It took me a second to figure that out. Neutrinos don't participate in the strong force and don't have any flavor. (The names are charming, but kind of annoyingly ambiguous out of context.)
They sure are strange-weird if they don't even participate in the weak force, as other neutrinos do. They're barely there at all (if they ARE there at all).
"Organic produce" refers not to the chemical makeup of the product, but of the farmer. It was originally produce grown with more human-intensive labor, rather than on gigantic factory farms. It's the farmer that's "organic", rather than metallic.
These days, "organic" has been debased to a point where it's still factory farms, using massively scaled up versions of some of the original organic ideas, and totally ignoring others.
Just check with a doctor before you go shopping for that steak, to ensure that your heart can take the prices.
It is, truly, excellent meat. And kidding aside, it's "only" 2-3 times as expensive as the meat in a regular grocery store. Some of it isn't even that much more, though the steaks generally are. And these animals generally lead better lives than the mass-produced ones, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive; that may not matter to others but it matters to me.
The other thing: once you've had a truly excellent steak, you'll have a hard time enjoying the wan, pale, bland stuff you get at most grocery stores. Which is also not necessarily a bad thing.
I get it in the "magic indistinguishable from a rigged demo" kind of way.
Language snippets that look great on a powerpoint slide don't always translate into great languages for programs that take up tens of thousands of lines. If anything, just the opposite: some of the redundancy that you've squeezed out to make it look great for a snippet is precisely what you need to make coding contracts. You end up having to convey the rest in comments, which gradually rot as the code develops.
Language developers are always seeking the right level of verbosity for the kinds of tasks they want to perform. Nothing is perfect. But since every language is mired in the same Turing tar-pit, the pigeonhole principle (applied metaphorically) implies that languages that are short for some tasks require more verbiage for others. The trick is to find the one that's brief and clear for all the tasks you want to do and to not worry about the others.
There is honest money to be made in the stock market. Not everything is overvalued all of the time. For most stocks, on most days, the price is a more-or-less reasonable approximation of the present value of the share, from which you can expect a reasonable return of a few percent per year, either from dividends or increased capital. That's a piece of the earnings of actual companies making actual products.
These are not the stocks that attract press, more or less by definition. Figuring out which ones are the best value involves a fair bit of work (and I'm not talking about technical analysis voodoo; I'm talking about reading prospectuses, evaluating products and management and markets, etc). You're unlikely to beat those who do that for a living, but they set a fair price, not an inflated price, and that fair price has a real if unglamorous return (better than your bank will give you, on average, though at considerably higher risk).
You can save yourself a lot of effort by giving it to a professional index fund with a low overhead, which yields even more modest rewards for considerably less work and somewhat more security.
The problem is that it's hard for me to conceive how, early on in the universe, the particles that would eventually make up my measuring apparatus and the particles that eventually make up your apparatus went their separate ways, in such a fashion that at a particular time they'd interact with two identical entangled particles and give opposite results. It's such a complex thing to achieve such a simple result.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's where the universe happens to lead us. It is what it is. I don't have much interest in "free will" and don't see what all the fuss is about; it's pretty obviously a rump explanation of a macro phenomenon with no real manifestation as a separate entity.
Explanations involving retro-causality or non-locality are probably equally good ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Either one would have to be highly restrictive versions, because special relativity sets some constraints on it that for aesthetic reasons I suspect are insurmountable. That is, time travel feels like wishful thinking, and I suspect that retrocausality/non-locality would not enable it. But that's just a guess.
There's a difference, though: fires and airbags don't think. They're not scared off by fire alarms. Fire alarms don't prevent electrical shorts and dropped cigarettes, nor are you more conscious of avoiding shorting out electrical equipment and watching your cigarettes because there's a fire alarm.
The "security theater" has two audiences, and the passengers are only the secondary one. The primary one is potential terrorists, who run the risk of getting caught. Not the guarantee, but the risk, and a pretty serious one: a terrorist captured alive is potentially a font of information. And potentially, under torture. (A dangerous risk for the US to take, and now even if it swears up and down that there's no more torture, people will believe it.)
It's impossible to measure the number of potential terrorists who gave up. Maybe it's zero; maybe it's many more. If there's any answer to it, it could only come from monitoring their communications, and that's not something they're going to talk about.
