I suspect that cost-per-pound, it's cheaper to pump it than to send it up in an airplane. Still, airlines are already up, reducing the overhead costs, so it's an idea they should probably consider.
This is just a first test of the technology. If they were really going to use this for climate engineering, they'd use "clay, salts or metallic oxides suspended in liquid" (according to TFA) to reflect some sunlight back into space before it hits the earth.
As you can imagine, just figuring out whether you can pump millions of kilograms of stuff 1,000 meters into the air (not 1,000 km, as the submitter wrote) is an open question. Their ultimate goal is to get it 20 km up. For the first test, you use what's cheap: water.
The water itself is a greenhouse gas, but water molecules condense and fall as rain. It quickly returns to the existing equilibrium. The goal is to put up particles that would stay there for a while. Unlike water, they don't condense and fall out as quickly.
Before it fell, the water would reduce sunlight a bit. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but water in clouds isn't vapor; it's condensed droplets. Those droplets can reflect light; that's why cloudy days are dark. The goal isn't to produce water clouds, which would only be temporary and would be too much darkening. The goal is to put up enough particulates to get a slight reduction of incident light without having to continually pump new particles into the atmosphere.
(Note: I'm not crazy about geoengineering as a solution to climate change, but the experiment is still interesting.)
Many people have the sense that they are not their brains. Intuitively, their brains are like their eyes, ferrying information from the world to the "real you" that peeps out through the eyes like windows.
It's an insupportable notion, but one people hold very deal. There's a sense of self-ness that doesn't feel like it's just the reactions of zillions of neurons. And since neurologists can't yet explain the details, it's easy to treat your own perception of self-ness as more realistic than their handwaves.
There is key philosophical differences between dualism and physicalism. In physicalism, when the brain dies, you die. In dualism, there is a transcendent part that can continue to survive. Science practically presumes physicalism, and scientific arguments against dualism can veer into begging the question. Evidence like this makes it increasingly clear that there isn't any cogency to dualism, but it's not trivial.
There are a lot of moral implications as well. "Blame" is a less clear concept when the "I" isn't a rock-solid, immutable everlasting soul. Does guilt attenuate over time? What is the point of punishment? These are questions for which the intuitive dualism gives different answers from physicalism.
So, when people talk about "killing the idea of free will", it's really the dualistic free will they're talking about. The idea doesn't go away lightly, especially when neurologists have only hints like this experiment. This is one more interesting pointer in defeating the intuitive, and probably wrong, approach.
Just a nitpick, but they use the word "veneer" several times in the abstract. It makes it sound like a thin solid sheet of precious metal. That's not what they're trying to imply. They're trying to emphasize the "thinness" of it, but not really getting the "scattered" part.
Probably "dusting" has some specific connotation to geologists. Maybe "scattering" would suit the situation.
From reading TFA (yeah, I know), it's not so much that she was lying so much as that she used some very loaded language to describe it. The woman was fully dressed, but the full-on crotch prod caught her "between the labia", several times.
It's hard to imagine that the finger got so far as to be "in the vagina", though clearly that's drawing some very fine distinctions. She certainly felt violated.
I don't know precisely how TSA agents prod women, but I could see it getting into the camel toe. That would be pretty unpleasant, and if you did it to somebody a sexual assault charge is likely, though not rape. There are legal definitions to those charges, but those weren't the senses in which it was used, and I have no idea how a judge will see that. It's not legally rape, and she didn't press rape charges, but colloquially it's not incorrect.
Sounds like a miserable day for everybody concerned: the TSA agent presumably just doing her job, and the woman who got subjected to that job.
I think that "horrible article" could be applied by default to "Hey, did you hear they're applying on patent for [trivial thing]?" articles. I'm no fan of the actual patent system, and it's clearly broken, but the version of the patent system presented on Slashdot is fictional.
I'm one of those luddites whose cell phones makes phone calls, and I'm antisocial, so I'm kind of behind the curve here. Zynga's the guys behind Farmville, right? How do microtransactions come into it?
Are they basically trying to rent you the game by the minute? Or is it that they're trying to actually sell you in-game stuff with real money? I've never understood the point of their games. It's no worse than Solitaire in terms of pointlessness, I suppose, but I'm not exactly excited about Solitaire.
Other animals already digest cellulose and turn it into simple sugars. Is there any particular advantage to the one found in panda poop? Or do journalists simply like saying "panda poop"?
Nobody's making me read the stories, but they are on the front page of a site that I read more or less every day. Vaporware stories make that site less interesting, especially if I have to read into the story to find out that it is in fact vaporware.
