There are thousands of years of observation behind Chinese herbal medicine. There is a plausible mechanism of action.
That makes it, not "pseudoscience", but protoscience. To the best of my knowledge, Chinese doctors hadn't discovered double-blind statistically valid clinical trials. That makes their observations subject to improved scrutiny, but not necessarily wrong.
Pre-scientific medicine made some valid discoveries. Indian doctors had figured out that you should boil water before drinking it, and locate the privy downhill from the well. The Chinese figured out that motion was a necessity for health before we discovered anything about lymph circulation. The Greeks knew that being fat was bad for you.
Nor is Western medicine necessarily scientific. The "evidence-based medicine" movement is constantly finding that standard treatments are not justified scientifically.
The sound argument to be made here is that a university should be testing Chinese herbal medicine rather than teaching it.
Chaum and Shamir have done fascinating work on satisfying both anonymity and integrity.
Their schemes suffer from usability problems.
A related problem is that elections have to be seen to be fair as well as being fair. Almost everyone understands paper. A system that depends on PhD level math is something an average voter would have to take on trust, which is a Bad Thing.
A large part of the problem is that if they got math at all then it was part of the track to the physical sciences (algebra -> algebra 2 -> calculus -> differential equations).
Voters who aren't in a physics-based career need math, but not the same branch of it. Statistics is critical. Understanding what correlation means and what it doesn't, what a control group is for, recognizing sample bias, and definitely the base rate fallacy are all vital for resisting propaganda.
If you can get that box out of the basement (assuming you have a basement), then you can pick up things from the rest of the house, and put them in its place. Result: cleaner house. Also dramatically easier to find something if it's in electronic form.
The weird thing being that a lot of the policy options are things we'd want to do anyway: increasing energy efficiency, building more nuclear power plants, and reforestation are examples.
In _Profiles of the Future_, Arthur Clarke collected a long series of well-thought-out, quantitative, proofs of the practical impossibility of aviation and space flight. The people he quoted were willing to agree that future breakthroughs such as antigravity might allow aviation to work, but that it was an engineering impossibility.
The guy's paper makes more sense. He suggests uranium sulfide at the core, with reactions having started when there was more 235U, so analogous to the Oklo reactor but with sulfur instead of water. Sulfur's not a good choice for a moderator, though.
Then it would have bred some plutonium, which is more fissile than 238U.
I don't know enough quantitative reactor physics to know if the hypothesis is workable.
We should remember this case and cite it as an example the next time someone says that surveillance doesn't affect the innocent or "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
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A point that Jefferson emphasized, that a people's ability to govern themselves critically depended on their being informed.
There are thousands of years of observation behind Chinese herbal medicine. There is a plausible mechanism of action.
That makes it, not "pseudoscience", but protoscience. To the best of my knowledge, Chinese doctors hadn't discovered double-blind statistically valid clinical trials. That makes their observations subject to improved scrutiny, but not necessarily wrong.
Pre-scientific medicine made some valid discoveries. Indian doctors had figured out that you should boil water before drinking it, and locate the privy downhill from the well. The Chinese figured out that motion was a necessity for health before we discovered anything about lymph circulation. The Greeks knew that being fat was bad for you.
Nor is Western medicine necessarily scientific. The "evidence-based medicine" movement is constantly finding that standard treatments are not justified scientifically.
The sound argument to be made here is that a university should be testing Chinese herbal medicine rather than teaching it.
When you mentioned shipping containers, were you thinking of this?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=162480#.T1RLHpgtA20
Uranium in a pipe, like the Little Boy design, sailed through security a year *after* ABC publicized the exact same test before.
Maybe their smart concrete and our smart bombs can have a battle of wits, maybe settle their differences with a game of chess.
Don't overcomplicate it. An attacker could simply DDoS the recording servers in opposition districts. An insider could underprovision them.
Chaum and Shamir have done fascinating work on satisfying both anonymity and integrity.
Their schemes suffer from usability problems.
A related problem is that elections have to be seen to be fair as well as being fair. Almost everyone understands paper. A system that depends on PhD level math is something an average voter would have to take on trust, which is a Bad Thing.
A large part of the problem is that if they got math at all then it was part of the track to the physical sciences (algebra -> algebra 2 -> calculus -> differential equations).
Voters who aren't in a physics-based career need math, but not the same branch of it. Statistics is critical. Understanding what correlation means and what it doesn't, what a control group is for, recognizing sample bias, and definitely the base rate fallacy are all vital for resisting propaganda.
Anything is vulnerable to attacks on reduced-round variants. For full security, do what I did for this post: the full 16 rounds of ROT-13.
1. House goes up on air cushion.
2. Ground below shifts sideways several meters.
3. House goes down off its foundation.
Airline frequent flier miles can be exchanged for non-airline goods and services, making them a form of money.
In 1992 North Korea agreed to keep the peninsula free of nuclear weapons.
But let's be optimistic, maybe this time around the inspectors will be allowed to do inspections.
Would you advocate or approve of similar restrictions on the university library?
What's the difference?
Are you also opposed to therapies for lost eyesight, lost mobility, lost hearing, and so on? All of those happen for reasons.
You *can* use U-233 in a bomb, but the high levels of penetrating gamma radiation make it harder and more expensive to work with.
He has a business to run, and has been running it successfully for quite a while, so presumably he knows what he's doing.
If you can get that box out of the basement (assuming you have a basement), then you can pick up things from the rest of the house, and put them in its place. Result: cleaner house. Also dramatically easier to find something if it's in electronic form.
>disavowing the religion of the majority (apostasy)
No, apostasy means disavowing one's own religion.
Were you thinking of Indonesia, with its "pancasila"?
Malaysia applies Muslim law to Muslims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia#Religion
The weird thing being that a lot of the policy options are things we'd want to do anyway: increasing energy efficiency, building more nuclear power plants, and reforestation are examples.
It's a strange kind of "priesthood" that has to show its work and changes its mind when new evidence comes in.
In _Profiles of the Future_, Arthur Clarke collected a long series of well-thought-out, quantitative, proofs of the practical impossibility of aviation and space flight. The people he quoted were willing to agree that future breakthroughs such as antigravity might allow aviation to work, but that it was an engineering impossibility.
Non-enriched uranium with no moderator?
The guy's paper makes more sense. He suggests uranium sulfide at the core, with reactions having started when there was more 235U, so analogous to the Oklo reactor but with sulfur instead of water. Sulfur's not a good choice for a moderator, though.
Then it would have bred some plutonium, which is more fissile than 238U.
I don't know enough quantitative reactor physics to know if the hypothesis is workable.
I suspect the Foxconn employees are allowed to learn to read.
Do you believe the Chinese workers are deciding freely?
What do you think would happen if they organized for better working conditions?
We should remember this case and cite it as an example the next time someone says that surveillance doesn't affect the innocent or "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".