Sounds to me like Arp's research falls into a category termed "pathological science." Sometimes a scientist becomes so enamored with an idea that they try too hard to make everything fit into their world-view, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Contrary evidence is either ignored or the pet theory is made more elaborate and, to others, less tolerable.
It's a little unfair just to brand scientists with this label, because it's sometimes a matter of degrees and also an unfair judgement after-the-fact. We now can explain the granular redshift distribution, but that explanation was not available at the time Arp was formulating his theories.
But on the other hand, there are some cases that are obvious and the telltale signs of pathological science serve as a useful warning not to take some claims seriously. Cold fusion, for example, falls here. At the same time you might be able to say the same thing about both supersymmetry and string theory, which have both certainly experienced cronyism and certain signs of pathological science -- always a position to retreat back to in the face of negative evidence. But here I'm more forgiving since most of this research has been done with a good amount of empiricism and expectations that were not completely unmotivated or unreasonable.
Finally, I'm again cautious to apply such labels to scientists because we're comparing recent scientific development with an idealized and polished version of past scientific history. Most students learn about science history in the context of learning the science itself, and a simplified narrative of history serves the professors well in this case. It's not taught with all of the hairy, messy details that would better characterize what research was actually like at the time, with all of the heated arguments, politics, and dead-ends of the day.
I think mainstream scientists going astray isn't, perhaps, all that different from fringe scientists going astray. A healthy scientific program needs a blend of ideas and personalities, and to foster creative approaches. We have a terrible stagnation going on today in basic science, and group-think and witch hunting seem to underlie this.
Ack I hit submit too soon. Forgot to add a criteria that they don't use but that's pernicious, which is a filtering bias. What stories do you publish? If you only publish stories that put your favorite political party in a good light or all others in a bad light, you're being manipulative and dishonest even if the stories themselves are accurate. I think most moderate news outlets have some filtering bias but they will still publish stories both for and against any and all political parties. I could not find any examples of unfiltered/counterspin articles in any of the "junk" sites listed in this study.
Their list of junk news sites seems reasonable to me when I spot-check it. Come on, people are actually defending Breitbart, InfoWars, hannity.com, and others like these? Really?
If I need to prove objectively that 100% of their list is indeed junk, I cannot. But a strong majority of them are obviously so. Browsing through their sample articles, the problems are unmistakeable.
But I do see a conspicuous lack of hard-left hyper-partisan news sites, which is a real problem. They most certainly exist. It's hard to imagine that there isn't a strong selection bias going in, before their criteria is applied. I don't see how they came up with an original list, though I suppose it could be derived from twitter and facebook posts. Regardless, the lack of alt-left sites is conspicuous.
I've heard this argument before in recent months, but it's not true. I took a look at the ratio of population to electors in our various states and there isn't all that much spread.
If you research it, I think you'll find the original motivation behind the electoral college had several facets, but rural representation was not one of them. Part of it had to do with the three-fifths compromise, part of it was simple practicality in the 1700s, and part of it was the idea that electors, being reasonable and educated people, might reject a popular but un-presidential candidate. The last part might seem like a virtue, but historically this has never become a factor.
I've recently enjoyed learning about various voting systems, which generally do not work well with the electoral college. These systems are being studied carefully these days in terms of a variety of criteria, how often those come into play, and how gameable the various systems are. Currently I like the idea of STAR Voting -- see for example www.equal.vote. This seems tangential at first, but it leads back around to the electoral college.
I disagree. Those criteria, while they do allow for judgement calls, seem like good ones. Requiring 3 out of the 5 is a little arbitrary though.
The fake news awards were pure white house propaganda, as are claims of CNN and the stock market. Not all news outlets use *highly* emotional language, and to do so would be obviously unprofessional. All-caps and bad punctuation also point at lack of professionalism. Junk news outlets use all these techniques a lot because they are trying to persuade, not inform.
Limited use of unnamed sources is understandable, as long as you don't do this all the time. CNN does usually cite its sources. The logical fallacies and other propaganda techniques are obvious to spot with a little training, and junk news sources use these regularly. It's baffling that it isn't more obvious to people.
Yes, this! I don't often read the slashdot discussions, but I did here looking for exactly this kind of comment. Finally! How many other posters here have actually RTFA? Here that means the full PDF. I've read some of it, but not enough. (So I don't count yet.) Most everything else, even my own meta-post here, is off-topic, irrelevant, reactionary blather.
