If you can't learn basic calculus from a textbook then you shouldn't pass it and have access to a field that requires it. Everything else works this way. If you can't run the 40 in a certain time and tackle with a certain proficiency you don't get to play in the NFL. College IS NOT for everyone.
Where do all these painfully pretentious "I learned how to do this myself, if you can't you're an idiot" asshats come from? Have you ever considered that not everybody has identical aptitudes? Sure, some people might be fine picking up calculus from a textbook, but what if you went to a terrible high school and didn't have an adequate algebra background, or didn't have a family that supported learning?
It's fine for you to feel high and mighty because you taught yourself math, and good for you for doing it, but you reveal your complete ignorance about the psychology of education if you think everybody can or should do it that way. And, many people who aren't geniuses at math have ended up revolutionizing fields that are almost entirely math based - look at Faraday and Einstein, for instance. Maybe, just maybe, the people who can't teach themselves calculus still have something to offer the world...
The patronage model certainly wasn't perfect, and ours isn't either, but I think this underscores the way that culture and economics influence the way things get made. It used to be fashionable for the rich/powerful to be patrons of various causes - you look at composers, authors, scientists, artists, pretty much any of the things that might enrich life without being immediately and obviously profitable - but that no longer seems to be the case. You used to have a pet scientist to show off to your rich friends, but that disappeared eventually for some reason. What are the rich spending their money on now, and why don't they spend their money on this kind of stuff?
I'm not sure if you blame capitalism or postmodernity or whatever, but the thing is we don't really have any kind of morality that we even pay lipservice to anymore. During the Victorian era there was at least this kind of moral pressure for the rich to benevolently devote their resources to further social and artistic causes. Part of it came from peer groups, etc. And I suppose you could argue that the Prius-owning green movement is an example of that at least among wealthy celebrities. You also see hospitals and symphonies that are supported partly by wealthy donors. But, I personally don't think it would be a bad thing to bring this sense of upper class obligation back. Or really, any class obligation. It's obnoxious for the wealthy to act morally superior (patronizing, perhaps?) but they can feel however they want as long as they support shit that needs to happen. I, for one, welcome our patronizing overlords!
You make a common mistake, which is to conflate religion with fundamentalism. They are not the same any more than atheism and communism are the same. Fundamentalism is typically anti-intellectual, destructive, and backwards. Religion can certainly be about truth and beauty - look at Buddhism, various newage stuff or more liberal interpretations of Christianity. "Enlightenment", appreciating nature, and relationships to people around you are pretty central to these traditions. Also, only Fundamentalism insists on literal creation stories - again not the norm for much of Christianity.
I'm not saying that religion is perfect or that you should become religious. However, if you are going to attack something, you should attack actual attributes of the thing you dislike, so we can have an intelligent discussion. Of course, that would require understanding the thing you hate, which most people aren't interested in doing.
The Big Bang was substantially supported by the work of Edwin Hubble and others, who found evidence of redshift in distant objects in the galaxy, showing that they were moving away from us very quickly. And, redshift corresponded pretty precisely to the distance - the farther the objects were, the faster they were going. All you have to do is mentally press "rewind" and you can see how that all gets explained by assuming a single point of origin.
Interesting - I hadn't heard of the altitude dependence before. It is a shame that people approach climate science trying to cherry pick points to support their preexisting beliefs rather than trying to get informed about the state of the science, and then forming an opinion.
I'm certainly not a climate scientist, but I would bet they incorporate all of these pieces of information into their models - average insolation, reflectance, and absorption of different spectra would be easy pickings, I'd think. Then you kind of fudge around with the numbers until it fits past behavior pretty well, and see what it says about the future. It is difficult making predictions with such an absurdly complex system, but sometimes you can do better than you'd expect by making some drastic simplifications and assumptions to prune down the model.
The good thing is that our data and computing capacity gets better every single year, so even though we only have spotty temperature records and some ice cores to go off of now, we're always improving.
The idea that science and religion don't mix is largely an invention of fundamentalist Christianity, starting around 1900 or so. Individuals on both sides of the fence have talked about the compatibility and value of both disciplines - Augustine said hundreds of years ago that we shouldn't discard a truth about the world because of a metaphorical bible story, and Einstein defended the value of religion in a very well articulated paper, although he was quick to point out potential dangers there.
