Sure, *this* is just one guy. But just because the present story doesn't mention other cases of bogus resumes or degrees it doesn't mean that there aren't more out there. A little Google-searching would have shown that a GAO audit of several Federal Agencies back in 2004 turned up 463 employees with bogus degrees. Id's day that we have a problem.
For the record, Heavens-Above.com isn't just devoted to tracking spy sats, although I would have gotten that impression from the blurb. The site tracks all kinds of satellites -- including ISS, the shuttle (if it were up), and the Iridium constellation. It's not just for people with a specific interest in spy sats and it is in fact very handy if you want to see what you might be able to see on a given night before going out to observe. (Showing friends or students the shuttles, the space station, or Iridium flares is pretty neat, so I always take a look before observing.)
Why would you use floats/doubles at all? Since there's a smallest unit of currency (a dollar if you round, a cent otherwise), why not just use integers?
Yeah. Of course, if they really want to track you that badly at that point, they'll be able to do it without you being at all aware of it either way. So the DL is still pretty pointless.
Some of the logic needs work, here. Needing a driver's license is hardly the same as saying you can't travel anonymously. Unless a cop pulls me over and asks to seem my license, they have NO way of knowing where I'm driving and when I'm doing so just based on the fact that I have been licensed to drive a car in the US.
At that distance, the planet systems are probably OK. You get distruption with closer binaries, but a light-year is pretty far out. A factor of 4000 in distances leads to a factor of 16 million in gravitational accelerations, after all.
Even in the Earth-Moon system, the Moon's effects on satellites is minor. (Drag from the atmosphere is a far bigger player and the main need for thrusters in most cases.)
You don't need a companion to produce a sharp edge in the Kuiper belt. Simulations have shown that. Anyone who makes the assertion that the edges suggest such a thing ought to have at least become familiar with that research.
Furthermore, the analogy to Saturn's rings is, I suspect, misleading. The moons that directly shape the outer edge of the A ring are close to the ring and small. (They are tied to other moons via resoances so the whole system is strung together, but that's not what's being argued for here.) A star would be much more massive than the Kuiper belt and would seriously disrupt the system rather than maintain it. (It would also be pretty obvious if it were just beyond the orbit of the outer edge of the Kuiper belt. We'd feel it here, for a start.) A more distant star might be able to hold back the edge of the belt with a resonance, but that's a different thing. And odds are that such a companion would destroy a belt more readily than maintain it. (Look at Jupiter and the asteroid belt.)
It should also be noted that 300 million years is a short time in solar system terms. It's even shorter for the outer solar system where it's about one million orbits. Since things move slowly and there is little material out there, spreading is very slow. Ones the material is placed there by a larger body (like Neptune), it tends to stay put for quite a while.
That's not what the grandparent post says at all. You're going off on a rant that has little to do with what the post actually is saying.
The post says that the poster is *confident* that the theory won't hold up. That's a personal prediction, not an absolute dismissal. And given that most radical theories like this one turn out to be wildly wrong, that's a very safe bet just based on history.
Well, in theory if you can make a *sufficiently* intense field you'll cram enough energy density in there to warp spacetime and thereby play with gravity. But you'd need a SERIOUSLY strong field. So yeah, I'm with you. Sounds like utter BS to me. If he succeeds, great, but I'm not getting excited about it.
The "God does not play at dice with the universe" was a metaphorical way of saying he didn't believe the probabilistic perspective on QM. Even if you are unable to spot that, then you're reading it as a purely non-scientific statement of faith and it has nothing to do with him as a scientist any more than if he had said, "God is merciful."
Einstein rejected some of the conclusions of QM, but none of the parts he disputed were tested at that time. We've only just tested the "spooky action at a distance" predictions that he disliked. And a lot of his objections really came down to Bohr's interpretation of QM, which is purely a matter of philosphy and not science. Scientists are allowed to disagree with each other and even be wrong to the extent that the data allow. And they're allowed to reject other people's extensions of their own works.
If a scientist adheres to a wrong theory after the data have shown him or her to be wrong, that's bad science. There have been cases of this, to be sure. Of course, there's usually a significant period where the data are not yet overwelming for or against an idea.
