Mechanism is often lacking even in regular science, especially in medicine. Biochemistry and physiology are complicated, and we often have only a vague idea (if that) about what makes a particular drug work.
But mechanism isn't a necessary part. What is necessary is that something have measurable, demonstrable, repeatable effects. If you don't have that, you've got nothing. And this is especially important in medicine, where wishful thinking is extremely easy; people will fool themselves into thinking something helps, because they want it so desperately.
That's aside from the placebo effect, where things actually can have some some measurable benefits despite the explicit lack of mechanism. That's because the mechanisms are very complicated, and mental state can be a mechanism all by itself.
Science is most effective when it knows the mechanism, and science of all human endeavors is uniquely suited to finding mechanisms. That's because it starts with an insistence on measures, which gives you some idea what the "whole" is as you break it down into the "sum of the parts".
From mechanisms you can work forward with better efficiency. That doesn't mean you can't make progress without them, and much of medicine starts with a guess rather than a mechanism, e.g. maybe this willow bark will help with the headache. That guess becomes science once you can measure the effect.
When a scientist claims a "lack of mechanism", it happens in conjunction with a lack of demonstrated effect. It's like piling on: not only doesn't it work, there's no reason to believe it could work, so there's nowhere to go from here. At that point, pursuit of the guess usually stems solely from wishful thinking and not from any commitment to objectivity.
Because fashion is the only "art" that can become OBSOLETE.
I disagree with that, but I think your point doesn't need it, because the same cycles are at play. Music trends come and go pretty fast. There may be no point in protecting a song past the first, say, 30 days, which will contain most of the sales.
Software has a longer cycle, a few years at least. There's no real point in protecting, say, Windows 2000, solely because nobody really wants to copy it. Those few who do aren't worth much revenue.
In both cases, the "copying" goes a lot faster than it does in fashion. Burning a CD takes minutes. Even with a pattern, copying a dress takes hours; reverse-engineering it is likely to take days. And the process takes a lot more skill.
That cycle is still shorter than the fashion season, and knock-offs can appear pretty quickly. But in music and software, the copies are perfect; fashion copies are suspect in terms of quality. (Even if the originals are badly cut and sewn, as they often are, they at least use expensive materials, which have better "drape".)
That's correct. What's at issue here is a matter of engineering, not physics.
Physicists reserve "impossible" for the truly mathematically unavoidable, while engineers expand it to the wildly impractical. When you say something "is" true, you're speaking in the former sense. When you say you "believe" something to be true, as Einstein did, you're speaking in the latter sense.
So it's not overthrowing any physical principles. It's merely confirming something else Einstein said: the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.
"Ultraviolet catastrophe" is a physics term, talking about a time when math that had seemed to work out well produced some puzzling answers. The solution was that they had to scrap the old math and replace it with something radically different. Equivalent to somebody accidentally proving that there was no such thing as molecules, and having to re-do chemistry from scratch.
In the case of the "ultraviolet catastrophe", the old math said that a hot object should emit photons at every wavelength. Fewer at shorter, higher-energy wavelengths, but some nonetheless. The math worked for longer wavelengths, but for shorter ones (say, ultraviolet) it got worse. For ultra-short wavelengths, any body hotter than absolute zero should be emitting photons of near-zero wavelength with arbitrarily large amounts of energy. Infinite, in fact. Quite a catastrophe.
The solution turned out to be to say that the energy had to come in discrete packets. The new theory is perplexing, but more accurate and way more useful. (Computers, lasers, etc etc etc.)
Ultimately it turned out well, but nobody at the time really wanted to have to throw out everything they knew about energy. In this case, it's unsurprising that the new solutions should confirm that we're not looking at another similar revolution. I don't think anybody was looking forward to scrapping what we think we know about gases.
Mostly, it helps us explain why there isn't any antimatter to map.
One would expect that the universe started with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we don't see any antimatter. One possibility is that there's a slight bias towards matter. Much antimatter was present at one point, but interacted with matter, producing high-energy photons and leaving the universe with just matter.
At least, that's one possibility, and this experiment is evidence in favor of it. One more piece of a very difficult puzzle.
I do know Senator Bennett. As I understand it he was ousted primarily over his support for TARP, and I'm not hearing any outrage from his former opponents over this. Earmarks get a bad name, but spending is spending; earmarks actually account for a trivial fraction of the budget.
Can I blame those GOP Senators for pushing for funding to keep jobs in their state?
