They are among the most careful and cautious of entities, for obvious reasons.
I respectfully beg to differ. Newspapers have a vested interest in throwing caution to the wind and reporting every tidbit of relevant information that crosses their desks. If they don't, their competitors will, and they will sell less ad space as a consequence. While I will be the first to say that they serve a necessary and critical function in American society, let us not give them more credit here than they deserve. Their only real incentive is for credibility, and not responsibility, in handling sensitive information. Credibility helps them to sell more newspapers, whereas responsibility in dealing with sensitive or classified information may cause them to sell fewer.
There's another very disturbing aspect to your attitude. Govts. have often used impressionable ideas [sic] such as yours...
Let's stop for a moment with your assumptions about my attitudes (and I'll refrain from characterizing you as a pie-in-the-sky "the newspapers are altruistic servants of the people" idealist), and let's discuss the point I originally made: Does the NYTimes (and the popular press in general) act responsibly when dealing with classified, confidential, or otherwise sensitive information? I would argue that they do not, and this is a systemic problem with the news business. A newspaper, news magazine, news web site, or television or radio news program that does not sell ad space does not exist for long. This leads to an obvious conflict of interest when dealing with sensitive information, and it has led to instances of irresponsibility such as the one reported here.
It's always scary when people demand a crackdown on the press, on the grounds that it might reveal too much.
This is not a call for a "crackdown on the press," but rather an investigation of the felony offense of leaking classified information to individuals who should not have access, even if that person wears a press badge. We seem to call for people's heads when it is, say, Los Alamos National Laboratory employees, but yet we don't pursue with the same vigor other organizations who are guilty of the same thing.
In my mind, the issue of whether over-classification of information to prevent embarrassment of the government (an activity that I acknowledge certainly takes place, and that I am very much opposed to) is separate from the issue of whether the secret or top secret information should be in the hands of the press in the first place. Newspapers should be reporting the news, not making it, and when they leak sensitive information to the public they are guilty of the latter.
Many of the arguments on here have followed the lines of "The information is very old. Therefore it cannot be of any importance anymore, and no harm can result from releasing it to the public." These arguments miss the point, however, that the U.S. press is, perhaps unintentionally, one of the single most pervasive and irresponsible agents for foreign intelligence. They routinely violate people's civil rights by interfering with their right to a fair trial, they endanger national security by releasing classified information to the public, they interfere with ongoing investigations, and they place U.S. and U.N. soldiers and their missions in jeopardy by their aggressive reporting of active military operations. This is another in a long string of security mishaps perpetrated by the press, yet the only reason it constitutes news here on/. is because of their technical naivete.
The fact remains that the document in question was classified Secret and had no business being published in the first place. (I would argue that if it indeed endangers the lives of agents or their families, as argued by the CIA, then the document should have had a higher classification). What business do they have releasing such a document without ensuring that the sanitized version is indeed sanitized? Does the NYTimes take all appropriate security measures when they deal with such classified information? Do they have a secure perimeter within their confines where classified information is kept away from those without a compelling "need to know?" And just what constitutes a compelling "need to know" among the press--the need to sell a 4x4 ad for Cambell's Chunky Soup or the latest "Big Sale" at Macy's? Am I the only one who is disturbed by how many of our national secrets could be compromised in this manner?
Where is the investigation of the leak? Is the FBI pursuing criminal charges against the NYTimes and its staff as they are with the NEST team at Los Alamos? Why does the Los Alamos National Laboratory suffer daily in the press because some hard drives were misplaced within a secure area, yet when the NYTimes mishandles classified documents (documents with the same level of classification, mind you), then so little is made of the affair?
Has lab-bashing become so fashionable that we don blinders whenever larger security issues surface in the vaunted press? Enquiring minds want to know.
Just curious: have any estimates been made on the frequency with which the smaller, climate-affecting asteroids impact the Earth? What kinds of time scales are we talking about? 10k years? 100k years?
Who the hell leaves nuclear secretes on hard drives just lying around?
Someone did, apparently. Actually, if you go to a weapons laboratory and trek behind the multiple layers of security, badge readers, biometric scanners, you'll likely find many computers just "lying around," some of which may have nuclear secrets on them. This may come as a shock to you, but weapons designers actually use this kind of data in performing their jobs. Being able to use data entails being able to access it. Being able to access it entails having the data be somewhat more vulnerable than if it all sat in a sealed concrete bunker with 3 divisions of infantry guarding it. This is the nature of the game--the best you can hope for is to hire qualified people and to have .
The data is probably copied. The damage is done. Who's the spy?
Don't jump to conclusions. No evidence has been released that suggests that espionage is in any way related to the drives' disappearance. More plausible scenarios are that someone made an honest mistake in misplacing the drives, or possibly that someone feared losing their job and being prosecuted aggressively by an FBI all too eager to assume the worst of someone. Just ask Wen Ho Lee the price of cooperation with the FBI when someone has a political axe to grind.
pletonium
It's playdonium. It comes in many bright colors, tastes salty, and can be molded into most any shape you like--even rockets and bombs. Look for it in the toy section of Walmart.
Religion and belief in god is an irrational belief with no basis whatsoever, for weak minded people...
Yes! Another Jesse "The Mind" Ventura devotee. But seriously, the question of religion, in my mind, is not whether the tenets of the church are literally true (as almost all assuredly aren't [assonance]), but rather whether religion may lead to a fortuitous and consistent worldview. (This condition is rather complicated since the meaning of "fortuitous" would be derived in part from this worldview, making for a nonlinear problem). To take Christianity as an example, even if I knew with certainty that the Jesus myth were untrue, would I be derelict in using the Christian credo as a basis for my moral system? This is a much more difficult question to answer, and it is more signifiant than whether a Jesus existed as a historical figure.
Many smart folk have questioned whether science alone can serve as the basis of a worldview; a large fraction have argued that it cannot. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that while science can make a decent stab at telling us how the world works, it doesn't explain anything of importance. He wrote that science was best used as a tool for acquiring power over the world, and not a system for deriving meaning from the world. His counterchallenge for science was to develop an instrument to measure the quality of musical composition.
While I agree that science is darned cool (I myself am a physicist), alone it is ill-suited to answering questions of meaning and substance. One must either step outside the system to consider morality, or else one embraces nihilism de facto. Perhaps you should consider following some of Nietzsche's work since the two of you agree on much: He, like you, believed "God is dead" and that irrespective of the veracity of the Christian myth, Christian morality is itself a heinous evil in part because it mandates subjugation of the spirit. (I find he walks too close to radical relativism for my palate, though. Your milage may vary).
Fit yourself for a perspectivist hat, Doug Neal. They are quite fashionable this year, especially with pumps and earthtones.
I added a few more exclamation marks to your subject heading--I gather that every 6 marks is worth a moderation point.
I knew this the moment I knew quasars were thought of as large black holes. It's quite simple and logical.
You would have been an excellent student of Aristotle.
In modern science one generally requires convincing evidence before incorporating a hypothesis into one's worldview. Even then, alternative hypotheses are admissible provided they also explain the data. (One simply holds both to be "possibly true" and one waits for an experiment or observation that disproves one or the other hypothesis). Disproving a competing theory--such as, for instance, evidence that disproves the notion of quasars as enormous starbursts--does not necessarily prove a theory (in this case, big vociferous black holes that gobble everything that comes near).
I knew this ages ago. C'mon. This ain't news:) Although the concrete evidence may be the news here, the concept is not.
By that token, if someone proved the existence of a Creator figure you would consider it to be not newsworthy as well, since the concept itself is far from new.
I suspect that you and I disagree on the meaning of the words "to know." Just because it is printed in a book does not necessarily make it true. (I should know--I've written a book where some of my speculation has since been disproved.:) Physics would be so much easier to do if it weren't for those pesky observations and experiments...).
Another is how Fry's (the electronics store) went after "frys.com". IIRC, frys.com was owned by a company involved in making some kind of food product; the company had been in existence for a number of years before the lawsuit was brought against them, but I guess since Fry's Electronics sells Fritos in their abysmally long checkout lines they must have felt stiff competition and a need to protect their trademark.
Has anyone heard what became of this fight? (The page at frys.com describing the legal battle has since been removed).
Most of the matter in galaxies is found not in the stars, but in the gas between the stars (stars are rather like dust grains in water), which leads one to wonder whether standard hydro simulations may model these system more faithfully anyway for most purposes.
