Always hesitate to take people's word for the significance of a piece of work. This is especially true of their own work, naturally, but even friends and colleagues often mis-judge or lack perspective on the importance of a discovery. Furthermore, reporters often misquote or pull quotes from context to the point where they'd be considered falsification if this were a scientific paper. I've even been quoted by a reporter who made the entire quote up from whole cloth. (Seriously, I'd never said anything remotely like what was quoted. Fortunately, it wasn't really a bad quote and I wasn't too bothered, except by the principle.) Thus, when someone says something as hyperbolic-sounding as the quote there, I immediately suspect it.
I *am* a physicist, although I don't have Dr. Albrecht's credentials in this area, so he certainly has a more informed opinion than my own. However, based on my knowledge of the subject, the importance of this finding is in fact fairly over-rated. I don't think that it confirms anything unexpected *and* the theory is, as far as I know, not falsifiable. (I've never heard of a test which would differentiate between the Many Worlds view and the competing interpretations.) So you see, showing that you can't rule Many Worlds out is important, but it does strike me as really revolutionary.
There are many ways to leverage atomic-level (things in the domain of QM) changes into macroscopic effects. For example, the exact quantum state of molecules used in setting states in your brain are quantum mechanically defined (don't ask me the details, I've forgotten them). Flip it one way, it's possible that you show up to the intersection 30 seconds earlier or 30 seconds later by almost-forgetting (or just remember) your keys.
I don't think (I *hope*) is asserting that the car is itself subject to QM in the same sense as an electron is, but this whole matter *is*, after all, the basis for Schroedinger's Cat.
Ya know, if you guys are going to argue about this, how about getting more than just the superficial facts of the case. (That is, reading beyond the TV News's abbreviated coverage.) I admit to not following this case closely until just recently, but I knew there was more than just nooses and then a single beating: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12353776
There's a reason people are upset about the treatment of the assailants relative to the way the white kids apparently got treated.
1) I'm just repeating the news reports from at that time. (In Science, I imagine, since that's the most likely source to have covered something like that which I also read.) It's possible that the reporting or the information given to the reporters was wrong, of course.
Fair 'nough about NSA, but how long do the cable taps have to last? RTGs have a half-life of ~20 years, which may not be considering "long lasting" for a lot of applications.
Far too expensive for anyone other than NASA to use. Almost true. Lose one of the A's and you'd get another agency that's known to use RTGs on satellites. (Shortly after 9/11, the plutonium that was to be used for New Horizons was suddenly reallocated to an "unnamed Federal agency". It wasn't NASA, New Horizons was their only mission to the outer solar system being prepared just then. Most people were able to conclude, reasonably, that the RTGs were heading for spy sats.)
Spy satellites, as far as I know. It's considering prudent to *not* have large solar panels on your birds if you don't want to make it easy for others to know where your sats are at a given time.
As far as I have ever heard, most other satellites just use solar panels.
As far as I know, no one ever "fought and died" for the rights of someone to disrupt legitimate activities of others, such this town-hall meeting. In fact, one might as well note that *this* guy was denying others their rights to free speech (he jumped in line and hogged available time, effectively filibustering others) and their rights to assembly by disrupting the proceedings.
No, you do *not* have unlimited rights to say what you want, where and when you want, as loudly as you want. (The SCOTUS has ruled on this on a number of occasions, so there's little room for a reasonable argument to the contrary.) Either you lack any understanding of the law (and the Constitution) or you're being astonishingly disingenuous.
A wonderful alternative which is available, but I think that the point in the summary was that NBC isn't getting (much) money from these viewings. Almost certainly not as much as they'd make selling the show on iTunes. Considering that, it seems like NBC would want to think very carefully about what they gain by pulling the shows from iTunes.
Why do the Wikipedia supporters always bring up "speed" as if it is a meaningful comparison? It's entirely useless to tell us how fast errors are corrected if you don't *also* tell us how rapidly errors are produced. I've seen articles go back and forth repeatedly between two "facts" (both of which cannot be true). Is the fact that those same errors were repeatedly corrected (quickly) more meaningful than the fact that the errors kept getting inserted? Nope. It's a question of relative rates, not one absolute rate or the other.
