't! Even in a simplistic single-planet solar system, the planet has an elliptical orbit with the star at one focus, not at the center of the ellipse (and certainly not at the center of mass). More planets give more perturbations; I've also neglected general relativity and quantum mechanics which add even more trouble. Of course, it's far more correct to say the sun is at the center of the solar system than to say the earth is, just like it's far more correct to call evolution a law rather than a theory, at least to the average person.
If the phonebook has 10,000 entries, on average you'll need to look through about half of them—5,000 entries—before you get lucky. A quantum search algorithm only needs to guess 100 times. With 5,000 guesses a quantum computer could search through a phonebook with 25 million names.
Using linear search on a phonebook (which is alphabetized) is preposterous. As the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Grover's algorithm says,
Grover's algorithm is a quantum algorithm for searching an unsorted database with N entries in O(N^1/2) time and using O(log N) storage space
So, the example should have used an unsorted database. The article also implies the big-O constant is 1, which I find very suspicious.
I lie. I read on, but then stopped again after
During a quantum algorithm, this symphony of possibilities split and merge, eventually coalescing around a single solution.
I lie again. I continued reading on, but was forced to quit once and for all by
The crown jewel of quantum mechanics, the phenomenon of entanglement is inextricably bound to the power of quantum computers.
Can anyone suggest a math-filled crash course in quantum computing that doesn't wax poetic while screwing up the few technical details it gives? Something geared for someone with a little knowledge of quantum mechanics like some Hilbert space theory, knowledge of the roles of Hermitian operators and kets, etc. would be what I'm after.
Physicists are widely known for their lack of mathematical rigor. David Hilbert, perhaps the most influential mathematician of the 20th century (who incidentally discovered Einstein's field equations before Einstein, though who was also nice enough not to get into a priority dispute since most of the work leading up to the discovery was Einstein's), is often quoted as saying some variation on, "Physics is too difficult for physicists!" His meaning was apparently that the mathematics required to rigorously justify assertions in advanced physics is often beyond the reach (or inclination) of physicists. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, by the way, but it indicates the traditional lack of rigor in physicist's math.
The paper itself says,
We use concepts from economics to gain quantitative insights into the role of exogenous factors on the evolution of language, combined with methods from statistical physics to quantify the competition arising from correlations between words and the memory-driven autocorrelations in u_i(t) across time.
Perhaps "Bringing quantitative statistical analysis..." is a better phrase.
As for the physics, here's a video where the acceleration is around 10 kph per second, which translates to about 0.3g. An object 2 meters in the air undergoing 0.3g horizontal and 1g vertical acceleration will hit the floor after about 0.64 seconds, traveling 0.6m horizontally in the process. That's hardly a projectile. If my book slipped it might hit the feet or ankles of the person behind me, but there's usually a seat in the way anyway. None of this sounds remotely dangerous.
As for your really crappy link, it doesn't support your statement inasmuch as it does not discuss objects becoming projectiles during takeoff or landing. It certainly makes me disinclined to believe the rest of your assertions.
Thanks for relating your experiences. There are a number of things you can do with a Ph.D. in math besides teaching, though certainly entering academia is a big piece of the job pie. I'm not sure how similar Ph.D.'s in the humanities are; you implied that it's academia or nothing. I'm very much looking forward to TAing and thesis work in grad school, to see how well I like some of the actual work that would be involved in being a professor. I imagine I will be happy with both, though I can't yet know for sure.
My undergraduate degree is also in CS, so I'd have that to fall back on at least if math doesn't work out at all. In any case, the replacement of traditional post-secondary education with new sources is certainly something I should keep my eye on in grad school. If worst comes to worst, I can build some up-to-date coding experience. I doubt it will come to that for me, but having a backup plan is a great idea.
Yes, research often is a big part of a university professor's job, though it depends on the institution. An AC responded to your post describing some of the alternatives where more or less research takes place.
Perhaps I was unclear. My worry isn't that university professors (in math, in my case) will become useless, but that the number of jobs might decrease significantly as some of their duties are taken over by online learning, decreasing the number of professors some schools are willing to support, decreasing the available job pool before the number of people wanting those jobs decreases.
