I really have to wonder if they've done any sort of radiation qualification on this thing. It isn't as though it will be running critical, multimillion dollar hardware or anything, but still, you're asking for trouble if you're putting rad-soft parts up there. At best you're going to have random bugs and suspect data from bit upsets, at worst you're going to brick your entire system when you get latchup or a functional interrupt that you aren't able to mitigate. Maybe they're tackling it with redundancy - I see that they have 17 Arduinos, so they can just shut one down if it degrades too much, but if your control hardware isn't rad-hard then it doesn't matter - weakest link and all that.
I have put an Arduino in space, btw, but only on a suborbital flight lasting about 20 minutes. Also, for what it's worth, IAAREE (I am a radiation effects engineer).
The early to mid 20th century was one of the most dynamic times to ever happen in physics, with massive shifts in thinking and incredible applications of science that led to some of the greatest achievements of mankind. For a variety of reasons, it seems as though progress recently has been more incremental, collective, and focused on confirming the big ideas of previous thinkers. What attribute do you think is most needed in the upcoming generation of physicists to usher in the next era of scientific progress?
That does raise a question, though. Why do boys do better when they're graded remotely, and why do girls do better when they're graded by their own teacher? I don't suppose there's a bit of favoritism going on, no? I suppose that ties back into the point of my rant.
We live in a world where when a woman fails, we find every excuse we can up to some unprovable discrimination that *must* exist otherwise she wouldn't have failed.
If a man fails, we blame him.
Favoritism is the only explanation, then?
Physics teacher here, and I try to grade things pretty objectively - I have a multiple choice segment on many of the assessments I give for precisely that reason. Of course it is problematic in other ways, but you assess in a variety of methods so that hopefully you end up with a pretty fair picture of the student's total capability.
In my class, girls often get better grades because they just turn stuff in more, and it is more complete when they do turn it in.
I don't know if there's anything terribly meaningful to draw from this study, though. I suspect that school grades often reward work ethic, even if content knowledge is lacking. Standardized tests focus more on the content, but they also focus on a very specific way of utilizing knowledge, in a formal setting with a very limited array of possible answers. Certain people are much more skilled at "gaming the system" of multiple choice tests, thinking in a strategic way to try to increase odds of success, and I would wager that this effect is mostly responsible for the advantage of boys here - a higher predilection for gaming might even play a part here. Of course, standardized tests have huge limitations, so even if the boys are succeeding more here, that may or may not say anything significant about their actual knowledge.
With girls, for whatever reason, the format of school as it currently stands seemingly aligns more closely with their methods of motivation. It seems to me that girls are more willing to do the work on something that they don't see the inherent value in, which is going to be a large portion of school unless you love every subject. I also find that girls are much more likely to obsess about a grade, whereas many boys are not as motivated by the number or letter on the report card. There is also the fact that some girls seem to be more concerned about approval from teachers. Even consider the gender bias in society and teacher numbers - male teachers get more respect and attention from male students in some cases, and since males are underrepresented in the teaching profession, this is going to have a gender-biased effect on student performance.
You also have the "faking dumb" pattern that seems to happen at higher rates and for different reasons with girls. Many boys are intimidated by a smarter girl, and at dating ages in school, a girl can be concerned enough about this that she will intentionally get a bad grade to avoid alienating boys. I know of one female student that intentionally got C's until she came to an agreement with the teacher to write a "C" on her paper even if she actually earned an A. So while a boy might merely choose not to complete assignments, the girl will intentionally get a worse grade on an assignment that she actually completes. It wouldn't be inconceivable for a student to carry that over to a standardized test. This might also play some part in the fact that girls do better in single-sex classrooms - take the boys away, and girl's performance goes up, particularly in math and science.
Gender and education is a tricky thing. Like it or not, our society is far from equal, from the ways that we pay people to the jobs we encourage them to pursue, so it is really difficult to say what intrinsic differences are in the sexes, and what is merely a result of gender identities that students have been molded to step into. Certainly it seems like we are losing male engagement in schools, which is problematic as a long-term trend.
Asking questions is not "playing dumb" - asking questions is a great way to communicate and make a point without being confrontational. I know that it is an entirely different context, but as a teacher, asking students questions is much more effective than pushing them around - if they are wandering around the class when they should be in their seat, you can either say some variant of "Sit your ass back down" or ask a question like "Do you need me to help you find something?" In the first case, the student will either obey at a loss of their personal dignity or will resist the affront to their autonomy by turning it into a confrontation. In the second case, the student will probably be caught off their guard, realize that they aren't supposed to be up, and then head back to the seat.