Early research can be interesting, but only from a highly technical standpoint: what makes this research different from the other research. In the summary, aside from the mention of antimony and gallium nitride, there's nothing that distinguishes it from any other story about water-cracking catalysts that we've read dozens of times. The rest of the summary is blather that insults the audience.
So what I've never figured out: why can't we just burn trees rather than coal in power plants? You could run cars from the electricity, and wood (unlike coal) is renewable. The only CO2 you release is CO2 you sequester.
I realize that IPv4 is going to be with us for quite some time, but is this going to be worth the effort? It requires a bit of jiggery-pokery to repoint your DNS, the kind of thing that appeals to the Slashdot crowd but which your grandma will never, ever pull off. ISPs could help, but will they do so before IPv6 makes it irrelevant?
actually I don't know what excuse they're on these days, all of those have been disproven.
All of them. It doesn't really matter which, since the conclusion ("We don't have to do anything") is foregone, and the rest is just details. Disprove one and they'll switch to a different one, and when you disprove that they'll jump back to the first, hoping you've forgotten about it.
They're still stuck with explaining how they, an ignoramus who would have failed high school algebra if they hadn't cheated off the nerd in the next row, is somehow more informed about climate modeling than the scientists. That's where the Global Socialist Conspiracy comes in.
A movie is taking up very expensive real estate. It requires a large screening room, with several employees to manage it. Further, the movie is selling not just itself, but the snacks that go along with it. (And that's actually most of where the theater makes its profit; it's showing the movie nearly at cost.)
A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.
I've never actually heard one of those neuter pronouns used in real speech. I've seen them in "Hey, somebody should invent a neuter pronoun" articles, but never in real life.
I'd love to see it catch on in the legal community. Lawyers are used to stilted language aimed at increasing precision. (Whether they really succeed or not is a different question.) That would be a good place to introduce an awkward new word that we really need.
Individual opinion of people who work for the government is not the same as government policy.
It is, and must be, official government policy that individuals working for them, especially in a position of educating children, stay out of religious matters. Students are ordered to go to school and told to believe everything that the teacher tells them. What the individual says in that context has a lot of force, more than ordinary first amendment right to free speech.
From what I read in that transcript, the teacher is out of line. A generous reading can exonerate the teacher from actually denying the existence of God, but it goes well beyond simply pointing out that intelligent design is not scientific.
Renaissance plays often began with a dumbshow, a mimed version of the story you're about to see. You can see one in Hamlet: the play-within-a-play is preceded by a dumbshow of itself.
In both the Greek and Renaissance times, the audience was nearly always familiar with the story. They ripped each other off all the time, and audiences liked it that way. Almost none of Shakespeare's stories are original The show wasn't in what it was about, but how it was about it, to borrow Roger Ebert's phrase.
If you thought that American and Chinese universities were the only ones who pump up their press releases with nonsense to attract more attention, the Max Planck Gesselschaft offers up evidence to the contrary.
The real news here: they've discovered a novel mechanism for chemosynthesis, which is how organisms can make energy from chemicals rather than photosynthesis. It's already been observed with other hydrogen compounds like hydrogen sulfide and methane, but it hadn't been observed for pure hydrogen until now.
It's probably not useful for powering cars. There's nothing surprising or novel about the ability to extract energy from pure hydrogen or hydrogen compounds; it's surprising and novel that you can power a living organism that way. The hard part has always been obtaining and transporting high-energy hydrogen compounds in the first place (though fuel cells can always use some improvement).
Of course you never know what insights are going to come from any novel mechanism you discover, but the article doesn't go into applications and there's no reason to imagine it would be good for cars. The keyword for this study is microbiology, not engineering, and that's is just a way to try to make it sound more immediately applicable than it is.
I suppose it's asking too much for press release writers to stick to the actual facts, which are interesting enough in this case, rather than unfounded speculation.
I don't believe in God either, but finding the Higgs is far from proof of that.
It's yet another data point that science produces answers about how the universe came into being, and religion doesn't. There are already so many data points that the curve that fits them is obvious, but adding yet another isn't going to change the mind of anybody so fixated that they haven't already drawn it.
The "6,000 year old universe" is an idea so misbegotten that I pronounce anybody who believes it a fool. But there are other aspects of a deity which the Higgs doesn't disprove. I don't find those ideas compelling, either, but rationally I can't disprove them, and as long as they allow people to get along together I've got no objections.
The worst ugliness won't change even if you did logically disprove the existence of God, since violent people are using God as an excuse; they're immune to logic.
Little will change with the finding of the Higgs. I believe that the billions spent are trivial compared with other, large money sinks (like dubious, trillion-dollar wars and subsidies for things like sugar) and I object to canceling potentially-valuable science if favor of known-valueless endeavors. But evaluated by itself I don't know if the money is well spent.
