I'll admit I was kind of creeped out when I got invited to Foobar, but what sold me was the fun, spirited, and intellectually challenging puzzles it offered. That may be a compromise of my ethical principles, but I don't care.
If you knock on my door at 10 p.m., I'm going to be annoyed. But if you knock on my door at 10 p.m. to hand me the keys to a new Ferrari, I'll probably forgive the intrusion.
Just fyi: everyone is watching and evaluating you all the time. Your neighbors notice you stumbling in at 2 am and wonder how your date went. Your mailman sees your copy of IEEE Spectrum and daydreams of asking you to chat with his nerdy nephew. Your garbage man hears the clink of bottles in your trash and guesses you're an alcoholic.
Like it or not, you *are* a rat in a glass cage. It's utterly impossible to live in modern society without leaking bits of your identity to the people around you. The question is, what do they do with the scraps they pick up on? And in this case, inviting you to participate in a fun, challenging game that might lead to an awesome career seems like a pretty good outcome.
What? No, I'm not saying we should discard pseudoscientific theories without inquiry. I'm saying that after we test them out and find them to be bullshit, as has been done hundreds of times for electromagnetic sensitivity, we should use these findings aggressively to make decisions rather than allowing rumor and intuition as equally valid forms of evidence.
See, this is why you can't give pseudoscience an inch. Every little success validates it in the eyes of its own practitioners, and legitimizes it in the eyes of the public, until society tumbles down the rabbit hole of paranoia and irrational fear of the harmless on one hand, and blind trust in actually harmful practices on the other hand.
Do you keep yourself logged in with a google account when you search?
Yes, for everyday use. I've decided that protecting your privacy while working with a search engine is like maintaining anonymity with your pharmacist. The system makes it practically impossible, and there are some real advantages to the personalized help you can get by granting it your trust. Which isn't to say your trust should be blind: you should pick your pharmacist and your search engine carefully, and keep an eye out for weird behavior, but in the end, they're inevitably going to learn something about you.
Or another way to put it: those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither, but giving up a little privacy to get an essential service is a trade worth considering.
I got invited into Google Foobar last winter, pretty much an identical experience to what's written in the article. I love my job as a college physics professor, so I didn't go for the "recruitme" command when it appeared, but it was a really fun brain-stretcher. I got through eight of 'em before work caught up with me and I ran out of free time to work on a really hard one.
I won't spoil the puzzles, but they require working skills in discrete math, logic, data structures, algorithms, and cryptography, and the easiest ones are about at the limit of what I'd be comfortable asking an undergraduate to solve. They're all a lot of fun, in a nerd sniping kind of way. And I really liked that none of them relied on arcane knowledge of fiddly trivia, all it takes is high school math/CS and tons of brainpower.
Rumor has it the selection process happens through your Google search history over a long period of time, so you're not going to be able to just spam Python jargon at the search engine and get in tomorrow. But if you do get an invite, drop what you're doing and accept it!
I was really disappointed that when the semester ended and I had time to go back to Google Foobar, I was locked out. Sure, I failed a puzzle, so the rules say it's game over, but I'd really love to take a crack at more of them just for fun. Maybe someday I'll get another invite.
scamming isn't totally eliminated as the emissions still need to be measured by some sort of regulation.
Not a problem. We know how much CO2 is going to come out of a ton of oil or coal, and we know how much a molecule of CFC blocks infrared compared to CO2. Basic physics and chemistry, all you need to do is monitor and tax the inputs into your economy, and there's so much of it it's impossible to hide.
However, there is also the problem of leakage. Unless the tax is global, it won't work to solve the problem, just like an ETS won't work. Emissions intensive industries such as aluminium production just move to countries that don't have the tax (and probably less environmental controls too).
That's why I said you need to combine this with a tariff on goods imported from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax. That jacks up the price until it matches the cost of production in Carbontaxland, so there's no benefit to offshoring.
The only solution is technological change.
Frankly, we have the technology already. The only reason renewable energy struggles to compete with fossil fuels is that fossil fuel users don't have to pay the cost of the environmental damage it causes. It's cheaper because it's robbing us all. A fossil fuel tax is all about making this external cost an internal one that consumers pay, rather than their grandchildren.
This article singles out Russia and Ukraine, but a larger issue is CFC-23, a nasty greenhouse gas. It's a chemical byproduct which Chinese and Indian companies are deliberately producing in order to destroy, because the cause the credits for destroying the byproduct are worth five times the value of stuff they're nominally trying to make.