Not saying that managers are children (maybe they are), just saying that asking questions can be an effective way to communicate while making sure it doesn't come across as needlessly confrontational. Which is a surefire way to get on someone's wrong side. Asking the kind of questions that the GP is talking about doesn't undermine your technical position as a developer either - it reveals that you are trying to understand how best to work with your team. And, there's always the chance that the manager's choices are well thought out, and that you will find a benefit from understanding the strategy.
I was involved in a recent university project that launched a payload on a suborbital sounding rocket. Depending on your objectives, getting into Arduino or Beagleboard or Gumstix or some similar low-power microcontroller will really open up a lot of possibilities for you. We launched a capsule that radio'd back inertial data using largely off-the-shelf components from places like Sparkfun.
No, it doesn't. Because that's not how wealth is created in reality. The people who create a lot of wealth become rich and the people who on their own can't create a lot of wealth become poor -- unless they happen to be working for the first group or engage in some of the wide variety of rent seeking opportunities the US has to offer. If your country is busy destroying wealth of the people who create the most, then how are the people who can't create a lot of wealth on their own going to make up for it? It doesn't happen.
Reality disagrees with you. People don't "become rich" anymore, at least not like they used to. Class mobility is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Further, rich people might do any manner of things with their money - send it offshore, put it into microtrading schemes that have no legitimate benefit for the economy, let it sit in a Swiss bank doing nothing...
The middle class, however, has to spend the money it has immediately, on cars, homes, food, etc... That income that actually keeps a company in business. The idea that rich people are rich because they contribute more to the economy is complete nonsense. Rich people don't want to make jobs - they want to keep their money. Employing people is expensive, and they will avoid it until they have no other choice. If allowing rich people to get richer helped our economy, then why haven't average wages skyrocketed over the past several decades the way that the income of the rich have? In 1988, the average American taxpayer was earning around $33,400. In 2008, that average had fallen to $33,000. The richest 1% of Americans, on the other hand, saw their incomes rise about 33% in the same time period. Tell me again about how effective your trickle down economics are...
We hear about Finland a lot, which is nice and all, but Finland doesn't have the same demographics as the United States and works a lot differently in practice.
If you rounded up a portion of the US population that was 99% white with little to no immigration and few if any pressures from a declining manufacturing sector, and of course made that portion the same size as Finland, you'd probably have... Finland. There is no magical Finnish sauce, you're just lucky that you all look exactly like your neighbors.
Nonsense. We've got lots of areas in the US that are minimally diverse. Look up North and you'll find several. Those places still don't hold a candle to the Finnish system, even though their demographic challenges are virtually the same.
We can't fix education by making excuses for our system constantly. We also can't fix education by placing the blame on things that are unsolvable (like an unmotivated society). What we have to do is do good, rigorous research, find things that work, and start doing them. Listening to baseless conjecture that has been formulated merely to mesh well with one political platform or another is never going to accomplish anything, but unfortunately that has been the driving force behind education policy for the last few decades.
No dispute about the monarchy thing, but you are incorrect about the subject/citizen thing. Many verses call believers adoptive sons and daughters alongside Christ. Which is a considerable upgrade from the picture you paint.
Not saying that you should accept the theology - just saying that you should be factually correct about whatever criticisms you have.
I don't understand why we do not have small, one to two-person blimps flying around. The technology is there. They are safe. They might crash into eachother but will more than likely just bounce off. If they do plumet to the earth, they'll do it slow motion.
We obviously have the technology. No major breakthrough required. What am I missing here?
I would guess because blimps are slow, not very maneuverable, and have a tough time in bad weather. Personal transportation is about convenience, and so I don't think they fit that niche very well.
Don't get me wrong though. It would be a much more appealing landscape.
I have more of a robotics/embedded systems/physical computing background, but I can tell you calculus is all over the effing place there.
The PID controller is an integral (pun intended) part of everything from autonomous cars to thermostats - it stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative. Calculus is a very cool part of these things, although, when implemented in programming, it won't look very much like calculus. A knowledge of the concepts really informs your understanding of how these things work, though.
Also, if you ever want to program an application that does significant motion control, think wiimote or smartphone apps (and you don't have a nifty library that does all the thinking for you) you'll need to know calculus to be able to turn your accelerometer readouts into velocity and position information. Same thing for turning gyro data (roll rates) into rotational position or acceleration data. Missiles, UAV's, spacecraft and a bunch of other things use these principles - look up IMU (inertial measurement unit) , or AHRS (altitude and heading reference system).