Sometimes I think in our eagerness to pass judgments on books, we neglect to actually *read* them. At least not with real critical objectivity.
Yes, and this generalizes. Political discourse is filled with people passing non-objective judgements with incomplete information, both on each other and on policy matters. Talking heads often fall into an "us vs. them" mentality which is partly fueled by this error. Very few people are all good or all bad, and very few smart people have no good points whatsoever.
Frankly, the mania for correcting the mistakes of others, even when those "mistakes" have no conceivable bearing on us, strikes me as a kind of mental illness. Evidently it's a common form of insanity.
Interesting. I can't help but feeling the pot is calling the kettle black here, though--you're at least in part trying to correct a mistake you see people make, even though those mistakes don't affect you personally in any real way. The main reason why I bother trying to correct someone (as I did in the GP) is in hopes of slowly increasing the quality of reasoning in the general population, which eventually may affect me. Being human, I also find it satisfying to "be right" when someone else is wrong, especially when others agree with that assessment, but that's mostly a convenient by-product. I correct people in the same way even one-on-one.
As someone who's likely to end up as a university professor of math in a decade or so, online learning like this makes me wonder about my long-term job security. Why should I get paid to put together and give a lecture on material that an excellent lecturer and support staff have already thoroughly covered online? Sure, there's more to classroom learning than mutely listening to a lecture, but is there enough to justify the extraordinarily high cost of the alternative? Will it be tempting in a few years for a budget-conscious administrator to have undergraduates watch free online lectures with grad students doing all the support work (grading, office hours, recitations, etc.)?
I take some comfort in the fact that people are willing to pay through the nose for a prestigious education and that online education is currently a second-class citizen. Academic institutions are also very slow to change as a rule. My theoretical job is probably safe, but I don't know what the long term future holds. Residential undergraduate institutions stocked with professors giving lectures may become extremely rare as high quality, highly reproducible, efficient online learning improves and perhaps becomes mainstream.
What an asshole you are. You make up your own cultural norms by presumably abstracting from your personal experiences and then you passionately insult anyone who doesn't follow the limited views that result.
Norm 1: people read books to be "enriched" by them as efficiently as possible ("Why go through all the trouble reading the Harry Potter or Hunger Games series when you could read Dr. Seuss's books and become three times as enriched in a fraction of the time?"). This is patently ridiculous. Books can be enriching, but they can also be guilty pleasures, pure entertainment, sleep-inducing material, or a host of other things. Moreover, books are different things to different people. Your own view of a book will probably not be very universal, and that's not a bad thing.
Norm 2: an "adult or literate high-school upperclassman" should not promote a children's or young adult's ("Dick and Jane") series. Screw you; I'll recommend The Hobbit or Harry Potter or whatever I think is appropriate for whatever reason I feel like to whomever I wish. You're in no position to pre-judge the quality of my reasons in such a hypothetical case you judgmental prick. You're similarly in no position to judge the value of everyone's reasons for reading a particular book.
You do have some good points--calling Twilight "good literature" is pretty silly using the usual definition of "literature"; most people on/. are literate adults; and Dr. Seuss' books are remarkably enriching, especially to the young. Your good points are buried in crap and shrouded in assholery today, though.
The summary could have been clearer, but the 0.007 number isn't even remotely close to representing absolute error bounds. It's actually a scaled relative error--that is, the amount the ratio of Planck's constant at one position to the value at another position differs from 1, multiplied by a scale factor. That scale factor is somewhat complicated and depends on the speed of light as well as the gravitational field and velocity of measurement devices at each position. I don't know enough general relativity to explain the reasoning behind the particular scale factor chosen. Without that reasoning the quoted number is almost useless; perhaps someone else can provide it.
From the abstract:
The results indicate that h [Planck's constant] is invariant within a limit of |\beta_h| < 0.007, where \beta_h is a dimensionless parameter that represents the extent of LPI [local position invariance] violation.
[For those unfamiliar with TeX markup, \beta is just the Greek letter beta, and _ indicates a subscript.]