The article mentions this, but doesn't mention that CFC-23 fraud supplies HALF of all the carbon emissions credits sold on the European market.
The cheating problem is a big part of why I favor a straight up carbon tax rather than trying to get fancy with incentives and credits. Place a flat tax per ton CO2e on companies which generate or import fossil fuels or CFCs. They will pass this cost on to customers, making goods that require lots of fossil fuels cost more, so the market will determine which emissions reductions strategies are most cost-effective. You can return the tax money to the people via lower income or payroll taxes, use it to reduce the deficit, or use it to pay for green infrastructure, I don't care. One more element is needed to make this work: you need import tariffs on manufactured goods coming in from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax. Otherwise countries that "offshore" their emissions will have an advantage.
In addition to being simpler and harder to cheat, this system is preferable from a "big gubmint is evil" perspective. Conservatives don't want a massive government bureaucracy inspecting every element of the supply chain, making sure the incentives are properly spent and the credits fairly earned, and neither do I. I just want to use their worst enemy, taxes, to make their best friend, capitalism, work to help the planet. Put a green thumb on Adam Smith's invisible hand.
I'm a free-market environmentalist. I say we need to stop hoping that greed will go away, or worse pretending it doesn't exist, and start using it as a tool.
The same website that was pushing the "F-35 defeated by F-16 in dogfight" story that hit Slashdot a few weeks ago took another look in a maybe more appropriate wargaming scenario. This is an off-the-shelf commercial software simulation done by dedicated non-government folks based on educated guesses about classified aircraft, so I wouldn't dream of saying it's a realistic simulation, but it does show you a different view of the F-35.
From the enemy fighter's perspective, you're cruising around looking for trouble, and the first sign of it you see is incoming long-range missiles. Your amazing maneuverability comes in to play as you try to dodge hypersonic missiles, but in the end you and all your friends get blown up before the F-35s appear on your radar screen. Through countless simulations, the Russian jets were invariably wiped out with negligible losses on the American side.
Like I said, that's not the real world. But it demonstrates that comparing the maneuverability of a stealth aircraft against a non-stealth fighter is kind of an empty hypothetical.
If the NSA really were monitoring that closely, they'd have identified every ISIS sympathizer and rounded 'em all up long before they got to my friend, and the con artist reward would be unnecessary.
Likewise if they were able to find my friend through the financial system based on his money order, ISIS would respond by doing business strictly in untraceable cash, and so there'd be no way for me to prove that I'd conned ISIS, and so the con artist reward would be useless.
So whichever way you slice it, this scam artist reward scheme is either useless or open to abuse.
... Okay, so I get a friend in Saudi Arabia to send me a money order, marked: "for travel to the Islamic State, Allahu akbar". I show it to the US government, they pay me a reward, I split it with my friend.
That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure a real con artist could do better. The problem with doing business with con artists is that they're con artists.
Yeah, it's tough to grade providers on their overall success because so much depends on factors outside the hospital. But grading them based on conditions the patient acquires *in* the hospital is legit.
Another modification to the grading system: in addition to counting patients who die after surgery, also count patients the surgeon refuses to operate on as a fractional failure. That way a doctor who takes thoughtful risks and loses a few can compete against a doctor who passes up all but the safest patients.
It's easy to say "treatment at all costs is stupid", but it's a lot harder to do when your own mom is dying of cancer. I'm impressed at your realistic perspective. My own mother's doctors were quite frank about her chances given further treatment, but her problem was much more acute than cancer.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and say that maybe this isn't a problem. Doctors are getting downgraded for choosing to perform risky surgeries, but maybe that's a poor decision on their part: perhaps they should be seeking safer solutions, or suggesting that patients might want to make the best of the time they have rather than dying on the operating table. And that's not even to mention the cost of risky failed surgery.
Hopefully there's an exemption for truly experimental procedures, or medical progress will slow to a crawl, but one could argue that all things considered, medicine could use a little more caution in choosing surgery.
The FAA can take jurisdiction on this and work with the FCC to set some pretty reasonable rules that would solve this problem. Pretty much all modern R/C hobby aircraft operate on the same 2.4 Ghz spread-spectrum protocol. These aren't just passive AM/FM systems, they have microprocessors in them. The gubmint could designate an emergency 2.4 Ghz radio transmission, and require commercially-made drones sold in the US to respond to it by beginning a controlled descent. General-purpose R/C systems used for build-your-own aircraft would respond by lowering the throttle servo to near-idle.