You can see here that calculus is a very fundamental part of understanding physical motion and behavior, so I imagine that if you ever get into the dirty work of designing a physics engine of any level of realism calculus could be extremely helpful. Even if you don't explicitly take a derivative anywhere, it helps you have a better understanding of things that change continuously, and even just be mindful of the way various forces operate.
Finally, Calculus is just goddamn beautiful. I'm no expert at it, but if you've got any interest in things like programming, math, and science, it is something you ought to be familiar with just because it is such an elegant and astonishingly simple way to understand so many really complicated things.
Will we have better video games? A faster internet? A more secure internet? A more secure society? Focus on what people actually care about to market your research.
This is an awful idea. There is already too much of this happening - fundamental research (and physics is some of the most fundamental) often doesn't anticipate specific applications - that isn't the job of scientists. It is misrepresenting their work to suggest so. Look at the cold fusion craze in the 90's - because so many people promised so much for so little, and obviously failed, there is a huge aversion now to the entire topic. It is next to impossible to get any funding for anything that hints of cold fusion.
What we need is an educated public that understands what science is and how it works, and that understands how progress in fundamental areas doesn't reach applications for decades in some cases, or more. Quantum mechanics showed up in the early 1900's, and we didn't start getting interesting applications (lasers for instance) until the 60's and 70's, and even then we didn't see lasers reaching consumer devices until the 80's. Do you think Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger had lasers in mind when they were doing their fundamental work?
Keep marketing out of science. We have too damn much of it everywhere else.
The original comment had nothing to do with the Higgs - it was a barely related joke. Secondly, it can be argued that it is technically correct - considering that if he lost weight, he would have lost mass as well. Yes, weight and mass are different, but because of the way gravity works, and the fact that the vast majority of humanity never experiences less than the Earth's gravitational acceleration for any appreciable amount of time, they are for practical purposes treatable as the same property for most everything except physics calculations.
The Higgs imbues particles with mass, which then gives them weight as long as they are near a significant source of gravity. The correction in this case was mere semantics, and the primary purpose of the correction was ego inflation.
Please take the time to understand what I'm saying here - I'm not disputing the accuracy of your claim, I'm just saying that if you hope to educate people about science, ur doin it wrong. When you correct people about details like that (that only matter if you are being rigorous, which the OP obviously wasn't being), you are alienating them just to make yourself seem superior. There are humble and approachable ways of teaching science that let people keep their dignity while they fix their ignorance, and there are arrogant and alienating ways of teaching science, where the teacher belittles his students to help his own self esteem. The second should be avoided at all costs, because it is likely to do more harm than good, and that conviction is what motivated my response in the first place.
Correcting someone about the mass/weight difference when they are making a joke, is, indeed, pointless.
...or could be viewed as an opportunity to provide some education. If you never get your mistakes corrected then how will you ever learn not to make them? I would not correct someone using weight vs. mass in an everyday context but, when discussing physics, the language is precise and it is important to be correct. When you are keen and passionate about science you want to share that understanding with others not sit back and let them muddle on in half comprehension as you suggest. The reason for this is because, without that comprehension, you can see no more of the grandeur of science that you can see of the grandeur of the Mona Lisa through a sheet of frosted glass.
Agree to disagree - it is generally considered rude to correct someone on a small mistake when nothing of importance is at stake and they haven't asked for feedback.
Also, while a deep, formal understanding of physics certainly makes it possible to appreciate grand truths about the universe that you otherwise couldn't, there are lots of things that can be appreciated by the layman, and pointing out small technical errors can obstruct that. Consider - Bill Nye, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson spend much more effort on the big ideas, and much less on pointing out small details that are really only important for a formal approach to a topic.
The difference between mass and weight is NOT "pointless minutiae" they are fundamentally different physical things - one which the Higgs boson can explain and one which it cannot. I get that you do not understand the difference between the two and it does not surprise me - this difference is subtle and hard to grasp and was something I struggled with when first learning physics.
Actually, the difference isn't all that subtle - multiply mass times the acceleration of a gravitational field and you have weight, simple as that. Note that I never said you were wrong technically. I said you were wrong for derailing the topic to make the point. The ambiguity in this case wasn't introducing any misinformation that was actually important to the discussion. Nitpicking does nothing for anyone, except for helping you to stoke your nerd-ego.
