Absolutely. Better diets are important, and most people should improve their diet. There are significant metabolic and genetic factors. These can be dealt with, but their existence should not be denied.
How much gas would the US save each year if our vehicles didn't have to schlep all that extra fat around?
Almost none. If you chopped off your entire body and drove around as a head in a jar, a la Futurama, you'd reduce gasoline consumption by only a few percent.
Accelerating the mass of the vehicle, internal friction, and wind resistance grossly dominate energy consumption for a vehicle.
You can drop more vehicle weight by switching to a smaller car than you could ever hope to lose. You can also reduce the size of your car (less wind resistance), drive slower (wind resistance goes as ~v^1.4), recapture energy lost by braking (what hybrids do). Even better, if you carpool with one other person, you can cut fuel consumption almost by half -- for the both of you.
Actually, proper tuning of your vehicle will reduce its fuel consumption more than losing weight.
Lose weight to be healthier. Change your vehicle to consume less fuel.
And I say, "you don't seem to know much about biology". Your biggest error is claiming that you have muscle mass that is "all diet". More important, though, you don't seem to recognize the significance that metabolism -- including very significant genetic factors -- plays in the system.
By "thermodynamics" you probably mean "energy conservation". All mass and energy conservation tells you, on first glance, is that you can't possibly gain more weight than your total intake (minus your total excretion -- including respiration). Reducing your consumption reduces available energy -- your body can respond by reducing metabolism rather than consuming stored fat.
That reminds me of an ethics mini-class required at my undergraduate school (for computer science).
When asked what they would do if they were told to design and build a system that they knew would be insecure, they said they would build it anyway. Even if the question is modified so that this insecurity puts the operator of the system in violation of federal law (e.g., it's storing medical records), they would still do it -- it's the legal responsibility of the operator.
The problem is most programmers aren't professionals.
A) Some CERN scientists might have good answers, but most of the research slated for the LHC is far enough at the edge of research that we can't forsee potential benefits. Compare with ages ago when people were trying to determine the internal structure of the atom. There were no slated benefits. Eventual benefits of that research are things like nuclear power, smoke detectors, and cancer treatments.
A1) The probability of important scientific gains is high. The risk of losing the Earth is so small that there's no good way to express how unlikely it is. It's below the level at which a scientists really should translate it to a layman as "impossible".
A2) As far as I know, there's no other known way of testing these particular questions.
B) Interesting question. Launching it into space isn't as cheap as you might think. Space experiments are all designed to be performed by no more than a couple of people who are not subject-matter experts. Good space experiments can be launched and run remotely. They're also fairly small and, ideally, cheap enough that the fact that it will eventually run out of power, deorbit, and burn up is no big problem. Particle accelerators are significantly larger than anything we've launched into space before. We have a small accelerator here that's essentially a ~3m diameter concrete tube that encircles a football field and a baseball field. They're expensive enough that they're designed to run for a few decades and then be repurposed. They require a huge amount of power, and a large number (by space standards -- on the order of dozens) technical staff familiar with the accelerator to function. (To be honest, particle accelerators are very complex and often use technology that isn't nearly as reliable as space technology. They get shut down a lot for repairs.)
First, it's a very scientific argument, you're just mangling it. Suppose you posit a new force X with certain properties. I show that if this force existed, masses of water of at least 2 gallons should show on the order of 1 bright pink flash per second. That this has never been observed suggests, to an extremely high likelihood, your force X does not exist.
To answer your latter question, the reason we are "risking our existence to satisfy the curiosity of a couple of thousand" is that we are not risking our existence.
We don't do experiments because we have no idea what will happen. We do experiments because we have very specific questions we want to answer. Whether or not miniature black holes will be created is not one of those questions.
On the one hand, we have particle physicists whose "theories" on the interaction of subatomic-scale matter is drawn from decades of research and experimentation.
On the other hand, we have people who know essentially no physics and seemingly assume that the people building the LHC must be as lost when it comes to science as they. They make the argument, "Well, we don't *really* know what's going to happen."