I don't think I've ever seen the noun form of "affect" used, but I have seen the adjective version ("affective") used quite often in certain circles. The meaning isn't lost entirely, even if the root word itself has fallen out of favor.
A lot of those ideas where already out there, actually. Galileo certainly knew and appreciated the first law, for example.
Also, don't forget that Newton never said "F=ma". He said that F = dp/dt, an inherently calculus-based statement. Without the Calculus, that definition is almost useless.
As a scientist, he was actually kind of sketchy. He did some great experimental research, but also was very convinced of some really sketchy things when he should have known better, as a scienist.
Actually, Einstein didn't criticize the real work that lead to the atomic bomb, since that was really the experimental results. I don't think that quantum was up for describing nuclear fission from the theoretical perspective at that time. In fact, Einstein signed off on the letter to Roosevelt telling the president to get working on a bomb because Germany was already working on it. That pretty clearly indicates that he believed the experimental results. But he continued to work on his own alternative approach to unification of the forces (and thus removing the need for at least much of QM) until his death.
Also, don't forget that he was also one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics. He didn't like the direction it took later on.
He wasn't really that gifted at math by his own admission. I'm not saying he was a raging idiot because he was certainly capable. But there's a big gap between being able to use mathematics and being able to invent whole new areas of mathematics. And he wasn't up for the latter. Which is why, when he was working on General Relativity, he had to seek outside help with the math. (This is no insult to the man. In fact, it's a helluva compliment. He knew when he was in over his head and he had the balls to seek help. As a result, his theory saw the light of day and we're better off for it.)
that's what I was saying. When Newton invented the Calculus, he was able to complete the work that so many had wanted to do, but been unable to. His mathematical abilities are what allowed him to make the scientific discoveries, not his brilliance as a scientist.
And you have your people reversed. Newton discovered the Calculus first and then sat on it for decades. In the meantime, Leibiniz rediscovered it. Bitterness ensued.
Hm, I don't think I can agree with that. Newton was unquestionably one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. (Most historians will put him in the three-way tie for first with Gauss and Archimedes.) As a scientist, Newton had a sort of mixed track record once you factor out his mathematical breakthroughs. A lot of the things he did were sitting around waiting to be connected up by the math, once the Calculus arrived on the scene. (For example, the inverse-square law of gravity was generally suspected to apply to gravity by many scientists of the day, include Hooke, Wren, and Halley. But none of them could actually prove that it gave the right behaviors for orbits without Newton's mathematical skills.) If you read the works of Galileo, a generation before Newton (and who Newton almost certainly must have read, although I don't have a source on that), you can see that the man was so close with his physical principles, but lacked the mathematical tools to put it all together. (And he lacked the mathematical genius to create the tools.)
Einstein, on the other hand, was NOT mathematically gifted by any stretch (although he wasn't stupid, either), but had an amazing ability to understand the physical principles and their general consequences. Plus, he was far more loveable than the cold, often caustic Newton.
The general public didn't learn of the atomic bomb until Hiroshima, and until roughly the start of the war it was generally thought impossible by the people who knew about the possiblity at all. Einstein achieved his fame aroudn 1919 with the gravitational lensing test of General Relativity in 1919.
I don't see how the fact that Einstein was a rogue contradicts the other traits. Gandhi was undoubtedly humane and I think we probably agree that he was humble. But he was also pretty anti-establishment. While it might be reasonable to associate the rogue trait with lack of humility, I don't think it's a given.
The pressure shouldn't change much with temperature. The pressure at the Earth's surface is basically set by the weight of the overlying layers of atmosphere. (With slight changes due to inflow and outflow from a given location.) However, the *density* will change. (Remember good ol' PV=nRT.)
If I did the quick calcuation right, the different in air density between freezing and 120 degree F is about 20 percent. Interestingly, that's about the same difference as between sea level and Denver. I am willing to bet that the Denver airport has longer runways in expecation of this, though. Why Neveda runways wouldn't be similarly lengthened in expectation of hot weather, I don't know.