Right - I was saying that using units to try to prove a point is a worthless endeavor - the fact that a pound is used in the context of F/A is as meaningless as the fact that a pound can be converted directly to kilos - there's some ambiguity there, and reasoning beings can live with it and get their calculations done even so.
The original comment was, in fact, a joke (losing a few pounds). Correcting someone about the mass/weight difference when they are making a joke, is, indeed, pointless.
I am well aware of the difference between weight and mass, but again, it isn't really important to correct someone misusing it in the context of a joke. And, you conveniently neglected to rebut my point - Euro-folk use kilos to talk about weight every bit as much as Americans use pounds to talk about mass - outside of physics, this amount of ambiguity is acceptable, just like the use of velocity and speed as synonymous terms. Language is imprecise, and that is fine, and only socially stunted pedants try to make it scientifically precise in contexts where it doesn't matter (such as making a joke about losing weight).
I get peeved at so-called science supporters that do things like this - you are winning the battle (correcting the OPs usage of weight where mass would've been technically correct) and losing the war (making the grandeur of science into little more than a dick-waving match to make yourself feel superior, and alienating people in the process).
Ya, I mean, I'm all for pragmatism, but what happened to knowledge for it's own sake, and exploration for it's own sake? It is easy to make arguments that the money could be better spent elsewhere, but we're surely expending money on more frivolous things that do less for humanity.
It probably won't produce a result, and there are better things to devote yourself to, but if it does... DAMN that would be awesome. It is exciting, and I for one think we could all use a bit more romanticism and a bit less jaded cynicism - this does more for humanity than Jersey Shore, Farmville, and a hell of a lot of other things we all waste our time and money on.
What you have just highlighted though is one of the (many) reasons why imperial units are stupid and inconsistent. The pound is a measure of weight which is a force otherwise you cannot explain the use of pounds per square inch as units for pressure.
If you are going to use that kind of reasoning - a pound can be converted directly into kilograms, therefore it must in fact be a mass.
This kind of pedantry is what annoys me about the way people teach physics. We could use pounds just fine for mass, and you aren't going to get yourself in trouble with conversions as long as you keep simple things in mind. Consider, if you ask a European what their weight is, they sure as hell aren't going to give you their answer in Newtons. So they are at least as inconsistent in their mass/weight distinctions as us backwoods imperial unit hicks.
Being a dick about those distinctions doesn't add to the conversation, and in fact helps to convince people that to be into science you have to be a nitpicking douchebag. Finding pointless minutia to criticize is nothing but a failed effort to make yourself seem more intelligent. If you want to actually have a decent conversation that doesn't get derailed into uninteresting arguments about things like this, overlook the error - pointing out the mistakes of others (particularly when they are part of a joke) isn't a good way to make friends or productive discourse.
All that said, of course SI units are the only way to go for any calculation of any importance, and I would love if they were adopted worldwide - but trying to wield physics to correct people's unimportant mistakes and make yourself seem superior is bad PR for science.
I actually wonder if there are galaxies or at least star systems that are completely made of antimatter and have very little matter there?
That's exactly the problem. Those galaxies haven't been detected, and so, as far as we can tell, there's a huge bias against anti-matter in this universe.
Antimatter does, in some respects, travel backwards in time. A positron behaves precisely as an electron would if it were going the opposite direction in time.
Well, there was John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" where he suggests that the future interstellar soldiers for humanity will all be old people that have lived full lives, and now have less reservations and more life experience. Of course, they get upgraded into healthy, new, augmented bodies to help them out with soldiering, but overall it's a pretty interesting concept. Well worth the read.
I personally don't see the problem with judging a photo instead of an essay. Especially since it isn't something that students will have already done 100 of, so it will likely inspire more creativity and originality. A really good photo can say just as much as a good essay, and is arguably harder to put together. Plus it is easier to judge and easier to show off when you announce the winner.
That said, the "tweet" angle isn't really relevant or helpful, but I think it is just a way to get more eyeballs and try to appeal to younger folks. It seems to be working, at any rate.
A large percentage of what they do on the show is strictly for entertainment value. Many of the so-called myths they test, and the methods they devise to test them, are completely predictable by anyone with any common sense, yet they perform the "tests" anyway because they involve entertaining car wrecks, explosions, fire balls, or Adam ending up in pain and/or puking.
It's a TV show, so 100% of what they do is strictly for entertainment value. It just so happens that they've managed to capture parts of the scientific method in ways that end up being entertaining. The fact that many of their experiments are predictable isn't a mark against them, either - science is about formally testing and verifying any kind of knowledge, and sometimes, even when we think the answer is obvious, it turns out differently than we expect and we learn something from it.