The benefit from finding it is that you know that your model works. This is a particularly crucial piece of the model: it explains why mass happens. The model predicts a number of particles responsible for things like atoms holding together and neutrons occasionally decaying into protons. We found all those particles.
It also explains why mass works, and clearly it's important to get that right. We'll know if it's right if we can find the particle. If we don't find it, we have to go back to the drawing board. Which would be too bad, because it means radically changing a theory that works really, really well.
Nothing actually changes the day we find the Higgs. Most physicists assume that it's right and are doing work already. Knowing the actual mass of the Higgs will help them, but mostly it'll help them to know that they're not building their future work on shifting sand.
There aren't any practical applications, either immediate or long-term. I'm personally a little dubious about spending this much money on it. Basic research has occasionally paid vast, vast dividends: quantum mechanics yielded computers and lasers, among other things, and we had no idea it would go there. But at least quantum mechanics was relatively cheap, especially at the beginning, when it was a paper-and-pencil exercise.
I believe people pursue this more because of the philosophical implications than the expectation of practical value. Everybody wants to know where the universe came from, and this is an important clue in that direction. But it doesn't solve that problem, and even if it did, it can't be expected to produce any value besides the satisfaction of knowing. Maybe something will come of it, but I'm skeptical.
You don't really find a single Higgs boson. You can't detect the Higgs directly. You have to detect its decay processes (usually, a pair of taus or photons), which can also be produced by other processes. You find it statistically: if you get more of those pairs than is accounted for by understood processes, and if the amount of the excess corresponds to the mount of excesses you'd expect from the Higgs, AND if the machine is running at an energy that you'd expect to produce the Higgs, you get to call it a detection.
So you can count up how many Higgs events you thought there were, and then repeat the experiments focusing on the energy range you think the Higgs has. So, it's not quite the "eureka" moment you might hope for, but it's good enough to confirm the Standard Model.
Whether all of that was really "worth it"... well, that's something else altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that cost-per-pound, it's cheaper to pump it than to send it up in an airplane. Still, airlines are already up, reducing the overhead costs, so it's an idea they should probably consider.
This is just a first test of the technology. If they were really going to use this for climate engineering, they'd use "clay, salts or metallic oxides suspended in liquid" (according to TFA) to reflect some sunlight back into space before it hits the earth.
As you can imagine, just figuring out whether you can pump millions of kilograms of stuff 1,000 meters into the air (not 1,000 km, as the submitter wrote) is an open question. Their ultimate goal is to get it 20 km up. For the first test, you use what's cheap: water.
The water itself is a greenhouse gas, but water molecules condense and fall as rain. It quickly returns to the existing equilibrium. The goal is to put up particles that would stay there for a while. Unlike water, they don't condense and fall out as quickly.
Before it fell, the water would reduce sunlight a bit. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but water in clouds isn't vapor; it's condensed droplets. Those droplets can reflect light; that's why cloudy days are dark. The goal isn't to produce water clouds, which would only be temporary and would be too much darkening. The goal is to put up enough particulates to get a slight reduction of incident light without having to continually pump new particles into the atmosphere.
(Note: I'm not crazy about geoengineering as a solution to climate change, but the experiment is still interesting.)
Many people have the sense that they are not their brains. Intuitively, their brains are like their eyes, ferrying information from the world to the "real you" that peeps out through the eyes like windows.
It's an insupportable notion, but one people hold very deal. There's a sense of self-ness that doesn't feel like it's just the reactions of zillions of neurons. And since neurologists can't yet explain the details, it's easy to treat your own perception of self-ness as more realistic than their handwaves.
There is key philosophical differences between dualism and physicalism. In physicalism, when the brain dies, you die. In dualism, there is a transcendent part that can continue to survive. Science practically presumes physicalism, and scientific arguments against dualism can veer into begging the question. Evidence like this makes it increasingly clear that there isn't any cogency to dualism, but it's not trivial.
There are a lot of moral implications as well. "Blame" is a less clear concept when the "I" isn't a rock-solid, immutable everlasting soul. Does guilt attenuate over time? What is the point of punishment? These are questions for which the intuitive dualism gives different answers from physicalism.
So, when people talk about "killing the idea of free will", it's really the dualistic free will they're talking about. The idea doesn't go away lightly, especially when neurologists have only hints like this experiment. This is one more interesting pointer in defeating the intuitive, and probably wrong, approach.
Just a nitpick, but they use the word "veneer" several times in the abstract. It makes it sound like a thin solid sheet of precious metal. That's not what they're trying to imply. They're trying to emphasize the "thinness" of it, but not really getting the "scattered" part.