Most scientists I've talked to appreciate just how much we don't know about the world, and aren't the kind of people to push beliefs on others. They have an attitude of live and let live, more or less, which is a fairly reasonable way to go about your life.
The basic science of global warming isn't too tough or very modern(clearly), although most people don't understand it very well. This article seems to make things fairly confusing as well, although the quote from Tyndall himself is pleasantly concise and clear: "heat in the state of light finds less resistance in penetrating the air, than in re-passing into the air when converted into non-luminous heat." My favorite explanation, I think, is how Carl Sagan explained it in Cosmos, which is roughly as follows:
The idea is that visible light hits the earth, and warms it up. Some of that light is reflected straight back, so it leaves the atmosphere the way it came in and we're done. A lot of that light, though, gets absorbed by trees or rocks or walruses, causing them to heat up. They'll slowly re-radiate it out again because of blackbody radiation (all things radiate continually, even the universe itself) but it will be in the form of lower energy, lower frequency wavelengths. This means that energy from visible light gets absorbed and often radiated back out again as infrared.
CO2 and other "greenhouse" gases let light in the visible part of the spectrum pass unimpeded, but they don't let IR through as easily. So, energy comes in but it can't get back out again.
Think about it this way - two like charges repel. But, if you look at repulsion in reverse, it looks just like attraction. So, an electron that is moving in backwards time will be attracted to the things it should be repulsed by and vice versa. Which means that for all intents and purposes, you have changed the sign of the charge. That's why electrons moving backwards in time are indistinguishable from a positron going forward in time - they would behave exactly the same, and there really is no way (mathematically at least) to distinguish between them.
So, I think when you do the charge conservation analysis, you consider the backwards-time negative to be a positive...? It would make sense since they have inverse effects.
Doesn't work with matter-antimatter annihilation (unless we work out what that means in terms of time-anti-time annihilation), but it was an interesting revelation in physics class.
Sure it does - it's the mass-energy equivalence principle. If you look at matter-antimatter annihilation in reverse, you see two gamma rays colliding and producing an electron and positron. Momentum, energy, charge, and all the important parts are conserved. This idea is what makes particle accelerators work. If you get enough energy together, then any particle can be created, as long as it conserves where it matters.
Those might be the only reasons against it, but there's no compelling reasons for it!
There's no compelling reason for most of what we do - a huge portion of our activities are completely inane and worthless. We do many of them for some kind of instant gratification, but is that really where we're content to stay? Some of us want something more significant to do with our spare time, a challenge that will make us push ourselves to new heights and see what we're capable of. I think this is the attitude we should have as a species.
I think it's important to notice WHY going to the moon was a big deal - sure, we gained a lot of urgency because of the race against the Russians, but we could have been competing against them in anything (and in many cases were). The thing that really counted in the eyes of the public, though, was space. That's because space is the most challenging thing, it is the grandest thing, and it is the future of humanity one way or the other. It really is the final frontier. Either we die on this rock or we go elsewhere. We could have used anything for a battleground, but space was where we arguably fought our biggest battles in the Cold War, because that is the place that mattered to people. People didn't become interested in space just because of the Space Race, we had the Space Race because people cared about space and saw that it was important. Just like countries used to compete on the strength of their navies, countries are now measured by their space capability - it is the most difficult thing that humans are currently capable of.
Honestly, there is a huge chance for profit in space, even though I think that shouldn't be our exclusive motivation for going. Hell, selling tickets into space has already been profitable for Space Adventures, and I think it's going to happen whether we're along for the ride or not as a nation. Airplanes were seen as useless diversions for the rich once, too, and by selling experiences to people who cared we developed capabilities that never could've been imagined before. The technologies I've talked about can make space cheaper by at least 2 orders of magnitude. When a ticket is available for $20,000 or less, I'd be all over that - space is around the price of a luxury vacation at that point. I don't think there will be any shortage of customers at that point.
Some things require being ruthlessly practical. However, that can end up being a naive view in and of itself that doesn't really consider how real people actually operate. We're largely irrational beings, we pursue things for reasons that aren't always justifiable in an economic sense, and it seems like that trait has worked out all right for us judging by our dominance as a species.