It comes down to trust, and obviously, the government has strained your trust well past the breaking point. I have no answer to that, beyond noting in passing that a lot of what you've read on this site has been badly exaggerated, though even sorting through that leaves plenty of real reasons to be distrustful. I can't conceive of any way for the government to get your trust back, though eliminating the foolish "no nail clippers or water bottles" rules would be at least a start.
Yeah, superdeterminism was my first thought in reading this. It sounds like they're pushing any superdeterminism all the way back to the time of inflation, but since that's exactly what superdeterminism would predict, I don't see that they've contradicted anything.
It's intellectually unsatisfying to think that superdeterminism could relate to something as supremely complicated as a scientific apparatus: the whole state two measuring apparatuses conspires to yield opposite results on particles that were, up to that instant, completely identical, without any communication. But I think it makes more sense than trying to impose some outside "free will" force that also makes itself visible only on the most carefully isolated particle experiments yet also just happens to manifest as something we see numerous orders of magnitude larger as "what we think", despite layers of purely chemical interactions in between.
We're still obligated to explain the larger-scale version of "free will", in that the phenomenon that we believe it exists is real, and I think your way of looking at it is good as any. And superdeterminism doesn't contradict that.
Superdeterminism still doesn't satisfy, but I suspect that "satisfaction" is a purely human property. The equations yield the right answers, and that's all you get. Like classical dynamics, free will is an idea that we're going to keep expecting to see, even though we'll always get out unsatisfying answers when we try to explain corner cases.
The activity is indeed valuable, but that's not the same as saying that they are entitled to as much compensation as they are making.
They're entitled to it in the sense that they've managed to gull stockholders into giving it to them, but that money "belongs" to the stockholders in the bank, who are underwriting the banker's paycheck but have little say in negotiating his salary. Is there some other person who could do just as well at a third the price? Or a hundredth of it?
The financial crisis proves that the job is indeed very important, but it also suggests that a lot of them aren't very good at it. Several major banks failed; more would have failed if the US government hadn't stepped in to save their butts. If they earned their money, it was in convincing the government that they should do that, saying out of the left sides of their mouths that the banking industry was too important to allow to fail, while using the right sides to convince people that it wasn't actually their fault and that banking sector is well run if only it weren't for those dastardly (Chinese, poor people, regulators, etc.)
In the end their compensation is indeed a tiny sip of the gusher of money that flows through their hands, and it wouldn't fix the problem to turn that sip into a sniff. It does, however, imply that they aren't being hired to protect the long-term health of either the bank itself or the economy, but instead engaging in a lot of back-slapping and hand-shaking to use other people's money. If it were a better measure of their relative skill compared to other bankers, rather than merely taking credit for the rising tide that lifted all the ships (and their heavily-leveraged ship higher than most), I wouldn't mind that their salaries were so high. But they don't seem to have gotten there through any meritocracy, and their incompetence puts the entire country in jeopardy from time to time.
An even more interesting question, to me: how did he get a PhD, to be in charge of an (expensive) NASA climate monitoring satellite? He's one of the people gathering the data that demonstrates the warming.
And yet he's intent on doing anything he can to re-interpret that data to prove anything except the flagrantly obvious, using methods that don't even come close to passing scientific muster. It's as if he does reasonable science by day and turns into a raving lunatic by night. How does that work?
Except that the same party that opposes creation of regulations also opposes enforcement. The like to cut the EPA's budget, and appoint judges who favor businesses. They're the party who demand apologies when the government does attempt to enforce regulations even after the fact.
The other party is certainly far from guiltless, but there's only one party that makes a point out of making enforcement harder and harder. Enforcement requires effort, generally taking many years to achieve, and is frequently fruitless by the time corporate lawyers have circled the wagons. In that time, it's not uncommon for the executive branch to change hands and simultaneously change its mind about just how important it is to proceed.
So yeah, it's a partisan issue. I won't forgive the blue party for its failures to prosecute, but I recognize that for them to take any action at all requires a supreme force of will and political capital against an opposing party whose primary goal is to thwart them. If the red party matched its zeal to deregulate with equal fervor in prosecuting those who violate remaining regulations, it might be different, but instead we're left with a party of "please do something, anything" to try to counter the party of "do nothing, ever". And since the separation of powers favors inaction, that's what we get.
Question: is there any mechanism by which you can push that back up the line? As in, "Hey, I'm getting bogus requests from you. Can you see which of your users are sending vast quantities of DNS (or NTP) requests aimed at me, and perhaps inform the users that they are violating your terms of service?"