So the fire department pushes a button, and all the drones slowly descend to the ground. If yours lands in a lake, well, serves you right for operating a drone in an emergency area. Of course, the emergency transmission can't be secret, so you pass a little law making unauthorized sale or operation of an emergency drone-crash beacon a crime.
It's basically the same idea as the traffic signal pre-emption devices that let fire trucks get a green light whenever they need it. There's even a law covering unauthorized sale of them.
The US has a similar plan, the EB-5 visa program, but you only need to invest $1 million to get your green card.
I say, if we're going to let people bribe their way to the front of the immigration line, we should get top dollar for it. $15 million sounds about right, plus $2 million paid directly to the government, and used to hire more immigration workers to clear the ludicrous immigration backlog for everyone else.
*Especially* since a good chunk of those buying green cards are Chinese businessmen and government officials fleeing corruption charges in China: if we're going to be complicit in fraud, I want a bigger piece of the action.
Oh, and by the way, ever notice that Americans who're furious about people "skipping the line" in the immigration process never complain about this program? Seriously the only mention I can find over on Fox News is concern that Mexicans are doing it, despite the fact that for every Mexican EB-5 visa applicant, there are 200 Chinese.
I teach physics at a liberal arts college, I am totally on board with exposing students to cross-disciplinary ideas that go against accepted norms. So as I'm reading through the syllabus, I'm fine with things like this:
Alternative medicine... has gained unprecedented popularity among patients... The focus of the course is not on the shortcomings or limitations of conventional medicine, but on the ways in which various alternative... modalities reflect a paradigm of health, disease, and healing that stand in contrast to the scientific, biomedicalized paradigm, the standard understanding in the West.
Sure, no problem, let's do a compare-and-contrast, it's popular enough that we need to be familiar with it whether we think it's baloney or not, and considerations of how states of mind affect states of health are real and useful. But then we hit page 2:
We will delve into a quantum physics’ understanding of disease and alternative medicine to provide a scientific hypothesis of how these modalities may work. Quantum physics is a branch of physics that understands the interrelationship between matter and energy. This science offers clear explanations as to why homeopathic remedies with seemingly no chemical trace of the original substance are able to resolve chronic diseases, why acupuncture can offer patients enough pain relief to undergo surgery without anesthesia, why meditation alone can, in some instances, reduce the size of cancerous tumors.
No. The author has no idea what quantum physics is, and is using it as a magic wand made of pure bullshit. Uttering the phrase "quantum physics" is, of course, a pretty common and cliched way to sound impressive without knowing anything, but it demonstrates that the "honest intellectual inquiry" thing is just a disguise, and the professor is here to sell snake oil.
Slashdot Mirror
It is if you're Google.
I'll admit I was kind of creeped out when I got invited to Foobar, but what sold me was the fun, spirited, and intellectually challenging puzzles it offered. That may be a compromise of my ethical principles, but I don't care.
If you knock on my door at 10 p.m., I'm going to be annoyed. But if you knock on my door at 10 p.m. to hand me the keys to a new Ferrari, I'll probably forgive the intrusion.
Just fyi: everyone is watching and evaluating you all the time. Your neighbors notice you stumbling in at 2 am and wonder how your date went. Your mailman sees your copy of IEEE Spectrum and daydreams of asking you to chat with his nerdy nephew. Your garbage man hears the clink of bottles in your trash and guesses you're an alcoholic.
Like it or not, you *are* a rat in a glass cage. It's utterly impossible to live in modern society without leaking bits of your identity to the people around you. The question is, what do they do with the scraps they pick up on? And in this case, inviting you to participate in a fun, challenging game that might lead to an awesome career seems like a pretty good outcome.
What? No, I'm not saying we should discard pseudoscientific theories without inquiry. I'm saying that after we test them out and find them to be bullshit, as has been done hundreds of times for electromagnetic sensitivity, we should use these findings aggressively to make decisions rather than allowing rumor and intuition as equally valid forms of evidence.
See, this is why you can't give pseudoscience an inch. Every little success validates it in the eyes of its own practitioners, and legitimizes it in the eyes of the public, until society tumbles down the rabbit hole of paranoia and irrational fear of the harmless on one hand, and blind trust in actually harmful practices on the other hand.
Yes, for everyday use. I've decided that protecting your privacy while working with a search engine is like maintaining anonymity with your pharmacist. The system makes it practically impossible, and there are some real advantages to the personalized help you can get by granting it your trust. Which isn't to say your trust should be blind: you should pick your pharmacist and your search engine carefully, and keep an eye out for weird behavior, but in the end, they're inevitably going to learn something about you.