It's amazing that the latter are able to function, as crippled as they should be of the fear of uncertainty.
This is what the article addresses. The counter-argument to "cosmic rays would already produce them" is that they would be moving quickly through the Earth and not interact. They would be produced by cosmic rays elsewhere in the universe, though. If they are interactive enough to destroy the world within the lifetime of the Sun, they would be captured (despite their high velocity) by certain types of stars and consume them. We see no evidence that this has occurred.
Yes, neither x-ray microscopy nor x-ray diffraction are new. This appears to be essentially small-sample x-ray diffraction, as you describe.
TEM of biological materials (like a virus or protein) is tricky because the TEM can destroy the structure of the protein and can't adequately discern its internal structure. I'm less familiar with SEM, so I couldn't say, but diffraction is usually interesting not for obtaining an image of the sample, but determining its structure.
And yeah, you use zone plates. Or, for some applications, optical fiber (which is what we use to do confocal X-ray fluorescence).
While the statement "you cannot focus X-rays like you can visible light with lenses" is misleading, it's true. You can't focus X-rays like you can focus visible light, and you can't do it (effectively) with lenses. However, you can focus X-rays.
I said that's the fear. It presents some benefits (the material's already in the US, so no need to smuggle it in), but the black market in Africa and Eastern Europe is better. Still, it's the reason breeder reactors are avoided.
Realistically, for someone who would steal nuclear material (e.g., a terrorist), other methods of getting your point across are likely to be easier and have a higher probability of success.
GP mentions silly paranoia about breeder reactors. The reason people avoid those is fear that someone would get ahold of the materials used by them to make a nuclear weapon.
However, your comment is still paranoia, not justifiable fear. What exactly would terrorists do to holding areas at nuclear power stations to make the eastern US uninhabitable for 5000 years? Fly a plane into a holding site for nuclear material or waste? That wouldn't disperse the material much at all. The worse-case scenario is someone in the US stealing the material and using it to make a nuclear weapon -- something that's already possible using other sources. Even trying to blow up a nuclear reactor would cause limited damage, and they're not trivial to blow up.
DARPA has almost nothing to do with those "causes". It's associated with the same Department of Defense, and that's about it.
While some direct research projects in DoD departments might see actual application in one of those areas, DARPA research doesn't see the field for a long, long time.
No, I'm quite familiar with how much "faking it" is used in movies and video games. (I'm also personally familiar with "faking it" in live theater.)
However, faking it requires a lot of work and places restrictions on what you can do. The bar for "faking it" continually increases as technology is developed to enable more convincing effects.
For classical optics, modeling the scene in either direction (castings rays from lightsources and only counting ones that hit the viewer vs. casting rays from the viewer and only counting ones that hit lightsources) is valid.
I assume you didn't mean for "efficiently" to be an item in your list, which is the way you wrote it, but raytracers can do all of those things. (I'll make no claims about efficiency.)
"But then again, it's a game, who cares about mathematicaly accurate reflections, when you can fake it close enough with reflection/refraction maps in a fraction of the processing time."
That argument is no more valid that if you say "it's just a game, why don't you just do raycasting, which takes a fraction of the processing time". "Faking it close enough" isn't close enough; it's obvious that you're faking it, and it requires that you either live with it or design your game to minimize the impact of faking it.
Even if all three were true, it's still voice data. If you recall, you claimed it's impossible to securely encrypt "voice data".
The third, running over a physically secure line, is certainly not always the case. High-security phones encrypt data for transmission over radio waves for communication to points that landlines don't cover (ships, teams in the field).
Try reading the Constitution. It differentiates between those parts that apply to all people within the jurisdiction of the US (which are really phrased as defining the powers of the federal government) and those parts that apply to citizens.
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Absolutely. Better diets are important, and most people should improve their diet. There are significant metabolic and genetic factors. These can be dealt with, but their existence should not be denied.
Almost none. If you chopped off your entire body and drove around as a head in a jar, a la Futurama, you'd reduce gasoline consumption by only a few percent.