I assume that hosting such an attack is a TOS violation from most ISPs, though I've certainly heard from Slashdotters who feel that their packets are their own business, and that their ISP should be required to carry them.
I don't really need my "news" right this instant. Except for the very rare disaster, it's just fine if I get it a week from now. Slashdot had always been the place I came to get reasonable discussions of the news. The comments were frequently more informative than the articles. Especially in science stories, where the article reeks of Science by Press Release and the other web sites were full of ZOMG COLD FUSION, the Slashdot commenters would tell me what the *actual* science behind the article was, by actual experts in the field.
Sadly, it's become less of that, even without the change to Beta. The community has changed in ways that made me feel much more ambivalent about it, even though I knew that it still had people who could tell me stuff I couldn't find elsewhere. And because of that I'm kind of ambivalent about Beta.
It was tricky trying to figure out actual science from the crap in the article, but here's what I was able to figure out:
Neutrons and protons aren't fundamental particles. They're made up of more fundamental particles, quarks. There are six kinds of quarks, though only two of them (up and down) go into making up protons and neutrons. There are also three "kinds" of electrons (electron, muon, tau) and three kinds of neutrinos. Those, plus the bosons (photon, gluon, W and Z, Higgs) are all the fundamental particles.
These interact in three major ways: strong, weak, and electric forces. (Gravity is a whole separate headache.) Strong and electric forces are "symmetric"; there's no difference between left and right, or between forward and backward in time. Make a movie of them, and it appears to be following the laws of physics even if you run it backwards or upside-down.
But weak forces violate that. They have a predisposition to run one way rather than the other. That's been known for decades in certain rare processes. This article shows that it happens even between quarks and electrons. They knew it should be there, because they do have a weak interaction on each other, but the weak interaction is (duh) weaker than the other ones, so it's really hard to see. They did, however, manage it.
It's not predicting any new particles, but it points to an idea of why is more matter in the universe than antimatter, or why time goes "forward" rather than "backward". It's not a solution to those questions, but it's a data point in trying to find one.
The problem, IMHO, is that voters appear to seek out information sources that they (should, at least) realize are feeding them BS. Major news media were better in the past than they are today, and anybody who didn't adapt to the new expectations has gone out of business. I don't wish to glorify the past; the news has always been at least partly about entertainment. But entertainment has become the primary goal.
The real news is almost never entertaining. News that is entertaining is nearly always laced with partisan pandering, attention-seeking extremism, or celebrity inanity.
There's no one answer to what we should do, but it's pretty obvious that voters need to stop expecting to enjoy watching the news. For the most part, they don't actually need any of it. They'd do better with a quick scan of the newspaper headlines, which takes five minutes and leaves them as informed as they're likely to get, and leaves them more time to go seek entertainment that, if it doesn't inform, at least doesn't mis-inform. That's probably not suited to televised news at all, and if they went out of business trying, I sure wouldn't mind.
They don't put it on their Facebook accounts, but it's not treated like a matter of national security. They buy and sell their houses, and drive to work in their cars, same as everybody else. They don't expect it to be secret, and it would be practically impossible to keep it secret.
Most of them don't even have personal security guards. I imagine that most of them have home alarms, but it's likely not all that different from many other people who live in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of DC.
I agree that it's probably not the case, but remember that the way US Presidential elections work, you can do a lot with a relatively small amount of vote tampering.
The 2000 election is an obvious case in point: a few hundred votes turned one state's entire set of electoral votes, which in turn carried the election. Subsequent elections weren't quite so close, but it's not inconceivable that one could tamper with an election enough to turn it using only tens of insiders rather than thousands of people.
I agree that's unlikely; even tens of insiders is a lot of opportunity to get caught. And it applies only to the very odd case of the Presidential election. House races are much smaller and closer, but you'd need to interfere in quite a few of them to make a difference. Senate races are more crucial, but they are state wide and it's rare to find one so close that you could change it without serious risk of discovery. They do happen, but it's not always clear in advance which ones they'll be; interfering in all the potentially close ones raises your chance of being caught.
Actually, the linked article is considerably better. The headline of TFA is more accurate: "Tesla Grapples With Charging-Cable Troubles In Norwegian Cold".
The article came to prominence via the New York Times, who published that rather scurrilous piece last year on Tesla, but this was a different writer and the Times' summary of it is reasonably neutral.
I'm running with the "classic" Google Maps because the new Google Maps is missing a lot of features that I find important. It still has this feature.