So far I'm impressed by the techniques used. I cannot tell yet if there is room for bias in the results but I don't see any yet.
I'm trying to comfort myself by wondering if the US being so tragicomically stupid well help the resolve of other countries and help to set a good example by failure. Like Papa Berenstain Bear?
This is an interesting point. Some journalists report that the Accord is clearly a treaty, others say that it's an agreement that does not require congressional approval. This sounds like one of those issues that requires more self-education than I've done. I doubt we could get 2/3 majority in the Senate today, and I doubt we could have gotten it a year ago either. This is a deeply sad fact more than any one president or action. Today Trump has backed out, saying that we're the laughing stock of the world for having signed on in the first place. Now we are joining the proud ranks of the non-signatories: Holy See, Nicaragua, and Syria.
I don't understand the specific consolidation of power that you're referring to. As another poster mentioned, some government-imposed mechanism like a CO2 tax is an effort to correct for a market failure. Correcting this would decentralize power. How many wind, solar, fusion etc companies are there? How many oil and coal companies? The fossil fuel companies are few, large, and politically powerful. What we have today *is* consolidation of power.
I'm just saying that a free, unregulated market does not self-optimize in many industries, and the energy industry is one of those for multiple reasons. Yes political organizations have problems, but as citizens we do whatever we can to help. You can't say "government has done many stupid things therefore I'm anti-government in every way." Let's say that some pothole damaged your car. You determine that the pothole was supposed to be fixed but the winning contractor had abused the system and never planned on completing the work. Government is to blame ultimately, so to solve that we should remove all government funding for roads. Downsize that evil government! That's allowing yourself to be ignorant of the bigger picture. Overly-simplistic thinking is a trap that many extremists fall victim to.
Transportation is another industry that cannot be fully privatized without any regulations. There are parallels.
I don't think that market economics are enough to stop global warming. It requires a political component, which the Paris Climate Accord was a small but important part of. It also will require sequestration efforts in addition to CO2-neutral energy production. I can't see us avoiding an unpleasant future unless we enact some kind of CO2 tax to fund renewables and sequestration initiatives, etc. CO2 emissions are a cost that are realized globally but not privately, so market economics alone will not correctly optimize that industry. Pulling out of the Paris Accord really gives the wrong message. It's not that the Paris Accord alone solves much of anything by itself, but it adds political momentum in the right direction.
A lot of history can be told with the narrative that our ancestors went through hell, fought and died, to give future generations a better life. Maybe that's a romanticized view of the past, but regardless it reflects an ideology that's the exact opposite of what we are doing today.
So far it looks like the best means of carbon sequestration are in agricultural practices. Climate change threatens to impact agriculture foremost, and agriculture is also is a significant part of our economic base. This adds urgency - we cannot wait for an economic collapse.
What do you mean about a model that can be back-tested? Is this a requirement?
Only 90% is a hoax. At this point the evidence for man-made climate change is unshakable. Science operates on the frontier of knowledge, and the frontier today is in predictions of severity, how far away are points of no return, future impacts of ocean acidification, ocean currents, and such. We've moved well beyond the initial questions: Is climate change happening? Yes. Is it caused by us? Yes. Will natural systems adapt to the change and self-regulate? No, at least not on the timescales we require. These were unsettled questions in the 1980's but were worrying enough that Regan and Bush initiated climate change negotiations with China. But science has since moved on.
There is still a manufactured debate going on about these basic facts of global warming, but it's entirely political. There are even a few (former) scientists making false statements, but they are all paid to do so by agencies with vested interests in manipulating public opinion. This has nothing to do with science.
... Time to quit putting ourselves at a self induced disadvantage till the others come on board and PROVE they are doing it.
The world needs to shift away from fossil fuels toward CO2-neutral energy production technologies. Not overnight of course, but over a small number of decades. To accomplish this, we need to maintain a strong economy. If we wait too long, the Earth will cripple world economy by itself and at that point I think recovery would take millennia.
We also need to develop feasible methods of carbon sequestration. "Green" energy production by itself is no longer sufficient.
In order to remain a technology leader, the U.S. needs to be on the frontier of these new energy technologies. We put ourselves at a self-induced disadvantage by halting research and subsidies/incentives for alternative energy.
I was thinking the same thing when I read the article. This was actually a great teachable moment. Take the time to show how to dig deeper to uncover the truth. Follow the sources of information, etc.