Of course, whether the plane can take off from a given runway has a lot do with the plane and its load. A heavily laden plane with a low lift to weight ratio is more affected than one with a high lift to thrust.
Based on what I've seen and heard, the price you pay for pop in the store has little to do with the manufacturing cost and much more to do with market forces: they *can* charge you $X, so they do. As such, if the sugar-based pop is more expensive, it's much more likely to be either a scale issue, a transportation issue, or just another market issue.
If I remember correctly, a pound of sugar is a couple bucks. (I might not be remembering right, though.) That's about 2,200 grams of sugar for around two dollars, or about 10 grams for 1 cent. The cost of the roughly 40 grams of sugar in a can of pop would be about 4 cents. That's probably right to within a factor of two, anyway. And it's probably nearer an overly expensive estimate: buying sugar in bulk would probably decrease the unit price *and* I haven't subtracted out the cost of the corn syrup. Given this, it seems improbable that doubling the price (say from 25 cents a can to 50 cents a can) would be purely due to the cost of the sugar used.
It would have occured to me when I was using Word as the machine's usual user. If not right away, sometime when I was ditzing with settings or when I noticed that my comments in version-controlled papers were ascribed to "Merck".:-)
I never said it was a left versus right issue. Why do you assume I meant it that way? Interesting.
Yeah, did say some really stupid things. Whether they're worthy of causing him to step down as chair is another question. And if you think that it was, then you need to think long and hard about people in quite a few other fields. I can name dozens of politicians (starting with the president and working down through both parties) who have said things just as embarassing. Very, very few of them have stepped aside. That's my point: it's an odd double standard.
And while I'll give you Franken, Dean is no where near as lunatic as O'Reilly or Linmaugh. He's actually fairly centrist, unless you're on the extreme right or you just read the GOP's talking point. Michael Moore would probably be a better example.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, *this* is just one guy. But just because the present story doesn't mention other cases of bogus resumes or degrees it doesn't mean that there aren't more out there. A little Google-searching would have shown that a GAO audit of several Federal Agencies back in 2004 turned up 463 employees with bogus degrees. Id's day that we have a problem.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04771t.pdf
For the record, Heavens-Above.com isn't just devoted to tracking spy sats, although I would have gotten that impression from the blurb. The site tracks all kinds of satellites -- including ISS, the shuttle (if it were up), and the Iridium constellation. It's not just for people with a specific interest in spy sats and it is in fact very handy if you want to see what you might be able to see on a given night before going out to observe. (Showing friends or students the shuttles, the space station, or Iridium flares is pretty neat, so I always take a look before observing.)
Why would you use floats/doubles at all? Since there's a smallest unit of currency (a dollar if you round, a cent otherwise), why not just use integers?
Yeah. Of course, if they really want to track you that badly at that point, they'll be able to do it without you being at all aware of it either way. So the DL is still pretty pointless.
Um, did you bother reading my post? How does my having a *license* play into EITHER of those things?
And come to it, if you're that paranoid about being tracked, stop using your damn cell phone, especially while driving.
Some of the logic needs work, here. Needing a driver's license is hardly the same as saying you can't travel anonymously. Unless a cop pulls me over and asks to seem my license, they have NO way of knowing where I'm driving and when I'm doing so just based on the fact that I have been licensed to drive a car in the US.
At that distance, the planet systems are probably OK. You get distruption with closer binaries, but a light-year is pretty far out. A factor of 4000 in distances leads to a factor of 16 million in gravitational accelerations, after all.
Even in the Earth-Moon system, the Moon's effects on satellites is minor. (Drag from the atmosphere is a far bigger player and the main need for thrusters in most cases.)
The outer reaches of the Kuiper belt are nothing like a light-year away. They're around 50 Astronomical Units, 1/4000 of a light-year.
Also, note that there are stars that orbit each other that far apart. So your intution has led you astray.
You don't need a companion to produce a sharp edge in the Kuiper belt. Simulations have shown that. Anyone who makes the assertion that the edges suggest such a thing ought to have at least become familiar with that research.