The recursive algorithm you described isn't the only particle-in-cell (PIC) game in town, incidentally. Perhaps the PIC techniques used in plasma simulations could be useful here? Plasma PIC simulations routinely model one or more conducting fluids with hundreds of millions of mutually interacting particles, often with comparable (in the case of electrostatic codes) or more complicated mutual interactions (in electromagnetic codes) than the blobs of gravitationally attracting fluids exhibit. (Instead of Newton's force law, in plasma media one solves Maxwell's equations to obtain the electric and magnetic fields, and then the particles are advanced in time using the Lorentz force). One thing that has resulted from this research is an understanding that in many parameter regimes of interest the "nearest-neighbor" interactions are less important than the collective effects, so smearing out individual particles into spatially extended blobs of superparticles can be a very reasonable approximation.
Well said. Even more accurate might be to suggest to the author, "Ask us this question after your manuscript has been rejected by two dozen publishers and you know it'll never see the light of day." Most first (and second, and third...) novels never get published.
Do these experiments redefine physics as we know it?
Not really. Superluminal evanescent waves have been demonstrated in tunneling experiments in both the optical and microwave frequency ranges. (I know of papers in the early 90s that demonstrate this--Steinberg et al., and also Enders and Nimtz). It's likely not Nobel prizewinning stuff since it's not that profound yet. One can find valid solutions to Maxwell's equations where "something" travels faster than c. To my admittedly limited knowledge (while I am a scientist with a Ph.D. in physics, I am not a specialist in these types of experiments), to date nobody has demonstrated how one can use this effect to transmit information faster than c.
If it is published in a non-scientific journal before the scientific community notices it, a "discovery" usually isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Agreed. I'd suggest you read the very interesting recent article Mugnai et al., May 22, 2000 Physical Review Letters, v.84, pages 4830-4. My casual reading suggests to me that their work is legit, and they do observe superluminal signals with their devices.
...but failed to notice the difference between group speed and phase speed of the light
The work I referenced above is interesting in that it is performed with microwaves in a dispersionless medium, so the two speeds are equivalent.
Hey, all right! Can anyone think of some more purely scientific endeavors that can be ruined be corporate involvement/takeover? I'm going IPO with my new business to sell print ads in elementary school textbooks. Maybe we can start selling ad space on artificial limbs?
For what it's worth, elementary school textbooks are not purely scientific endeavors, nor are artificial limbs. For that matter, neither is the ISS--science is rather low on its priority list, in fact. The ISS was born out of Cold War politicking in the Reagan era and, as far as I can tell, has more symbolic than commercial value.
Many scientists have argued against the ISS by stating that few advances in basic science can be anticipated from conducting experiments in low earth orbit (LEO) on the ISS that couldn't be learned from shuttle launches. While I'm personally a bit more open-minded about the possibilities for genuine discoveries aboard such a spacecraft, science remains of only secondary interest.
Amateur science is becoming the only real science. Now if only we can figure out a way to expropriate some superconducters...
Some things simply cannot be done easily with amateur science, although fabricating high-Tc superconductors is one of those things that can be done on a budget. Furthermore, if you do not want to roll your own, then for a modest price you can purchase high-Tc superconductors from a vendor. Liquid nitrogen is also very cheap. Enjoy!
This post is a joke, right? (Sometimes I'm slow in recognizing net humor). For fun, let's pretend you were serious:
NOBODY should have the power to develop nuclear weapons!
You're six decades too late, I'm afraid. The Germans began developing nuclear weapons in the late 1930s, and the U.S. and U.K. and U.S.S.R. started very soon afterwards.
I'll play devil's advocate and argue that the half century of relative peace in the world among the superpowers (no instances of "total war") is a direct result of deterrance. I know this will be hard for you to swallow, but in the context of preventing conflict nuclear weapons have actually saved lives and have reduced human suffering.
Now stop living in the dream world, Neo, and come to the real world. Nuclear weapons exist. Many nations have them. Many nations want them. No nation (except South Africa) has ever willingly dismantled and destroyed its entire stockpile. Talk of love and peace and "let's all hold hands and sing" is quaintly antiquated, and not even a remotely practical way to solve the problem.
...the whole concept of war is completely fucking STUPID!!!
You remind me of some of my former students, "Our having to learn this electromagnetic theory is stupid!" They didn't persuade me then, and I'm afraid that you don't persuade me now.
Clauswitz wrote of war that the threat of war and the resolve to go to war to settle a conflict is vital to a nation's being able to conduct foreign policy. I suggest you get used to the concept of war; it has been around for a very long time, and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
I think you would find that most citizens of ANY country would prefer to have peaceful relations with other countries than be at war.
The United Nations, arguably the largest representitive body in the world, continually sends out troops to "keep the peace" in places. Sometimes "keeping the peace" results in wars being fought by these same troops. I would argue that sometimes when the cause is sufficiently important most people would prefer war to passivity. To say "let's all get along with one another and not fight" is impractical when the opposing side does not share the same distaste for conflict, or when the cost of human suffering resulting from not fighting is too great.
...if people weren't so filled with hatred for fellow man, and had compassion and love, then this world would be a better place.
Agreed. Now just how do you intend to carry this out? (And what exactly does this have to do with stopping Hitler?) Again, I suggest you take a good look at the world as it is rather than as you want it to be. You would be surprised at just how nasty people can be towards one another.
Oh, and in case you couldnt tell, I believe the open source idea should be applied to everything.
Then I hope that you and your family are among the first to suffer once "Anthrax Incubation for Dummies" and "An Idiot's Guide to Saren" kits are sold over the internet.
While the US can pretend to its citizens that it is somehow different from Iraq, its own actions frequently force the rest of the world to remain unconvinced.
Perhaps I misunderstood your post. Upon rereading it I get the impression that when you wrote that you (and, according to you, the rest of the world) consider the U.S. to be roughly equivalent to Iraq in terms of its use of weapons of mass destruction. Is this the point you were trying to make? After a list of questionable activities of the U.S. government, you compare the United States' activities with Iraq's, a state that has used chemical and biological weapons on its own people (as well as on Iran during the Iraq-Iran war). If this isn't bashing, it's at the very least an unfair comparison, one that deserved some attention IMO.
The U.S. nuclear stockpile is safer than almost any other present-day stockpile. (The likely exception being China's).
Don't become yet another person whose response to anything that fails to glorify the USA is a kneejerk assumption of anti-americanism on behalf of the writer. That's an irrational cop-out.
Don't assume that because I object to your comparison that I am some kind of flag-waving zealot, or that I'm even from the U.S. That's also an irrational cop-out. I merely was pointing out that controlling the information that facilitates construction of weapons of mass destruction is the prudent thing to do; one's feelings towards the nations with the capacity are immaterial. This has nothing to do with whether or not you agree with the policies of the nations who have nuclear weapons. It has nothing to do with the right or wrong of developing or using nuclear weapons in the past, the moral dilemma of spending large amounts of tax dollars on the unpopular task of safeguarding the U.S. nuclear capacity, on the ethical problems associated with advocating disarmament in one breath and talking SDI development and resuming testing in the next, on being slow to ratify or carry out any treaty unless it gives the U.S. a strategic edge. This has nothing to do with anything, really, except the cold hard fact that the fewer nations with the capability of waging nuclear war the smaller the chance that an accident can occur or that some loose-reined fool like "bombs away LeMay" could intiate nuclear aggression.
You and I are probably in agreement here. You wanted to make a point, and so did I, and I think we both agree with each others' points. My apologies if I misunderstood your original post.
(Truth be told, perhaps the most responsible nation in terms of nuclear weapons is South Africa; they are the only nation to have developed and tested nuclear weapons and then willingly relinquished this capability. Of course, since saying anything positive about South Africa is politically incorrect I think I'll stop here).
I also concede many points in your very thoughtful reply, and I think we both agree that changes to the system would be an improvement. (I, for one, would start with journals that charge exhorbitant page-charge fees! It's not just the end-user who suffers...).
One difficulty with changing the system is that one is left with a "chicken and egg" dilemma. As a personal example, I only read about four or five journals in my research, and I only publish in those same journals. If I want to communicate to people in my field I need to publish in the journals that they read, so unless those journals change their way of doing business, I have little choice but to continue publishing in them.
I applaud the decision in the UK to make this information accessible on the net for free; perhaps convincing the journal publishers to provide low-cost access in public libraries to electronic versions of their journals may be a first step at providing the access you refer to.