This isn't Google's fault. They can improve for sure, which is how the article reads, but that's not the real lesson here! We just need to keep in mind how to react to this or any other news (internet or not) from any source. One of the primary roles of education needs to be to instill skepticism and how to dig deeper. In the end we often won't arrive at certainty -- that's normal -- but we can usually get a pretty good idea what's a hoax and what's not.
It's easy to remember to do this when the news you find runs counter to your expectations or political leaning. The goal is to react with suspicion to news that you are eager to believe. I fall into this trap a lot myself.
Several problems were exposed in the 2016 election. Well, "exposed" is not really true since they were evident in the past as well, but they stand center-stage today.
One is that propaganda won, and bigly! Reading the/. posts in this story alone, it's obvious that there are two non-overlapping versions of history in the minds of Americans. The vilification of both Trump and Hillary was effective beyond reason. Ever heard the term "Crooked Hillary" before? Does repetition make it true? Survey says "Yes!" I have no doubt that had Sanders won the primaries, he would have become the villain and thought to be the ONLY candidate Trump could actually beat. No politicians are ideal candidates. I think all the moderately-well-qualified people either avoid politics entirely or never get beyond local government positions. You can't get far without making compromises. Anyway, mud-slinging was done on both sides, and has never been more pervasive than in 2016.
Media basically failed us in the 2016 election for lots of reasons that I don't even pretend to understand. For one thing, journalistic integrity used to be a desirable thing, but the tables are turned. Does the term "Fact checker" (a denigration of the term "investigative reporter") bring to mind a particular political bias? Why is that? If conspiracy is part of your answer, I beg you to think more clearly and more deeply. Claims of widespread media conspiracy have been made in the past, and in other countries. History repeats itself -- study up.
The DNC emails show how corrupt our two-party system has become. It should be obvious that the problems these bring out are not unique to the DNC. (Observe block voting for example.) It should also be obvious that the U.S. has evolved far away from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What we have today is a democracy in name only.
I'm certainly revealing a liberal bias in this post, but I don't think either presidential candidate would solve the issues we have today with government. It's much deeper than that, and it's not about Democrats vs Republicans. It's about Democrats and Republicans.
For the record I'd have preferred Hillary for president, because of support of / funding for basic science. Hillary appeared to be a really bad candidate in that regard, but Trump is shaping up to be absolutely disastrous. But mostly it's in the hands of Congress anyway. And that isn't any comfort either. Climate change is also a big deal in my opinion. *warm shiver*
People in the U.S. seem to be divided into believing one of two non-overlapping realities. The two realities are accessed with this decision of belief:
1) Trump is very, very dishonest
2) Trump is the only one brave enough to tell the truth. All journalists are involved in a nationwide conspiracy to elect Crooked Hillary. All historical documents, footage, and transcripts have been faked. Your memory of recent events has been overwritten by high-tech drugs. The entire election was rigged so badly that Hillary *almost* won the popular vote. All internet content is a hoax, with the exception of photographs of Killary with block lettering printed on them.
It seems our nation is nearly equally divided between these two options. Note, however, that the hallmark of a master manipulator is to make claims of widespread conspiracy against themselves.
GP's statement that we're in a post-truth political era is chilling, but I think it's apt.
Two things have changed in recent years, and not exclusively in the U.S. (The Leave party in the UK for example.) One is, as you're pointing out, false statements are being bandied about by political front-runners long after they have been debunked (birther hoax, etc). The other is that these candidates make far more false claims than true. And the false claims are not just distortions or a twisting of words or the invention of a different context. They are just bald-faced and obvious lies. Those features alone do not make us post-truth, but the fact that the public warmly embraces these politicians does.
In the U.S., it's really been the Republicans that's brought us into post-truth. Not that the Democrats have been honest, but they are just 20th-century-dishonest. They mostly stick with the truth but try to mis-represent it in various ways. While that's terrible and unacceptable, it suddenly doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
I would have laughed at the idea that we are going in the direction of the DPRK or even shades of Nazi Germany. But now we have Trump telling journalists "We're going to open up [sic] libel laws, and we're going to have people sue you like you've never got sued before."
I get this feeling too about Consumer Reports. While I think some of their studies are helpful, and they try to fill an important role, I always end up wanting more detail than what they offer. They collect a lot of data but withhold all the details. I don't feel that their data analysis is very good. But maybe I just get that impression because I want to see statistical uncertainties, ranges, actual numbers, etc. Since that's all hidden from readers, I tend to assume their ratings are bogus.