The paper defines \beta_h in equation (6):
LPI violations for h can be written as
h_x/h_o = 1 + \beta_h \Delta U / c^2 where h_o is the locally measured value of h at reference point O, h_x is its locally measured value at x, and \beta_h is the parameter for Planck’s constant.
\Delta U had been defined just after equation (1):
The potential difference is \Delta U = U_x - U_o, where U_i = \Phi_i - v_i^2 / 2, \Phi_i is the gravitational potential energy per unit mass and v_i is the clock’s velocity.
I was curious and found this blog post from Incapsula which contains the statistics both articles used. The details are different enough that I wouldn't call either article "plagiarized" from that post, though the articles could have provided more accurate citations. The ZDNet post has some details like
I spoke with Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula. “Few people realize how much of their traffic is non-human, and that much of it is potentially harmful.”
which make me think it's probably an original work, despite being advertisement-heavy.
While you perhaps could have been more eloquent, you have a point. Malnutrition is a terrible problem and needs to be more effectively addressed on an international level. Allowing people fleeing hunger in their home country refugee status in other countries would help, as would more thoughtful subsidy policy, better access to seeds and fertilizers, less social stigma about being poor, and more efficient use of existing resources. To be fair, the number of malnurished people has generally declined over the last several decades as a fraction of world population so something is being done about the problem, but there's still nearly a billion people (yes, three times the population of the US) who suffer from malnutrition each year.
On the other hand, there several arguments in favor of this research:
* One never knows when and where pure research will pay off. Science builds on previous work, so who knows what will become of this? Is it inconceivable that a more effective method of dealing with mosquito-borne malaria might come of this? That's just one possible route to an application out of innumerable ones, most of which I can't conceive of now.
* Many believe knowledge has intrinsic value beyond practical applications. I agree. Stupidity is humanity's single worst plague, and it is fought with both knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. Spreading science--which ideally embodies evidenced-based, rigorous reasoning--by funding scientists fights stupidity effectively (though scientists could stand to be better communicators, on the whole).
* Other branches of academic research have even less hope of achieving applicability. Literary analysis and some corners of math and theoretical physics come to mind. Why pick on this one?
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Not actually determining the order of "e, i, l" is probably common in humans reading this title, so some people will just pick "files" since it fits all the data they've gathered at a glance. Also, "i" and "l" are so close that the two alternatives are hard to distinguish, leading to more errors. Neither of these issues falls under the term dyslexia. While it's common to call letter transpositions dyslexia, the term actually means something quite different. It roughly translates to "difficulty with words" and generally denotes difficulty reading caused by neurological problems (as opposed to, say, poor instruction). Just to fight social stigma, I should mention that dyslexia is essentially uncorrelated with intelligence--dyslexics tend to read more slowly and have trouble spelling, but they're not on average either smarter or stupider.
[Note: I'm not sure if the quote above is actually supported by academic research, though there's clearly at least some truth to it. snopes isn't sure either. Really one should ask a linguist.]
The Sun sends enormous numbers of neutrinos in all directions. Every second, about 65 billion (6.5×10^10) solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter on the part of the Earth that faces the Sun. Since neutrinos are insignificantly absorbed by the mass of the Earth, the surface area on the side of the Earth opposite the Sun receives about the same number of neutrinos as the side facing the Sun.
The Science Daily article is much better; I wouldn't even bother with the ars technica one since it's short and misleading. For instance,
Neutrinos are nearly massless and travel very close to the speed of light, so they can pass through substances, including entire planets, with little disruption.
That neutrinos are nearly massless and travel close to the speed of light is not the reason they interact so little with other matter. For instance, photons are often stopped by pieces of paper yet they're massless and travel at the speed of light. Neutrinos (for whatever reason) are only affected by two of the four fundamental forces, the weak nuclear and gravity, leaving out the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces. This limits their interactions significantly.
eventually, they could provide a stable alternative to the electromagnetic waves we use now.