I don't know why they remove useful, functional features. I've always assumed it had to do with streamlining the interfaces, Apple-style (motto: "It's either easy or it's impossible"). But they don't seem to end up more friendly or usable.
I keep expecting them to start adding new features such that I'm forced to abandon the classic maps if I want them, but as far as I can tell there's nothing compelling about the new Maps, and I'll keep with the classic until they stop offering it.
I'm a big fan of Google, and I really love the way they give me cool stuff for free. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt when they stop supporting things, and assume it means that they're working on other cool stuff. But this has me rather perplexed: a lot of work put into a new interface which is not just feature-poor but clunky.
1. There are lawsuits in progress. Courts have generally set a very high bar for lawsuits against public officials. If they can claim that they were just doing their job, even by a stretch of the imagination, they can usually get away with it. (That's not entirely unreasonable, since they also tend to be the targets of vindictive or politically motivated lawsuits, and the courts want to keep the bar to try to exclude those.) The gun here smokes pretty hard, but they're going to need a real mountain to clear that bar. (And if you say that means the bar has been set too high, given what we've seen so far... yeah, I agree.)
2. It's not just courts you have to convince, it's voters, and they can be pretty thick. Most voters are partisan, and will vote the same way every time, regardless of how much evidence you shove at them. And those voters are about evenly divided. It takes a mountain of evidence to reliably shift those few undecided voters your way. Especially since Christie's supporters will be engaging in a similar effort to disgrace his opponents. (Whether warranted or not, of course, is for the voters to decide; they'll present what they've got.)
3. As smoking as the gun is, it's almost certainly not enough to have Christie impeached. I'm not taking a position on whether that's warranted or not, but there's every reason to keep reporting it until legislators reach a decision.
This doesn't really move the needle all that much, and I don't expect it to be reported much in the popular media. It's of only minor interest as news for nerds.
They also pass through airplane skins, presumably. But I wonder how many of the particles that pass through airplanes and tape will also be intercepted by sensors?
I suppose the only answer needed is "enough to calibrate against."
Slashdot Mirror
(I was hoping somebody would notice. Thank you!)
It took me a second to figure that out. Neutrinos don't participate in the strong force and don't have any flavor. (The names are charming, but kind of annoyingly ambiguous out of context.)
They sure are strange-weird if they don't even participate in the weak force, as other neutrinos do. They're barely there at all (if they ARE there at all).
"Organic produce" refers not to the chemical makeup of the product, but of the farmer. It was originally produce grown with more human-intensive labor, rather than on gigantic factory farms. It's the farmer that's "organic", rather than metallic.
These days, "organic" has been debased to a point where it's still factory farms, using massively scaled up versions of some of the original organic ideas, and totally ignoring others.
Just check with a doctor before you go shopping for that steak, to ensure that your heart can take the prices.
It is, truly, excellent meat. And kidding aside, it's "only" 2-3 times as expensive as the meat in a regular grocery store. Some of it isn't even that much more, though the steaks generally are. And these animals generally lead better lives than the mass-produced ones, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive; that may not matter to others but it matters to me.
The other thing: once you've had a truly excellent steak, you'll have a hard time enjoying the wan, pale, bland stuff you get at most grocery stores. Which is also not necessarily a bad thing.
I get it in the "magic indistinguishable from a rigged demo" kind of way.
Language snippets that look great on a powerpoint slide don't always translate into great languages for programs that take up tens of thousands of lines. If anything, just the opposite: some of the redundancy that you've squeezed out to make it look great for a snippet is precisely what you need to make coding contracts. You end up having to convey the rest in comments, which gradually rot as the code develops.
Language developers are always seeking the right level of verbosity for the kinds of tasks they want to perform. Nothing is perfect. But since every language is mired in the same Turing tar-pit, the pigeonhole principle (applied metaphorically) implies that languages that are short for some tasks require more verbiage for others. The trick is to find the one that's brief and clear for all the tasks you want to do and to not worry about the others.
Yeah, yeah, millions in bitcoins, but what about the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange? I keep all my wealth in Moxes. How will I exchange them now?
There is honest money to be made in the stock market. Not everything is overvalued all of the time. For most stocks, on most days, the price is a more-or-less reasonable approximation of the present value of the share, from which you can expect a reasonable return of a few percent per year, either from dividends or increased capital. That's a piece of the earnings of actual companies making actual products.