I think your rhetorical question is exactly the right one to be asking. Or at least a variant of it. How do we end up with having to choose the lesser of two evils every election? It's been this way for the past several elections at least, but it seems to be getting progressively worse. And it's not just the major parties -- even our minor-party and leading independents have said some ridiculously screwball things that no one I know personally would have said.
There is something about the economics (in a broad sense) of our political process that brings the worst of our nation into the highest offices. I'll take a stab at answering this, but I'm certainly wrong and/or missing some pieces. It's really worth digging into though!
1) Human nature -> shocking, negative info is more memorable and motivating 2) Plurality voting -> 3rd-party spoiler -> Exactly two parties -> Mud-slinging becomes optimal politicking strategy (1) and (2) lead to nearly 100% mudslinging, so it's perfectly natural for us to focus on how evil our candidates are.
On top of this, we have huge amounts of money now being spent by both the DNC and RNC, which are using increasingly-large datasets and the tools of the scientist to hone and optimize their election chances. Therefore we are inundated with 21st-century propaganda and demagoguery on a daily/hourly basis. Even those citizens that are well-educated can't help but be influenced.
The kinds of people who are best suited for government would never want to get involved with all this, and hence would never even register on the radar of the public and would have no chance getting far in a political career.
I think that was fixed in 5.6, although on my laptop I still have issues connecting to and from a docking station with external monitors. I've been using Cinnamon recently and thinking about even going (back to) XFCE. The problems are most likely related to X.org drivers and xrandr support, but the various DEs handle failure cases differently.
I like KDE in general because it supports what I find to be efficient workflows, and the customization is relatively user-friendly and complete. But I've gotten increasingly frustrated with it over the years because it seems bugs are addressed slowly if at all, and there is rarely backporting of bugfixes like that display-port-related crash. That may be a little unfair, but that's the impression I get when using KDE.
Very late post but I still have to add my $.02. I feel like your objection here is too strong and artificial.
I've used both Python and C-style languages including Go for a long time now (15 and 30+ years). I don't really mind either block system. I've had problems with editors doing unexpected things with Python code blocks, and I have to be watchful of that. But in practice I agree with the gp -- it's very rarely a problem except with beginners.
Curly braces are good for auto-formatting, and gofmt really seems to fit with the philosophy of Go in general, so I disagree with what Have is attempting to do in this case since I don't see how gofmt can do its job in this case. But I've also seen some really bad code with curly-braces. Recently I've had to work with a large (million lines) C++ code base that's completely inconsistent, mixing tabs and spaces with no one tab width making sense even within a single file. Every developer had their own editor and settings. Reading that was a major PITA and literally dozens of bugs ended up being wrong-code-block (indent level) types of bugs. And how often have you found yourself counting braces, brackets, and parentheses to find that balancing problem? That doesn't go away with Python, but it helps a little.
I also kind of hate this style that's so popular: if (stuff) {
something; } else {
something_else; }
Reading lots of code written this way is significantly more taxing for me than the more compact styles, especially as outer blocks stretch out over multiple pages of text.
So: You have to be careful when editing indent-sensitive code like Python. But you also have to be careful when editing code with block delineators. Both styles can be bug-prone and are sensitive to accidental editor actions as well as mixed-developer consistency issues. For me the pros and cons of the two are closely balanced.
I think I can partially answer my own question. The protons and neutrons in the nucleus can be described as being in a sort of quantum fluid with essentially no viscosity. So Although in some sense the nucleus is hard and almost incompressible, it's more like a superfluid than it is like a crystal. So I'm guessing that the "pear" shape is an unexpected nucleon wave function. Again I'm no nuclear physicist but maybe the situation is something a little bit like that?
I am not a nuclear physicist, but I still don't get the distinction here. Nuclei are formed through processes that are full of asymmetries. For example, two nuclei collide, or a neutron is captured, or whatever. Is there some theory that asserts that nuclei must obey certain symmetries regardless of the constituent parts? These are unstable nuclei to be sure. Maybe they are an excited state that decays via gammas to a more symmetric one (which could be even less stable)? I'm not sold here but hoped some slashdotter could help illuminate this better.