Slashdot Mirror
I really have to wonder if they've done any sort of radiation qualification on this thing. It isn't as though it will be running critical, multimillion dollar hardware or anything, but still, you're asking for trouble if you're putting rad-soft parts up there. At best you're going to have random bugs and suspect data from bit upsets, at worst you're going to brick your entire system when you get latchup or a functional interrupt that you aren't able to mitigate. Maybe they're tackling it with redundancy - I see that they have 17 Arduinos, so they can just shut one down if it degrades too much, but if your control hardware isn't rad-hard then it doesn't matter - weakest link and all that.
I have put an Arduino in space, btw, but only on a suborbital flight lasting about 20 minutes. Also, for what it's worth, IAAREE (I am a radiation effects engineer).
The early to mid 20th century was one of the most dynamic times to ever happen in physics, with massive shifts in thinking and incredible applications of science that led to some of the greatest achievements of mankind. For a variety of reasons, it seems as though progress recently has been more incremental, collective, and focused on confirming the big ideas of previous thinkers. What attribute do you think is most needed in the upcoming generation of physicists to usher in the next era of scientific progress?
That does raise a question, though. Why do boys do better when they're graded remotely, and why do girls do better when they're graded by their own teacher? I don't suppose there's a bit of favoritism going on, no? I suppose that ties back into the point of my rant.
We live in a world where when a woman fails, we find every excuse we can up to some unprovable discrimination that *must* exist otherwise she wouldn't have failed.
If a man fails, we blame him.
Favoritism is the only explanation, then?
Physics teacher here, and I try to grade things pretty objectively - I have a multiple choice segment on many of the assessments I give for precisely that reason. Of course it is problematic in other ways, but you assess in a variety of methods so that hopefully you end up with a pretty fair picture of the student's total capability.
In my class, girls often get better grades because they just turn stuff in more, and it is more complete when they do turn it in.
I don't know if there's anything terribly meaningful to draw from this study, though. I suspect that school grades often reward work ethic, even if content knowledge is lacking. Standardized tests focus more on the content, but they also focus on a very specific way of utilizing knowledge, in a formal setting with a very limited array of possible answers. Certain people are much more skilled at "gaming the system" of multiple choice tests, thinking in a strategic way to try to increase odds of success, and I would wager that this effect is mostly responsible for the advantage of boys here - a higher predilection for gaming might even play a part here. Of course, standardized tests have huge limitations, so even if the boys are succeeding more here, that may or may not say anything significant about their actual knowledge.
With girls, for whatever reason, the format of school as it currently stands seemingly aligns more closely with their methods of motivation. It seems to me that girls are more willing to do the work on something that they don't see the inherent value in, which is going to be a large portion of school unless you love every subject. I also find that girls are much more likely to obsess about a grade, whereas many boys are not as motivated by the number or letter on the report card. There is also the fact that some girls seem to be more concerned about approval from teachers. Even consider the gender bias in society and teacher numbers - male teachers get more respect and attention from male students in some cases, and since males are underrepresented in the teaching profession, this is going to have a gender-biased effect on student performance.
You also have the "faking dumb" pattern that seems to happen at higher rates and for different reasons with girls. Many boys are intimidated by a smarter girl, and at dating ages in school, a girl can be concerned enough about this that she will intentionally get a bad grade to avoid alienating boys. I know of one female student that intentionally got C's until she came to an agreement with the teacher to write a "C" on her paper even if she actually earned an A. So while a boy might merely choose not to complete assignments, the girl will intentionally get a worse grade on an assignment that she actually completes. It wouldn't be inconceivable for a student to carry that over to a standardized test. This might also play some part in the fact that girls do better in single-sex classrooms - take the boys away, and girl's performance goes up, particularly in math and science.
Gender and education is a tricky thing. Like it or not, our society is far from equal, from the ways that we pay people to the jobs we encourage them to pursue, so it is really difficult to say what intrinsic differences are in the sexes, and what is merely a result of gender identities that students have been molded to step into. Certainly it seems like we are losing male engagement in schools, which is problematic as a long-term trend.
If you arrested everyone that had explosive chemicals in the house, then you would have to arrest everyone that cleans anything.
So most slashdotters have nothing to be afraid of!