The implication of replacing most current hardware with neutrino-based communication is almost certainly ludicrously optimistic. Neutrinos don't interact with other matter very often (kind of the point), so you have to send huge numbers of them to get your message heard. They're also hard to generate. The scientists actually say,
Neutrino communication systems would be much more complicated than today's systems, but may have important strategic uses.
implying that a few highly specialized communications systems might conceivably use neutrinos one day. Maybe in the future vastly improved neutrino detectors and generators could be constructed, but the sun generates large numbers of neutrinos constantly, so you'd at least have to get some filtering mechanisms or similar in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Execution in the US is too rare to make much of a dent in organ donation numbers. Under 50 executions took place in the last two years (source); in contrast, there's around 2000~2500 heart transplants in the US annually (see this page for more organs). As for China, from TFA,
Some human rights groups estimate that China puts to death thousands of prisoners annually, but official figures are a state secret, according to BBC correspondents.
TFA is very light on details but does list one reason:
While Dr. Huang did not bring up any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners at the conference, he said that organ donations from prisoners were not ideal because rates of fungal and bacterial infection in prisoner organs were quite high, and affected the long-term survival rates of those who undergo the transplants.
There is no worst blind than the one which do not want to see. US using imperial units is the perfect example of that.
You're arguing against someone because they're stuck in the past when you're stuck on an overgeneralization. The metric system is used in the US in a number of places, notably by medical professionals, scientists, and sometimes engineers. There are actually some decent arguments for Fahrenheit over Celsius (2 sig figs gives good human-scale accuracy vs. 3 with Celsius; the 0-100 range is pretty much the human range; neither are absolute anyway). On the whole, Imperial is used far more often, but certainly not exclusively.
I'd be fine with a change to metric length, speed, mass, and volume. I'm undecided on area and temperature. Whatever sadist made 640 acres to a square mile should be shot. The more complicated units like energy or power are mostly metric already (eg. kWh -- a ridiculous unit if ever there was one).
You have to make a jump from the tiny centimeter, to the relatively huge meter, with nothing in between to easily reference.
What about the decimeter?
I don't find what's written terribly objectionable. How it gets applied in practice may be a different matter. Here's the guts of the bill:
understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths
and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being
taught.
Since "the Bible doesn't agree" isn't a scientific weakness of evolution, that argument wouldn't belong in the classroom.
analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific
weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.
Fine by me, so long as they really are talking about scientific strengths and weaknesses. The bill specifically addresses the religious controversy:
This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not
be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination
for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination
for or against religion or non-religion.
My only worry is that crackpots with Ph.D.'s promoting crazy theories might be considered "scientific" enough to warrant classroom discussion despite being an extreme minority in the scientific community.
A decrease in global average temperature and CO2 observations would falsify the hypothesis. An alien sensor log recording relevant data over the last, say, million years could also hypothetically test (and reject) the "anthropogenic" part. Are you actually asking for human-obtainable data that could falsify the hypothesis? As far as I'm aware, that's not what most people mean when they bring up the falsifiability criterion.
But it isn't! Even in a simplistic single-planet solar system, the planet has an elliptical orbit with the star at one focus, not at the center of the ellipse (and certainly not at the center of mass). More planets give more perturbations; I've also neglected general relativity and quantum mechanics which add even more trouble. Of course, it's far more correct to say the sun is at the center of the solar system than to say the earth is, just like it's far more correct to call evolution a law rather than a theory, at least to the average person.
I agree. As I said originally, "this isn't necessarily a bad thing, by the way".
I didn't mean to agree with the GP. I just meant to supply them with a better phrase for their (IMO faulty) point. Sorry that wasn't clear.
I stopped reading the ars article after
If the phonebook has 10,000 entries, on average you'll need to look through about half of them—5,000 entries—before you get lucky. A quantum search algorithm only needs to guess 100 times. With 5,000 guesses a quantum computer could search through a phonebook with 25 million names.
Using linear search on a phonebook (which is alphabetized) is preposterous. As the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Grover's algorithm says,
Grover's algorithm is a quantum algorithm for searching an unsorted database with N entries in O(N^1/2) time and using O(log N) storage space
So, the example should have used an unsorted database. The article also implies the big-O constant is 1, which I find very suspicious.