Fantasy? Fantasy is like these wackos that are using the recent neutrino findings to say that relativity is crap and time travel will be possible any time now. The only reasons against a sustained human presence in space are economic and political.
To get a cheap, sustainable, and worthwhile presence in space:
1. Develop inexpensive, rocket-based, man-rated space access technologies - SpaceX is making progress here, but we have all sorts of other options if we could get the fucking politics out of spaceflight. Hell, Venturestar was a good try back in the 90's but the management wouldn't listen to engineering and piloted a program with a lot of potential right into the ground.
2a. Develop a super cheap way to get bulk mass into space - electromagnetic rail gun, launch tether, ???
2b. Develop a super cheap way to get people and everything else into space - space elevator, launch loop, ???
3. Do whatever the hell we want in space, because we can go there whenever we feel like it.
All of these things are physically possible, and if we merely invested the same amount of GDP in space exploration as humanity has typically done (and get the fingers of the corrupt politicians out of NASA) it would be doable within my lifetime and probably yours.
Is it really childish to have a dream? So what if I want to go to space - I've already built and programmed electronics that went to space. The thing is, improbable dreams have led us to accomplish amazing things as a race. We can call the dream of eliminating poverty childish and naive, but I don't think that means we should stop pursuing it. Same with spaceflight. Humanity needs a challenge to unite behind, something to bring out the best of us, and doing something that has never been done before and will open up an entire new world of possibility is the best I can think of.
This isn't the first time it's been brought up in this thread, and it won't be the last, but I'll repost it anyway because it says it better than I ever will: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept."
What return will we get for that money? I don't mean some spin-off technology like Velcro or whatever giving back 0.01% of what was spent. I mean 110% return. Will we, as a human race, profit? Will we actually get a benefit from that money that we couldn't obtain, right here, on Earth?
The simple harsh answer is no.
The idea that only profitable things are worth doing is utterly without merit. The problems with this position are so numerous that it is difficult to know where to begin addressing them.
Money is not an end. Profit is not an end. These things only have worth insofar as they allow us to obtain things that ARE actually valuable - food, shelter, safety, stability, education, entertainment. You've bought so completely into the consumerist propaganda that you apparently believe that life has no purpose outside of material gain. Education isn't profitable - let's axe it. Taking care of the disabled isn't profitable - let's stop. Providing assistance to Haiti or Japan isn't profitable - what the hell were we thinking?
The truth is, we have more labor available for diversionary pursuits than at any other time in history. How much of our economy is tied up in something that is in no way related to basic living necessities? How many of our labors only "help" humanity in the sense that they keep the distraction going for another 20 minutes? Maybe you can be satisfied to live in a generation that did nothing better with its free time than a couple new seasons of American Idol and a completely fleshed out Pokemon section on Wikipedia, but I for one dream of bringing back the days when we engaged in noble pursuits that would secure us a place in history. We are going to waste our time on something - why not waste it on a grand endeavor?
Hmm - cut NASA's budget and layoff a bunch of engineers? How will that help?
Instead, maybe we can support the middle class with money obtained by raising taxes (oh noes!) on things we want to discourage anyways - hedge fund microtransactions, for example.
Why even bother with a theology you must admit contains errors? Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith? Only when it apparently contradicts science you can reject a doctrine, or what is the verification principle at play here for these "Christian" "scientists".
Why even bother with a scientific theory/political system/nerd website that you must admit contains errors? Nothing we have is perfect. The truth of the matter is that not much in life is black and white - often we have a choice between ok and worse, or good and slightly better, or even left and right with no real designation between them. It would be dishonest to claim that Christianity has never had a positive influence on anyone - the doctrines of nonviolence and social justice that Jesus taught were revolutionary for living conditions while the early church was forming, and more recently, Gandhi and MLK used the teachings of Jesus to inspire brilliant, nonviolent movements that corrected massive injustices with a minimum of bloodshed. This suggests to me that there is useful truth there.
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that terrible acts have been done in the name of the church, so I'm not pretending that the whole thing is perfect. But, in my mind, conservative Christian theology is the culprit - the teachings of Christ are actually very poignant even today and encourage a far more palatable interpretation than that which has become mainstream. It's pretty absurd to consider that there is a massive religious institution devoted entirely to a man who was harshly critical of massive religious institutions.