Incidentally, in the case of scientific journals anyway, I think that most of what's published is of scant value to any except experts in the field, and these experts generally have access to a university or laboratory library. (I am a physicist, and I lack the background to get much out of at least 80% of Physical Review Letters, as an example). I doubt journal publishers would lose much revenue by providing such a service.
Your impassioned diatribe is largely irrelevant in the discussion at hand. Regardless of the activities of the U.S. government, which you may or may not agree with, protecting nuclear secrets is not only prudent, it is the morally correct thing to do.
An organization requires three things to develop a nuclear capacity: 1) The technical expertise and knowledge of how to develop nuclear weapons, 2) the raw materials, and 3) enough capital to do so. Protecting nuclear secrets falls under item 1). Unless you are so loopy as to believe that the world would be safer if everyone who wanted a nuclear capacity had one, you cannot deny that protecting nuclear weapons secrets is the correct course of action, if even by a nation that you loathe so much.
Our taxes also fund the local fire department, but that doesn't mean they have to give us rides in their big red trucks for free.
I take it by "Free software ethos" you really mean you want journals to be free? Part of the reason academic journals cost so much is because (a) they have a very limited audience, (b) they generally don't sell their space for advertising, and (c) their target audiences, research institutions and universities, can (usually) afford these prices. Subscription rates for individuals, while expensive, are not outrageously so in my opinion for most journals.
If you've ever tried purchasing an esoteric book in the science or mathematics fields, you've probably experienced something similar: a 150-page book may retail for 150$, when the local grocery store hawks pulp fiction by the metric ton. As you identified, it results from their business model: if you are only going to sell a few thousand of something, then a high markup is required in order to make even a modest profit on your work. While I agree that academic books and journals could be cheaper, and they should be so when the distribution costs are lowered due to electronic publishing, I doubt that they could be made completely free without sacrificing quality in the process. Many journals that publish electronically (for example, the Physical Review Letters) offer lower subscription rates for the electronic version of their journals than the paper version.
Incidentally, free electronic journal services do exist, e.g. the Los Alamos e-Print archive at xxx.lanl.gov. One thing you will probably notice is that while many of the articles are outstanding, just as many are "I wiped my nose this morning and decided what I saw on the tissue was publishable so here it is" quality. It's hit-or-miss with these articles sometimes. Standard practice among many disciplines is to archive an early draft of the work on the ePrint archive and then publish the refereed, edited, corrected version in a journal such as the Physical Review....
In this enlightened scenario, there would be very much greater dissemination of the knowledge produced, to the benefit of a very much wider set of users.
...which brings me to my point: High quality, refereed journals that cost money are, in many ways, superior to unfiltered electronic archives precisely because they charge for their services and then in turn use a portion of that money to perform quality control. Part of what one pays for is the process of having experts in the field (hopefully) perusing each article closely to catch mistakes made by the authors or elucidate points the authors left unclear. Editors coordinate the refereeing process, and publishers maintain an infrastructure for ensuring this process happens in a timely manner. As long as people are willing to pay for quality control, then a market will exist for these journals. Electronic publishing can do away with many of the costs of publication and distribution of the information, but I don't see how it can reduce the cost to zero without asking publishers to simply get out of the publishing business altogether.
JESUS CHRIST!!! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Gravity, or big G is constant everywhere, its used in a formula (that I cannot remember) to calculate the gravitational force between any two objects (along with there mass and distance (increases with mass, decreases with distance).
I'm not Jesus Christ, but I'll play.
It should be noted that big G can refer to different things in a gravitational context.
On the one hand is the forumula |F| = G m1 m2 / r^2 that you refer to in your post. m1 and m2 are masses, r is the distance of separation between the masses, F is the force, and G is the constant of proportionality. The direction of the force is such to attract the two bodies towards one another. Each mass feels an equally strong force pulling it toward the other. If there's a whole bunch of mass points, like in the case of Earth where many particles are globbed together, then you sum up each individual mass point to get the total force on a body in Earth's gravitational field. This is Newtonian physics, and it is good enough for most applications.
A somewhat more interesting formula that also uses a big G is that of general relativity: "G = 8 Pi T." Here big G is a second rank tensor that describes the curvature of the spacetime manifold, and big T is a second rank tensor that has as its components the local density of energy and momentum and fluxes of energy and momentum at every point in spacetime. In the most general case, this is a set of coupled nonlinear differential equations, and it is not solvable exactly except for a few special cases. If you work through the math and make the approximation of a low density of matter (which is fine for Earth but bad for black holes) that does not bend spacetime very drastically around it, then you also get the attractive force of gravity occurring through curvature in the space-time manifold. At the center of a spherically symmetric distribution of non-infinite density matter the spacetime manifold is, to leading order, flat (which is trivially the case except at spacetime singularities), and it is also flat to first order corrections, implying that the gravitational force vanishes there. The case of a uniform distribution of matter inside of a radius R can be solved exactly. The case of a nonuniform, yet spherically symmetric, distribution of matter may be expressed in terms of quadratures.
In the article the first big G is the one they measured. (Incidentally, though I'm a physicist I haven't done any GR in ages, so I welcome any corrections in the above from the experts out there).
Re:Perfect strategy for tic-tac-toe
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Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
Move 5 is wrong in your example. X needs to block O at left center, then O blocks X at right center, and from there nobody can force a win.
I think that it's because so many people are armchair physicists. (You have to admit that alot of physics is just plain cool, and it's alot of fun thinking about stuff like relativity and quantum mechanics). Discovery Channel blurbs are great for public exposure of interesting ideas, and speaking as a physicist (IAAP), it is heartening to see more public interest in physics, even if it is "out there" stuff like this.
Perhaps a light-hearted earlier discussion of the social phenomenon may be of interest.
I don't know about you guys but I believe that once someone says that something is possible, it WILL be possible and will be done.
Let me say once for the record that it is possible that every reader of/. will write a check for $1000 (US) payable to the "Help Fund Claudius's Leisure" Fund.
I propose that it WILL be possible when all of/. reads this post and marvels at my rapier acumen.
But then again, I also think the space program hasn't acomplished anything big enough to justify the billions spent on it.
While the average Joe may not give a whit about ephemeral scientific discoveries, he does like his DirectTV.
Permit me, if you will, to disagree with your statement. A healthy space program provides a great number of benefits to society: GPS, weather satellites, communication satellites, and yes, digital TV. These are so integral a part of our lives that we no longer even think of where they came from, yet they follow immediately from the technologies developed in the space program. NASA's Mission to Planet Earth was highly illuminating from an environmental perspective, and it led to great deal of insight into how man affects the global climate. (Too bad their findings were so unpopular with certain powerful lobbying groups in Washington, else their funding probably wouldn't have been axed so earnestly). With solar maximum arriving, an emphasis has been made in understanding the Sun-Earth connection better in order to predict geomagnetic storms reliably. Consider the billions of lost revenue when a single massive blackout occurs or when a handful of expensive spacecraft are incapacitated, and the potential payoffs from this research become apparent. Furthermore, "spinoff" technologies from the space program are commonplace: new materials, advances in computing and computational physics techniques, and advances in manufacturing techniques all have resulted from a space-program impetus.
Another benefit of a healthy space program is how our remote monitoring capabilities allow us to make public policy more effectively. For example, with a combination of satellite observations and ground-based seismic observations, we were able to detect nuclear weapons tests in India and Pakistan recently. Nuclear war is bad for business, and the space program has helped give us the tools to make informed policy decisions related to nuclear weapons.
Many highly successful "pure" scientific missions have been launched by NASA and other space programs: Orbiting and imaging of near-earth asteroids, Jupiter and its moons, Mars, and (in a few years) Saturn. The Voyager mission, the "Energizer Bunny" of spacecraft, still sends back useful data about the outer regions of the heliosphere and heliopause. The Space Telescope has led to an enormous number of discoveries that would be extremely difficult or impossible to have achieved without such a device. The solar wind and heliosphere are becoming much better understood with in situ observations being made by spacecraft such as Ulysses, SOHO, and ACE. The list goes on and on. I've only provided a small sample here.
While we may quibble about the merits of certain programs (the ISS comes to mind), the space program as a whole has, in my mind, performed admirably with the resources we have given them. (Now if you wish to argue about programs that do not justify their cost, Social Security comes to mind...).
b) their use falls under the fair use exemptions in copyright law
I believe the issue here for me is not with/.'s "fair use" per se, but rather with the use of said quotations without appropriately attributing the work to the authors. Where I come from this borders on plagiarism, and as such it may fall outside the bounds of "fair use."
