They're not playing it off like it'll save the world. They're playing it off like it solves a long standing problem in organic photovoltaic synthesis, a problem which has been what's keeping the technology "five years off." Research isn't a cake: you can't just wait and expect your investment of time to be repaid in full. Problems like these need to be figured out.
That said....inorganic semiconductors with 3.2% efficiency!? That's awful, and they know that. The accomplishment here is that in THIS system, the nanocone morphology improves the efficiency. Will it improve any other system? Will it improve photovoltaic cells that don't have such low efficiencies? We don't know, the SPO was just trigger happy. This article is equivalent to an article on the oxidation of nitrogen being titled MIRACLE PROCESS USES AIR TO FUEL CARS
The battery life has actually been a non-issue for me. 2-3 Hours sounds pretty bad numerically, but honestly unless I'm taking a plane I'm never far from a charger for any longer than three or four hours, and it's never the case that all of that time I am capable of playing a video game. Like most "mobile" devices I don't carry them with me so that I can jack into the cyberverse at a moment's notice, but so that the device is portable in the weakest sense of the word: as long as a system is more portable than a console, it'll cut it.
I'd say price is the bigger issue. The 3D is okay, but not worth the $250. When you consider that the PSP has been more or less unchanged for its run, whereas the DS has undergone FOUR separate updates, one wonders if they maybe couldn't have pushed it off for a year or so while getting the price back down to 200$. And yes, this has nothing to do with me "misunderstanding" the $250 I suddenly do not have anymore.
The difference being that the CEO of Goldman Sachs' only responsibility is to make money: for himself and others, but still just to make money. Our current financial system is certainly stacked on top of large financial firms in such a way that they rise and fall as one, but it's not as if "the guys at the top" are there because they are turning the wheels of the world with a steady hand. They're there because they clawed their way to the top of the pile, and them being there doesn't really help anyone but themselves. Its not to say such behavior is necessarily blameworthy: that's just human nature, but it certainly isn't anyone's responsibility to enjoy being looked down upon from such a great height.
The debate is not over whether the greedy fat cats are blameworthy or not, it is over whether to apply a uniform moral standard to people across different economic classes. If you defend the means by which the greedy fat cats rose to the top, it's not fair to act like the starving cats at the bottom got that way by their own choice: the fat cats are undoubtedly helping.
In short, if we're going to treat scientists with sneering, capitalist intent, we should be similarly aggressive with the financiers who are accumulating far more money while contributing far less.
And maybe...5 people have realized this article is from a joke news site? Jesus. If "Nissan Nilsson" and his oddly long quotes about "shooting them two knuckleheads from American Pickers" weren't enough to tip you off, the main page headline "Jack Hanna Fired For Supplying Sheen Tiger Blood" should have been. And this is a really terrible joke news site: it's more like a collation of lame chain emails from your uncle. The hilarious thing is that this has somehow gotten piped to a bunch of actual tech blogs. Eeesh. Stick to the dirty jokes and CGI gifs of fat men dancing, creepy-internet-uncle-Kevin.
If this really is graphene, it's not your traditional carbon compound. It is a poly-conjugated system, so oxidation happens much slower. It's in fact very hard to GET conjugated compounds to oxidize, it's a significant problem in industrial waste treatment The stuff is chemically very similar to fullerene, which see use as lubricants in environments with plenty of heat and plenty of oxygen.
And yeah, diamonds oxidize, but not fast or well. Diamonds may not be literally forever but they're sure as hell around for a long time, and they aren't even conjugated. If it were a significant problem, diamond tipped drills and the like would have to be "re-tipped" every so often because the atmosphere would strip all the diamond off!
This stuff won't be any easier to oxidize than steel is in the first place, and I don't think anyone is arguing that we don't know how to keep steel machine parts from oxidizing, or that the oxidation causes failure over a prohibitively short period of time. You could build anything you want out if this.