Or another way to put it: those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither, but giving up a little privacy to get an essential service is a trade worth considering.
Ray, when Google asks you if you're up for a challenge, you say YES!
I got invited into Google Foobar last winter, pretty much an identical experience to what's written in the article. I love my job as a college physics professor, so I didn't go for the "recruitme" command when it appeared, but it was a really fun brain-stretcher. I got through eight of 'em before work caught up with me and I ran out of free time to work on a really hard one.
I won't spoil the puzzles, but they require working skills in discrete math, logic, data structures, algorithms, and cryptography, and the easiest ones are about at the limit of what I'd be comfortable asking an undergraduate to solve. They're all a lot of fun, in a nerd sniping kind of way. And I really liked that none of them relied on arcane knowledge of fiddly trivia, all it takes is high school math/CS and tons of brainpower.
Rumor has it the selection process happens through your Google search history over a long period of time, so you're not going to be able to just spam Python jargon at the search engine and get in tomorrow. But if you do get an invite, drop what you're doing and accept it!
I was really disappointed that when the semester ended and I had time to go back to Google Foobar, I was locked out. Sure, I failed a puzzle, so the rules say it's game over, but I'd really love to take a crack at more of them just for fun. Maybe someday I'll get another invite.
Genius!
Not a problem. We know how much CO2 is going to come out of a ton of oil or coal, and we know how much a molecule of CFC blocks infrared compared to CO2. Basic physics and chemistry, all you need to do is monitor and tax the inputs into your economy, and there's so much of it it's impossible to hide.
That's why I said you need to combine this with a tariff on goods imported from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax. That jacks up the price until it matches the cost of production in Carbontaxland, so there's no benefit to offshoring.
Frankly, we have the technology already. The only reason renewable energy struggles to compete with fossil fuels is that fossil fuel users don't have to pay the cost of the environmental damage it causes. It's cheaper because it's robbing us all. A fossil fuel tax is all about making this external cost an internal one that consumers pay, rather than their grandchildren.
This article singles out Russia and Ukraine, but a larger issue is CFC-23, a nasty greenhouse gas. It's a chemical byproduct which Chinese and Indian companies are deliberately producing in order to destroy, because the cause the credits for destroying the byproduct are worth five times the value of stuff they're nominally trying to make.
The article mentions this, but doesn't mention that CFC-23 fraud supplies HALF of all the carbon emissions credits sold on the European market.
The cheating problem is a big part of why I favor a straight up carbon tax rather than trying to get fancy with incentives and credits. Place a flat tax per ton CO2e on companies which generate or import fossil fuels or CFCs. They will pass this cost on to customers, making goods that require lots of fossil fuels cost more, so the market will determine which emissions reductions strategies are most cost-effective. You can return the tax money to the people via lower income or payroll taxes, use it to reduce the deficit, or use it to pay for green infrastructure, I don't care. One more element is needed to make this work: you need import tariffs on manufactured goods coming in from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax. Otherwise countries that "offshore" their emissions will have an advantage.
In addition to being simpler and harder to cheat, this system is preferable from a "big gubmint is evil" perspective. Conservatives don't want a massive government bureaucracy inspecting every element of the supply chain, making sure the incentives are properly spent and the credits fairly earned, and neither do I. I just want to use their worst enemy, taxes, to make their best friend, capitalism, work to help the planet. Put a green thumb on Adam Smith's invisible hand.
I'm a free-market environmentalist. I say we need to stop hoping that greed will go away, or worse pretending it doesn't exist, and start using it as a tool.
The same website that was pushing the "F-35 defeated by F-16 in dogfight" story that hit Slashdot a few weeks ago took another look in a maybe more appropriate wargaming scenario. This is an off-the-shelf commercial software simulation done by dedicated non-government folks based on educated guesses about classified aircraft, so I wouldn't dream of saying it's a realistic simulation, but it does show you a different view of the F-35.
From the enemy fighter's perspective, you're cruising around looking for trouble, and the first sign of it you see is incoming long-range missiles. Your amazing maneuverability comes in to play as you try to dodge hypersonic missiles, but in the end you and all your friends get blown up before the F-35s appear on your radar screen. Through countless simulations, the Russian jets were invariably wiped out with negligible losses on the American side.
Like I said, that's not the real world. But it demonstrates that comparing the maneuverability of a stealth aircraft against a non-stealth fighter is kind of an empty hypothetical.
No, this is a small stealthy bomber that can defend itself pretty well if someone manages to spot it.