In the past I have had excerpts of essays I have posted to USENET published in newspaper articles. The authors of these articles went to great lengths to identify and contact me prior to publishing my work. (I didn't provide contact information in my posts for anti-spam reasons). I do not know whether they were legally obligated to do, however I appreciated their courtesy in this regard. I think that/. could have done much to dispel ill-will by showing some of the same courtesy to its contributors.
I hope the proceeds to go a good cause.
An executive summary of the "debate."
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Wormholes? Maybe.
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I intend to provide a service to the/. community by summarizing the "debate," if I may be so bold as to characterize it as such, regarding this and every other wormhole-related post:
There are basically four camps, none of which does anything except rehash old articles from the wormhole post the week before, or the week before that, or the week before that, or.... Any semblance of dialogue is illusionary; apparent polite discourse is actually just one person posting under two different names in an attempt to boost his or her Karma.
Group 1:(scientists, people who use fancy science-sounding words and appear moderately intelligent, people who have half a clue what physics is) (a) Yawn. Been there, done that. Aren't we stuck in some kind of closed, time-like loop? (b) 'Welcome to the "Wormhole Theory of the Month" club. Thank you for your kind donation. Now kindly leave your critical thought at the door and let's all group hug. Did I mention we are going to go IPO?' (c) If you can make wormholes, you can violate causality, the second law of thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and Robert's Rules of Order. (d) You can't make a beowulf cluster out of these things.
Group 2:(skeptical laypeople who haven't a clue what the physics is, but are ignorant enough not to realize how little they know, people who try to use big, important-sounding science words but haven't a clue what they mean) This can't work because: (a) Just what the **** is a "closed time-like loop" anyway, you pretentious twerp! (b) relativity is wrong (let me tell you why). (c) Scientists don't know what they are talking about. (d) I saw on the Discovery Channel that this wasn't possible. (e) A beowulf cluster of these things would be lame since there's no Open Source support for wormholes.
Group 3: (agathistic laypeople who haven't a clue what the physics is, but are ignorant enough not to realize how little they know, people who instinctively distrust those who use big, important-sounding science words) (a) He must be right since a few well-known historical figures were right about something and they were told they were wrong. (Of course I'll conveniently forget about the umteen thousands who were told they were wrong and actually turned out to be wrong). (b) How do you KNOW he isn't right? You don't, do you! You can't prove it so shut up and allow ME to speak about something I know nothing about. (c) Wouldn't it be great if this worked? This is just like Star Trek! It's so cool! (d) Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!!!!
Group 4:(trolls, Republicans) (a) JonKatzSux(tm)! (b) OpenSourceSux(tm)! (c) I wonder what would happen if I had a wormhole in my pocket and poured hot grits down my pants. (d) BeowulfClustersSux(tm)!
Anything that cannot be classified into these four groups may safely be moderated down as being "Offtopic."
Your commentary is interesting, albeit heavily laden with the "value judgments" you poopoo so readily. Permit me, if you will, to do a point-by-point of some of the more interesting comments:
I don't presume to know what the original poster meant, but this statement strikes me as being just as value laden.
I never claimed we needed to know the underlying laws, but merely that some underlying order exists in the universe. I think you should reread what I wrote; you will find that my position is far less extreme than the original poster's.
This is an emotional value judgement and therefore irrelevent. The state of your digestive system....
Look who's being snide and sanctimonious now. *smile* I would hope the debate can focus on something more substantial than critiquing my vernacular.
I don't believe you read my post very carefully, depsite your quoting liberally from it. I was hedging, saying in effect "If I were to play the odds, I'd bet against this, but I will reserve final judgment until I hear more of the facts." I even said as much in a following paragraph. To make any stronger claims would be foolish since I haven't seen the data. I never claimed "wrong" or "right," but rather gave a professional opinion with the appropriate qualifying restrictions.
Incidentally, "value-judgments" do have a place in science. If you review the scientific method you will find that step one is "formulate hypothesis," step two is "test said hypothesis." Here's a dirty little secret: A hidden step 1.5 is here, namely choose which hypothesis to test. I can formulate hypotheses until the cows come home. I can do it from my armchair at night drinking brewskies, and I can do it as I walk to work in the morning. I have only limited resources to test hypotheses, however, so I must have some manner of distilling out only the "good" ones to test and ignore the rest. This is the hidden step here, and it requires value judgments on the part of the scientist. You will never separate these value judgments from the process of doing science, but the method itself, if done right, is independent of these values. Physicists I know instinctively perform this distillation process when they hear new ideas. There simply is no other practical way to do science--too much time would be spent chasing chimeras. (More on this in the following paragraph).
Extraordinary claims have a heavier burden of proof than do mundane claims
Once again - an emotional value judgement. The point of importance is...
Piffle. If I walked up to you and announced that gasoline is just saltwater, then you would hold me to a stricter burden of proof than if I walked up and said "It'll rain tomorrow"--even if I went to a gas pump, poured out a glass of the liquid, drank it, and said, "Boy, that was sure salty water". You would still want independent review before you started a company to mine the oceans for gasoline. My comment stands, and after reading some of the other/. posts in this thread, I am convinced that it is indeed an important point even if you are not.
The more radical the claim, the more it shakes up your worldview, the more it opposes most everything you've come to understand about the world, then the more proof you require. This is simple pragmatism; emotions do not enter into it. For a physicist to tear apart his understanding of gravitation and relativity is as big a shock as your discovering that gasoline is well-marketed saltwater.
The solution to this is public education.
Dr. Park has written a book for this very purpose. Its release date is in May if I am not mistaken.
The down turn in science funding is essentially nothing more than an indication of the fact....
"Value-laden" statements are allowed now? I'll venture one of my own in saying that the problem is considerably more complex than your explanation suggests.
...serve no purpose except to convince the public that scientists are all arrogant jerks.
Oh, I think they are already well aware of that. *smile* (Frankly, I feel the same way about IT people, particularly Open Source zealots). A recent article in Science describes the problem most eloquently, and I recomend it to you.
Kindly stick to the facts and leave the preaching to the lunatic fringe.
By all means, just as soon as you convince the rest of/. that they have as little right to state their opinions as I do.
Despite the sometimes caustic tone of your comments, I have enjoyed this give-and-take very much. Perhaps we can do it again sometime.
Re: ... A modest critique of Katz Essays.
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 5
Mr. Katz is not trained in a technical field where saying things precisely is both norm and necessity, but rather he is a journalist. To many journalists precision is secondary to seemingly more lofty goals such as "style" or "sensationalism." Admittedly, Mr. Katz is worse than most in this regard. (Witness all the fuss over his loose use of the word "interactive" in his Oscars aricle). Then again, I would wager that anyone who has read/. for more than a week has divined this already about Mr. Katz and has set his User Preferences accordingly.
My impression is that Mr. Katz believes every jot and tittle he scribes is worthy of/. headlining. He would do much towards increasing his signal-to-noise ratio if he were to write rather than ramble--if he put more effort into the rudaments of communication, e.g. researching elements of his essays and paying some attention to the audience to which he his writing, it would save him from bathing in chagrin as frequently as he does. Journalism is very seldom profound, and in his haste to publish his essays here take on a slapdash, imprecise character that I (and probably most other/.ers) find tiring in articles that promise so much more. I'd love to see Mr. Katz spend 5x as much time on a single essay, put his heart into it, and publish here 0.2x as often. Even the most jaded among us has to admit that sometimes he does have something valuable to say--the difficulty is that these gems are so infrequent.
It would be refreshing and an excellent exercise for Mr. Katz if he were to devote some effort to deconstructing the nature of verbal communication in this increasingly technical society. (That sounds like the name of a Katz article right there...). His essays typify the dichotomy between the technical and the non-technical, the analytic and the artistic, the realist and the impressionist. His writing has the pretense of profound knowledge but the attitude of an outsider, and as a consequence he often conveys to his reader an arrogance typical of those who believe that the non-technically oriented have somehow cornered the market on philosophy. He provokes ire primarily because, at a fundamental level, he underestimates the capaibilities of his audience, and his sloppiness costs him credibility in the long run.
It's sad: in trying to wear the two hats of journalist and philosopher he succeeds at neither, and he really does have some interesting ideas once in awhile.