Okay, this is driving me nuts: in TFA's comment thread, the first poster is talking about "PT cruisers wrapped in headless people" about "two years ago." What the hell is he talking about? It sounds so insane as to be almost poignant
It's a series of dominoes attached to mechanically actuated levers. As each point in the circuit trips, a domino is lowered, very carefully, to the ground. The fact that everything here was mechanically actuated and bypassable means that it's not an RG machine: nothing depends on the step before it except in theory
at least with current technologogies? Duh. If we could do it, we would have. No one seriously believes the main obstacle to a Mars mission is the liberal agenda or the freemasons or anything, right?
The original poster is correct insofar as the central assumption of your scientific understanding: namely that the principles which cause your post to appear are invariant over the time and space interval which encompasses both your post and the establishment of the those principles, is something that MUST be established a priori. Believing that A causes B is not materially different from knowing that A causes B causes C: the fact that electrons don't magically become positive or something and prevent your computer from working for a few seconds instead of transmitting your post is something you take on faith.
But of course, this is due to the ambiguous nature of analyticity: it is quite possible that all apparently analytic statements can be reduced to synthetic ones. This is what lies at the core of this "Science is based on faith" nonsense, since the thinking is that if scientific truth can be reduced to the synthetic or empirical truths, then all understanding of science which is NOT empirical is ultimately groundless: that is, people without a firsthand understanding . Which is a bullshit gateway to solipsism, and results from a false dichotomy between empirical faculties (the ability to collect and construct information) and analytic faculties (the ability to extract new information from the empirical)
. As an example, it is perfectly possible for a biochemist with no understanding of electrodynamics or quantum theory to extract meaningful biochmical information from a physical chemical simulation. To argue that because scientists are not immediately capable of reducing their findings to terms of particle physics, they are "taking things on faith" is simply bad scientific philosophy, which has been recognized as bad since the 1950's
Yes, but they only list a few that people use deliberately, "definately" and "fucken" not counting. And I am assuming we are standardizing spellings, so that any mere phonetic variation does not count.
Of course, this beside the point when attempting to introduce non-letter symbols into the dictionary. Are we supposed to pronounce 1337 phonetically? or as "one thousand three hundred thirty seven" when we see it in context? And do numbers like a million become "loo?" The number "3" is pronounced "three," and blurring the phonetic lines so thoroughly will only lead to confusion.
It is certainly true that bio sciences tend to attract people with a skill set that doesn't include math. I'd question whether this makes it more attractive as a discpline to women, but given the stigma associated with female mathematical competence it might be true that women in some way are more likely to develop as non-mathematical scientists
Unfortunately, scientists seems to be divided down the middle, in a line which ends up travelling right through chemistry. Organic and other synthetic chemists, shading into biochemists and molecular biologists, tend to be quite math shy, whereas physical chemists and chemical physicists tend to enjoy and excel at math. There is a joke at my school that the rivalry between the p.chemists and the orgo chemists is based on the fact that p. chemists all did badly in orgo, and orgo chemists all did badly in p. chem. It is not hard to imagine a person who doesn't like math tracking themselves into a discpline like the biomedical field.
And what is this about a dearth of funding? More money is allocated to the biomedical and health sector than any other branch of research.
Wow, what a supremely asinine attitude. "It's happened before, so why not let it happen again?"
It is really not such a inconceivable moral demand of humanity that it recognize the ethical invalidity of imperialism and upholding the right of the strong to prey upon the weak. And like all ethical maxims according to which society is carried out, it indeed may not be possible that all nations and peoples act at all times according to these maxims. We can, however, avoid actively sponsoring such violations, and bathing its cause in misappropriated guilt money.
The maintenance of some kind of "moral consistency" is a pretty piss poor reason to abandon the right treatment of people, and the same goes for any fatalist "law-of-the-jungle" rhetorics which uphold such despicable conduct by those who claim to be the more right behaving members of the species.