I'm afraid maybe you went to college for the wrong thing. I'm a self-taught IT guy and computer programmer, and I never saw any point in going to college for those things because I could do them well enough already, and I'm confident I could teach myself anything else I care to know in those fields. However, after dropping out of a liberal arts program that I was doing just to get my degree, I worked some shit jobs and then decided that if I went back it was going to be for something worthwhile. I chose physics, and I can tell you that I've learned no end of useful, applicable stuff, and opened doors that never would've existed before. There are jobs paying 60k a year that I could have right out of college if I wanted them. I've gotten research experience and contacts that will make me a shoe-in at most grad schools I'm interested in. I've been able to work with fun stuff - particle detectors, liquid nitrogen, robotics, radioactive substances, aerospace projects - And, I've gotten my education certification, without which it is illegal to work as a teacher.
So, college has done a whole lot for me. There's not a class I've taken in physics that hasn't taught me something cool and useful. And, it is useful in both a "people would pay me for this shit" kind of way and in a "I've always wanted to be able to do this" kind of way. And, believe it or not, the education program has given me a lot of real-world experience and practical knowledge that will make my job as a teacher much easier.
If you go to college just for the earning potential, it is probably a waste of time. If you go to college to pursue a passion or, I don't know, learn something, you might find it a more valuable experience.
In terms of anti-intellectual geeks - Intellectualism doesn't mean that you can do something complicated or that you've built something, or that you can outprogram your peers in your chosen language. In my mind, intellectualism means a love for knowledge and truth and an endless curiosity. A lot of geeks have blinders to everything that isn't computers, gaming, or otherwise overtly nerdy.
Somehow the ideal of the Renaissance man has disappeared, but for quite some time I think that was the meaning taken by "Intellectual". To qualify, I think you need to value knowledge itself. As soon as you call some field of knowledge worthless, you've undermined the entire body of intellectualism. Sure Art History doesn't require calculus and doesn't have the same earning potential. So what? You've made it ok to say "knowledge is worthless" in one instance, so you undermine whatever piece of knowledge you claim to value.
A little walking never hurt anybody. If you want to buy a lot of groceries, bring a wagon - a lot of families have them anyways for kids, and they make great all-around stuff haulers. Most babysitters I know of come to you - some local highschool girl can probably walk or bike or get a ride to watch your kids for an evening. And, with telecommuting, self employment, biking, and a bit of creativity, there's a good chance that a person can avoid a car entirely while keeping their choice of career. Plus, even if you still drive to work, avoiding the rest of it is still significant.
Seriously, all it takes is an ounce of effort to figure out how to get away from the car. I moved a little while ago from a new, shiny condo in a very suburban neighborhood to an older house close to downtown, and it has made a world of difference. Even if you don't give a shit about the environment, the improvement to your quality of life because of the increased activity will be immediately apparent.
I imagine an uber-accurate clock like this could have big implications for proximity sensors that rely on time-of-flight (sonar, some lasers) and also for local, non-GPS positioning systems.
It's like claiming that the homeless guy who keeps shitting in the middle of the street is more "clean" than me because he doesn't have a car.
By just about any metric besides "which one looks grosser" that homeless guy is almost certainly cleaner than you. You drive a car that introduces pollutants of various kinds into the environment, and which involves all sorts of dirty processes to extract fuel for, not to mention the initial construction. Your home is mostly likely powered in part by coal, which introduces plenty of nasty stuff including radioactive ash into our atmosphere. Each year, you probably produce a mountain of trash that would dwarf that homeless guy's little steaming pile, and when you take a dump, your convenient indoor plumbing dirties up a gallon+ of water that is more drinkable than that in much of the world.
Just because you don't see it festering in the middle of the street doesn't mean you aren't shitting all over the place yourself.
Unfortunately, that isn't how entanglement works - it sure seems like it should be able to send information faster than light, but every hypothetical experiment that has been devised still gets curtailed by a light speed constraint.
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If you can't learn basic calculus from a textbook then you shouldn't pass it and have access to a field that requires it. Everything else works this way. If you can't run the 40 in a certain time and tackle with a certain proficiency you don't get to play in the NFL. College IS NOT for everyone.