These are not the stocks that attract press, more or less by definition. Figuring out which ones are the best value involves a fair bit of work (and I'm not talking about technical analysis voodoo; I'm talking about reading prospectuses, evaluating products and management and markets, etc). You're unlikely to beat those who do that for a living, but they set a fair price, not an inflated price, and that fair price has a real if unglamorous return (better than your bank will give you, on average, though at considerably higher risk).
You can save yourself a lot of effort by giving it to a professional index fund with a low overhead, which yields even more modest rewards for considerably less work and somewhat more security.
The problem is that it's hard for me to conceive how, early on in the universe, the particles that would eventually make up my measuring apparatus and the particles that eventually make up your apparatus went their separate ways, in such a fashion that at a particular time they'd interact with two identical entangled particles and give opposite results. It's such a complex thing to achieve such a simple result.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's where the universe happens to lead us. It is what it is. I don't have much interest in "free will" and don't see what all the fuss is about; it's pretty obviously a rump explanation of a macro phenomenon with no real manifestation as a separate entity.
Explanations involving retro-causality or non-locality are probably equally good ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Either one would have to be highly restrictive versions, because special relativity sets some constraints on it that for aesthetic reasons I suspect are insurmountable. That is, time travel feels like wishful thinking, and I suspect that retrocausality/non-locality would not enable it. But that's just a guess.
There's a difference, though: fires and airbags don't think. They're not scared off by fire alarms. Fire alarms don't prevent electrical shorts and dropped cigarettes, nor are you more conscious of avoiding shorting out electrical equipment and watching your cigarettes because there's a fire alarm.
The "security theater" has two audiences, and the passengers are only the secondary one. The primary one is potential terrorists, who run the risk of getting caught. Not the guarantee, but the risk, and a pretty serious one: a terrorist captured alive is potentially a font of information. And potentially, under torture. (A dangerous risk for the US to take, and now even if it swears up and down that there's no more torture, people will believe it.)
It's impossible to measure the number of potential terrorists who gave up. Maybe it's zero; maybe it's many more. If there's any answer to it, it could only come from monitoring their communications, and that's not something they're going to talk about.
It comes down to trust, and obviously, the government has strained your trust well past the breaking point. I have no answer to that, beyond noting in passing that a lot of what you've read on this site has been badly exaggerated, though even sorting through that leaves plenty of real reasons to be distrustful. I can't conceive of any way for the government to get your trust back, though eliminating the foolish "no nail clippers or water bottles" rules would be at least a start.
Yeah, superdeterminism was my first thought in reading this. It sounds like they're pushing any superdeterminism all the way back to the time of inflation, but since that's exactly what superdeterminism would predict, I don't see that they've contradicted anything.
It's intellectually unsatisfying to think that superdeterminism could relate to something as supremely complicated as a scientific apparatus: the whole state two measuring apparatuses conspires to yield opposite results on particles that were, up to that instant, completely identical, without any communication. But I think it makes more sense than trying to impose some outside "free will" force that also makes itself visible only on the most carefully isolated particle experiments yet also just happens to manifest as something we see numerous orders of magnitude larger as "what we think", despite layers of purely chemical interactions in between.
We're still obligated to explain the larger-scale version of "free will", in that the phenomenon that we believe it exists is real, and I think your way of looking at it is good as any. And superdeterminism doesn't contradict that.
Superdeterminism still doesn't satisfy, but I suspect that "satisfaction" is a purely human property. The equations yield the right answers, and that's all you get. Like classical dynamics, free will is an idea that we're going to keep expecting to see, even though we'll always get out unsatisfying answers when we try to explain corner cases.
The activity is indeed valuable, but that's not the same as saying that they are entitled to as much compensation as they are making.
They're entitled to it in the sense that they've managed to gull stockholders into giving it to them, but that money "belongs" to the stockholders in the bank, who are underwriting the banker's paycheck but have little say in negotiating his salary. Is there some other person who could do just as well at a third the price? Or a hundredth of it?
The financial crisis proves that the job is indeed very important, but it also suggests that a lot of them aren't very good at it. Several major banks failed; more would have failed if the US government hadn't stepped in to save their butts. If they earned their money, it was in convincing the government that they should do that, saying out of the left sides of their mouths that the banking industry was too important to allow to fail, while using the right sides to convince people that it wasn't actually their fault and that banking sector is well run if only it weren't for those dastardly (Chinese, poor people, regulators, etc.)