You can when they're also pushing for an end to earmarks, reduced government spending, and a generalized "the government can't do anything right" attitude.
"Small government" is a valid position, but "reduce spending on everybody but me" is an attitude that merits blame.
This is true, and I've learned to expect no better from the popular press, which is the target of this press release. (And what we're linked to is a press release, not a journal article.)
I'd like to think better of Slashdot, but that's not really the case.
If one actually wants to read science news, I recommend Science News, which does precisely what you suggest: the research in the headline, the speculative applications buried at the end. (And I think they expect their readers always take that with a grain of salt.)
As usual with "SOLAR CELLS HERE TOMORROW!" stories, the actual important news in the story is buried around paragraph six.
This is not the first time such a material has been developed, but it is the first one that can handle light of any polarity, from any angle. It also works in the blue part of the visible spectrum, making it the first NIM to operate at visible frequencies.
Ah, thank you. As usual, a nice, modestly useful development of moderate interest to those who study materials engineering, and of essentially zero interest to anybody else. (Well, except for us science nerds, who shouldn't have to be sold the fluff, but it's what we get anyway.)
But since press releases attract more attention than journal articles, at least when they promise free power, you put FREE SOLAR ENERGY at the top and actual scientific research gets a paragraph somewhere in the middle.
CNN, at least, is not consuming any spectrum. The "C" stands for "cable".
The broadcast spectrum is not as limited as it used to be. Between the switch to digital broadcasting and most viewers switching away from over-the-air altogether, broadcast news is certainly anachronistic. But evening newscasts from the Big Three are still viewed by 20 million people per night, and that's a pretty considerable chunk.
CBS is the least of them, but 5 million people a night still watch it. That's only a quarter of American Idol, the top-rated show, but it's more than other things in the prime time lineup (3.4 million for America's Next Top Model; 4.9 million for The Middle [admittedly, a rerun].)
All told, the nightly news on the three networks gets more viewers than American Idol.
Right, but the 4 billion mark isn't that much further away, just a factor of two. The conditions under which you'd need precisely 32 bits, without any risk of going over into 33, are relatively narrow.
It's one of the weaknesses of the language that you often hear people griping about, but I guess I can sort of see the logic.
The difference between signed and unsigned originated when memories were a lot smaller and CPUs slower. (Hey, I wrote assembly for the 8080, which lacked even a 16-bit multiply.) A single extra bit made a noticeable difference.
Today... hey, you think you're gonna need to count more than 2 billion? Fine, use an extra 4 bytes.
For that rare set of circumstances where you need more than 2 billion, but definitely less than 4 billion, and your loops are so tight that the extra delay in the pipelining makes a noticeable difference... well, you don't want to be writing in a garbage-collecting language anyway, now do you?
In theory, the Tea Partiers aren't in the thrall of the Christian Right as the rest of the Republican party is. They want lower taxes and are willing to cut services to do it. (Unsurprising, as they are on average wealthier than your average American, and so don't need the services they want to see cut.)
In practice, the Tea Partiers will oppose it on tax grounds, and hope nobody notices that it's precisely what the Christian Right wants.
You'd think that it would come under the auspices of the "personal responsibility" the Republicans are so keen to chant about. Except when it's something they're opposed to, in which case "personal responsibility" is apparently insufficient.
a. Somebody is actually using all of those bits. If most of it is write-only (i.e. people put it out there but few read it), it can be a net win despite losing the store-and-forward.
b. People continue to download those files. Some will switch to BitTorrent (which may be easier on them, and has some of the same store-and-forward advantages of Usenet); others will stop entirely.
I think they're mostly banking on (a) not being true. I suspect that a lot of warez users have ALREADY switched to ButTorrent (which they can throttle, another advantage for them). But they still have to download the complete contents of the newsgroups.
They did control a bit for that; the control group saw a "blank square", according to the actual journal article.
Not entirely sure what "blank" means, but they were generally being shown a screen full of flashing lights: "participants reported that they had seen color blocks without any meaningful pattern".
Seems to me that they should at least have controlled for ANY logos, perhaps for a car rental company or just random corporate logos. It's not at all clear to me whether they've actually proven anything about "fast food logos" rather than complicated shapes in general.
I'm generally suspicious about subliminal programming experiments, and their failure to control for something that seems obvious to me makes me skeptical.
The remarkable, novel thing about the Wii was using accelerometers in its controller. That means you're not just applying force; you're doing so with a range of motion. That's aerobic exercise, using your own weight as the resistance.