Furthermore, the analogy to Saturn's rings is, I suspect, misleading. The moons that directly shape the outer edge of the A ring are close to the ring and small. (They are tied to other moons via resoances so the whole system is strung together, but that's not what's being argued for here.) A star would be much more massive than the Kuiper belt and would seriously disrupt the system rather than maintain it. (It would also be pretty obvious if it were just beyond the orbit of the outer edge of the Kuiper belt. We'd feel it here, for a start.) A more distant star might be able to hold back the edge of the belt with a resonance, but that's a different thing. And odds are that such a companion would destroy a belt more readily than maintain it. (Look at Jupiter and the asteroid belt.)
It should also be noted that 300 million years is a short time in solar system terms. It's even shorter for the outer solar system where it's about one million orbits. Since things move slowly and there is little material out there, spreading is very slow. Ones the material is placed there by a larger body (like Neptune), it tends to stay put for quite a while.
That's not what the grandparent post says at all. You're going off on a rant that has little to do with what the post actually is saying.
The post says that the poster is *confident* that the theory won't hold up. That's a personal prediction, not an absolute dismissal. And given that most radical theories like this one turn out to be wildly wrong, that's a very safe bet just based on history.
Well, in theory if you can make a *sufficiently* intense field you'll cram enough energy density in there to warp spacetime and thereby play with gravity. But you'd need a SERIOUSLY strong field. So yeah, I'm with you. Sounds like utter BS to me. If he succeeds, great, but I'm not getting excited about it.
The "God does not play at dice with the universe" was a metaphorical way of saying he didn't believe the probabilistic perspective on QM. Even if you are unable to spot that, then you're reading it as a purely non-scientific statement of faith and it has nothing to do with him as a scientist any more than if he had said, "God is merciful."
Einstein rejected some of the conclusions of QM, but none of the parts he disputed were tested at that time. We've only just tested the "spooky action at a distance" predictions that he disliked. And a lot of his objections really came down to Bohr's interpretation of QM, which is purely a matter of philosphy and not science. Scientists are allowed to disagree with each other and even be wrong to the extent that the data allow. And they're allowed to reject other people's extensions of their own works.
If a scientist adheres to a wrong theory after the data have shown him or her to be wrong, that's bad science. There have been cases of this, to be sure. Of course, there's usually a significant period where the data are not yet overwelming for or against an idea.
I don't think I've ever seen the noun form of "affect" used, but I have seen the adjective version ("affective") used quite often in certain circles. The meaning isn't lost entirely, even if the root word itself has fallen out of favor.
A lot of those ideas where already out there, actually. Galileo certainly knew and appreciated the first law, for example.
Also, don't forget that Newton never said "F=ma". He said that F = dp/dt, an inherently calculus-based statement. Without the Calculus, that definition is almost useless.
As a scientist, he was actually kind of sketchy. He did some great experimental research, but also was very convinced of some really sketchy things when he should have known better, as a scienist.
Actually, Einstein didn't criticize the real work that lead to the atomic bomb, since that was really the experimental results. I don't think that quantum was up for describing nuclear fission from the theoretical perspective at that time. In fact, Einstein signed off on the letter to Roosevelt telling the president to get working on a bomb because Germany was already working on it. That pretty clearly indicates that he believed the experimental results. But he continued to work on his own alternative approach to unification of the forces (and thus removing the need for at least much of QM) until his death.
Also, don't forget that he was also one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics. He didn't like the direction it took later on.
I *am* a working physicist. You were saying?
He wasn't really that gifted at math by his own admission. I'm not saying he was a raging idiot because he was certainly capable. But there's a big gap between being able to use mathematics and being able to invent whole new areas of mathematics. And he wasn't up for the latter. Which is why, when he was working on General Relativity, he had to seek outside help with the math. (This is no insult to the man. In fact, it's a helluva compliment. He knew when he was in over his head and he had the balls to seek help. As a result, his theory saw the light of day and we're better off for it.)
that's what I was saying. When Newton invented the Calculus, he was able to complete the work that so many had wanted to do, but been unable to. His mathematical abilities are what allowed him to make the scientific discoveries, not his brilliance as a scientist.
And you have your people reversed. Newton discovered the Calculus first and then sat on it for decades. In the meantime, Leibiniz rediscovered it. Bitterness ensued.