Slashdot Mirror
They are among the most careful and cautious of entities, for obvious reasons.
I respectfully beg to differ. Newspapers have a vested interest in throwing caution to the wind and reporting every tidbit of relevant information that crosses their desks. If they don't, their competitors will, and they will sell less ad space as a consequence. While I will be the first to say that they serve a necessary and critical function in American society, let us not give them more credit here than they deserve. Their only real incentive is for credibility, and not responsibility, in handling sensitive information. Credibility helps them to sell more newspapers, whereas responsibility in dealing with sensitive or classified information may cause them to sell fewer.
There's another very disturbing aspect to your attitude. Govts. have often used impressionable ideas [sic] such as yours...
Let's stop for a moment with your assumptions about my attitudes (and I'll refrain from characterizing you as a pie-in-the-sky "the newspapers are altruistic servants of the people" idealist), and let's discuss the point I originally made: Does the NYTimes (and the popular press in general) act responsibly when dealing with classified, confidential, or otherwise sensitive information? I would argue that they do not, and this is a systemic problem with the news business. A newspaper, news magazine, news web site, or television or radio news program that does not sell ad space does not exist for long. This leads to an obvious conflict of interest when dealing with sensitive information, and it has led to instances of irresponsibility such as the one reported here.
It's always scary when people demand a crackdown on the press, on the grounds that it might reveal too much.
This is not a call for a "crackdown on the press," but rather an investigation of the felony offense of leaking classified information to individuals who should not have access, even if that person wears a press badge. We seem to call for people's heads when it is, say, Los Alamos National Laboratory employees, but yet we don't pursue with the same vigor other organizations who are guilty of the same thing.
In my mind, the issue of whether over-classification of information to prevent embarrassment of the government (an activity that I acknowledge certainly takes place, and that I am very much opposed to) is separate from the issue of whether the secret or top secret information should be in the hands of the press in the first place. Newspapers should be reporting the news, not making it, and when they leak sensitive information to the public they are guilty of the latter.
Many of the arguments on here have followed the lines of "The information is very old. Therefore it cannot be of any importance anymore, and no harm can result from releasing it to the public." These arguments miss the point, however, that the U.S. press is, perhaps unintentionally, one of the single most pervasive and irresponsible agents for foreign intelligence. They routinely violate people's civil rights by interfering with their right to a fair trial, they endanger national security by releasing classified information to the public, they interfere with ongoing investigations, and they place U.S. and U.N. soldiers and their missions in jeopardy by their aggressive reporting of active military operations. This is another in a long string of security mishaps perpetrated by the press, yet the only reason it constitutes news here on /. is because of their technical naivete.
The fact remains that the document in question was classified Secret and had no business being published in the first place. (I would argue that if it indeed endangers the lives of agents or their families, as argued by the CIA, then the document should have had a higher classification). What business do they have releasing such a document without ensuring that the sanitized version is indeed sanitized? Does the NYTimes take all appropriate security measures when they deal with such classified information? Do they have a secure perimeter within their confines where classified information is kept away from those without a compelling "need to know?" And just what constitutes a compelling "need to know" among the press--the need to sell a 4x4 ad for Cambell's Chunky Soup or the latest "Big Sale" at Macy's? Am I the only one who is disturbed by how many of our national secrets could be compromised in this manner?
Where is the investigation of the leak? Is the FBI pursuing criminal charges against the NYTimes and its staff as they are with the NEST team at Los Alamos? Why does the Los Alamos National Laboratory suffer daily in the press because some hard drives were misplaced within a secure area, yet when the NYTimes mishandles classified documents (documents with the same level of classification, mind you), then so little is made of the affair?
Has lab-bashing become so fashionable that we don blinders whenever larger security issues surface in the vaunted press? Enquiring minds want to know.
Just curious: have any estimates been made on the frequency with which the smaller, climate-affecting asteroids impact the Earth? What kinds of time scales are we talking about? 10k years? 100k years?
Who the hell leaves nuclear secretes on hard drives just lying around?
Someone did, apparently. Actually, if you go to a weapons laboratory and trek behind the multiple layers of security, badge readers, biometric scanners, you'll likely find many computers just "lying around," some of which may have nuclear secrets on them. This may come as a shock to you, but weapons designers actually use this kind of data in performing their jobs. Being able to use data entails being able to access it. Being able to access it entails having the data be somewhat more vulnerable than if it all sat in a sealed concrete bunker with 3 divisions of infantry guarding it. This is the nature of the game--the best you can hope for is to hire qualified people and to have .
The data is probably copied. The damage is done. Who's the spy?
Don't jump to conclusions. No evidence has been released that suggests that espionage is in any way related to the drives' disappearance. More plausible scenarios are that someone made an honest mistake in misplacing the drives, or possibly that someone feared losing their job and being prosecuted aggressively by an FBI all too eager to assume the worst of someone. Just ask Wen Ho Lee the price of cooperation with the FBI when someone has a political axe to grind.
pletonium
It's playdonium. It comes in many bright colors, tastes salty, and can be molded into most any shape you like--even rockets and bombs. Look for it in the toy section of Walmart.
Religion and belief in god is an irrational belief with no basis whatsoever, for weak minded people...
Yes! Another Jesse "The Mind" Ventura devotee. But seriously, the question of religion, in my mind, is not whether the tenets of the church are literally true (as almost all assuredly aren't [assonance]), but rather whether religion may lead to a fortuitous and consistent worldview. (This condition is rather complicated since the meaning of "fortuitous" would be derived in part from this worldview, making for a nonlinear problem). To take Christianity as an example, even if I knew with certainty that the Jesus myth were untrue, would I be derelict in using the Christian credo as a basis for my moral system? This is a much more difficult question to answer, and it is more signifiant than whether a Jesus existed as a historical figure.
Many smart folk have questioned whether science alone can serve as the basis of a worldview; a large fraction have argued that it cannot. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that while science can make a decent stab at telling us how the world works, it doesn't explain anything of importance. He wrote that science was best used as a tool for acquiring power over the world, and not a system for deriving meaning from the world. His counterchallenge for science was to develop an instrument to measure the quality of musical composition.
While I agree that science is darned cool (I myself am a physicist), alone it is ill-suited to answering questions of meaning and substance. One must either step outside the system to consider morality, or else one embraces nihilism de facto. Perhaps you should consider following some of Nietzsche's work since the two of you agree on much: He, like you, believed "God is dead" and that irrespective of the veracity of the Christian myth, Christian morality is itself a heinous evil in part because it mandates subjugation of the spirit. (I find he walks too close to radical relativism for my palate, though. Your milage may vary).
Fit yourself for a perspectivist hat, Doug Neal. They are quite fashionable this year, especially with pumps and earthtones.
I added a few more exclamation marks to your subject heading--I gather that every 6 marks is worth a moderation point.
:) Although the concrete evidence may be the news here, the concept is not.
:) Physics would be so much easier to do if it weren't for those pesky observations and experiments...).
I knew this the moment I knew quasars were thought of as large black holes. It's quite simple and logical.
You would have been an excellent student of Aristotle.
In modern science one generally requires convincing evidence before incorporating a hypothesis into one's worldview. Even then, alternative hypotheses are admissible provided they also explain the data. (One simply holds both to be "possibly true" and one waits for an experiment or observation that disproves one or the other hypothesis). Disproving a competing theory--such as, for instance, evidence that disproves the notion of quasars as enormous starbursts--does not necessarily prove a theory (in this case, big vociferous black holes that gobble everything that comes near).
I knew this ages ago. C'mon. This ain't news
By that token, if someone proved the existence of a Creator figure you would consider it to be not newsworthy as well, since the concept itself is far from new.
I suspect that you and I disagree on the meaning of the words "to know." Just because it is printed in a book does not necessarily make it true. (I should know--I've written a book where some of my speculation has since been disproved.
Another is how Fry's (the electronics store) went after "frys.com". IIRC, frys.com was owned by a company involved in making some kind of food product; the company had been in existence for a number of years before the lawsuit was brought against them, but I guess since Fry's Electronics sells Fritos in their abysmally long checkout lines they must have felt stiff competition and a need to protect their trademark.
Has anyone heard what became of this fight? (The page at frys.com describing the legal battle has since been removed).
Most of the matter in galaxies is found not in the stars, but in the gas between the stars (stars are rather like dust grains in water), which leads one to wonder whether standard hydro simulations may model these system more faithfully anyway for most purposes.