Isometrics are another good form of exercise, and they can be done with much simpler tools, since all you need to measure is force. But that isn't what the Wii is doing.
Future generations will look back and conclude that some people REALLY did have to TOO much time and trivial stuff to share.
Sure, why not? You never know what sort of insights you'll get. What people do in their free time is just as important to historians as what they do when they're working. More so, sometimes, since the work is often ephemeral while the free time is an important insight into the culture as a whole.
Most of it's garbage, but garbage middens are one of anthropology's favorite data sources.
Either way, even small advances like this are exciting.
I just wish more news sources would try to find the excitement in them as they actually are, rather than puffing them into yet another entry of the "solar power coming soon!" litany.
The actual splitting of water is done by using a pigment to absorb sunlight, then transferring the energy to indium oxide as a catalyst to split water. That's old news. Good, but old.
The problem is that it's hard to keep them doing this efficiently; things tend to clump up. They came up with a way to use viruses to make a structure that keeps everything separate. Viruses are good for building self-assembling structures; this is also old news in nanotech.
Putting it all together here, that's news, but not terribly exciting news, since it's all still in a lab and not scaled to industrial sizes. So the PR department buffs it up with a misleading headline about viruses splitting water.
So no, you don't have to worry about the virus eating the world. It's all about indium oxide, which is not self-replicating. The viruses are just a piece of the machinery.
Everyone is clamoring over the iPad calling it a Kindle-Killer but the device is more than an eReader.
Precisely. And the question is, does the world have much call for a single-purpose device like the Kindle?
Single-purpose devices can be optimized wonderfully. The Kindle is lighter, uses less power, and is easier to read outside. It does one thing, and does it reasonably well. Not perfectly well, and it's possible that the Kindle could fail now and resurface in a decade when the screen technology takes another leap. Like the PDA, which failed as a Newton, rose again with Palm, and then sank again as the functionality was bundled into the phone.
The iPad itself is more limited than a notebook or even a netbook. But is it just the right kind of limited? We'll find out.
Slashdot Mirror
Mechanism is often lacking even in regular science, especially in medicine. Biochemistry and physiology are complicated, and we often have only a vague idea (if that) about what makes a particular drug work.
But mechanism isn't a necessary part. What is necessary is that something have measurable, demonstrable, repeatable effects. If you don't have that, you've got nothing. And this is especially important in medicine, where wishful thinking is extremely easy; people will fool themselves into thinking something helps, because they want it so desperately.
That's aside from the placebo effect, where things actually can have some some measurable benefits despite the explicit lack of mechanism. That's because the mechanisms are very complicated, and mental state can be a mechanism all by itself.
Science is most effective when it knows the mechanism, and science of all human endeavors is uniquely suited to finding mechanisms. That's because it starts with an insistence on measures, which gives you some idea what the "whole" is as you break it down into the "sum of the parts".
From mechanisms you can work forward with better efficiency. That doesn't mean you can't make progress without them, and much of medicine starts with a guess rather than a mechanism, e.g. maybe this willow bark will help with the headache. That guess becomes science once you can measure the effect.
When a scientist claims a "lack of mechanism", it happens in conjunction with a lack of demonstrated effect. It's like piling on: not only doesn't it work, there's no reason to believe it could work, so there's nowhere to go from here. At that point, pursuit of the guess usually stems solely from wishful thinking and not from any commitment to objectivity.
Because fashion is the only "art" that can become OBSOLETE.
I disagree with that, but I think your point doesn't need it, because the same cycles are at play. Music trends come and go pretty fast. There may be no point in protecting a song past the first, say, 30 days, which will contain most of the sales.
Software has a longer cycle, a few years at least. There's no real point in protecting, say, Windows 2000, solely because nobody really wants to copy it. Those few who do aren't worth much revenue.
In both cases, the "copying" goes a lot faster than it does in fashion. Burning a CD takes minutes. Even with a pattern, copying a dress takes hours; reverse-engineering it is likely to take days. And the process takes a lot more skill.
That cycle is still shorter than the fashion season, and knock-offs can appear pretty quickly. But in music and software, the copies are perfect; fashion copies are suspect in terms of quality. (Even if the originals are badly cut and sewn, as they often are, they at least use expensive materials, which have better "drape".)
Goddamn it, why don't I ever have mod points when I need them?
Thanks for pointing that out!
That's correct. What's at issue here is a matter of engineering, not physics.