In the end their compensation is indeed a tiny sip of the gusher of money that flows through their hands, and it wouldn't fix the problem to turn that sip into a sniff. It does, however, imply that they aren't being hired to protect the long-term health of either the bank itself or the economy, but instead engaging in a lot of back-slapping and hand-shaking to use other people's money. If it were a better measure of their relative skill compared to other bankers, rather than merely taking credit for the rising tide that lifted all the ships (and their heavily-leveraged ship higher than most), I wouldn't mind that their salaries were so high. But they don't seem to have gotten there through any meritocracy, and their incompetence puts the entire country in jeopardy from time to time.
An even more interesting question, to me: how did he get a PhD, to be in charge of an (expensive) NASA climate monitoring satellite? He's one of the people gathering the data that demonstrates the warming.
And yet he's intent on doing anything he can to re-interpret that data to prove anything except the flagrantly obvious, using methods that don't even come close to passing scientific muster. It's as if he does reasonable science by day and turns into a raving lunatic by night. How does that work?
Except that the same party that opposes creation of regulations also opposes enforcement. The like to cut the EPA's budget, and appoint judges who favor businesses. They're the party who demand apologies when the government does attempt to enforce regulations even after the fact.
The other party is certainly far from guiltless, but there's only one party that makes a point out of making enforcement harder and harder. Enforcement requires effort, generally taking many years to achieve, and is frequently fruitless by the time corporate lawyers have circled the wagons. In that time, it's not uncommon for the executive branch to change hands and simultaneously change its mind about just how important it is to proceed.
So yeah, it's a partisan issue. I won't forgive the blue party for its failures to prosecute, but I recognize that for them to take any action at all requires a supreme force of will and political capital against an opposing party whose primary goal is to thwart them. If the red party matched its zeal to deregulate with equal fervor in prosecuting those who violate remaining regulations, it might be different, but instead we're left with a party of "please do something, anything" to try to counter the party of "do nothing, ever". And since the separation of powers favors inaction, that's what we get.
Question: is there any mechanism by which you can push that back up the line? As in, "Hey, I'm getting bogus requests from you. Can you see which of your users are sending vast quantities of DNS (or NTP) requests aimed at me, and perhaps inform the users that they are violating your terms of service?"
I assume that hosting such an attack is a TOS violation from most ISPs, though I've certainly heard from Slashdotters who feel that their packets are their own business, and that their ISP should be required to carry them.
Very much this. Thank you.
I don't really need my "news" right this instant. Except for the very rare disaster, it's just fine if I get it a week from now. Slashdot had always been the place I came to get reasonable discussions of the news. The comments were frequently more informative than the articles. Especially in science stories, where the article reeks of Science by Press Release and the other web sites were full of ZOMG COLD FUSION, the Slashdot commenters would tell me what the *actual* science behind the article was, by actual experts in the field.
Sadly, it's become less of that, even without the change to Beta. The community has changed in ways that made me feel much more ambivalent about it, even though I knew that it still had people who could tell me stuff I couldn't find elsewhere. And because of that I'm kind of ambivalent about Beta.
It was tricky trying to figure out actual science from the crap in the article, but here's what I was able to figure out:
Neutrons and protons aren't fundamental particles. They're made up of more fundamental particles, quarks. There are six kinds of quarks, though only two of them (up and down) go into making up protons and neutrons. There are also three "kinds" of electrons (electron, muon, tau) and three kinds of neutrinos. Those, plus the bosons (photon, gluon, W and Z, Higgs) are all the fundamental particles.
These interact in three major ways: strong, weak, and electric forces. (Gravity is a whole separate headache.) Strong and electric forces are "symmetric"; there's no difference between left and right, or between forward and backward in time. Make a movie of them, and it appears to be following the laws of physics even if you run it backwards or upside-down.
But weak forces violate that. They have a predisposition to run one way rather than the other. That's been known for decades in certain rare processes. This article shows that it happens even between quarks and electrons. They knew it should be there, because they do have a weak interaction on each other, but the weak interaction is (duh) weaker than the other ones, so it's really hard to see. They did, however, manage it.
It's not predicting any new particles, but it points to an idea of why is more matter in the universe than antimatter, or why time goes "forward" rather than "backward". It's not a solution to those questions, but it's a data point in trying to find one.
The problem, IMHO, is that voters appear to seek out information sources that they (should, at least) realize are feeding them BS. Major news media were better in the past than they are today, and anybody who didn't adapt to the new expectations has gone out of business. I don't wish to glorify the past; the news has always been at least partly about entertainment. But entertainment has become the primary goal.