I see that plastics are by definition organic, but fail to see how organic transistors are by definition plastic. My objection was to the use of plastic as a kind of simplified buzzword: yes indeed these materials fulfill the technical criteria for being considered plastics (though given the fact that it's a tiny bit of actual semiconductor material drowned in an ocean of regular ol' hydrocarbon, this isn't surprising) but to call this a "plastic computer" makes it sound like we're making it out of used bottlecaps or something. The materials they use are in fact, highly specialized organic compounds which are usually synthesized specifically for their electronic properties. Work in organic semiconductors has been progressing for decades in many different disciplines, and if this article were about how the researchers managed to get materials designed to conduct electricity to conduct electricity, it wouldn't be very interesting at all. It is in fact about how a circuit was created using said conducting material, a material which bears less resemblance to commerical plastics than gasoline does to olive oil. They certainly aren't criminals for zazzing up their soundbite, but a vehicle powered by jet fuel does not an rocket car make, and while the difference between organic and inorganic circuits could be characterized as "plastic vs. metal" it's hardly right to call that rigorous.
All right, all right, just hold your goddam horses. First of all, there are D and L amino acids. L, the ones which are "levorotary," or "left handed" are in fact the ones mostly used by eukaryotes, and the ones used as part of our metabolic pathways. However, many D acids are indeed useful to a variety of species, including many prokaryotes, the organisms believed to more greatly resemble the earliest life forms. Calling the product toxic is like calling oxygen caustic: accurate, but misleading. There are certainly more than a few organisms who might be quite happy mucking around in this stuff, which should be enough to push the intelligent biogenesis people in a slightly more sympathetic direction, if not the humans-and-dinosaurs-coexisted counterevolutionists.
Erh, there's certainly a large proportion of physicists, physical chemists and et cetera that get lucrative careers working for things far outside their discipline (I have a physical chemist friend who works for Intel, and was entirely retrained upon hire), since being handy with math is not something to sneeze at. True, it's very difficult to find a STEM job with a terminal math MS, but you could certainly hunt around hedge funds or Intel or any number of places that snap up quality number crunchers. True, given that wall street was the biggest hirer of people in this sector before the economic fuck-up, it's a little trickier, but most people don't require you to be an engineer in order to hire you for your book-smarts.
High citation levels have been used as a shorthand for scientific quality forever, and people do acknowledge that it's a dubious metric, but of course the only *metric* there is. And how do you figure the ecological fallacy? I'd say that even if a city contains only a single individual publishing high numbers of top-cited papers, that city could be safely categorized as an important scientific center. Unless you mean with respect to departments, in which case the same conditon holds (MIT's weak sociology program can, I think, be forgiven, for example.). Unless you mean with respect to cities (i.e., making assumptions about cities based on university activity) in which case I would ask you where exactly scientific activity is supposed to take place, if not in a university or a laboratory. Finally, if you mean with respect to individual scientists, I believe the article makes no such claims about the scientific work of a particular researcher, only about the city itself. And abuse of statistical significance testing? Is their threshold too high or too low? That seems debatable. At best, you could call this a bad science semifecta, if that.
Oh wait, wait! I have a better Idea, how about you just offer short clips, like 30-60 seconds, and then....
Oh, they already did that. How am I going to know if something is worth buying unless I actually see the full version? I might buy it and find that I don't want to pay money for it. You've just brought us back fulld circle
You know those fat-cat scientists. Using their mastery of political manipulation to coax huge sums of money from hapless patrons. That's why they became climate scientists in the first place: the huge cash payoffs.
...The assumption being that scientists will commit fraudulent research so that money will be spent said fraudulent research. Apparently scientists just get huge hard-ons whenever money is being wasted, because it sure as hell isn't padding the scientist's pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not playing it off like it'll save the world. They're playing it off like it solves a long standing problem in organic photovoltaic synthesis, a problem which has been what's keeping the technology "five years off." Research isn't a cake: you can't just wait and expect your investment of time to be repaid in full. Problems like these need to be figured out.