Asking questions is not "playing dumb" - asking questions is a great way to communicate and make a point without being confrontational. I know that it is an entirely different context, but as a teacher, asking students questions is much more effective than pushing them around - if they are wandering around the class when they should be in their seat, you can either say some variant of "Sit your ass back down" or ask a question like "Do you need me to help you find something?" In the first case, the student will either obey at a loss of their personal dignity or will resist the affront to their autonomy by turning it into a confrontation. In the second case, the student will probably be caught off their guard, realize that they aren't supposed to be up, and then head back to the seat.
Not saying that managers are children (maybe they are), just saying that asking questions can be an effective way to communicate while making sure it doesn't come across as needlessly confrontational. Which is a surefire way to get on someone's wrong side. Asking the kind of questions that the GP is talking about doesn't undermine your technical position as a developer either - it reveals that you are trying to understand how best to work with your team. And, there's always the chance that the manager's choices are well thought out, and that you will find a benefit from understanding the strategy.
I was involved in a recent university project that launched a payload on a suborbital sounding rocket. Depending on your objectives, getting into Arduino or Beagleboard or Gumstix or some similar low-power microcontroller will really open up a lot of possibilities for you. We launched a capsule that radio'd back inertial data using largely off-the-shelf components from places like Sparkfun.
No, it doesn't. Because that's not how wealth is created in reality. The people who create a lot of wealth become rich and the people who on their own can't create a lot of wealth become poor -- unless they happen to be working for the first group or engage in some of the wide variety of rent seeking opportunities the US has to offer. If your country is busy destroying wealth of the people who create the most, then how are the people who can't create a lot of wealth on their own going to make up for it? It doesn't happen.
Reality disagrees with you. People don't "become rich" anymore, at least not like they used to. Class mobility is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Further, rich people might do any manner of things with their money - send it offshore, put it into microtrading schemes that have no legitimate benefit for the economy, let it sit in a Swiss bank doing nothing...
The middle class, however, has to spend the money it has immediately, on cars, homes, food, etc... That income that actually keeps a company in business. The idea that rich people are rich because they contribute more to the economy is complete nonsense. Rich people don't want to make jobs - they want to keep their money. Employing people is expensive, and they will avoid it until they have no other choice. If allowing rich people to get richer helped our economy, then why haven't average wages skyrocketed over the past several decades the way that the income of the rich have? In 1988, the average American taxpayer was earning around $33,400. In 2008, that average had fallen to $33,000. The richest 1% of Americans, on the other hand, saw their incomes rise about 33% in the same time period. Tell me again about how effective your trickle down economics are...
appealing to their bassist instincts...
I've always said that drummers are more trustworthy. *rimshot*
We hear about Finland a lot, which is nice and all, but Finland doesn't have the same demographics as the United States and works a lot differently in practice.
If you rounded up a portion of the US population that was 99% white with little to no immigration and few if any pressures from a declining manufacturing sector, and of course made that portion the same size as Finland, you'd probably have... Finland. There is no magical Finnish sauce, you're just lucky that you all look exactly like your neighbors.
Nonsense. We've got lots of areas in the US that are minimally diverse. Look up North and you'll find several. Those places still don't hold a candle to the Finnish system, even though their demographic challenges are virtually the same.
We can't fix education by making excuses for our system constantly. We also can't fix education by placing the blame on things that are unsolvable (like an unmotivated society). What we have to do is do good, rigorous research, find things that work, and start doing them. Listening to baseless conjecture that has been formulated merely to mesh well with one political platform or another is never going to accomplish anything, but unfortunately that has been the driving force behind education policy for the last few decades.
No dispute about the monarchy thing, but you are incorrect about the subject/citizen thing. Many verses call believers adoptive sons and daughters alongside Christ. Which is a considerable upgrade from the picture you paint.
Not saying that you should accept the theology - just saying that you should be factually correct about whatever criticisms you have.
I don't understand why we do not have small, one to two-person blimps flying around. The technology is there. They are safe. They might crash into eachother but will more than likely just bounce off. If they do plumet to the earth, they'll do it slow motion.
We obviously have the technology. No major breakthrough required. What am I missing here?
I would guess because blimps are slow, not very maneuverable, and have a tough time in bad weather. Personal transportation is about convenience, and so I don't think they fit that niche very well.
Don't get me wrong though. It would be a much more appealing landscape.
I have more of a robotics/embedded systems/physical computing background, but I can tell you calculus is all over the effing place there.
The PID controller is an integral (pun intended) part of everything from autonomous cars to thermostats - it stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative. Calculus is a very cool part of these things, although, when implemented in programming, it won't look very much like calculus. A knowledge of the concepts really informs your understanding of how these things work, though.