Accelerating the mass of the vehicle, internal friction, and wind resistance grossly dominate energy consumption for a vehicle.
You can drop more vehicle weight by switching to a smaller car than you could ever hope to lose. You can also reduce the size of your car (less wind resistance), drive slower (wind resistance goes as ~v^1.4), recapture energy lost by braking (what hybrids do). Even better, if you carpool with one other person, you can cut fuel consumption almost by half -- for the both of you.
Actually, proper tuning of your vehicle will reduce its fuel consumption more than losing weight.
Lose weight to be healthier. Change your vehicle to consume less fuel.
And I say, "you don't seem to know much about biology". Your biggest error is claiming that you have muscle mass that is "all diet". More important, though, you don't seem to recognize the significance that metabolism -- including very significant genetic factors -- plays in the system.
By "thermodynamics" you probably mean "energy conservation". All mass and energy conservation tells you, on first glance, is that you can't possibly gain more weight than your total intake (minus your total excretion -- including respiration). Reducing your consumption reduces available energy -- your body can respond by reducing metabolism rather than consuming stored fat.
That reminds me of an ethics mini-class required at my undergraduate school (for computer science).
When asked what they would do if they were told to design and build a system that they knew would be insecure, they said they would build it anyway. Even if the question is modified so that this insecurity puts the operator of the system in violation of federal law (e.g., it's storing medical records), they would still do it -- it's the legal responsibility of the operator.
The problem is most programmers aren't professionals.
A) Some CERN scientists might have good answers, but most of the research slated for the LHC is far enough at the edge of research that we can't forsee potential benefits. Compare with ages ago when people were trying to determine the internal structure of the atom. There were no slated benefits. Eventual benefits of that research are things like nuclear power, smoke detectors, and cancer treatments.
A1) The probability of important scientific gains is high. The risk of losing the Earth is so small that there's no good way to express how unlikely it is. It's below the level at which a scientists really should translate it to a layman as "impossible".
A2) As far as I know, there's no other known way of testing these particular questions.
B) Interesting question. Launching it into space isn't as cheap as you might think. Space experiments are all designed to be performed by no more than a couple of people who are not subject-matter experts. Good space experiments can be launched and run remotely. They're also fairly small and, ideally, cheap enough that the fact that it will eventually run out of power, deorbit, and burn up is no big problem. Particle accelerators are significantly larger than anything we've launched into space before. We have a small accelerator here that's essentially a ~3m diameter concrete tube that encircles a football field and a baseball field. They're expensive enough that they're designed to run for a few decades and then be repurposed. They require a huge amount of power, and a large number (by space standards -- on the order of dozens) technical staff familiar with the accelerator to function. (To be honest, particle accelerators are very complex and often use technology that isn't nearly as reliable as space technology. They get shut down a lot for repairs.)
First, it's a very scientific argument, you're just mangling it. Suppose you posit a new force X with certain properties. I show that if this force existed, masses of water of at least 2 gallons should show on the order of 1 bright pink flash per second. That this has never been observed suggests, to an extremely high likelihood, your force X does not exist.
To answer your latter question, the reason we are "risking our existence to satisfy the curiosity of a couple of thousand" is that we are not risking our existence.
Time to feel better, then. They performed extensive impact studies at the start of the project, more than 10 years ago.
That's all right. I have shiny things outside my office to distract anyone who shows up to complain.
We don't do experiments because we have no idea what will happen. We do experiments because we have very specific questions we want to answer. Whether or not miniature black holes will be created is not one of those questions.
There are two opposing viewpoints on the matter.
On the one hand, we have particle physicists whose "theories" on the interaction of subatomic-scale matter is drawn from decades of research and experimentation.
On the other hand, we have people who know essentially no physics and seemingly assume that the people building the LHC must be as lost when it comes to science as they. They make the argument, "Well, we don't *really* know what's going to happen."
It's amazing that the latter are able to function, as crippled as they should be of the fear of uncertainty.