Probably "dusting" has some specific connotation to geologists. Maybe "scattering" would suit the situation.
From reading TFA (yeah, I know), it's not so much that she was lying so much as that she used some very loaded language to describe it. The woman was fully dressed, but the full-on crotch prod caught her "between the labia", several times.
It's hard to imagine that the finger got so far as to be "in the vagina", though clearly that's drawing some very fine distinctions. She certainly felt violated.
I don't know precisely how TSA agents prod women, but I could see it getting into the camel toe. That would be pretty unpleasant, and if you did it to somebody a sexual assault charge is likely, though not rape. There are legal definitions to those charges, but those weren't the senses in which it was used, and I have no idea how a judge will see that. It's not legally rape, and she didn't press rape charges, but colloquially it's not incorrect.
Sounds like a miserable day for everybody concerned: the TSA agent presumably just doing her job, and the woman who got subjected to that job.
I don't ordinary point out typos or spelling errors, but sheesh, dude, you REALLY stepped in this one.
I think that "horrible article" could be applied by default to "Hey, did you hear they're applying on patent for [trivial thing]?" articles. I'm no fan of the actual patent system, and it's clearly broken, but the version of the patent system presented on Slashdot is fictional.
I'm discovering that the callouses I get from playing guitar aren't so good for touch screens, either.
Sorry to hear about your thumb, though. Table saws scare the bejeezus out of me.
I'm one of those luddites whose cell phones makes phone calls, and I'm antisocial, so I'm kind of behind the curve here. Zynga's the guys behind Farmville, right? How do microtransactions come into it?
Are they basically trying to rent you the game by the minute? Or is it that they're trying to actually sell you in-game stuff with real money? I've never understood the point of their games. It's no worse than Solitaire in terms of pointlessness, I suppose, but I'm not exactly excited about Solitaire.
Thanks!
Other animals already digest cellulose and turn it into simple sugars. Is there any particular advantage to the one found in panda poop? Or do journalists simply like saying "panda poop"?
Nobody's making me read the stories, but they are on the front page of a site that I read more or less every day. Vaporware stories make that site less interesting, especially if I have to read into the story to find out that it is in fact vaporware.
Early research can be interesting, but only from a highly technical standpoint: what makes this research different from the other research. In the summary, aside from the mention of antimony and gallium nitride, there's nothing that distinguishes it from any other story about water-cracking catalysts that we've read dozens of times. The rest of the summary is blather that insults the audience.
Wouldn't that at least be more efficient than trying to manipulate it into being an alcohol?
So what I've never figured out: why can't we just burn trees rather than coal in power plants? You could run cars from the electricity, and wood (unlike coal) is renewable. The only CO2 you release is CO2 you sequester.
Too messy? Too expensive? Too slow to grow?
I realize that IPv4 is going to be with us for quite some time, but is this going to be worth the effort? It requires a bit of jiggery-pokery to repoint your DNS, the kind of thing that appeals to the Slashdot crowd but which your grandma will never, ever pull off. ISPs could help, but will they do so before IPv6 makes it irrelevant?
actually I don't know what excuse they're on these days, all of those have been disproven.
All of them. It doesn't really matter which, since the conclusion ("We don't have to do anything") is foregone, and the rest is just details. Disprove one and they'll switch to a different one, and when you disprove that they'll jump back to the first, hoping you've forgotten about it.
They're still stuck with explaining how they, an ignoramus who would have failed high school algebra if they hadn't cheated off the nerd in the next row, is somehow more informed about climate modeling than the scientists. That's where the Global Socialist Conspiracy comes in.
A movie is taking up very expensive real estate. It requires a large screening room, with several employees to manage it. Further, the movie is selling not just itself, but the snacks that go along with it. (And that's actually most of where the theater makes its profit; it's showing the movie nearly at cost.)
A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.
In other words... these are apples and oranges.
I've never actually heard one of those neuter pronouns used in real speech. I've seen them in "Hey, somebody should invent a neuter pronoun" articles, but never in real life.
I'd love to see it catch on in the legal community. Lawyers are used to stilted language aimed at increasing precision. (Whether they really succeed or not is a different question.) That would be a good place to introduce an awkward new word that we really need.
Individual opinion of people who work for the government is not the same as government policy.
It is, and must be, official government policy that individuals working for them, especially in a position of educating children, stay out of religious matters. Students are ordered to go to school and told to believe everything that the teacher tells them. What the individual says in that context has a lot of force, more than ordinary first amendment right to free speech.