Basically, all of this is a bit like Homer Simpson (under the name Max Power) bragging about his way being the wrong way, but *faster*.
Sounds about right. That, or there was the Leviathan with the degenerate PKs and the crazy genius with the twinning-device and a taste for brain juice. Crichton definitely blew that one up. (Crichton blew up damn near everything he touched, it sometimes seemed. Mike Nelson, eat your heart out!) Or the grandparent could be referring to Talyn's sacrifice.
The actors used to (jokingly, I think) complain that Rygel costed more than any of them did. This may explain why they quickly developed a habit of smacking around the Muppet whenever they could. (Mind you, there were actually several Rygels, including a face model, a normal model, and a stunt model. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if any one of them first two costed more than any given actor's salary.)
I don't think that any of those are relevant to the question actually asked and to which two answers were proposed. The question, as I read it, was about the merits of the satellite and why it was ever supported at all, not about the merits of the person.
Now, there probably are other options to answer that question than the two proposed. I'm simply saying that claiming it's a false dilemma without providing other reasonable choices to show that this is the case is a rather poor rhetorical ploy.
It's only a false dilemma if there really is a reasonable option C. Do you have one? If not, it seems to be a bit off-base to hurl accusations of logical fallacies.
(His argument may still be incorrect, but then it's for lack of data, not for poor logic.)
A Planet with a high percentage of Carbon Dioxide - What can we learn from that, maybe links to global warming? Why would you got to Mars for that? Mars's greenhouse effect barely manages a few Kelvins. (Compared to Earth's ~30 K.) If you want to study the greenhouse effect far from home, Venus is the planet you want, but I see no reason to send people to either place to study it.
Finding ways to store mass amounts of energy to shuttle astronots back and forth from earth to mars, in a small place, perhaps will help with out energy consumption problems? IS there insufficient financial motivation to come up with better energy solutions on Earth right now? If so, why not dump the money straight into energy research rather than filter it through the Mars mission?
Ligher Weight, easer to move, rugged space suits. This can help create far better materials for many applications. Same as above, except with the added caveat that one wonders why we haven't already done this. It isn't like we haven't been putting people in space (and aren't eying the Moon again).
Number of americans employed for such a project helping the economy. Ah, "tax us so you can employ us." Even if you wanted to go that route, it doesn't justify spending the money on Mars any more than flying saucer research or cold fusion. If you're going to great work programs, you might as well do it for something with a real benefit.
Working with other nations of such a project, better tolerance for other cultures.... Last I checked, this was an American endeavor. Even if it goes international, note how ISS has turned out. Lots of broken agreements there.
One project of this scale has many side efects that a lot of supid winy people just don't want to grasp their minds around to understand. A project of this scale *does* have man side effects. But side effects aren't always good. Spending a country deeply into debt results in failing economies and shortage of governmental services, for example.
Yep, that was the meeting. My graduate adviser was there. He said that what really convinced people was the first suite of numerical models that showed that it was possible dynamically to make the Moon that way.
It's not always that bad in science: some theories are accepted pretty quickly. The Dark Energy theory has gained wide-spread acceptance almost overnight. The Giant Impact theory for the formation of the Moon was accepted by much of the community over the course of a single meeting, I've been told by a participant.
It seems to be a question of overwhelming evidence: if you don't have really compelling evidence, you'll have a slow, uphill battle. If you do, odds seem to be in your favor for gaining a much more rapid acceptance. In the end, there's nothing particularly wrong with that. Radical theories are *aren't* backed up by really powerful data or convincing models deserve to be treated with great skepticism.
I agree completely. I'm neither a Flordianian nor a Democrat and I, frankly, don't care how they chose their candidates. If the parties want to decide that, hey, candidate Y has a better chance of winning than candidate X, even though X got more votes in the primary, that's their concern. Presumably they'll be smart enough to listen to their people for the most part, but why get in a tizzy if they override the choice for whatever other reasons they have? Parties aren't democracies, it's the voting in November that's supposed to matter.