Also, if you ever want to program an application that does significant motion control, think wiimote or smartphone apps (and you don't have a nifty library that does all the thinking for you) you'll need to know calculus to be able to turn your accelerometer readouts into velocity and position information. Same thing for turning gyro data (roll rates) into rotational position or acceleration data. Missiles, UAV's, spacecraft and a bunch of other things use these principles - look up IMU (inertial measurement unit) , or AHRS (altitude and heading reference system).
You can see here that calculus is a very fundamental part of understanding physical motion and behavior, so I imagine that if you ever get into the dirty work of designing a physics engine of any level of realism calculus could be extremely helpful. Even if you don't explicitly take a derivative anywhere, it helps you have a better understanding of things that change continuously, and even just be mindful of the way various forces operate.
Finally, Calculus is just goddamn beautiful. I'm no expert at it, but if you've got any interest in things like programming, math, and science, it is something you ought to be familiar with just because it is such an elegant and astonishingly simple way to understand so many really complicated things.
Will we have better video games? A faster internet? A more secure internet? A more secure society? Focus on what people actually care about to market your research.
This is an awful idea. There is already too much of this happening - fundamental research (and physics is some of the most fundamental) often doesn't anticipate specific applications - that isn't the job of scientists. It is misrepresenting their work to suggest so. Look at the cold fusion craze in the 90's - because so many people promised so much for so little, and obviously failed, there is a huge aversion now to the entire topic. It is next to impossible to get any funding for anything that hints of cold fusion.
What we need is an educated public that understands what science is and how it works, and that understands how progress in fundamental areas doesn't reach applications for decades in some cases, or more. Quantum mechanics showed up in the early 1900's, and we didn't start getting interesting applications (lasers for instance) until the 60's and 70's, and even then we didn't see lasers reaching consumer devices until the 80's. Do you think Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger had lasers in mind when they were doing their fundamental work?
Keep marketing out of science. We have too damn much of it everywhere else.
The original comment had nothing to do with the Higgs - it was a barely related joke. Secondly, it can be argued that it is technically correct - considering that if he lost weight, he would have lost mass as well. Yes, weight and mass are different, but because of the way gravity works, and the fact that the vast majority of humanity never experiences less than the Earth's gravitational acceleration for any appreciable amount of time, they are for practical purposes treatable as the same property for most everything except physics calculations.
The Higgs imbues particles with mass, which then gives them weight as long as they are near a significant source of gravity. The correction in this case was mere semantics, and the primary purpose of the correction was ego inflation.
Please take the time to understand what I'm saying here - I'm not disputing the accuracy of your claim, I'm just saying that if you hope to educate people about science, ur doin it wrong. When you correct people about details like that (that only matter if you are being rigorous, which the OP obviously wasn't being), you are alienating them just to make yourself seem superior. There are humble and approachable ways of teaching science that let people keep their dignity while they fix their ignorance, and there are arrogant and alienating ways of teaching science, where the teacher belittles his students to help his own self esteem. The second should be avoided at all costs, because it is likely to do more harm than good, and that conviction is what motivated my response in the first place.
Correcting someone about the mass/weight difference when they are making a joke, is, indeed, pointless.
Agree to disagree - it is generally considered rude to correct someone on a small mistake when nothing of importance is at stake and they haven't asked for feedback.
Also, while a deep, formal understanding of physics certainly makes it possible to appreciate grand truths about the universe that you otherwise couldn't, there are lots of things that can be appreciated by the layman, and pointing out small technical errors can obstruct that. Consider - Bill Nye, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson spend much more effort on the big ideas, and much less on pointing out small details that are really only important for a formal approach to a topic.
The difference between mass and weight is NOT "pointless minutiae" they are fundamentally different physical things - one which the Higgs boson can explain and one which it cannot. I get that you do not understand the difference between the two and it does not surprise me - this difference is subtle and hard to grasp and was something I struggled with when first learning physics.
Actually, the difference isn't all that subtle - multiply mass times the acceleration of a gravitational field and you have weight, simple as that. Note that I never said you were wrong technically. I said you were wrong for derailing the topic to make the point. The ambiguity in this case wasn't introducing any misinformation that was actually important to the discussion. Nitpicking does nothing for anyone, except for helping you to stoke your nerd-ego.
Right - I was saying that using units to try to prove a point is a worthless endeavor - the fact that a pound is used in the context of F/A is as meaningless as the fact that a pound can be converted directly to kilos - there's some ambiguity there, and reasoning beings can live with it and get their calculations done even so.