Take snowflakes for example. They aren't all perfectly symmetric even though the bonds have a certain symmetry. The history of their formation manifests in the shape of the snowflake and causes deviations from the prevailing symmetry.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds to me like Arp's research falls into a category termed "pathological science." Sometimes a scientist becomes so enamored with an idea that they try too hard to make everything fit into their world-view, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Contrary evidence is either ignored or the pet theory is made more elaborate and, to others, less tolerable.
It's a little unfair just to brand scientists with this label, because it's sometimes a matter of degrees and also an unfair judgement after-the-fact. We now can explain the granular redshift distribution, but that explanation was not available at the time Arp was formulating his theories.
But on the other hand, there are some cases that are obvious and the telltale signs of pathological science serve as a useful warning not to take some claims seriously. Cold fusion, for example, falls here. At the same time you might be able to say the same thing about both supersymmetry and string theory, which have both certainly experienced cronyism and certain signs of pathological science -- always a position to retreat back to in the face of negative evidence. But here I'm more forgiving since most of this research has been done with a good amount of empiricism and expectations that were not completely unmotivated or unreasonable.
Finally, I'm again cautious to apply such labels to scientists because we're comparing recent scientific development with an idealized and polished version of past scientific history. Most students learn about science history in the context of learning the science itself, and a simplified narrative of history serves the professors well in this case. It's not taught with all of the hairy, messy details that would better characterize what research was actually like at the time, with all of the heated arguments, politics, and dead-ends of the day.
I think mainstream scientists going astray isn't, perhaps, all that different from fringe scientists going astray. A healthy scientific program needs a blend of ideas and personalities, and to foster creative approaches. We have a terrible stagnation going on today in basic science, and group-think and witch hunting seem to underlie this.
Ack I hit submit too soon. Forgot to add a criteria that they don't use but that's pernicious, which is a filtering bias. What stories do you publish? If you only publish stories that put your favorite political party in a good light or all others in a bad light, you're being manipulative and dishonest even if the stories themselves are accurate. I think most moderate news outlets have some filtering bias but they will still publish stories both for and against any and all political parties. I could not find any examples of unfiltered/counterspin articles in any of the "junk" sites listed in this study.
Their list of junk news sites seems reasonable to me when I spot-check it. Come on, people are actually defending Breitbart, InfoWars, hannity.com, and others like these? Really?
If I need to prove objectively that 100% of their list is indeed junk, I cannot. But a strong majority of them are obviously so. Browsing through their sample articles, the problems are unmistakeable.
But I do see a conspicuous lack of hard-left hyper-partisan news sites, which is a real problem. They most certainly exist. It's hard to imagine that there isn't a strong selection bias going in, before their criteria is applied. I don't see how they came up with an original list, though I suppose it could be derived from twitter and facebook posts. Regardless, the lack of alt-left sites is conspicuous.
I've heard this argument before in recent months, but it's not true. I took a look at the ratio of population to electors in our various states and there isn't all that much spread.
If you research it, I think you'll find the original motivation behind the electoral college had several facets, but rural representation was not one of them. Part of it had to do with the three-fifths compromise, part of it was simple practicality in the 1700s, and part of it was the idea that electors, being reasonable and educated people, might reject a popular but un-presidential candidate. The last part might seem like a virtue, but historically this has never become a factor.
I've recently enjoyed learning about various voting systems, which generally do not work well with the electoral college. These systems are being studied carefully these days in terms of a variety of criteria, how often those come into play, and how gameable the various systems are. Currently I like the idea of STAR Voting -- see for example www.equal.vote. This seems tangential at first, but it leads back around to the electoral college.
I disagree. Those criteria, while they do allow for judgement calls, seem like good ones. Requiring 3 out of the 5 is a little arbitrary though.
The fake news awards were pure white house propaganda, as are claims of CNN and the stock market. Not all news outlets use *highly* emotional language, and to do so would be obviously unprofessional. All-caps and bad punctuation also point at lack of professionalism. Junk news outlets use all these techniques a lot because they are trying to persuade, not inform.
Limited use of unnamed sources is understandable, as long as you don't do this all the time. CNN does usually cite its sources. The logical fallacies and other propaganda techniques are obvious to spot with a little training, and junk news sources use these regularly. It's baffling that it isn't more obvious to people.
Yes, this! I don't often read the slashdot discussions, but I did here looking for exactly this kind of comment. Finally! How many other posters here have actually RTFA? Here that means the full PDF. I've read some of it, but not enough. (So I don't count yet.) Most everything else, even my own meta-post here, is off-topic, irrelevant, reactionary blather.