This is what the article addresses. The counter-argument to "cosmic rays would already produce them" is that they would be moving quickly through the Earth and not interact. They would be produced by cosmic rays elsewhere in the universe, though. If they are interactive enough to destroy the world within the lifetime of the Sun, they would be captured (despite their high velocity) by certain types of stars and consume them. We see no evidence that this has occurred.
I have watched it, and its average quality is at about the level of the worst news on any other network.
If you've been following along, we're talking about nuclear power generation in the United States.
Black-market nuclear material is already available in the vicinity of Libya.
Yes, neither x-ray microscopy nor x-ray diffraction are new. This appears to be essentially small-sample x-ray diffraction, as you describe.
TEM of biological materials (like a virus or protein) is tricky because the TEM can destroy the structure of the protein and can't adequately discern its internal structure. I'm less familiar with SEM, so I couldn't say, but diffraction is usually interesting not for obtaining an image of the sample, but determining its structure.
And yeah, you use zone plates. Or, for some applications, optical fiber (which is what we use to do confocal X-ray fluorescence).
While the statement "you cannot focus X-rays like you can visible light with lenses" is misleading, it's true. You can't focus X-rays like you can focus visible light, and you can't do it (effectively) with lenses. However, you can focus X-rays.
I said that's the fear. It presents some benefits (the material's already in the US, so no need to smuggle it in), but the black market in Africa and Eastern Europe is better. Still, it's the reason breeder reactors are avoided.
Realistically, for someone who would steal nuclear material (e.g., a terrorist), other methods of getting your point across are likely to be easier and have a higher probability of success.
You can create problems, yes.
You can't create problems nearly on the scale that the person I replied to suggested.
GP mentions silly paranoia about breeder reactors. The reason people avoid those is fear that someone would get ahold of the materials used by them to make a nuclear weapon.
However, your comment is still paranoia, not justifiable fear. What exactly would terrorists do to holding areas at nuclear power stations to make the eastern US uninhabitable for 5000 years? Fly a plane into a holding site for nuclear material or waste? That wouldn't disperse the material much at all. The worse-case scenario is someone in the US stealing the material and using it to make a nuclear weapon -- something that's already possible using other sources. Even trying to blow up a nuclear reactor would cause limited damage, and they're not trivial to blow up.
DARPA has almost nothing to do with those "causes". It's associated with the same Department of Defense, and that's about it.
While some direct research projects in DoD departments might see actual application in one of those areas, DARPA research doesn't see the field for a long, long time.
Yes.
n is the number of massive objects (e.g. stars); as per the article, it's 5n-5 for n > 1
No, I'm quite familiar with how much "faking it" is used in movies and video games. (I'm also personally familiar with "faking it" in live theater.)
However, faking it requires a lot of work and places restrictions on what you can do. The bar for "faking it" continually increases as technology is developed to enable more convincing effects.
For classical optics, modeling the scene in either direction (castings rays from lightsources and only counting ones that hit the viewer vs. casting rays from the viewer and only counting ones that hit lightsources) is valid.
I assume you didn't mean for "efficiently" to be an item in your list, which is the way you wrote it, but raytracers can do all of those things. (I'll make no claims about efficiency.)
"But then again, it's a game, who cares about mathematicaly accurate reflections, when you can fake it close enough with reflection/refraction maps in a fraction of the processing time."
That argument is no more valid that if you say "it's just a game, why don't you just do raycasting, which takes a fraction of the processing time". "Faking it close enough" isn't close enough; it's obvious that you're faking it, and it requires that you either live with it or design your game to minimize the impact of faking it.
Even if all three were true, it's still voice data. If you recall, you claimed it's impossible to securely encrypt "voice data".
The third, running over a physically secure line, is certainly not always the case. High-security phones encrypt data for transmission over radio waves for communication to points that landlines don't cover (ships, teams in the field).
Try reading the Constitution. It differentiates between those parts that apply to all people within the jurisdiction of the US (which are really phrased as defining the powers of the federal government) and those parts that apply to citizens.