I lie. I read on, but then stopped again after
During a quantum algorithm, this symphony of possibilities split and merge, eventually coalescing around a single solution.
I lie again. I continued reading on, but was forced to quit once and for all by
The crown jewel of quantum mechanics, the phenomenon of entanglement is inextricably bound to the power of quantum computers.
Can anyone suggest a math-filled crash course in quantum computing that doesn't wax poetic while screwing up the few technical details it gives? Something geared for someone with a little knowledge of quantum mechanics like some Hilbert space theory, knowledge of the roles of Hermitian operators and kets, etc. would be what I'm after.
Please adjust this joke to the sexual proclivities of your audience as needed.
Haha, thanks. I already did ;)
Bringing mathematical rigour...
Physicists are widely known for their lack of mathematical rigor. David Hilbert, perhaps the most influential mathematician of the 20th century (who incidentally discovered Einstein's field equations before Einstein, though who was also nice enough not to get into a priority dispute since most of the work leading up to the discovery was Einstein's), is often quoted as saying some variation on, "Physics is too difficult for physicists!" His meaning was apparently that the mathematics required to rigorously justify assertions in advanced physics is often beyond the reach (or inclination) of physicists. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, by the way, but it indicates the traditional lack of rigor in physicist's math.
The paper itself says,
We use concepts from economics to gain quantitative
insights into the role of exogenous factors on the evolution
of language, combined with methods from statistical
physics to quantify the competition arising from correlations
between words and the memory-driven autocorrelations
in u_i(t) across time.
Perhaps "Bringing quantitative statistical analysis..." is a better phrase.
As for the physics, here's a video where the acceleration is around 10 kph per second, which translates to about 0.3g. An object 2 meters in the air undergoing 0.3g horizontal and 1g vertical acceleration will hit the floor after about 0.64 seconds, traveling 0.6m horizontally in the process. That's hardly a projectile. If my book slipped it might hit the feet or ankles of the person behind me, but there's usually a seat in the way anyway. None of this sounds remotely dangerous.
As for your really crappy link, it doesn't support your statement inasmuch as it does not discuss objects becoming projectiles during takeoff or landing. It certainly makes me disinclined to believe the rest of your assertions.
Thanks for relating your experiences. There are a number of things you can do with a Ph.D. in math besides teaching, though certainly entering academia is a big piece of the job pie. I'm not sure how similar Ph.D.'s in the humanities are; you implied that it's academia or nothing. I'm very much looking forward to TAing and thesis work in grad school, to see how well I like some of the actual work that would be involved in being a professor. I imagine I will be happy with both, though I can't yet know for sure.
My undergraduate degree is also in CS, so I'd have that to fall back on at least if math doesn't work out at all. In any case, the replacement of traditional post-secondary education with new sources is certainly something I should keep my eye on in grad school. If worst comes to worst, I can build some up-to-date coding experience. I doubt it will come to that for me, but having a backup plan is a great idea.
Yes, research often is a big part of a university professor's job, though it depends on the institution. An AC responded to your post describing some of the alternatives where more or less research takes place.
Perhaps I was unclear. My worry isn't that university professors (in math, in my case) will become useless, but that the number of jobs might decrease significantly as some of their duties are taken over by online learning, decreasing the number of professors some schools are willing to support, decreasing the available job pool before the number of people wanting those jobs decreases.
Sometimes I think in our eagerness to pass judgments on books, we neglect to actually *read* them. At least not with real critical objectivity.
Yes, and this generalizes. Political discourse is filled with people passing non-objective judgements with incomplete information, both on each other and on policy matters. Talking heads often fall into an "us vs. them" mentality which is partly fueled by this error. Very few people are all good or all bad, and very few smart people have no good points whatsoever.
Frankly, the mania for correcting the mistakes of others, even when those "mistakes" have no conceivable bearing on us, strikes me as a kind of mental illness. Evidently it's a common form of insanity.