So far I'm impressed by the techniques used. I cannot tell yet if there is room for bias in the results but I don't see any yet.
I'm trying to comfort myself by wondering if the US being so tragicomically stupid well help the resolve of other countries and help to set a good example by failure. Like Papa Berenstain Bear?
This is an interesting point. Some journalists report that the Accord is clearly a treaty, others say that it's an agreement that does not require congressional approval. This sounds like one of those issues that requires more self-education than I've done. I doubt we could get 2/3 majority in the Senate today, and I doubt we could have gotten it a year ago either. This is a deeply sad fact more than any one president or action. Today Trump has backed out, saying that we're the laughing stock of the world for having signed on in the first place. Now we are joining the proud ranks of the non-signatories: Holy See, Nicaragua, and Syria.
I don't understand the specific consolidation of power that you're referring to. As another poster mentioned, some government-imposed mechanism like a CO2 tax is an effort to correct for a market failure. Correcting this would decentralize power. How many wind, solar, fusion etc companies are there? How many oil and coal companies? The fossil fuel companies are few, large, and politically powerful. What we have today *is* consolidation of power.
I'm just saying that a free, unregulated market does not self-optimize in many industries, and the energy industry is one of those for multiple reasons. Yes political organizations have problems, but as citizens we do whatever we can to help. You can't say "government has done many stupid things therefore I'm anti-government in every way." Let's say that some pothole damaged your car. You determine that the pothole was supposed to be fixed but the winning contractor had abused the system and never planned on completing the work. Government is to blame ultimately, so to solve that we should remove all government funding for roads. Downsize that evil government! That's allowing yourself to be ignorant of the bigger picture. Overly-simplistic thinking is a trap that many extremists fall victim to.
Transportation is another industry that cannot be fully privatized without any regulations. There are parallels.
I don't think that market economics are enough to stop global warming. It requires a political component, which the Paris Climate Accord was a small but important part of. It also will require sequestration efforts in addition to CO2-neutral energy production. I can't see us avoiding an unpleasant future unless we enact some kind of CO2 tax to fund renewables and sequestration initiatives, etc. CO2 emissions are a cost that are realized globally but not privately, so market economics alone will not correctly optimize that industry. Pulling out of the Paris Accord really gives the wrong message. It's not that the Paris Accord alone solves much of anything by itself, but it adds political momentum in the right direction.
A lot of history can be told with the narrative that our ancestors went through hell, fought and died, to give future generations a better life. Maybe that's a romanticized view of the past, but regardless it reflects an ideology that's the exact opposite of what we are doing today.
I forgot to add...
So far it looks like the best means of carbon sequestration are in agricultural practices. Climate change threatens to impact agriculture foremost, and agriculture is also is a significant part of our economic base. This adds urgency - we cannot wait for an economic collapse.
What do you mean about a model that can be back-tested? Is this a requirement?
Only 90% is a hoax. At this point the evidence for man-made climate change is unshakable. Science operates on the frontier of knowledge, and the frontier today is in predictions of severity, how far away are points of no return, future impacts of ocean acidification, ocean currents, and such. We've moved well beyond the initial questions: Is climate change happening? Yes. Is it caused by us? Yes. Will natural systems adapt to the change and self-regulate? No, at least not on the timescales we require. These were unsettled questions in the 1980's but were worrying enough that Regan and Bush initiated climate change negotiations with China. But science has since moved on.
There is still a manufactured debate going on about these basic facts of global warming, but it's entirely political. There are even a few (former) scientists making false statements, but they are all paid to do so by agencies with vested interests in manipulating public opinion. This has nothing to do with science.
... Time to quit putting ourselves at a self induced disadvantage till the others come on board and PROVE they are doing it.
The world needs to shift away from fossil fuels toward CO2-neutral energy production technologies. Not overnight of course, but over a small number of decades. To accomplish this, we need to maintain a strong economy. If we wait too long, the Earth will cripple world economy by itself and at that point I think recovery would take millennia.
We also need to develop feasible methods of carbon sequestration. "Green" energy production by itself is no longer sufficient.
In order to remain a technology leader, the U.S. needs to be on the frontier of these new energy technologies. We put ourselves at a self-induced disadvantage by halting research and subsidies/incentives for alternative energy.