If the NSA really were monitoring that closely, they'd have identified every ISIS sympathizer and rounded 'em all up long before they got to my friend, and the con artist reward would be unnecessary.
Likewise if they were able to find my friend through the financial system based on his money order, ISIS would respond by doing business strictly in untraceable cash, and so there'd be no way for me to prove that I'd conned ISIS, and so the con artist reward would be useless.
So whichever way you slice it, this scam artist reward scheme is either useless or open to abuse.
I wish I could vote for the real Al Gore.
Yeah, because nobody in the history of warfare ever misused a letter of marque.
... Okay, so I get a friend in Saudi Arabia to send me a money order, marked: "for travel to the Islamic State, Allahu akbar". I show it to the US government, they pay me a reward, I split it with my friend.
That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure a real con artist could do better. The problem with doing business with con artists is that they're con artists.
"Currently Quantum Computers Might Be Where Rockets Were At the Time of Goddard"
Designed on totally incorrect physics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The true revolutionaries of rocket propulsion all have German last names.
Yeah, it's tough to grade providers on their overall success because so much depends on factors outside the hospital. But grading them based on conditions the patient acquires *in* the hospital is legit.
Another modification to the grading system: in addition to counting patients who die after surgery, also count patients the surgeon refuses to operate on as a fractional failure. That way a doctor who takes thoughtful risks and loses a few can compete against a doctor who passes up all but the safest patients.
It's easy to say "treatment at all costs is stupid", but it's a lot harder to do when your own mom is dying of cancer. I'm impressed at your realistic perspective. My own mother's doctors were quite frank about her chances given further treatment, but her problem was much more acute than cancer.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and say that maybe this isn't a problem. Doctors are getting downgraded for choosing to perform risky surgeries, but maybe that's a poor decision on their part: perhaps they should be seeking safer solutions, or suggesting that patients might want to make the best of the time they have rather than dying on the operating table. And that's not even to mention the cost of risky failed surgery.
Hopefully there's an exemption for truly experimental procedures, or medical progress will slow to a crawl, but one could argue that all things considered, medicine could use a little more caution in choosing surgery.
The FAA can take jurisdiction on this and work with the FCC to set some pretty reasonable rules that would solve this problem. Pretty much all modern R/C hobby aircraft operate on the same 2.4 Ghz spread-spectrum protocol. These aren't just passive AM/FM systems, they have microprocessors in them. The gubmint could designate an emergency 2.4 Ghz radio transmission, and require commercially-made drones sold in the US to respond to it by beginning a controlled descent. General-purpose R/C systems used for build-your-own aircraft would respond by lowering the throttle servo to near-idle.
So the fire department pushes a button, and all the drones slowly descend to the ground. If yours lands in a lake, well, serves you right for operating a drone in an emergency area. Of course, the emergency transmission can't be secret, so you pass a little law making unauthorized sale or operation of an emergency drone-crash beacon a crime.
It's basically the same idea as the traffic signal pre-emption devices that let fire trucks get a green light whenever they need it. There's even a law covering unauthorized sale of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
The US has a similar plan, the EB-5 visa program, but you only need to invest $1 million to get your green card.
I say, if we're going to let people bribe their way to the front of the immigration line, we should get top dollar for it. $15 million sounds about right, plus $2 million paid directly to the government, and used to hire more immigration workers to clear the ludicrous immigration backlog for everyone else.
*Especially* since a good chunk of those buying green cards are Chinese businessmen and government officials fleeing corruption charges in China: if we're going to be complicit in fraud, I want a bigger piece of the action.
Oh, and by the way, ever notice that Americans who're furious about people "skipping the line" in the immigration process never complain about this program? Seriously the only mention I can find over on Fox News is concern that Mexicans are doing it, despite the fact that for every Mexican EB-5 visa applicant, there are 200 Chinese.
I teach physics at a liberal arts college, I am totally on board with exposing students to cross-disciplinary ideas that go against accepted norms. So as I'm reading through the syllabus, I'm fine with things like this:
Sure, no problem, let's do a compare-and-contrast, it's popular enough that we need to be familiar with it whether we think it's baloney or not, and considerations of how states of mind affect states of health are real and useful. But then we hit page 2:
No. The author has no idea what quantum physics is, and is using it as a magic wand made of pure bullshit. Uttering the phrase "quantum physics" is, of course, a pretty common and cliched way to sound impressive without knowing anything, but it demonstrates that the "honest intellectual inquiry" thing is just a disguise, and the professor is here to sell snake oil.
Get the hell out of my ivory tower.