Physicists reserve "impossible" for the truly mathematically unavoidable, while engineers expand it to the wildly impractical. When you say something "is" true, you're speaking in the former sense. When you say you "believe" something to be true, as Einstein did, you're speaking in the latter sense.
So it's not overthrowing any physical principles. It's merely confirming something else Einstein said: the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.
"Ultraviolet catastrophe" is a physics term, talking about a time when math that had seemed to work out well produced some puzzling answers. The solution was that they had to scrap the old math and replace it with something radically different. Equivalent to somebody accidentally proving that there was no such thing as molecules, and having to re-do chemistry from scratch.
In the case of the "ultraviolet catastrophe", the old math said that a hot object should emit photons at every wavelength. Fewer at shorter, higher-energy wavelengths, but some nonetheless. The math worked for longer wavelengths, but for shorter ones (say, ultraviolet) it got worse. For ultra-short wavelengths, any body hotter than absolute zero should be emitting photons of near-zero wavelength with arbitrarily large amounts of energy. Infinite, in fact. Quite a catastrophe.
The solution turned out to be to say that the energy had to come in discrete packets. The new theory is perplexing, but more accurate and way more useful. (Computers, lasers, etc etc etc.)
Ultimately it turned out well, but nobody at the time really wanted to have to throw out everything they knew about energy. In this case, it's unsurprising that the new solutions should confirm that we're not looking at another similar revolution. I don't think anybody was looking forward to scrapping what we think we know about gases.
Mostly, it helps us explain why there isn't any antimatter to map.
One would expect that the universe started with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we don't see any antimatter. One possibility is that there's a slight bias towards matter. Much antimatter was present at one point, but interacted with matter, producing high-energy photons and leaving the universe with just matter.
At least, that's one possibility, and this experiment is evidence in favor of it. One more piece of a very difficult puzzle.
Great way to whip up the base in an election year, but the problem itself is simply too complex for our current crop of officials.
I agree, though I'm not sure a new crop of officials would be any better. Hard problem is hard.
I do know Senator Bennett. As I understand it he was ousted primarily over his support for TARP, and I'm not hearing any outrage from his former opponents over this. Earmarks get a bad name, but spending is spending; earmarks actually account for a trivial fraction of the budget.
Can I blame those GOP Senators for pushing for funding to keep jobs in their state?
You can when they're also pushing for an end to earmarks, reduced government spending, and a generalized "the government can't do anything right" attitude.
"Small government" is a valid position, but "reduce spending on everybody but me" is an attitude that merits blame.
This is true, and I've learned to expect no better from the popular press, which is the target of this press release. (And what we're linked to is a press release, not a journal article.)
I'd like to think better of Slashdot, but that's not really the case.
If one actually wants to read science news, I recommend Science News, which does precisely what you suggest: the research in the headline, the speculative applications buried at the end. (And I think they expect their readers always take that with a grain of salt.)
As usual with "SOLAR CELLS HERE TOMORROW!" stories, the actual important news in the story is buried around paragraph six.
This is not the first time such a material has been developed, but it is the first one that can handle light of any polarity, from any angle. It also works in the blue part of the visible spectrum, making it the first NIM to operate at visible frequencies.
Ah, thank you. As usual, a nice, modestly useful development of moderate interest to those who study materials engineering, and of essentially zero interest to anybody else. (Well, except for us science nerds, who shouldn't have to be sold the fluff, but it's what we get anyway.)
But since press releases attract more attention than journal articles, at least when they promise free power, you put FREE SOLAR ENERGY at the top and actual scientific research gets a paragraph somewhere in the middle.
CNN, at least, is not consuming any spectrum. The "C" stands for "cable".
The broadcast spectrum is not as limited as it used to be. Between the switch to digital broadcasting and most viewers switching away from over-the-air altogether, broadcast news is certainly anachronistic. But evening newscasts from the Big Three are still viewed by 20 million people per night, and that's a pretty considerable chunk.
CBS is the least of them, but 5 million people a night still watch it. That's only a quarter of American Idol, the top-rated show, but it's more than other things in the prime time lineup (3.4 million for America's Next Top Model; 4.9 million for The Middle [admittedly, a rerun].)
All told, the nightly news on the three networks gets more viewers than American Idol.
Right, but the 4 billion mark isn't that much further away, just a factor of two. The conditions under which you'd need precisely 32 bits, without any risk of going over into 33, are relatively narrow.
It's one of the weaknesses of the language that you often hear people griping about, but I guess I can sort of see the logic.