Interesting. I can't help but feeling the pot is calling the kettle black here, though--you're at least in part trying to correct a mistake you see people make, even though those mistakes don't affect you personally in any real way. The main reason why I bother trying to correct someone (as I did in the GP) is in hopes of slowly increasing the quality of reasoning in the general population, which eventually may affect me. Being human, I also find it satisfying to "be right" when someone else is wrong, especially when others agree with that assessment, but that's mostly a convenient by-product. I correct people in the same way even one-on-one.
As someone who's likely to end up as a university professor of math in a decade or so, online learning like this makes me wonder about my long-term job security. Why should I get paid to put together and give a lecture on material that an excellent lecturer and support staff have already thoroughly covered online? Sure, there's more to classroom learning than mutely listening to a lecture, but is there enough to justify the extraordinarily high cost of the alternative? Will it be tempting in a few years for a budget-conscious administrator to have undergraduates watch free online lectures with grad students doing all the support work (grading, office hours, recitations, etc.)?
I take some comfort in the fact that people are willing to pay through the nose for a prestigious education and that online education is currently a second-class citizen. Academic institutions are also very slow to change as a rule. My theoretical job is probably safe, but I don't know what the long term future holds. Residential undergraduate institutions stocked with professors giving lectures may become extremely rare as high quality, highly reproducible, efficient online learning improves and perhaps becomes mainstream.
What an asshole you are. You make up your own cultural norms by presumably abstracting from your personal experiences and then you passionately insult anyone who doesn't follow the limited views that result.
Norm 1: people read books to be "enriched" by them as efficiently as possible ("Why go through all the trouble reading the Harry Potter or Hunger Games series when you could read Dr. Seuss's books and become three times as enriched in a fraction of the time?"). This is patently ridiculous. Books can be enriching, but they can also be guilty pleasures, pure entertainment, sleep-inducing material, or a host of other things. Moreover, books are different things to different people. Your own view of a book will probably not be very universal, and that's not a bad thing.
Norm 2: an "adult or literate high-school upperclassman" should not promote a children's or young adult's ("Dick and Jane") series. Screw you; I'll recommend The Hobbit or Harry Potter or whatever I think is appropriate for whatever reason I feel like to whomever I wish. You're in no position to pre-judge the quality of my reasons in such a hypothetical case you judgmental prick. You're similarly in no position to judge the value of everyone's reasons for reading a particular book.
You do have some good points--calling Twilight "good literature" is pretty silly using the usual definition of "literature"; most people on /. are literate adults; and Dr. Seuss' books are remarkably enriching, especially to the young. Your good points are buried in crap and shrouded in assholery today, though.
The summary could have been clearer, but the 0.007 number isn't even remotely close to representing absolute error bounds. It's actually a scaled relative error--that is, the amount the ratio of Planck's constant at one position to the value at another position differs from 1, multiplied by a scale factor. That scale factor is somewhat complicated and depends on the speed of light as well as the gravitational field and velocity of measurement devices at each position. I don't know enough general relativity to explain the reasoning behind the particular scale factor chosen. Without that reasoning the quoted number is almost useless; perhaps someone else can provide it.
From the abstract:
The results indicate that h [Planck's constant] is invariant within a limit of |\beta_h| < 0.007, where \beta_h is a dimensionless parameter that represents the extent of LPI [local position invariance] violation.
[For those unfamiliar with TeX markup, \beta is just the Greek letter beta, and _ indicates a subscript.]
The paper defines \beta_h in equation (6):
LPI violations for h can be written as
h_x/h_o = 1 + \beta_h \Delta U / c^2
where h_o is the locally measured value of h at reference point O, h_x is its locally measured value at x, and \beta_h is the parameter for Planck’s constant.
\Delta U had been defined just after equation (1):
The potential difference is \Delta U = U_x - U_o,
where U_i = \Phi_i - v_i^2 / 2, \Phi_i is the gravitational potential energy per unit mass and v_i is the clock’s velocity.
Good point. Maybe so.