Besides, the primary system is clearly screwed up. It gave the Dems John Kerry in '04 because he was the blandest candidate in the field, not because he necessarily had the best chance of winning or would have been the best president.
But think about it this way: is drunk driving really so bad that you automatically have your license suspended? I mean, it's not like as if you had an accident or anything (at which point other crimes may have been committed). Someone could drive all the way home while intoxicated, and pull onto their street and be seen swerving by a cop. They can pull safely into their driveway, and the cop comes and takes away their license (depends on the state, I suppose). Irrelevant whether you had an accident or not. The point of the stiff penalties is that you're recklessly endangering other people when you drive drunk (whether anything bad happens on your particular drive or not). To go back to your burglary analogy: the goods (money, TV, whatever) I steal from your home may never be missed for all anyone might know, but that doesn't lessen the fact that it's a crime.
"If the rule in my state was that they revoked your license, then I wouldn't have any logical complaint about it."
That rather depends on the relative punishment for, say, drunk driving. If drunks got off lighter than mild (say +10 mph on the highway) speeding, you'd have a right to complain. Sentences have been thrown out for this sort of thing, even if they were the law.
You're absolutely right: we don't have the whole story and it's pretty clear that the submitter was trying to sensationalize quite a bit. But that said, you're trying deflect the discussion with a straw man: I don't thank many (any?) people here are prepared to argue that circumventing the firewalls was not an offense that merits some form of punishment. What I think people are arguing about (and what I feel you keep shifting away from) is whether a three month suspension is really a suitable response. I think detention and revocation of computer privileges would have been very much in order, but this seems excessive.
So when you get caught speeding for the first time, are you OK with the cops taking away your license permanently? There's punishing people for breaking the rules and there's unreasonable punishment.
For comparison, I'd love to know the standard suspension for, say, fighting in school; I've heard of a lot of cases where that's not more than a week. If it's not significantly more than three months in this district, I think that's a problem.
The Sun's field is not caused by nuclear fusion, except indirectly. All fusion provides is a heat source in the center of the body to sustain convection.
I feel the same way all the time! When you're a government contractor, it's especially bad.
I don't think paid adverts on the website actually ruins the fair use case as long as they aren't selling the source material itself. It might be interesting to see that raised in court, but I suspect (non-lawyer that I am) that it wouldn't matter.
Provide the usual rules for "Fair Use" are followed, I heartily agree that this absolutely should fall under that category and the publisher should be fought in court. This would be true even if the research in question were not government-funded. I think this is pretty clearly a case of the publisher bullying someone even though I doubt that they have a leg to stand on if it goes to court.
Ease of creation (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with the argument, here. A lot of art is pretty easy to produce. (Ever used a camera?) Nor does the fact that the authors created the plots and tables (since they sign over rights to the journal when they publish, although exactly how much of the rights get signed over varies from journal to journal). The fact that authors (and journals) have COPYRIGHTS on the items in question is the salient point here. The copyrights are very similar to the copyrights that protect artists' works. In the case of scientists, our "art" just takes a different form.
So yes, these figures and tables are the end result of taxpayer money. So is all of the art produced under NEA grants. It doesn't mean that the artists' copyrights are invalid. Similarly, your taxpayer dollars goes to pay for tanks and fighter jets. Care to try that same argument (you paid for it, you get to use it) on the DoD?
Seriously, do you really believe what you're saying or are you just being argumentative? I hope it's the latter since you seem to be trying to force me to argue that the blogger shouldn't have been able to reproduce the plots (I said I think that that's fair) rather than discuss my point that her *argument* is the wrong approach.
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Always hesitate to take people's word for the significance of a piece of work. This is especially true of their own work, naturally, but even friends and colleagues often mis-judge or lack perspective on the importance of a discovery. Furthermore, reporters often misquote or pull quotes from context to the point where they'd be considered falsification if this were a scientific paper. I've even been quoted by a reporter who made the entire quote up from whole cloth. (Seriously, I'd never said anything remotely like what was quoted. Fortunately, it wasn't really a bad quote and I wasn't too bothered, except by the principle.) Thus, when someone says something as hyperbolic-sounding as the quote there, I immediately suspect it.