The difference between signed and unsigned originated when memories were a lot smaller and CPUs slower. (Hey, I wrote assembly for the 8080, which lacked even a 16-bit multiply.) A single extra bit made a noticeable difference.
Today... hey, you think you're gonna need to count more than 2 billion? Fine, use an extra 4 bytes.
For that rare set of circumstances where you need more than 2 billion, but definitely less than 4 billion, and your loops are so tight that the extra delay in the pipelining makes a noticeable difference... well, you don't want to be writing in a garbage-collecting language anyway, now do you?
Take a deep breath. Have a nice cup of tea.
In theory, the Tea Partiers aren't in the thrall of the Christian Right as the rest of the Republican party is. They want lower taxes and are willing to cut services to do it. (Unsurprising, as they are on average wealthier than your average American, and so don't need the services they want to see cut.)
In practice, the Tea Partiers will oppose it on tax grounds, and hope nobody notices that it's precisely what the Christian Right wants.
You'd think that it would come under the auspices of the "personal responsibility" the Republicans are so keen to chant about. Except when it's something they're opposed to, in which case "personal responsibility" is apparently insufficient.
That's a good thought, but it's true only if:
a. Somebody is actually using all of those bits. If most of it is write-only (i.e. people put it out there but few read it), it can be a net win despite losing the store-and-forward.
b. People continue to download those files. Some will switch to BitTorrent (which may be easier on them, and has some of the same store-and-forward advantages of Usenet); others will stop entirely.
I think they're mostly banking on (a) not being true. I suspect that a lot of warez users have ALREADY switched to ButTorrent (which they can throttle, another advantage for them). But they still have to download the complete contents of the newsgroups.
They did control a bit for that; the control group saw a "blank square", according to the actual journal article.
Not entirely sure what "blank" means, but they were generally being shown a screen full of flashing lights: "participants reported that they had seen color blocks without any meaningful pattern".
Seems to me that they should at least have controlled for ANY logos, perhaps for a car rental company or just random corporate logos. It's not at all clear to me whether they've actually proven anything about "fast food logos" rather than complicated shapes in general.
I'm generally suspicious about subliminal programming experiments, and their failure to control for something that seems obvious to me makes me skeptical.
The remarkable, novel thing about the Wii was using accelerometers in its controller. That means you're not just applying force; you're doing so with a range of motion. That's aerobic exercise, using your own weight as the resistance.
Isometrics are another good form of exercise, and they can be done with much simpler tools, since all you need to measure is force. But that isn't what the Wii is doing.
Future generations will look back and conclude that some people REALLY did have to TOO much time and trivial stuff to share.
Sure, why not? You never know what sort of insights you'll get. What people do in their free time is just as important to historians as what they do when they're working. More so, sometimes, since the work is often ephemeral while the free time is an important insight into the culture as a whole.
Most of it's garbage, but garbage middens are one of anthropology's favorite data sources.
Whoops! Thanks for catching that.
Either way, even small advances like this are exciting.
I just wish more news sources would try to find the excitement in them as they actually are, rather than puffing them into yet another entry of the "solar power coming soon!" litany.
The actual splitting of water is done by using a pigment to absorb sunlight, then transferring the energy to indium oxide as a catalyst to split water. That's old news. Good, but old.
The problem is that it's hard to keep them doing this efficiently; things tend to clump up. They came up with a way to use viruses to make a structure that keeps everything separate. Viruses are good for building self-assembling structures; this is also old news in nanotech.
Putting it all together here, that's news, but not terribly exciting news, since it's all still in a lab and not scaled to industrial sizes. So the PR department buffs it up with a misleading headline about viruses splitting water.
So no, you don't have to worry about the virus eating the world. It's all about indium oxide, which is not self-replicating. The viruses are just a piece of the machinery.
Everyone is clamoring over the iPad calling it a Kindle-Killer but the device is more than an eReader.
Precisely. And the question is, does the world have much call for a single-purpose device like the Kindle?
Single-purpose devices can be optimized wonderfully. The Kindle is lighter, uses less power, and is easier to read outside. It does one thing, and does it reasonably well. Not perfectly well, and it's possible that the Kindle could fail now and resurface in a decade when the screen technology takes another leap. Like the PDA, which failed as a Newton, rose again with Palm, and then sank again as the functionality was bundled into the phone.
The iPad itself is more limited than a notebook or even a netbook. But is it just the right kind of limited? We'll find out.