The recursive algorithm you described isn't the only particle-in-cell (PIC) game in town, incidentally. Perhaps the PIC techniques used in plasma simulations could be useful here? Plasma PIC simulations routinely model one or more conducting fluids with hundreds of millions of mutually interacting particles, often with comparable (in the case of electrostatic codes) or more complicated mutual interactions (in electromagnetic codes) than the blobs of gravitationally attracting fluids exhibit. (Instead of Newton's force law, in plasma media one solves Maxwell's equations to obtain the electric and magnetic fields, and then the particles are advanced in time using the Lorentz force). One thing that has resulted from this research is an understanding that in many parameter regimes of interest the "nearest-neighbor" interactions are less important than the collective effects, so smearing out individual particles into spatially extended blobs of superparticles can be a very reasonable approximation.
Well said. Even more accurate might be to suggest to the author, "Ask us this question after your manuscript has been rejected by two dozen publishers and you know it'll never see the light of day." Most first (and second, and third...) novels never get published.
Do these experiments redefine physics as we know it?
...but failed to notice the difference between group speed and phase speed of the light
Not really. Superluminal evanescent waves have been demonstrated in tunneling experiments in both the optical and microwave frequency ranges. (I know of papers in the early 90s that demonstrate this--Steinberg et al., and also Enders and Nimtz). It's likely not Nobel prizewinning stuff since it's not that profound yet. One can find valid solutions to Maxwell's equations where "something" travels faster than c. To my admittedly limited knowledge (while I am a scientist with a Ph.D. in physics, I am not a specialist in these types of experiments), to date nobody has demonstrated how one can use this effect to transmit information faster than c.
If it is published in a non-scientific journal before the scientific community notices it, a "discovery" usually isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Agreed. I'd suggest you read the very interesting recent article Mugnai et al., May 22, 2000 Physical Review Letters, v.84, pages 4830-4. My casual reading suggests to me that their work is legit, and they do observe superluminal signals with their devices.
The work I referenced above is interesting in that it is performed with microwaves in a dispersionless medium, so the two speeds are equivalent.
Hey, all right! Can anyone think of some more purely scientific endeavors that can be ruined be corporate involvement/takeover? I'm going IPO with my new business to sell print ads in elementary school textbooks. Maybe we can start selling ad space on artificial limbs?
...
For what it's worth, elementary school textbooks are not purely scientific endeavors, nor are artificial limbs. For that matter, neither is the ISS--science is rather low on its priority list, in fact. The ISS was born out of Cold War politicking in the Reagan era and, as far as I can tell, has more symbolic than commercial value.
Many scientists have argued against the ISS by stating that few advances in basic science can be anticipated from conducting experiments in low earth orbit (LEO) on the ISS that couldn't be learned from shuttle launches. While I'm personally a bit more open-minded about the possibilities for genuine discoveries aboard such a spacecraft, science remains of only secondary interest.
Amateur science is becoming the only real science. Now if only we can figure out a way to expropriate some superconducters
Some things simply cannot be done easily with amateur science, although fabricating high-Tc superconductors is one of those things that can be done on a budget. Furthermore, if you do not want to roll your own, then for a modest price you can purchase high-Tc superconductors from a vendor. Liquid nitrogen is also very cheap. Enjoy!
This post is a joke, right? (Sometimes I'm slow in recognizing net humor). For fun, let's pretend you were serious:
...the whole concept of war is completely fucking STUPID!!!
...if people weren't so filled with hatred for fellow man, and had compassion and love, then this world would be a better place.
NOBODY should have the power to develop nuclear weapons!
You're six decades too late, I'm afraid. The Germans began developing nuclear weapons in the late 1930s, and the U.S. and U.K. and U.S.S.R. started very soon afterwards.
I'll play devil's advocate and argue that the half century of relative peace in the world among the superpowers (no instances of "total war") is a direct result of deterrance. I know this will be hard for you to swallow, but in the context of preventing conflict nuclear weapons have actually saved lives and have reduced human suffering.
Now stop living in the dream world, Neo, and come to the real world. Nuclear weapons exist. Many nations have them. Many nations want them. No nation (except South Africa) has ever willingly dismantled and destroyed its entire stockpile. Talk of love and peace and "let's all hold hands and sing" is quaintly antiquated, and not even a remotely practical way to solve the problem.
You remind me of some of my former students, "Our having to learn this electromagnetic theory is stupid!" They didn't persuade me then, and I'm afraid that you don't persuade me now.
Clauswitz wrote of war that the threat of war and the resolve to go to war to settle a conflict is vital to a nation's being able to conduct foreign policy. I suggest you get used to the concept of war; it has been around for a very long time, and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
I think you would find that most citizens of ANY country would prefer to have peaceful relations with other countries than be at war.
The United Nations, arguably the largest representitive body in the world, continually sends out troops to "keep the peace" in places. Sometimes "keeping the peace" results in wars being fought by these same troops. I would argue that sometimes when the cause is sufficiently important most people would prefer war to passivity. To say "let's all get along with one another and not fight" is impractical when the opposing side does not share the same distaste for conflict, or when the cost of human suffering resulting from not fighting is too great.
Agreed. Now just how do you intend to carry this out? (And what exactly does this have to do with stopping Hitler?) Again, I suggest you take a good look at the world as it is rather than as you want it to be. You would be surprised at just how nasty people can be towards one another.
Oh, and in case you couldnt tell, I believe the open source idea should be applied to everything.
Then I hope that you and your family are among the first to suffer once "Anthrax Incubation for Dummies" and "An Idiot's Guide to Saren" kits are sold over the internet.
While the US can pretend to its citizens that it is somehow different from Iraq, its own actions frequently force the rest of the world to remain unconvinced.
Perhaps I misunderstood your post. Upon rereading it I get the impression that when you wrote that you (and, according to you, the rest of the world) consider the U.S. to be roughly equivalent to Iraq in terms of its use of weapons of mass destruction. Is this the point you were trying to make? After a list of questionable activities of the U.S. government, you compare the United States' activities with Iraq's, a state that has used chemical and biological weapons on its own people (as well as on Iran during the Iraq-Iran war). If this isn't bashing, it's at the very least an unfair comparison, one that deserved some attention IMO.
The U.S. nuclear stockpile is safer than almost any other present-day stockpile. (The likely exception being China's).
Don't become yet another person whose response to anything that fails to glorify the USA is a kneejerk assumption of anti-americanism on behalf of the writer. That's an irrational cop-out.
Don't assume that because I object to your comparison that I am some kind of flag-waving zealot, or that I'm even from the U.S. That's also an irrational cop-out. I merely was pointing out that controlling the information that facilitates construction of weapons of mass destruction is the prudent thing to do; one's feelings towards the nations with the capacity are immaterial. This has nothing to do with whether or not you agree with the policies of the nations who have nuclear weapons. It has nothing to do with the right or wrong of developing or using nuclear weapons in the past, the moral dilemma of spending large amounts of tax dollars on the unpopular task of safeguarding the U.S. nuclear capacity, on the ethical problems associated with advocating disarmament in one breath and talking SDI development and resuming testing in the next, on being slow to ratify or carry out any treaty unless it gives the U.S. a strategic edge. This has nothing to do with anything, really, except the cold hard fact that the fewer nations with the capability of waging nuclear war the smaller the chance that an accident can occur or that some loose-reined fool like "bombs away LeMay" could intiate nuclear aggression.
You and I are probably in agreement here. You wanted to make a point, and so did I, and I think we both agree with each others' points. My apologies if I misunderstood your original post.
(Truth be told, perhaps the most responsible nation in terms of nuclear weapons is South Africa; they are the only nation to have developed and tested nuclear weapons and then willingly relinquished this capability. Of course, since saying anything positive about South Africa is politically incorrect I think I'll stop here).
I also concede many points in your very thoughtful reply, and I think we both agree that changes to the system would be an improvement. (I, for one, would start with journals that charge exhorbitant page-charge fees! It's not just the end-user who suffers...).
One difficulty with changing the system is that one is left with a "chicken and egg" dilemma. As a personal example, I only read about four or five journals in my research, and I only publish in those same journals. If I want to communicate to people in my field I need to publish in the journals that they read, so unless those journals change their way of doing business, I have little choice but to continue publishing in them.
