What the hell does this guy think he's talking about? The article is interesting but "designer babies"? "The fabric of reality"? Where do you people get this stuff?
Apparently, from the scientists he interviewed. One of them is quoted as saying that he had the electrons moving around in a massless state at the speed of light. That qualifies as changing the fabric of reality.
Or maybe just the fabric of fantasy. It's easy to see how somebody with no science education could see it that way if he's being fed such inaccurate statements by a reputable scientist.
More like bullshit, or at best wild overstatement of what they did.
The article epitomizes what's wrong with science reporting. You either have a scientist talking to a complete ignoramus who is totally unable to understand what it is that the scientist is describing, or you have the even worse situation of a scientist who knows the reporter is completely ignorant and dumbs down his explanation to a TV science-fiction level or makes completely false claims in order to grab headlines.
"The behavior of electrons in materials is at the heart of essentially all of today's technologies," said Hari Manoharan, associate professor of physics at Stanford and a member of SLAC's Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, who led the research. "We're now able to tune the fundamental properties of electrons so they behave in ways rarely seen in ordinary materials."
Manoharan claims that they can tune the fundamental properties of electrons. And he apparently said he made electrons think.
Well it turns out that if the author's article isn't misquoting Manoharan, he actually did claim that the electrons had no mass and were moving at the speed of light. That would be a huge scientific breakthrough if it were true.
I guess they must have because as an associate professor of physics at Standford, this guy ought to be able to know what the fundamental properties of electrons are. And as any sort of professor at all, he ought to be able to accurately describe his research even to a non-science writer. And the non-science writer might have taken the trouble to point out that if there were massless particles moving at the speed of light, they wouldn't have been on the surface of the copper wafer very long while the scientists tinkered with their fundamental properties.
But then he goes on to describe things that have fuck-all to do with changing he properties of electrons. What they did is made an arrangement of ATOMS that has an arrangement of electrons similar to that of graphene, and it behaves a lot like graphene, and they made some other interesting synthetic strutures. Good for them. This could be a step toward making a new class of exotic materials for special purposes. (But if you want, graphene properties, I'm sure it's cheaper to use real graphene.)
Reading a book aloud is copying the copyrighted material. Should it be legal to buy a book, record yourself reading it, and sell that on a CD? Perhaps you will say yes, but plenty of people will say no. As for the story, this should be legal not because it isn't copying, but because copyright shouldn't restrict all forms of copying.
If you RECORD it you are making a copy. If you read it aloud, where is the copy?
There's nothing wrong with knowing who your friends are and which they aren't or at least who you don't know are likely to vote for you. The only wrong is attempting to interfere with their right to vote. The penalty for that should be severe prison sentences.
Science can establish an upper bound on any claim you care to make.
It can't disprove existence claims. If you claim somebody somewhere has a psychic ability, that's easy to dismiss because no evidence is advanced, but can't be disproved.
But if you make a specific claim such as I can transmit my thoughts to my assistant in another room using ESP, that can be statistically proven or disproved.
"We know from lots of studies and lots of data now that violent criminals very often begin their careers as nonviolent criminals. And the earlier you can get a nonviolent criminal's DNA in the data bank, the higher your chances are of apprehending the right person.'"
Where's the probable cause? Oh, hell, let's just forget that whole 4th Amendment thing. It's inconvenient.
Lots of people start out using fake ID to enter a bar and later escalate to becoming a college graduate, a parent, and a productive member of society.
It's an interesting coincidence that I had a conversation just today with my company's software engineering manager. His observation was that most people including software engineers are wrong most of the time about what's making their code run inefficiently. It's easy to imagine that you have a scrap of slow code deeply embedded in your process that is bogging everything down, or that there's nothing wrong with the method, you're just running Python and Python is not as fast as C -- or assembly.
He said that most of the time, what he found based on the evidence was that slow code was slow because it was doing something the programmer hadn't thought carefully about, like causing unnecessary swaps or having a wait where there shouldn't be one. Rarely did it turn out to be the language at fault.
But I can see how it might be frequently characterized by the language, given that we all *know* Python is slower than C. But if I went into that inner loop and recoded it in C and made it so much faster, I won't bother to mention the extra steps I found inside the loop that should have been outside, one of which was a system call.. No, it's the LANGUAGE, not the fact that I could have made it run four times as fast in Python and that would have been fast enough.