That said....inorganic semiconductors with 3.2% efficiency!? That's awful, and they know that. The accomplishment here is that in THIS system, the nanocone morphology improves the efficiency. Will it improve any other system? Will it improve photovoltaic cells that don't have such low efficiencies? We don't know, the SPO was just trigger happy. This article is equivalent to an article on the oxidation of nitrogen being titled MIRACLE PROCESS USES AIR TO FUEL CARS
The battery life has actually been a non-issue for me. 2-3 Hours sounds pretty bad numerically, but honestly unless I'm taking a plane I'm never far from a charger for any longer than three or four hours, and it's never the case that all of that time I am capable of playing a video game. Like most "mobile" devices I don't carry them with me so that I can jack into the cyberverse at a moment's notice, but so that the device is portable in the weakest sense of the word: as long as a system is more portable than a console, it'll cut it.
I'd say price is the bigger issue. The 3D is okay, but not worth the $250. When you consider that the PSP has been more or less unchanged for its run, whereas the DS has undergone FOUR separate updates, one wonders if they maybe couldn't have pushed it off for a year or so while getting the price back down to 200$. And yes, this has nothing to do with me "misunderstanding" the $250 I suddenly do not have anymore.
The difference being that the CEO of Goldman Sachs' only responsibility is to make money: for himself and others, but still just to make money. Our current financial system is certainly stacked on top of large financial firms in such a way that they rise and fall as one, but it's not as if "the guys at the top" are there because they are turning the wheels of the world with a steady hand. They're there because they clawed their way to the top of the pile, and them being there doesn't really help anyone but themselves. Its not to say such behavior is necessarily blameworthy: that's just human nature, but it certainly isn't anyone's responsibility to enjoy being looked down upon from such a great height.
The debate is not over whether the greedy fat cats are blameworthy or not, it is over whether to apply a uniform moral standard to people across different economic classes. If you defend the means by which the greedy fat cats rose to the top, it's not fair to act like the starving cats at the bottom got that way by their own choice: the fat cats are undoubtedly helping.
In short, if we're going to treat scientists with sneering, capitalist intent, we should be similarly aggressive with the financiers who are accumulating far more money while contributing far less.
...which is why if they could get people to buy cars that they can drive for free, they would. Higher fuel prices mean more people taking the bus.
And maybe...5 people have realized this article is from a joke news site? Jesus. If "Nissan Nilsson" and his oddly long quotes about "shooting them two knuckleheads from American Pickers" weren't enough to tip you off, the main page headline "Jack Hanna Fired For Supplying Sheen Tiger Blood" should have been. And this is a really terrible joke news site: it's more like a collation of lame chain emails from your uncle. The hilarious thing is that this has somehow gotten piped to a bunch of actual tech blogs. Eeesh. Stick to the dirty jokes and CGI gifs of fat men dancing, creepy-internet-uncle-Kevin.
If this really is graphene, it's not your traditional carbon compound. It is a poly-conjugated system, so oxidation happens much slower. It's in fact very hard to GET conjugated compounds to oxidize, it's a significant problem in industrial waste treatment The stuff is chemically very similar to fullerene, which see use as lubricants in environments with plenty of heat and plenty of oxygen.
And yeah, diamonds oxidize, but not fast or well. Diamonds may not be literally forever but they're sure as hell around for a long time, and they aren't even conjugated. If it were a significant problem, diamond tipped drills and the like would have to be "re-tipped" every so often because the atmosphere would strip all the diamond off!
This stuff won't be any easier to oxidize than steel is in the first place, and I don't think anyone is arguing that we don't know how to keep steel machine parts from oxidizing, or that the oxidation causes failure over a prohibitively short period of time. You could build anything you want out if this.
Okay, this is driving me nuts: in TFA's comment thread, the first poster is talking about "PT cruisers wrapped in headless people" about "two years ago." What the hell is he talking about? It sounds so insane as to be almost poignant
Did you invent the universe first?