Where do all these painfully pretentious "I learned how to do this myself, if you can't you're an idiot" asshats come from? Have you ever considered that not everybody has identical aptitudes? Sure, some people might be fine picking up calculus from a textbook, but what if you went to a terrible high school and didn't have an adequate algebra background, or didn't have a family that supported learning?
It's fine for you to feel high and mighty because you taught yourself math, and good for you for doing it, but you reveal your complete ignorance about the psychology of education if you think everybody can or should do it that way. And, many people who aren't geniuses at math have ended up revolutionizing fields that are almost entirely math based - look at Faraday and Einstein, for instance. Maybe, just maybe, the people who can't teach themselves calculus still have something to offer the world...
Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.
I'm not your guy, buddy.
The patronage model certainly wasn't perfect, and ours isn't either, but I think this underscores the way that culture and economics influence the way things get made. It used to be fashionable for the rich/powerful to be patrons of various causes - you look at composers, authors, scientists, artists, pretty much any of the things that might enrich life without being immediately and obviously profitable - but that no longer seems to be the case. You used to have a pet scientist to show off to your rich friends, but that disappeared eventually for some reason. What are the rich spending their money on now, and why don't they spend their money on this kind of stuff?
I'm not sure if you blame capitalism or postmodernity or whatever, but the thing is we don't really have any kind of morality that we even pay lipservice to anymore. During the Victorian era there was at least this kind of moral pressure for the rich to benevolently devote their resources to further social and artistic causes. Part of it came from peer groups, etc. And I suppose you could argue that the Prius-owning green movement is an example of that at least among wealthy celebrities. You also see hospitals and symphonies that are supported partly by wealthy donors. But, I personally don't think it would be a bad thing to bring this sense of upper class obligation back. Or really, any class obligation. It's obnoxious for the wealthy to act morally superior (patronizing, perhaps?) but they can feel however they want as long as they support shit that needs to happen. I, for one, welcome our patronizing overlords!
Thanks for posting - this is exactly the article I was thinking of!
You make a common mistake, which is to conflate religion with fundamentalism. They are not the same any more than atheism and communism are the same. Fundamentalism is typically anti-intellectual, destructive, and backwards. Religion can certainly be about truth and beauty - look at Buddhism, various newage stuff or more liberal interpretations of Christianity. "Enlightenment", appreciating nature, and relationships to people around you are pretty central to these traditions. Also, only Fundamentalism insists on literal creation stories - again not the norm for much of Christianity.
I'm not saying that religion is perfect or that you should become religious. However, if you are going to attack something, you should attack actual attributes of the thing you dislike, so we can have an intelligent discussion. Of course, that would require understanding the thing you hate, which most people aren't interested in doing.
The Big Bang was substantially supported by the work of Edwin Hubble and others, who found evidence of redshift in distant objects in the galaxy, showing that they were moving away from us very quickly. And, redshift corresponded pretty precisely to the distance - the farther the objects were, the faster they were going. All you have to do is mentally press "rewind" and you can see how that all gets explained by assuming a single point of origin.
Interesting - I hadn't heard of the altitude dependence before. It is a shame that people approach climate science trying to cherry pick points to support their preexisting beliefs rather than trying to get informed about the state of the science, and then forming an opinion.
I'm certainly not a climate scientist, but I would bet they incorporate all of these pieces of information into their models - average insolation, reflectance, and absorption of different spectra would be easy pickings, I'd think. Then you kind of fudge around with the numbers until it fits past behavior pretty well, and see what it says about the future. It is difficult making predictions with such an absurdly complex system, but sometimes you can do better than you'd expect by making some drastic simplifications and assumptions to prune down the model. The good thing is that our data and computing capacity gets better every single year, so even though we only have spotty temperature records and some ice cores to go off of now, we're always improving.
The idea that science and religion don't mix is largely an invention of fundamentalist Christianity, starting around 1900 or so. Individuals on both sides of the fence have talked about the compatibility and value of both disciplines - Augustine said hundreds of years ago that we shouldn't discard a truth about the world because of a metaphorical bible story, and Einstein defended the value of religion in a very well articulated paper, although he was quick to point out potential dangers there.