There's always the question of how fast is fast enough. If it takes me 40 hours to crunch my code, fix it and retest it and that cost the company $4000, I better be chasing a more-than-$4000 problem. And it better not be keeping me from chasing down a $20000 problem.
That only made it all the worse for me. As an engineering major, I had no reference points to judge what a minimum passing level of effort WAS in an upper division history course. So I had to read until my eyes bled for fear that I wasn't reading enough, or understanding enough or remembering enough.
I think I ended up pulling a high C, and everybody always knew more than me whenever they spoke up in class. It was humbling. I think something like that experience should be required for engineers, because I meet a lot of them who have obviously never had an experience where they didn't think they were the smartest guy in the room.
I assume that's relative, but even so it's still very large considering the relative scale of the universe and the fact that we can easily measure frequency to 1 part in 10^10.
That result is interesting but if the variation of h across Earth's orbit court be as high as 0.007, it could on principle be much greater across much.larger scales. Is it the same at the center of the galaxy? In other galactic clusters? Over billions of years? The conditions of measurement were very small compared to those scales.
We can measure frequency with much more precision than anything else. I'm surprised their upper bound is so high.
And older gamers may be a more filtered population. Those who still game at 30 don't include those who always sucked. Poorer strategists and people who are slow probably lose more and quit before they reach the older gamer category. Its not as fun if you mostly lose.
Slashdot Mirror
Read they article. They already claim to have done that. Massless electrons moving at the speed of light!
What the hell does this guy think he's talking about? The article is interesting but "designer babies"? "The fabric of reality"? Where do you people get this stuff?
Apparently, from the scientists he interviewed. One of them is quoted as saying that he had the electrons moving around in a massless state at the speed of light. That qualifies as changing the fabric of reality.
Or maybe just the fabric of fantasy. It's easy to see how somebody with no science education could see it that way if he's being fed such inaccurate statements by a reputable scientist.
More like bullshit, or at best wild overstatement of what they did.
The article epitomizes what's wrong with science reporting. You either have a scientist talking to a complete ignoramus who is totally unable to understand what it is that the scientist is describing, or you have the even worse situation of a scientist who knows the reporter is completely ignorant and dumbs down his explanation to a TV science-fiction level or makes completely false claims in order to grab headlines.
"The behavior of electrons in materials is at the heart of essentially all of today's technologies," said Hari Manoharan, associate professor of physics at Stanford and a member of SLAC's Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, who led the research. "We're now able to tune the fundamental properties of electrons so they behave in ways rarely seen in ordinary materials."
Manoharan claims that they can tune the fundamental properties of electrons. And he apparently said he made electrons think.
Well it turns out that if the author's article isn't misquoting Manoharan, he actually did claim that the electrons had no mass and were moving at the speed of light. That would be a huge scientific breakthrough if it were true.
I guess they must have because as an associate professor of physics at Standford, this guy ought to be able to know what the fundamental properties of electrons are. And as any sort of professor at all, he ought to be able to accurately describe his research even to a non-science writer. And the non-science writer might have taken the trouble to point out that if there were massless particles moving at the speed of light, they wouldn't have been on the surface of the copper wafer very long while the scientists tinkered with their fundamental properties.
But then he goes on to describe things that have fuck-all to do with changing he properties of electrons. What they did is made an arrangement of ATOMS that has an arrangement of electrons similar to that of graphene, and it behaves a lot like graphene, and they made some other interesting synthetic strutures. Good for them. This could be a step toward making a new class of exotic materials for special purposes. (But if you want, graphene properties, I'm sure it's cheaper to use real graphene.)
The purpose of civil courts it to compensate people who are harmed by the actions of others.
The purpose of CRIMINAL courts is to punish the guilty.
Reading a book aloud is copying the copyrighted material. Should it be legal to buy a book, record yourself reading it, and sell that on a CD? Perhaps you will say yes, but plenty of people will say no. As for the story, this should be legal not because it isn't copying, but because copyright shouldn't restrict all forms of copying.
If you RECORD it you are making a copy. If you read it aloud, where is the copy?
Yeah, something like that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_decision_support_system
Obviously you missed my use of the word "our."
Why should I ever opt in to a class action if the lawyers are going to get all the money?
Why not just pass a law? 1984 was years ago. It's way past time to make it a crime to turn off the TV.