It's a series of dominoes attached to mechanically actuated levers. As each point in the circuit trips, a domino is lowered, very carefully, to the ground. The fact that everything here was mechanically actuated and bypassable means that it's not an RG machine: nothing depends on the step before it except in theory
Wow, how awfully lame. That's not a goldberg machine, that's a regular machine.
-send turbines spinning under power -starting changing earth's rotational axis -Neptunian winters -God help us
at least with current technologogies? Duh. If we could do it, we would have. No one seriously believes the main obstacle to a Mars mission is the liberal agenda or the freemasons or anything, right?
The original poster is correct insofar as the central assumption of your scientific understanding: namely that the principles which cause your post to appear are invariant over the time and space interval which encompasses both your post and the establishment of the those principles, is something that MUST be established a priori. Believing that A causes B is not materially different from knowing that A causes B causes C: the fact that electrons don't magically become positive or something and prevent your computer from working for a few seconds instead of transmitting your post is something you take on faith.
But of course, this is due to the ambiguous nature of analyticity: it is quite possible that all apparently analytic statements can be reduced to synthetic ones. This is what lies at the core of this "Science is based on faith" nonsense, since the thinking is that if scientific truth can be reduced to the synthetic or empirical truths, then all understanding of science which is NOT empirical is ultimately groundless: that is, people without a firsthand understanding . Which is a bullshit gateway to solipsism, and results from a false dichotomy between empirical faculties (the ability to collect and construct information) and analytic faculties (the ability to extract new information from the empirical)
. As an example, it is perfectly possible for a biochemist with no understanding of electrodynamics or quantum theory to extract meaningful biochmical information from a physical chemical simulation. To argue that because scientists are not immediately capable of reducing their findings to terms of particle physics, they are "taking things on faith" is simply bad scientific philosophy, which has been recognized as bad since the 1950's
Yes, but they only list a few that people use deliberately, "definately" and "fucken" not counting. And I am assuming we are standardizing spellings, so that any mere phonetic variation does not count.
Of course, this beside the point when attempting to introduce non-letter symbols into the dictionary. Are we supposed to pronounce 1337 phonetically? or as "one thousand three hundred thirty seven" when we see it in context? And do numbers like a million become "loo?" The number "3" is pronounced "three," and blurring the phonetic lines so thoroughly will only lead to confusion.
Especially since it's so SUPPOSED to 1337. Jeez
It is certainly true that bio sciences tend to attract people with a skill set that doesn't include math. I'd question whether this makes it more attractive as a discpline to women, but given the stigma associated with female mathematical competence it might be true that women in some way are more likely to develop as non-mathematical scientists
Unfortunately, scientists seems to be divided down the middle, in a line which ends up travelling right through chemistry. Organic and other synthetic chemists, shading into biochemists and molecular biologists, tend to be quite math shy, whereas physical chemists and chemical physicists tend to enjoy and excel at math. There is a joke at my school that the rivalry between the p.chemists and the orgo chemists is based on the fact that p. chemists all did badly in orgo, and orgo chemists all did badly in p. chem. It is not hard to imagine a person who doesn't like math tracking themselves into a discpline like the biomedical field.
And what is this about a dearth of funding? More money is allocated to the biomedical and health sector than any other branch of research.
Wow, what a supremely asinine attitude. "It's happened before, so why not let it happen again?"
It is really not such a inconceivable moral demand of humanity that it recognize the ethical invalidity of imperialism and upholding the right of the strong to prey upon the weak. And like all ethical maxims according to which society is carried out, it indeed may not be possible that all nations and peoples act at all times according to these maxims. We can, however, avoid actively sponsoring such violations, and bathing its cause in misappropriated guilt money.
The maintenance of some kind of "moral consistency" is a pretty piss poor reason to abandon the right treatment of people, and the same goes for any fatalist "law-of-the-jungle" rhetorics which uphold such despicable conduct by those who claim to be the more right behaving members of the species.