I *am* a physicist, although I don't have Dr. Albrecht's credentials in this area, so he certainly has a more informed opinion than my own. However, based on my knowledge of the subject, the importance of this finding is in fact fairly over-rated. I don't think that it confirms anything unexpected *and* the theory is, as far as I know, not falsifiable. (I've never heard of a test which would differentiate between the Many Worlds view and the competing interpretations.) So you see, showing that you can't rule Many Worlds out is important, but it does strike me as really revolutionary.
There are many ways to leverage atomic-level (things in the domain of QM) changes into macroscopic effects. For example, the exact quantum state of molecules used in setting states in your brain are quantum mechanically defined (don't ask me the details, I've forgotten them). Flip it one way, it's possible that you show up to the intersection 30 seconds earlier or 30 seconds later by almost-forgetting (or just remember) your keys.
I don't think (I *hope*) is asserting that the car is itself subject to QM in the same sense as an electron is, but this whole matter *is*, after all, the basis for Schroedinger's Cat.
Ya know, if you guys are going to argue about this, how about getting more than just the superficial facts of the case. (That is, reading beyond the TV News's abbreviated coverage.) I admit to not following this case closely until just recently, but I knew there was more than just nooses and then a single beating: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12353776
There's a reason people are upset about the treatment of the assailants relative to the way the white kids apparently got treated.
1) I'm just repeating the news reports from at that time. (In Science, I imagine, since that's the most likely source to have covered something like that which I also read.) It's possible that the reporting or the information given to the reporters was wrong, of course.
Fair 'nough about NSA, but how long do the cable taps have to last? RTGs have a half-life of ~20 years, which may not be considering "long lasting" for a lot of applications.
Spy satellites, as far as I know. It's considering prudent to *not* have large solar panels on your birds if you don't want to make it easy for others to know where your sats are at a given time.
As far as I have ever heard, most other satellites just use solar panels.
As far as I know, no one ever "fought and died" for the rights of someone to disrupt legitimate activities of others, such this town-hall meeting. In fact, one might as well note that *this* guy was denying others their rights to free speech (he jumped in line and hogged available time, effectively filibustering others) and their rights to assembly by disrupting the proceedings.
No, you do *not* have unlimited rights to say what you want, where and when you want, as loudly as you want. (The SCOTUS has ruled on this on a number of occasions, so there's little room for a reasonable argument to the contrary.) Either you lack any understanding of the law (and the Constitution) or you're being astonishingly disingenuous.
A wonderful alternative which is available, but I think that the point in the summary was that NBC isn't getting (much) money from these viewings. Almost certainly not as much as they'd make selling the show on iTunes. Considering that, it seems like NBC would want to think very carefully about what they gain by pulling the shows from iTunes.
Why do the Wikipedia supporters always bring up "speed" as if it is a meaningful comparison? It's entirely useless to tell us how fast errors are corrected if you don't *also* tell us how rapidly errors are produced. I've seen articles go back and forth repeatedly between two "facts" (both of which cannot be true). Is the fact that those same errors were repeatedly corrected (quickly) more meaningful than the fact that the errors kept getting inserted? Nope. It's a question of relative rates, not one absolute rate or the other.
Basically, all of this is a bit like Homer Simpson (under the name Max Power) bragging about his way being the wrong way, but *faster*.
Sounds about right. That, or there was the Leviathan with the degenerate PKs and the crazy genius with the twinning-device and a taste for brain juice. Crichton definitely blew that one up. (Crichton blew up damn near everything he touched, it sometimes seemed. Mike Nelson, eat your heart out!) Or the grandparent could be referring to Talyn's sacrifice.
The actors used to (jokingly, I think) complain that Rygel costed more than any of them did. This may explain why they quickly developed a habit of smacking around the Muppet whenever they could. (Mind you, there were actually several Rygels, including a face model, a normal model, and a stunt model. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if any one of them first two costed more than any given actor's salary.)