The law needs to be modified so that COPYRIGHT only controls the RIGHT to COPY the copyrighted material.
Anything else you want to do with your LEGAL COPY of a copyrighted material should be unrestricted.
Would be Wii Sports tennis game.
Or if they can make a kinnect responsive enough.
There's nothing wrong with knowing who your friends are and which they aren't or at least who you don't know are likely to vote for you. The only wrong is attempting to interfere with their right to vote. The penalty for that should be severe prison sentences.
Science can establish an upper bound on any claim you care to make.
It can't disprove existence claims. If you claim somebody somewhere has a psychic ability, that's easy to dismiss because no evidence is advanced, but can't be disproved.
But if you make a specific claim such as I can transmit my thoughts to my assistant in another room using ESP, that can be statistically proven or disproved.
Biologists too. They'd be interested in demonstrating the unknown biological mechanism that makes the new sense work.
I think what's needed is a cap on the fraction of a class action settlement or judgment that can go to attorney costs.
"We know from lots of studies and lots of data now that violent criminals very often begin their careers as nonviolent criminals. And the earlier you can get a nonviolent criminal's DNA in the data bank, the higher your chances are of apprehending the right person.'"
Where's the probable cause? Oh, hell, let's just forget that whole 4th Amendment thing. It's inconvenient.
Lots of people start out using fake ID to enter a bar and later escalate to becoming a college graduate, a parent, and a productive member of society.
(Yes, you can be all three!)
Tweak the hair-growth and tusk-growth genes on an Indian elephant and it will be close enough.
It's an interesting coincidence that I had a conversation just today with my company's software engineering manager. His observation was that most people including software engineers are wrong most of the time about what's making their code run inefficiently. It's easy to imagine that you have a scrap of slow code deeply embedded in your process that is bogging everything down, or that there's nothing wrong with the method, you're just running Python and Python is not as fast as C -- or assembly.
He said that most of the time, what he found based on the evidence was that slow code was slow because it was doing something the programmer hadn't thought carefully about, like causing unnecessary swaps or having a wait where there shouldn't be one. Rarely did it turn out to be the language at fault.
But I can see how it might be frequently characterized by the language, given that we all *know* Python is slower than C. But if I went into that inner loop and recoded it in C and made it so much faster, I won't bother to mention the extra steps I found inside the loop that should have been outside, one of which was a system call.. No, it's the LANGUAGE, not the fact that I could have made it run four times as fast in Python and that would have been fast enough.
There's always the question of how fast is fast enough. If it takes me 40 hours to crunch my code, fix it and retest it and that cost the company $4000, I better be chasing a more-than-$4000 problem. And it better not be keeping me from chasing down a $20000 problem.
That only made it all the worse for me. As an engineering major, I had no reference points to judge what a minimum passing level of effort WAS in an upper division history course. So I had to read until my eyes bled for fear that I wasn't reading enough, or understanding enough or remembering enough.
I think I ended up pulling a high C, and everybody always knew more than me whenever they spoke up in class. It was humbling. I think something like that experience should be required for engineers, because I meet a lot of them who have obviously never had an experience where they didn't think they were the smartest guy in the room.
Writing always comes after agriculture. People who don't farm don't have a need to write.
Well, I can write and I'm not a farmer, so where does that leave your argument, eh? Nowhere, that's where.
You didn't write that because you NEEDED to.
I think you understood that I was referring to cultures rather than individuals.
I assume that's relative, but even so it's still very large considering the relative scale of the universe and the fact that we can easily measure frequency to 1 part in 10^10.
That result is interesting but if the variation of h across Earth's orbit court be as high as 0.007, it could on principle be much greater across much.larger scales. Is it the same at the center of the galaxy? In other galactic clusters? Over billions of years? The conditions of measurement were very small compared to those scales.
We can measure frequency with much more precision than anything else. I'm surprised their upper bound is so high.
No. Bit if you know everything you hav is free software you have an increased confidence in telling them to piss off.
Instead of consult your doctor they'll say consult our computer.
But it's not science yet. The more important findings need to be verified in controlled experiments.
And older gamers may be a more filtered population. Those who still game at 30 don't include those who always sucked. Poorer strategists and people who are slow probably lose more and quit before they reach the older gamer category. Its not as fun if you mostly lose.