Most scientists I've talked to appreciate just how much we don't know about the world, and aren't the kind of people to push beliefs on others. They have an attitude of live and let live, more or less, which is a fairly reasonable way to go about your life.
The basic science of global warming isn't too tough or very modern(clearly), although most people don't understand it very well. This article seems to make things fairly confusing as well, although the quote from Tyndall himself is pleasantly concise and clear: "heat in the state of light finds less resistance in penetrating the air, than in re-passing into the air when converted into non-luminous heat." My favorite explanation, I think, is how Carl Sagan explained it in Cosmos, which is roughly as follows:
The idea is that visible light hits the earth, and warms it up. Some of that light is reflected straight back, so it leaves the atmosphere the way it came in and we're done. A lot of that light, though, gets absorbed by trees or rocks or walruses, causing them to heat up. They'll slowly re-radiate it out again because of blackbody radiation (all things radiate continually, even the universe itself) but it will be in the form of lower energy, lower frequency wavelengths. This means that energy from visible light gets absorbed and often radiated back out again as infrared.
CO2 and other "greenhouse" gases let light in the visible part of the spectrum pass unimpeded, but they don't let IR through as easily. So, energy comes in but it can't get back out again.
What he's trying to say is 10% chance of getting HIV * 10% chance of hooker having HIV = 1% chance of getting it, or 99% chance of not getting it.
This means that physics degrees are dangerous, and should be outlawed.
But I suppose if we make it illegal to have physics degrees, only criminals will be good at physics.
Think about it this way - two like charges repel. But, if you look at repulsion in reverse, it looks just like attraction. So, an electron that is moving in backwards time will be attracted to the things it should be repulsed by and vice versa. Which means that for all intents and purposes, you have changed the sign of the charge. That's why electrons moving backwards in time are indistinguishable from a positron going forward in time - they would behave exactly the same, and there really is no way (mathematically at least) to distinguish between them.
So, I think when you do the charge conservation analysis, you consider the backwards-time negative to be a positive...? It would make sense since they have inverse effects.
Doesn't work with matter-antimatter annihilation (unless we work out what that means in terms of time-anti-time annihilation), but it was an interesting revelation in physics class.
Sure it does - it's the mass-energy equivalence principle. If you look at matter-antimatter annihilation in reverse, you see two gamma rays colliding and producing an electron and positron. Momentum, energy, charge, and all the important parts are conserved. This idea is what makes particle accelerators work. If you get enough energy together, then any particle can be created, as long as it conserves where it matters.
Those might be the only reasons against it, but there's no compelling reasons for it!
There's no compelling reason for most of what we do - a huge portion of our activities are completely inane and worthless. We do many of them for some kind of instant gratification, but is that really where we're content to stay? Some of us want something more significant to do with our spare time, a challenge that will make us push ourselves to new heights and see what we're capable of. I think this is the attitude we should have as a species.
I think it's important to notice WHY going to the moon was a big deal - sure, we gained a lot of urgency because of the race against the Russians, but we could have been competing against them in anything (and in many cases were). The thing that really counted in the eyes of the public, though, was space. That's because space is the most challenging thing, it is the grandest thing, and it is the future of humanity one way or the other. It really is the final frontier. Either we die on this rock or we go elsewhere. We could have used anything for a battleground, but space was where we arguably fought our biggest battles in the Cold War, because that is the place that mattered to people. People didn't become interested in space just because of the Space Race, we had the Space Race because people cared about space and saw that it was important. Just like countries used to compete on the strength of their navies, countries are now measured by their space capability - it is the most difficult thing that humans are currently capable of.
Honestly, there is a huge chance for profit in space, even though I think that shouldn't be our exclusive motivation for going. Hell, selling tickets into space has already been profitable for Space Adventures, and I think it's going to happen whether we're along for the ride or not as a nation. Airplanes were seen as useless diversions for the rich once, too, and by selling experiences to people who cared we developed capabilities that never could've been imagined before. The technologies I've talked about can make space cheaper by at least 2 orders of magnitude. When a ticket is available for $20,000 or less, I'd be all over that - space is around the price of a luxury vacation at that point. I don't think there will be any shortage of customers at that point.
Some things require being ruthlessly practical. However, that can end up being a naive view in and of itself that doesn't really consider how real people actually operate. We're largely irrational beings, we pursue things for reasons that aren't always justifiable in an economic sense, and it seems like that trait has worked out all right for us judging by our dominance as a species.