I don't think that any of those are relevant to the question actually asked and to which two answers were proposed. The question, as I read it, was about the merits of the satellite and why it was ever supported at all, not about the merits of the person.
Now, there probably are other options to answer that question than the two proposed. I'm simply saying that claiming it's a false dilemma without providing other reasonable choices to show that this is the case is a rather poor rhetorical ploy.
It's only a false dilemma if there really is a reasonable option C. Do you have one? If not, it seems to be a bit off-base to hurl accusations of logical fallacies.
(His argument may still be incorrect, but then it's for lack of data, not for poor logic.)
Yep, that was the meeting. My graduate adviser was there. He said that what really convinced people was the first suite of numerical models that showed that it was possible dynamically to make the Moon that way.
It's not always that bad in science: some theories are accepted pretty quickly. The Dark Energy theory has gained wide-spread acceptance almost overnight. The Giant Impact theory for the formation of the Moon was accepted by much of the community over the course of a single meeting, I've been told by a participant.
It seems to be a question of overwhelming evidence: if you don't have really compelling evidence, you'll have a slow, uphill battle. If you do, odds seem to be in your favor for gaining a much more rapid acceptance. In the end, there's nothing particularly wrong with that. Radical theories are *aren't* backed up by really powerful data or convincing models deserve to be treated with great skepticism.
I agree completely. I'm neither a Flordianian nor a Democrat and I, frankly, don't care how they chose their candidates. If the parties want to decide that, hey, candidate Y has a better chance of winning than candidate X, even though X got more votes in the primary, that's their concern. Presumably they'll be smart enough to listen to their people for the most part, but why get in a tizzy if they override the choice for whatever other reasons they have? Parties aren't democracies, it's the voting in November that's supposed to matter.
Besides, the primary system is clearly screwed up. It gave the Dems John Kerry in '04 because he was the blandest candidate in the field, not because he necessarily had the best chance of winning or would have been the best president.
"If the rule in my state was that they revoked your license, then I wouldn't have any logical complaint about it."
That rather depends on the relative punishment for, say, drunk driving. If drunks got off lighter than mild (say +10 mph on the highway) speeding, you'd have a right to complain. Sentences have been thrown out for this sort of thing, even if they were the law.
You're absolutely right: we don't have the whole story and it's pretty clear that the submitter was trying to sensationalize quite a bit. But that said, you're trying deflect the discussion with a straw man: I don't thank many (any?) people here are prepared to argue that circumventing the firewalls was not an offense that merits some form of punishment. What I think people are arguing about (and what I feel you keep shifting away from) is whether a three month suspension is really a suitable response. I think detention and revocation of computer privileges would have been very much in order, but this seems excessive.
So when you get caught speeding for the first time, are you OK with the cops taking away your license permanently? There's punishing people for breaking the rules and there's unreasonable punishment.
For comparison, I'd love to know the standard suspension for, say, fighting in school; I've heard of a lot of cases where that's not more than a week. If it's not significantly more than three months in this district, I think that's a problem.
The Sun's field is not caused by nuclear fusion, except indirectly. All fusion provides is a heat source in the center of the body to sustain convection.
I feel the same way all the time! When you're a government contractor, it's especially bad.
I don't think paid adverts on the website actually ruins the fair use case as long as they aren't selling the source material itself. It might be interesting to see that raised in court, but I suspect (non-lawyer that I am) that it wouldn't matter.
Provide the usual rules for "Fair Use" are followed, I heartily agree that this absolutely should fall under that category and the publisher should be fought in court. This would be true even if the research in question were not government-funded. I think this is pretty clearly a case of the publisher bullying someone even though I doubt that they have a leg to stand on if it goes to court.
Seriously, do you really believe what you're saying or are you just being argumentative? I hope it's the latter since you seem to be trying to force me to argue that the blogger shouldn't have been able to reproduce the plots (I said I think that that's fair) rather than discuss my point that her *argument* is the wrong approach.