Hm, I don't think I can agree with that. Newton was unquestionably one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. (Most historians will put him in the three-way tie for first with Gauss and Archimedes.) As a scientist, Newton had a sort of mixed track record once you factor out his mathematical breakthroughs. A lot of the things he did were sitting around waiting to be connected up by the math, once the Calculus arrived on the scene. (For example, the inverse-square law of gravity was generally suspected to apply to gravity by many scientists of the day, include Hooke, Wren, and Halley. But none of them could actually prove that it gave the right behaviors for orbits without Newton's mathematical skills.) If you read the works of Galileo, a generation before Newton (and who Newton almost certainly must have read, although I don't have a source on that), you can see that the man was so close with his physical principles, but lacked the mathematical tools to put it all together. (And he lacked the mathematical genius to create the tools.)
Einstein, on the other hand, was NOT mathematically gifted by any stretch (although he wasn't stupid, either), but had an amazing ability to understand the physical principles and their general consequences. Plus, he was far more loveable than the cold, often caustic Newton.
The general public didn't learn of the atomic bomb until Hiroshima, and until roughly the start of the war it was generally thought impossible by the people who knew about the possiblity at all. Einstein achieved his fame aroudn 1919 with the gravitational lensing test of General Relativity in 1919.
I don't see how the fact that Einstein was a rogue contradicts the other traits. Gandhi was undoubtedly humane and I think we probably agree that he was humble. But he was also pretty anti-establishment. While it might be reasonable to associate the rogue trait with lack of humility, I don't think it's a given.
The pressure shouldn't change much with temperature. The pressure at the Earth's surface is basically set by the weight of the overlying layers of atmosphere. (With slight changes due to inflow and outflow from a given location.) However, the *density* will change. (Remember good ol' PV=nRT.)
If I did the quick calcuation right, the different in air density between freezing and 120 degree F is about 20 percent. Interestingly, that's about the same difference as between sea level and Denver. I am willing to bet that the Denver airport has longer runways in expecation of this, though. Why Neveda runways wouldn't be similarly lengthened in expectation of hot weather, I don't know.
Of course, whether the plane can take off from a given runway has a lot do with the plane and its load. A heavily laden plane with a low lift to weight ratio is more affected than one with a high lift to thrust.
Based on what I've seen and heard, the price you pay for pop in the store has little to do with the manufacturing cost and much more to do with market forces: they *can* charge you $X, so they do. As such, if the sugar-based pop is more expensive, it's much more likely to be either a scale issue, a transportation issue, or just another market issue.
If I remember correctly, a pound of sugar is a couple bucks. (I might not be remembering right, though.) That's about 2,200 grams of sugar for around two dollars, or about 10 grams for 1 cent. The cost of the roughly 40 grams of sugar in a can of pop would be about 4 cents. That's probably right to within a factor of two, anyway. And it's probably nearer an overly expensive estimate: buying sugar in bulk would probably decrease the unit price *and* I haven't subtracted out the cost of the corn syrup. Given this, it seems improbable that doubling the price (say from 25 cents a can to 50 cents a can) would be purely due to the cost of the sugar used.
It would have occured to me when I was using Word as the machine's usual user. If not right away, sometime when I was ditzing with settings or when I noticed that my comments in version-controlled papers were ascribed to "Merck". :-)
Ah, well. Silly, but reasonable in its way. It does render part of the track-changes feature pointless, though, to not insert some unique identifier.
I never said it was a left versus right issue. Why do you assume I meant it that way? Interesting.
Yeah, did say some really stupid things. Whether they're worthy of causing him to step down as chair is another question. And if you think that it was, then you need to think long and hard about people in quite a few other fields. I can name dozens of politicians (starting with the president and working down through both parties) who have said things just as embarassing. Very, very few of them have stepped aside. That's my point: it's an odd double standard.
And while I'll give you Franken, Dean is no where near as lunatic as O'Reilly or Linmaugh. He's actually fairly centrist, unless you're on the extreme right or you just read the GOP's talking point. Michael Moore would probably be a better example.