I applaud the decision in the UK to make this information accessible on the net for free; perhaps convincing the journal publishers to provide low-cost access in public libraries to electronic versions of their journals may be a first step at providing the access you refer to.
Incidentally, in the case of scientific journals anyway, I think that most of what's published is of scant value to any except experts in the field, and these experts generally have access to a university or laboratory library. (I am a physicist, and I lack the background to get much out of at least 80% of Physical Review Letters, as an example). I doubt journal publishers would lose much revenue by providing such a service.
Your impassioned diatribe is largely irrelevant in the discussion at hand. Regardless of the activities of the U.S. government, which you may or may not agree with, protecting nuclear secrets is not only prudent, it is the morally correct thing to do.
An organization requires three things to develop a nuclear capacity: 1) The technical expertise and knowledge of how to develop nuclear weapons, 2) the raw materials, and 3) enough capital to do so. Protecting nuclear secrets falls under item 1). Unless you are so loopy as to believe that the world would be safer if everyone who wanted a nuclear capacity had one, you cannot deny that protecting nuclear weapons secrets is the correct course of action, if even by a nation that you loathe so much.
Our taxes also fund the local fire department, but that doesn't mean they have to give us rides in their big red trucks for free.
I take it by "Free software ethos" you really mean you want journals to be free? Part of the reason academic journals cost so much is because (a) they have a very limited audience, (b) they generally don't sell their space for advertising, and (c) their target audiences, research institutions and universities, can (usually) afford these prices. Subscription rates for individuals, while expensive, are not outrageously so in my opinion for most journals.
If you've ever tried purchasing an esoteric book in the science or mathematics fields, you've probably experienced something similar: a 150-page book may retail for 150$, when the local grocery store hawks pulp fiction by the metric ton. As you identified, it results from their business model: if you are only going to sell a few thousand of something, then a high markup is required in order to make even a modest profit on your work. While I agree that academic books and journals could be cheaper, and they should be so when the distribution costs are lowered due to electronic publishing, I doubt that they could be made completely free without sacrificing quality in the process. Many journals that publish electronically (for example, the Physical Review Letters) offer lower subscription rates for the electronic version of their journals than the paper version.
Incidentally, free electronic journal services do exist, e.g. the Los Alamos e-Print archive at xxx.lanl.gov. One thing you will probably notice is that while many of the articles are outstanding, just as many are "I wiped my nose this morning and decided what I saw on the tissue was publishable so here it is" quality. It's hit-or-miss with these articles sometimes. Standard practice among many disciplines is to archive an early draft of the work on the ePrint archive and then publish the refereed, edited, corrected version in a journal such as the Physical Review....
In this enlightened scenario, there would be very much greater dissemination of the knowledge produced, to the benefit of a very much wider set of users.
...which brings me to my point: High quality, refereed journals that cost money are, in many ways, superior to unfiltered electronic archives precisely because they charge for their services and then in turn use a portion of that money to perform quality control. Part of what one pays for is the process of having experts in the field (hopefully) perusing each article closely to catch mistakes made by the authors or elucidate points the authors left unclear. Editors coordinate the refereeing process, and publishers maintain an infrastructure for ensuring this process happens in a timely manner. As long as people are willing to pay for quality control, then a market will exist for these journals. Electronic publishing can do away with many of the costs of publication and distribution of the information, but I don't see how it can reduce the cost to zero without asking publishers to simply get out of the publishing business altogether.
JESUS CHRIST!!! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Gravity, or big G is constant everywhere, its used in a formula (that I cannot remember) to calculate the gravitational force between any two objects (along with there mass and distance (increases with mass, decreases with distance).
I'm not Jesus Christ, but I'll play.
It should be noted that big G can refer to different things in a gravitational context.
On the one hand is the forumula |F| = G m1 m2 / r^2 that you refer to in your post. m1 and m2 are masses, r is the distance of separation between the masses, F is the force, and G is the constant of proportionality. The direction of the force is such to attract the two bodies towards one another. Each mass feels an equally strong force pulling it toward the other. If there's a whole bunch of mass points, like in the case of Earth where many particles are globbed together, then you sum up each individual mass point to get the total force on a body in Earth's gravitational field. This is Newtonian physics, and it is good enough for most applications.
A somewhat more interesting formula that also uses a big G is that of general relativity: "G = 8 Pi T." Here big G is a second rank tensor that describes the curvature of the spacetime manifold, and big T is a second rank tensor that has as its components the local density of energy and momentum and fluxes of energy and momentum at every point in spacetime. In the most general case, this is a set of coupled nonlinear differential equations, and it is not solvable exactly except for a few special cases. If you work through the math and make the approximation of a low density of matter (which is fine for Earth but bad for black holes) that does not bend spacetime very drastically around it, then you also get the attractive force of gravity occurring through curvature in the space-time manifold. At the center of a spherically symmetric distribution of non-infinite density matter the spacetime manifold is, to leading order, flat (which is trivially the case except at spacetime singularities), and it is also flat to first order corrections, implying that the gravitational force vanishes there. The case of a uniform distribution of matter inside of a radius R can be solved exactly. The case of a nonuniform, yet spherically symmetric, distribution of matter may be expressed in terms of quadratures.
In the article the first big G is the one they measured. (Incidentally, though I'm a physicist I haven't done any GR in ages, so I welcome any corrections in the above from the experts out there).
Move 5 is wrong in your example. X needs to block O at left center, then O blocks X at right center, and from there nobody can force a win.
I think that it's because so many people are armchair physicists. (You have to admit that alot of physics is just plain cool, and it's alot of fun thinking about stuff like relativity and quantum mechanics). Discovery Channel blurbs are great for public exposure of interesting ideas, and speaking as a physicist (IAAP), it is heartening to see more public interest in physics, even if it is "out there" stuff like this.
Perhaps a light-hearted earlier discussion of the social phenomenon may be of interest.
I don't know about you guys but I believe that once someone says that something is possible, it WILL be possible and will be done.
/. will write a check for $1000 (US) payable to the "Help Fund Claudius's Leisure" Fund.
/. reads this post and marvels at my rapier acumen.
Let me say once for the record that it is possible that every reader of
I propose that it WILL be possible when all of
When will it be done?
But then again, I also think the space program hasn't acomplished anything big enough to justify the billions spent on it.
While the average Joe may not give a whit about ephemeral scientific discoveries, he does like his DirectTV.
Permit me, if you will, to disagree with your statement. A healthy space program provides a great number of benefits to society: GPS, weather satellites, communication satellites, and yes, digital TV. These are so integral a part of our lives that we no longer even think of where they came from, yet they follow immediately from the technologies developed in the space program. NASA's Mission to Planet Earth was highly illuminating from an environmental perspective, and it led to great deal of insight into how man affects the global climate. (Too bad their findings were so unpopular with certain powerful lobbying groups in Washington, else their funding probably wouldn't have been axed so earnestly). With solar maximum arriving, an emphasis has been made in understanding the Sun-Earth connection better in order to predict geomagnetic storms reliably. Consider the billions of lost revenue when a single massive blackout occurs or when a handful of expensive spacecraft are incapacitated, and the potential payoffs from this research become apparent. Furthermore, "spinoff" technologies from the space program are commonplace: new materials, advances in computing and computational physics techniques, and advances in manufacturing techniques all have resulted from a space-program impetus.
Another benefit of a healthy space program is how our remote monitoring capabilities allow us to make public policy more effectively. For example, with a combination of satellite observations and ground-based seismic observations, we were able to detect nuclear weapons tests in India and Pakistan recently. Nuclear war is bad for business, and the space program has helped give us the tools to make informed policy decisions related to nuclear weapons.
Many highly successful "pure" scientific missions have been launched by NASA and other space programs: Orbiting and imaging of near-earth asteroids, Jupiter and its moons, Mars, and (in a few years) Saturn. The Voyager mission, the "Energizer Bunny" of spacecraft, still sends back useful data about the outer regions of the heliosphere and heliopause. The Space Telescope has led to an enormous number of discoveries that would be extremely difficult or impossible to have achieved without such a device. The solar wind and heliosphere are becoming much better understood with in situ observations being made by spacecraft such as Ulysses, SOHO, and ACE. The list goes on and on. I've only provided a small sample here.