The original comment was, in fact, a joke (losing a few pounds). Correcting someone about the mass/weight difference when they are making a joke, is, indeed, pointless.
I am well aware of the difference between weight and mass, but again, it isn't really important to correct someone misusing it in the context of a joke. And, you conveniently neglected to rebut my point - Euro-folk use kilos to talk about weight every bit as much as Americans use pounds to talk about mass - outside of physics, this amount of ambiguity is acceptable, just like the use of velocity and speed as synonymous terms. Language is imprecise, and that is fine, and only socially stunted pedants try to make it scientifically precise in contexts where it doesn't matter (such as making a joke about losing weight).
I get peeved at so-called science supporters that do things like this - you are winning the battle (correcting the OPs usage of weight where mass would've been technically correct) and losing the war (making the grandeur of science into little more than a dick-waving match to make yourself feel superior, and alienating people in the process).
Ya, I mean, I'm all for pragmatism, but what happened to knowledge for it's own sake, and exploration for it's own sake? It is easy to make arguments that the money could be better spent elsewhere, but we're surely expending money on more frivolous things that do less for humanity.
It probably won't produce a result, and there are better things to devote yourself to, but if it does... DAMN that would be awesome. It is exciting, and I for one think we could all use a bit more romanticism and a bit less jaded cynicism - this does more for humanity than Jersey Shore, Farmville, and a hell of a lot of other things we all waste our time and money on.
What you have just highlighted though is one of the (many) reasons why imperial units are stupid and inconsistent. The pound is a measure of weight which is a force otherwise you cannot explain the use of pounds per square inch as units for pressure.
If you are going to use that kind of reasoning - a pound can be converted directly into kilograms, therefore it must in fact be a mass.
This kind of pedantry is what annoys me about the way people teach physics. We could use pounds just fine for mass, and you aren't going to get yourself in trouble with conversions as long as you keep simple things in mind. Consider, if you ask a European what their weight is, they sure as hell aren't going to give you their answer in Newtons. So they are at least as inconsistent in their mass/weight distinctions as us backwoods imperial unit hicks.
Being a dick about those distinctions doesn't add to the conversation, and in fact helps to convince people that to be into science you have to be a nitpicking douchebag. Finding pointless minutia to criticize is nothing but a failed effort to make yourself seem more intelligent. If you want to actually have a decent conversation that doesn't get derailed into uninteresting arguments about things like this, overlook the error - pointing out the mistakes of others (particularly when they are part of a joke) isn't a good way to make friends or productive discourse.
All that said, of course SI units are the only way to go for any calculation of any importance, and I would love if they were adopted worldwide - but trying to wield physics to correct people's unimportant mistakes and make yourself seem superior is bad PR for science.
I actually wonder if there are galaxies or at least star systems that are completely made of antimatter and have very little matter there?
That's exactly the problem. Those galaxies haven't been detected, and so, as far as we can tell, there's a huge bias against anti-matter in this universe.
Antimatter does, in some respects, travel backwards in time. A positron behaves precisely as an electron would if it were going the opposite direction in time.
Well, there was John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" where he suggests that the future interstellar soldiers for humanity will all be old people that have lived full lives, and now have less reservations and more life experience. Of course, they get upgraded into healthy, new, augmented bodies to help them out with soldiering, but overall it's a pretty interesting concept. Well worth the read.
I personally don't see the problem with judging a photo instead of an essay. Especially since it isn't something that students will have already done 100 of, so it will likely inspire more creativity and originality. A really good photo can say just as much as a good essay, and is arguably harder to put together. Plus it is easier to judge and easier to show off when you announce the winner.
That said, the "tweet" angle isn't really relevant or helpful, but I think it is just a way to get more eyeballs and try to appeal to younger folks. It seems to be working, at any rate.
A large percentage of what they do on the show is strictly for entertainment value. Many of the so-called myths they test, and the methods they devise to test them, are completely predictable by anyone with any common sense, yet they perform the "tests" anyway because they involve entertaining car wrecks, explosions, fire balls, or Adam ending up in pain and/or puking.
It's a TV show, so 100% of what they do is strictly for entertainment value. It just so happens that they've managed to capture parts of the scientific method in ways that end up being entertaining. The fact that many of their experiments are predictable isn't a mark against them, either - science is about formally testing and verifying any kind of knowledge, and sometimes, even when we think the answer is obvious, it turns out differently than we expect and we learn something from it.