Fantasy? Fantasy is like these wackos that are using the recent neutrino findings to say that relativity is crap and time travel will be possible any time now. The only reasons against a sustained human presence in space are economic and political.
To get a cheap, sustainable, and worthwhile presence in space:
1. Develop inexpensive, rocket-based, man-rated space access technologies - SpaceX is making progress here, but we have all sorts of other options if we could get the fucking politics out of spaceflight. Hell, Venturestar was a good try back in the 90's but the management wouldn't listen to engineering and piloted a program with a lot of potential right into the ground.
2a. Develop a super cheap way to get bulk mass into space - electromagnetic rail gun, launch tether, ???
2b. Develop a super cheap way to get people and everything else into space - space elevator, launch loop, ???
3. Do whatever the hell we want in space, because we can go there whenever we feel like it.
All of these things are physically possible, and if we merely invested the same amount of GDP in space exploration as humanity has typically done (and get the fingers of the corrupt politicians out of NASA) it would be doable within my lifetime and probably yours.
Is it really childish to have a dream? So what if I want to go to space - I've already built and programmed electronics that went to space. The thing is, improbable dreams have led us to accomplish amazing things as a race. We can call the dream of eliminating poverty childish and naive, but I don't think that means we should stop pursuing it. Same with spaceflight. Humanity needs a challenge to unite behind, something to bring out the best of us, and doing something that has never been done before and will open up an entire new world of possibility is the best I can think of.
This isn't the first time it's been brought up in this thread, and it won't be the last, but I'll repost it anyway because it says it better than I ever will: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept."
What return will we get for that money? I don't mean some spin-off technology like Velcro or whatever giving back 0.01% of what was spent. I mean 110% return. Will we, as a human race, profit? Will we actually get a benefit from that money that we couldn't obtain, right here, on Earth?
The simple harsh answer is no.
The idea that only profitable things are worth doing is utterly without merit. The problems with this position are so numerous that it is difficult to know where to begin addressing them.
Money is not an end. Profit is not an end. These things only have worth insofar as they allow us to obtain things that ARE actually valuable - food, shelter, safety, stability, education, entertainment. You've bought so completely into the consumerist propaganda that you apparently believe that life has no purpose outside of material gain. Education isn't profitable - let's axe it. Taking care of the disabled isn't profitable - let's stop. Providing assistance to Haiti or Japan isn't profitable - what the hell were we thinking?
The truth is, we have more labor available for diversionary pursuits than at any other time in history. How much of our economy is tied up in something that is in no way related to basic living necessities? How many of our labors only "help" humanity in the sense that they keep the distraction going for another 20 minutes? Maybe you can be satisfied to live in a generation that did nothing better with its free time than a couple new seasons of American Idol and a completely fleshed out Pokemon section on Wikipedia, but I for one dream of bringing back the days when we engaged in noble pursuits that would secure us a place in history. We are going to waste our time on something - why not waste it on a grand endeavor?
Have you actually read anything about him? He made a fucking massive donation to the federal reserve. He explicitly says "tax me more".
Hmm - cut NASA's budget and layoff a bunch of engineers? How will that help? Instead, maybe we can support the middle class with money obtained by raising taxes (oh noes!) on things we want to discourage anyways - hedge fund microtransactions, for example.
Why even bother with a theology you must admit contains errors? Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith? Only when it apparently contradicts science you can reject a doctrine, or what is the verification principle at play here for these "Christian" "scientists".
Why even bother with a scientific theory/political system/nerd website that you must admit contains errors? Nothing we have is perfect. The truth of the matter is that not much in life is black and white - often we have a choice between ok and worse, or good and slightly better, or even left and right with no real designation between them. It would be dishonest to claim that Christianity has never had a positive influence on anyone - the doctrines of nonviolence and social justice that Jesus taught were revolutionary for living conditions while the early church was forming, and more recently, Gandhi and MLK used the teachings of Jesus to inspire brilliant, nonviolent movements that corrected massive injustices with a minimum of bloodshed. This suggests to me that there is useful truth there.