I was curious and found this blog post from Incapsula which contains the statistics both articles used. The details are different enough that I wouldn't call either article "plagiarized" from that post, though the articles could have provided more accurate citations. The ZDNet post has some details like
I spoke with Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula. “Few people realize how much of their traffic is non-human, and that much of it is potentially harmful.”
which make me think it's probably an original work, despite being advertisement-heavy.
While you perhaps could have been more eloquent, you have a point. Malnutrition is a terrible problem and needs to be more effectively addressed on an international level. Allowing people fleeing hunger in their home country refugee status in other countries would help, as would more thoughtful subsidy policy, better access to seeds and fertilizers, less social stigma about being poor, and more efficient use of existing resources. To be fair, the number of malnurished people has generally declined over the last several decades as a fraction of world population so something is being done about the problem, but there's still nearly a billion people (yes, three times the population of the US) who suffer from malnutrition each year.
On the other hand, there several arguments in favor of this research:
* One never knows when and where pure research will pay off. Science builds on previous work, so who knows what will become of this? Is it inconceivable that a more effective method of dealing with mosquito-borne malaria might come of this? That's just one possible route to an application out of innumerable ones, most of which I can't conceive of now.
* Many believe knowledge has intrinsic value beyond practical applications. I agree. Stupidity is humanity's single worst plague, and it is fought with both knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. Spreading science--which ideally embodies evidenced-based, rigorous reasoning--by funding scientists fights stupidity effectively (though scientists could stand to be better communicators, on the whole).
* Other branches of academic research have even less hope of achieving applicability. Literary analysis and some corners of math and theoretical physics come to mind. Why pick on this one?
Well, remember
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Not actually determining the order of "e, i, l" is probably common in humans reading this title, so some people will just pick "files" since it fits all the data they've gathered at a glance. Also, "i" and "l" are so close that the two alternatives are hard to distinguish, leading to more errors. Neither of these issues falls under the term dyslexia. While it's common to call letter transpositions dyslexia, the term actually means something quite different. It roughly translates to "difficulty with words" and generally denotes difficulty reading caused by neurological problems (as opposed to, say, poor instruction). Just to fight social stigma, I should mention that dyslexia is essentially uncorrelated with intelligence--dyslexics tend to read more slowly and have trouble spelling, but they're not on average either smarter or stupider.
[Note: I'm not sure if the quote above is actually supported by academic research, though there's clearly at least some truth to it. snopes isn't sure either. Really one should ask a linguist.]
Wikipedia says
The Sun sends enormous numbers of neutrinos in all directions. Every second, about 65 billion (6.5×10^10) solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter on the part of the Earth that faces the Sun. Since neutrinos are insignificantly absorbed by the mass of the Earth, the surface area on the side of the Earth opposite the Sun receives about the same number of neutrinos as the side facing the Sun.
As a gay mathematician,
they may even jump to moral decay as a causative agent
made me laugh. It would have been nice if they cited a source actually saying something so ridiculous.
The Science Daily article is much better; I wouldn't even bother with the ars technica one since it's short and misleading. For instance,
Neutrinos are nearly massless and travel very close to the speed of light, so they can pass through substances, including entire planets, with little disruption.
That neutrinos are nearly massless and travel close to the speed of light is not the reason they interact so little with other matter. For instance, photons are often stopped by pieces of paper yet they're massless and travel at the speed of light. Neutrinos (for whatever reason) are only affected by two of the four fundamental forces, the weak nuclear and gravity, leaving out the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces. This limits their interactions significantly.
eventually, they could provide a stable alternative to the electromagnetic waves we use now.
The implication of replacing most current hardware with neutrino-based communication is almost certainly ludicrously optimistic. Neutrinos don't interact with other matter very often (kind of the point), so you have to send huge numbers of them to get your message heard. They're also hard to generate. The scientists actually say,
Neutrino communication systems would be much more complicated than today's systems, but may have important strategic uses.
implying that a few highly specialized communications systems might conceivably use neutrinos one day. Maybe in the future vastly improved neutrino detectors and generators could be constructed, but the sun generates large numbers of neutrinos constantly, so you'd at least have to get some filtering mechanisms or similar in place.