I see that plastics are by definition organic, but fail to see how organic transistors are by definition plastic. My objection was to the use of plastic as a kind of simplified buzzword: yes indeed these materials fulfill the technical criteria for being considered plastics (though given the fact that it's a tiny bit of actual semiconductor material drowned in an ocean of regular ol' hydrocarbon, this isn't surprising) but to call this a "plastic computer" makes it sound like we're making it out of used bottlecaps or something. The materials they use are in fact, highly specialized organic compounds which are usually synthesized specifically for their electronic properties. Work in organic semiconductors has been progressing for decades in many different disciplines, and if this article were about how the researchers managed to get materials designed to conduct electricity to conduct electricity, it wouldn't be very interesting at all. It is in fact about how a circuit was created using said conducting material, a material which bears less resemblance to commerical plastics than gasoline does to olive oil. They certainly aren't criminals for zazzing up their soundbite, but a vehicle powered by jet fuel does not an rocket car make, and while the difference between organic and inorganic circuits could be characterized as "plastic vs. metal" it's hardly right to call that rigorous.
Nor are organic transistors "plastic"
All right, all right, just hold your goddam horses. First of all, there are D and L amino acids. L, the ones which are "levorotary," or "left handed" are in fact the ones mostly used by eukaryotes, and the ones used as part of our metabolic pathways. However, many D acids are indeed useful to a variety of species, including many prokaryotes, the organisms believed to more greatly resemble the earliest life forms. Calling the product toxic is like calling oxygen caustic: accurate, but misleading. There are certainly more than a few organisms who might be quite happy mucking around in this stuff, which should be enough to push the intelligent biogenesis people in a slightly more sympathetic direction, if not the humans-and-dinosaurs-coexisted counterevolutionists.
Erh, there's certainly a large proportion of physicists, physical chemists and et cetera that get lucrative careers working for things far outside their discipline (I have a physical chemist friend who works for Intel, and was entirely retrained upon hire), since being handy with math is not something to sneeze at. True, it's very difficult to find a STEM job with a terminal math MS, but you could certainly hunt around hedge funds or Intel or any number of places that snap up quality number crunchers. True, given that wall street was the biggest hirer of people in this sector before the economic fuck-up, it's a little trickier, but most people don't require you to be an engineer in order to hire you for your book-smarts.
High citation levels have been used as a shorthand for scientific quality forever, and people do acknowledge that it's a dubious metric, but of course the only *metric* there is. And how do you figure the ecological fallacy? I'd say that even if a city contains only a single individual publishing high numbers of top-cited papers, that city could be safely categorized as an important scientific center. Unless you mean with respect to departments, in which case the same conditon holds (MIT's weak sociology program can, I think, be forgiven, for example.). Unless you mean with respect to cities (i.e., making assumptions about cities based on university activity) in which case I would ask you where exactly scientific activity is supposed to take place, if not in a university or a laboratory. Finally, if you mean with respect to individual scientists, I believe the article makes no such claims about the scientific work of a particular researcher, only about the city itself. And abuse of statistical significance testing? Is their threshold too high or too low? That seems debatable. At best, you could call this a bad science semifecta, if that.
Do all the papers measured by this study get a cite? I say yes.
Oh wait, wait! I have a better Idea, how about you just offer short clips, like 30-60 seconds, and then.... Oh, they already did that. How am I going to know if something is worth buying unless I actually see the full version? I might buy it and find that I don't want to pay money for it. You've just brought us back fulld circle
You know those fat-cat scientists. Using their mastery of political manipulation to coax huge sums of money from hapless patrons. That's why they became climate scientists in the first place: the huge cash payoffs.
...The assumption being that scientists will commit fraudulent research so that money will be spent said fraudulent research. Apparently scientists just get huge hard-ons whenever money is being wasted, because it sure as hell isn't padding the scientist's pockets.