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that terrible acts have been done in the name of the church, so I'm not pretending that the whole thing is perfect. But, in my mind, conservative Christian theology is the culprit - the teachings of Christ are actually very poignant even today and encourage a far more palatable interpretation than that which has become mainstream. It's pretty absurd to consider that there is a massive religious institution devoted entirely to a man who was harshly critical of massive religious institutions.
I'm afraid maybe you went to college for the wrong thing. I'm a self-taught IT guy and computer programmer, and I never saw any point in going to college for those things because I could do them well enough already, and I'm confident I could teach myself anything else I care to know in those fields. However, after dropping out of a liberal arts program that I was doing just to get my degree, I worked some shit jobs and then decided that if I went back it was going to be for something worthwhile. I chose physics, and I can tell you that I've learned no end of useful, applicable stuff, and opened doors that never would've existed before. There are jobs paying 60k a year that I could have right out of college if I wanted them. I've gotten research experience and contacts that will make me a shoe-in at most grad schools I'm interested in. I've been able to work with fun stuff - particle detectors, liquid nitrogen, robotics, radioactive substances, aerospace projects - And, I've gotten my education certification, without which it is illegal to work as a teacher.
So, college has done a whole lot for me. There's not a class I've taken in physics that hasn't taught me something cool and useful. And, it is useful in both a "people would pay me for this shit" kind of way and in a "I've always wanted to be able to do this" kind of way. And, believe it or not, the education program has given me a lot of real-world experience and practical knowledge that will make my job as a teacher much easier.
If you go to college just for the earning potential, it is probably a waste of time. If you go to college to pursue a passion or, I don't know, learn something, you might find it a more valuable experience.
In terms of anti-intellectual geeks - Intellectualism doesn't mean that you can do something complicated or that you've built something, or that you can outprogram your peers in your chosen language. In my mind, intellectualism means a love for knowledge and truth and an endless curiosity. A lot of geeks have blinders to everything that isn't computers, gaming, or otherwise overtly nerdy.
Somehow the ideal of the Renaissance man has disappeared, but for quite some time I think that was the meaning taken by "Intellectual". To qualify, I think you need to value knowledge itself. As soon as you call some field of knowledge worthless, you've undermined the entire body of intellectualism. Sure Art History doesn't require calculus and doesn't have the same earning potential. So what? You've made it ok to say "knowledge is worthless" in one instance, so you undermine whatever piece of knowledge you claim to value.
A little walking never hurt anybody. If you want to buy a lot of groceries, bring a wagon - a lot of families have them anyways for kids, and they make great all-around stuff haulers. Most babysitters I know of come to you - some local highschool girl can probably walk or bike or get a ride to watch your kids for an evening. And, with telecommuting, self employment, biking, and a bit of creativity, there's a good chance that a person can avoid a car entirely while keeping their choice of career. Plus, even if you still drive to work, avoiding the rest of it is still significant.
Seriously, all it takes is an ounce of effort to figure out how to get away from the car. I moved a little while ago from a new, shiny condo in a very suburban neighborhood to an older house close to downtown, and it has made a world of difference. Even if you don't give a shit about the environment, the improvement to your quality of life because of the increased activity will be immediately apparent.
I imagine an uber-accurate clock like this could have big implications for proximity sensors that rely on time-of-flight (sonar, some lasers) and also for local, non-GPS positioning systems.
It's like claiming that the homeless guy who keeps shitting in the middle of the street is more "clean" than me because he doesn't have a car.
By just about any metric besides "which one looks grosser" that homeless guy is almost certainly cleaner than you. You drive a car that introduces pollutants of various kinds into the environment, and which involves all sorts of dirty processes to extract fuel for, not to mention the initial construction. Your home is mostly likely powered in part by coal, which introduces plenty of nasty stuff including radioactive ash into our atmosphere. Each year, you probably produce a mountain of trash that would dwarf that homeless guy's little steaming pile, and when you take a dump, your convenient indoor plumbing dirties up a gallon+ of water that is more drinkable than that in much of the world.
Just because you don't see it festering in the middle of the street doesn't mean you aren't shitting all over the place yourself.
Unfortunately, that isn't how entanglement works - it sure seems like it should be able to send information faster than light, but every hypothetical experiment that has been devised still gets curtailed by a light speed constraint.