The real news is almost never entertaining. News that is entertaining is nearly always laced with partisan pandering, attention-seeking extremism, or celebrity inanity.
There's no one answer to what we should do, but it's pretty obvious that voters need to stop expecting to enjoy watching the news. For the most part, they don't actually need any of it. They'd do better with a quick scan of the newspaper headlines, which takes five minutes and leaves them as informed as they're likely to get, and leaves them more time to go seek entertainment that, if it doesn't inform, at least doesn't mis-inform. That's probably not suited to televised news at all, and if they went out of business trying, I sure wouldn't mind.
They don't put it on their Facebook accounts, but it's not treated like a matter of national security. They buy and sell their houses, and drive to work in their cars, same as everybody else. They don't expect it to be secret, and it would be practically impossible to keep it secret.
Most of them don't even have personal security guards. I imagine that most of them have home alarms, but it's likely not all that different from many other people who live in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of DC.
I agree that it's probably not the case, but remember that the way US Presidential elections work, you can do a lot with a relatively small amount of vote tampering.
The 2000 election is an obvious case in point: a few hundred votes turned one state's entire set of electoral votes, which in turn carried the election. Subsequent elections weren't quite so close, but it's not inconceivable that one could tamper with an election enough to turn it using only tens of insiders rather than thousands of people.
I agree that's unlikely; even tens of insiders is a lot of opportunity to get caught. And it applies only to the very odd case of the Presidential election. House races are much smaller and closer, but you'd need to interfere in quite a few of them to make a difference. Senate races are more crucial, but they are state wide and it's rare to find one so close that you could change it without serious risk of discovery. They do happen, but it's not always clear in advance which ones they'll be; interfering in all the potentially close ones raises your chance of being caught.
Actually, the linked article is considerably better. The headline of TFA is more accurate: "Tesla Grapples With Charging-Cable Troubles In Norwegian Cold".
The article came to prominence via the New York Times, who published that rather scurrilous piece last year on Tesla, but this was a different writer and the Times' summary of it is reasonably neutral.
Or this XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/793/
Couldn't it also be a bookmark?
I'm running with the "classic" Google Maps because the new Google Maps is missing a lot of features that I find important. It still has this feature.
I don't know why they remove useful, functional features. I've always assumed it had to do with streamlining the interfaces, Apple-style (motto: "It's either easy or it's impossible"). But they don't seem to end up more friendly or usable.
I keep expecting them to start adding new features such that I'm forced to abandon the classic maps if I want them, but as far as I can tell there's nothing compelling about the new Maps, and I'll keep with the classic until they stop offering it.
I'm a big fan of Google, and I really love the way they give me cool stuff for free. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt when they stop supporting things, and assume it means that they're working on other cool stuff. But this has me rather perplexed: a lot of work put into a new interface which is not just feature-poor but clunky.
There are several reasons:
1. There are lawsuits in progress. Courts have generally set a very high bar for lawsuits against public officials. If they can claim that they were just doing their job, even by a stretch of the imagination, they can usually get away with it. (That's not entirely unreasonable, since they also tend to be the targets of vindictive or politically motivated lawsuits, and the courts want to keep the bar to try to exclude those.) The gun here smokes pretty hard, but they're going to need a real mountain to clear that bar. (And if you say that means the bar has been set too high, given what we've seen so far... yeah, I agree.)
2. It's not just courts you have to convince, it's voters, and they can be pretty thick. Most voters are partisan, and will vote the same way every time, regardless of how much evidence you shove at them. And those voters are about evenly divided. It takes a mountain of evidence to reliably shift those few undecided voters your way. Especially since Christie's supporters will be engaging in a similar effort to disgrace his opponents. (Whether warranted or not, of course, is for the voters to decide; they'll present what they've got.)
3. As smoking as the gun is, it's almost certainly not enough to have Christie impeached. I'm not taking a position on whether that's warranted or not, but there's every reason to keep reporting it until legislators reach a decision.
This doesn't really move the needle all that much, and I don't expect it to be reported much in the popular media. It's of only minor interest as news for nerds.
Interesting. Thanks.
They also pass through airplane skins, presumably. But I wonder how many of the particles that pass through airplanes and tape will also be intercepted by sensors?
I suppose the only answer needed is "enough to calibrate against."