From what I read in that transcript, the teacher is out of line. A generous reading can exonerate the teacher from actually denying the existence of God, but it goes well beyond simply pointing out that intelligent design is not scientific.
Renaissance plays often began with a dumbshow, a mimed version of the story you're about to see. You can see one in Hamlet: the play-within-a-play is preceded by a dumbshow of itself.
In both the Greek and Renaissance times, the audience was nearly always familiar with the story. They ripped each other off all the time, and audiences liked it that way. Almost none of Shakespeare's stories are original The show wasn't in what it was about, but how it was about it, to borrow Roger Ebert's phrase.
If you thought that American and Chinese universities were the only ones who pump up their press releases with nonsense to attract more attention, the Max Planck Gesselschaft offers up evidence to the contrary.
The real news here: they've discovered a novel mechanism for chemosynthesis, which is how organisms can make energy from chemicals rather than photosynthesis. It's already been observed with other hydrogen compounds like hydrogen sulfide and methane, but it hadn't been observed for pure hydrogen until now.
It's probably not useful for powering cars. There's nothing surprising or novel about the ability to extract energy from pure hydrogen or hydrogen compounds; it's surprising and novel that you can power a living organism that way. The hard part has always been obtaining and transporting high-energy hydrogen compounds in the first place (though fuel cells can always use some improvement).
Of course you never know what insights are going to come from any novel mechanism you discover, but the article doesn't go into applications and there's no reason to imagine it would be good for cars. The keyword for this study is microbiology, not engineering, and that's is just a way to try to make it sound more immediately applicable than it is.
I suppose it's asking too much for press release writers to stick to the actual facts, which are interesting enough in this case, rather than unfounded speculation.
I don't believe in God either, but finding the Higgs is far from proof of that.
It's yet another data point that science produces answers about how the universe came into being, and religion doesn't. There are already so many data points that the curve that fits them is obvious, but adding yet another isn't going to change the mind of anybody so fixated that they haven't already drawn it.
The "6,000 year old universe" is an idea so misbegotten that I pronounce anybody who believes it a fool. But there are other aspects of a deity which the Higgs doesn't disprove. I don't find those ideas compelling, either, but rationally I can't disprove them, and as long as they allow people to get along together I've got no objections.
The worst ugliness won't change even if you did logically disprove the existence of God, since violent people are using God as an excuse; they're immune to logic.
Little will change with the finding of the Higgs. I believe that the billions spent are trivial compared with other, large money sinks (like dubious, trillion-dollar wars and subsidies for things like sugar) and I object to canceling potentially-valuable science if favor of known-valueless endeavors. But evaluated by itself I don't know if the money is well spent.
The benefit from finding it is that you know that your model works. This is a particularly crucial piece of the model: it explains why mass happens. The model predicts a number of particles responsible for things like atoms holding together and neutrons occasionally decaying into protons. We found all those particles.
It also explains why mass works, and clearly it's important to get that right. We'll know if it's right if we can find the particle. If we don't find it, we have to go back to the drawing board. Which would be too bad, because it means radically changing a theory that works really, really well.
Nothing actually changes the day we find the Higgs. Most physicists assume that it's right and are doing work already. Knowing the actual mass of the Higgs will help them, but mostly it'll help them to know that they're not building their future work on shifting sand.
There aren't any practical applications, either immediate or long-term. I'm personally a little dubious about spending this much money on it. Basic research has occasionally paid vast, vast dividends: quantum mechanics yielded computers and lasers, among other things, and we had no idea it would go there. But at least quantum mechanics was relatively cheap, especially at the beginning, when it was a paper-and-pencil exercise.
I believe people pursue this more because of the philosophical implications than the expectation of practical value. Everybody wants to know where the universe came from, and this is an important clue in that direction. But it doesn't solve that problem, and even if it did, it can't be expected to produce any value besides the satisfaction of knowing. Maybe something will come of it, but I'm skeptical.
And that is why bloggers aren't journalists, and shouldn't be treated as sources of news.
You don't really find a single Higgs boson. You can't detect the Higgs directly. You have to detect its decay processes (usually, a pair of taus or photons), which can also be produced by other processes. You find it statistically: if you get more of those pairs than is accounted for by understood processes, and if the amount of the excess corresponds to the mount of excesses you'd expect from the Higgs, AND if the machine is running at an energy that you'd expect to produce the Higgs, you get to call it a detection.
So you can count up how many Higgs events you thought there were, and then repeat the experiments focusing on the energy range you think the Higgs has. So, it's not quite the "eureka" moment you might hope for, but it's good enough to confirm the Standard Model.
Whether all of that was really "worth it"... well, that's something else altogether.