While we may quibble about the merits of certain programs (the ISS comes to mind), the space program as a whole has, in my mind, performed admirably with the resources we have given them. (Now if you wish to argue about programs that do not justify their cost, Social Security comes to mind...).
b) their use falls under the fair use exemptions in copyright law
/.'s "fair use" per se, but rather with the use of said quotations without appropriately attributing the work to the authors. Where I come from this borders on plagiarism, and as such it may fall outside the bounds of "fair use."
/. could have done much to dispel ill-will by showing some of the same courtesy to its contributors.
I believe the issue here for me is not with
In the past I have had excerpts of essays I have posted to USENET published in newspaper articles. The authors of these articles went to great lengths to identify and contact me prior to publishing my work. (I didn't provide contact information in my posts for anti-spam reasons). I do not know whether they were legally obligated to do, however I appreciated their courtesy in this regard. I think that
I hope the proceeds to go a good cause.
I intend to provide a service to the /. community by summarizing the "debate," if I may be so bold as to characterize it as such, regarding this and every other wormhole-related post:
There are basically four camps, none of which does anything except rehash old articles from the wormhole post the week before, or the week before that, or the week before that, or.... Any semblance of dialogue is illusionary; apparent polite discourse is actually just one person posting under two different names in an attempt to boost his or her Karma.
Group 1: (scientists, people who use fancy science-sounding words and appear moderately intelligent, people who have half a clue what physics is) (a) Yawn. Been there, done that. Aren't we stuck in some kind of closed, time-like loop? (b) 'Welcome to the "Wormhole Theory of the Month" club. Thank you for your kind donation. Now kindly leave your critical thought at the door and let's all group hug. Did I mention we are going to go IPO?' (c) If you can make wormholes, you can violate causality, the second law of thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and Robert's Rules of Order. (d) You can't make a beowulf cluster out of these things.
Group 2: (skeptical laypeople who haven't a clue what the physics is, but are ignorant enough not to realize how little they know, people who try to use big, important-sounding science words but haven't a clue what they mean) This can't work because: (a) Just what the **** is a "closed time-like loop" anyway, you pretentious twerp! (b) relativity is wrong (let me tell you why). (c) Scientists don't know what they are talking about. (d) I saw on the Discovery Channel that this wasn't possible. (e) A beowulf cluster of these things would be lame since there's no Open Source support for wormholes.
Group 3: (agathistic laypeople who haven't a clue what the physics is, but are ignorant enough not to realize how little they know, people who instinctively distrust those who use big, important-sounding science words) (a) He must be right since a few well-known historical figures were right about something and they were told they were wrong. (Of course I'll conveniently forget about the umteen thousands who were told they were wrong and actually turned out to be wrong). (b) How do you KNOW he isn't right? You don't, do you! You can't prove it so shut up and allow ME to speak about something I know nothing about. (c) Wouldn't it be great if this worked? This is just like Star Trek! It's so cool! (d) Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!!!!
Group 4: (trolls, Republicans) (a) JonKatzSux(tm)! (b) OpenSourceSux(tm)! (c) I wonder what would happen if I had a wormhole in my pocket and poured hot grits down my pants. (d) BeowulfClustersSux(tm)!
Anything that cannot be classified into these four groups may safely be moderated down as being "Offtopic."
Your commentary is interesting, albeit heavily laden with the "value judgments" you poopoo so readily. Permit me, if you will, to do a point-by-point of some of the more interesting comments:
/. posts in this thread, I am convinced that it is indeed an important point even if you are not.
....
...serve no purpose except to convince the public that scientists are all arrogant jerks.
/. that they have as little right to state their opinions as I do.
I don't presume to know what the original poster meant, but this statement strikes me as being just as value laden.
I never claimed we needed to know the underlying laws, but merely that some underlying order exists in the universe. I think you should reread what I wrote; you will find that my position is far less extreme than the original poster's.
This is an emotional value judgement and therefore irrelevent. The state of your digestive system....
Look who's being snide and sanctimonious now. *smile* I would hope the debate can focus on something more substantial than critiquing my vernacular.
I don't believe you read my post very carefully, depsite your quoting liberally from it. I was hedging, saying in effect "If I were to play the odds, I'd bet against this, but I will reserve final judgment until I hear more of the facts." I even said as much in a following paragraph. To make any stronger claims would be foolish since I haven't seen the data. I never claimed "wrong" or "right," but rather gave a professional opinion with the appropriate qualifying restrictions.
Incidentally, "value-judgments" do have a place in science. If you review the scientific method you will find that step one is "formulate hypothesis," step two is "test said hypothesis." Here's a dirty little secret: A hidden step 1.5 is here, namely choose which hypothesis to test. I can formulate hypotheses until the cows come home. I can do it from my armchair at night drinking brewskies, and I can do it as I walk to work in the morning. I have only limited resources to test hypotheses, however, so I must have some manner of distilling out only the "good" ones to test and ignore the rest. This is the hidden step here, and it requires value judgments on the part of the scientist. You will never separate these value judgments from the process of doing science, but the method itself, if done right, is independent of these values. Physicists I know instinctively perform this distillation process when they hear new ideas. There simply is no other practical way to do science--too much time would be spent chasing chimeras. (More on this in the following paragraph).
Extraordinary claims have a heavier burden of proof than do mundane claims
Once again - an emotional value judgement. The point of importance is...
Piffle. If I walked up to you and announced that gasoline is just saltwater, then you would hold me to a stricter burden of proof than if I walked up and said "It'll rain tomorrow"--even if I went to a gas pump, poured out a glass of the liquid, drank it, and said, "Boy, that was sure salty water". You would still want independent review before you started a company to mine the oceans for gasoline. My comment stands, and after reading some of the other
The more radical the claim, the more it shakes up your worldview, the more it opposes most everything you've come to understand about the world, then the more proof you require. This is simple pragmatism; emotions do not enter into it. For a physicist to tear apart his understanding of gravitation and relativity is as big a shock as your discovering that gasoline is well-marketed saltwater.
The solution to this is public education.
Dr. Park has written a book for this very purpose. Its release date is in May if I am not mistaken.
The down turn in science funding is essentially nothing more than an indication of the fact
"Value-laden" statements are allowed now? I'll venture one of my own in saying that the problem is considerably more complex than your explanation suggests.
Oh, I think they are already well aware of that. *smile* (Frankly, I feel the same way about IT people, particularly Open Source zealots). A recent article in Science describes the problem most eloquently, and I recomend it to you.
Kindly stick to the facts and leave the preaching to the lunatic fringe.
By all means, just as soon as you convince the rest of
Despite the sometimes caustic tone of your comments, I have enjoyed this give-and-take very much. Perhaps we can do it again sometime.
Mr. Katz is not trained in a technical field where saying things precisely is both norm and necessity, but rather he is a journalist. To many journalists precision is secondary to seemingly more lofty goals such as "style" or "sensationalism." Admittedly, Mr. Katz is worse than most in this regard. (Witness all the fuss over his loose use of the word "interactive" in his Oscars aricle). Then again, I would wager that anyone who has read /. for more than a week has divined this already about Mr. Katz and has set his User Preferences accordingly.
/. headlining. He would do much towards increasing his signal-to-noise ratio if he were to write rather than ramble--if he put more effort into the rudaments of communication, e.g. researching elements of his essays and paying some attention to the audience to which he his writing, it would save him from bathing in chagrin as frequently as he does. Journalism is very seldom profound, and in his haste to publish his essays here take on a slapdash, imprecise character that I (and probably most other /.ers) find tiring in articles that promise so much more. I'd love to see Mr. Katz spend 5x as much time on a single essay, put his heart into it, and publish here 0.2x as often. Even the most jaded among us has to admit that sometimes he does have something valuable to say--the difficulty is that these gems are so infrequent.
My impression is that Mr. Katz believes every jot and tittle he scribes is worthy of
It would be refreshing and an excellent exercise for Mr. Katz if he were to devote some effort to deconstructing the nature of verbal communication in this increasingly technical society. (That sounds like the name of a Katz article right there...). His essays typify the dichotomy between the technical and the non-technical, the analytic and the artistic, the realist and the impressionist. His writing has the pretense of profound knowledge but the attitude of an outsider, and as a consequence he often conveys to his reader an arrogance typical of those who believe that the non-technically oriented have somehow cornered the market on philosophy. He provokes ire primarily because, at a fundamental level, he underestimates the capaibilities of his audience, and his sloppiness costs him credibility in the long run.
It's sad: in trying to wear the two hats of journalist and philosopher he succeeds at neither, and he really does have some interesting ideas once in awhile.