I was thinking the same thing when I read the article. This was actually a great teachable moment. Take the time to show how to dig deeper to uncover the truth. Follow the sources of information, etc.
This isn't Google's fault. They can improve for sure, which is how the article reads, but that's not the real lesson here! We just need to keep in mind how to react to this or any other news (internet or not) from any source. One of the primary roles of education needs to be to instill skepticism and how to dig deeper. In the end we often won't arrive at certainty -- that's normal -- but we can usually get a pretty good idea what's a hoax and what's not.
It's easy to remember to do this when the news you find runs counter to your expectations or political leaning. The goal is to react with suspicion to news that you are eager to believe. I fall into this trap a lot myself.
Several problems were exposed in the 2016 election. Well, "exposed" is not really true since they were evident in the past as well, but they stand center-stage today.
One is that propaganda won, and bigly! Reading the /. posts in this story alone, it's obvious that there are two non-overlapping versions of history in the minds of Americans. The vilification of both Trump and Hillary was effective beyond reason. Ever heard the term "Crooked Hillary" before? Does repetition make it true? Survey says "Yes!" I have no doubt that had Sanders won the primaries, he would have become the villain and thought to be the ONLY candidate Trump could actually beat. No politicians are ideal candidates. I think all the moderately-well-qualified people either avoid politics entirely or never get beyond local government positions. You can't get far without making compromises. Anyway, mud-slinging was done on both sides, and has never been more pervasive than in 2016.
Media basically failed us in the 2016 election for lots of reasons that I don't even pretend to understand. For one thing, journalistic integrity used to be a desirable thing, but the tables are turned. Does the term "Fact checker" (a denigration of the term "investigative reporter") bring to mind a particular political bias? Why is that? If conspiracy is part of your answer, I beg you to think more clearly and more deeply. Claims of widespread media conspiracy have been made in the past, and in other countries. History repeats itself -- study up.
The DNC emails show how corrupt our two-party system has become. It should be obvious that the problems these bring out are not unique to the DNC. (Observe block voting for example.) It should also be obvious that the U.S. has evolved far away from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What we have today is a democracy in name only.
I'm certainly revealing a liberal bias in this post, but I don't think either presidential candidate would solve the issues we have today with government. It's much deeper than that, and it's not about Democrats vs Republicans. It's about Democrats and Republicans.
For the record I'd have preferred Hillary for president, because of support of / funding for basic science. Hillary appeared to be a really bad candidate in that regard, but Trump is shaping up to be absolutely disastrous. But mostly it's in the hands of Congress anyway. And that isn't any comfort either. Climate change is also a big deal in my opinion. *warm shiver*
I see there that Fitbit did the same thing to Coin last May. It's nice to keep track of these things.
No, I'm a climate-change-hoax skeptic! The difference between skepticism and denial is left as an exercise for the reader.
People in the U.S. seem to be divided into believing one of two non-overlapping realities. The two realities are accessed with this decision of belief:
1) Trump is very, very dishonest
2) Trump is the only one brave enough to tell the truth. All journalists are involved in a nationwide conspiracy to elect Crooked Hillary. All historical documents, footage, and transcripts have been faked. Your memory of recent events has been overwritten by high-tech drugs. The entire election was rigged so badly that Hillary *almost* won the popular vote. All internet content is a hoax, with the exception of photographs of Killary with block lettering printed on them.
It seems our nation is nearly equally divided between these two options. Note, however, that the hallmark of a master manipulator is to make claims of widespread conspiracy against themselves.
GP's statement that we're in a post-truth political era is chilling, but I think it's apt.
Two things have changed in recent years, and not exclusively in the U.S. (The Leave party in the UK for example.) One is, as you're pointing out, false statements are being bandied about by political front-runners long after they have been debunked (birther hoax, etc). The other is that these candidates make far more false claims than true. And the false claims are not just distortions or a twisting of words or the invention of a different context. They are just bald-faced and obvious lies. Those features alone do not make us post-truth, but the fact that the public warmly embraces these politicians does.
In the U.S., it's really been the Republicans that's brought us into post-truth. Not that the Democrats have been honest, but they are just 20th-century-dishonest. They mostly stick with the truth but try to mis-represent it in various ways. While that's terrible and unacceptable, it suddenly doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
I would have laughed at the idea that we are going in the direction of the DPRK or even shades of Nazi Germany. But now we have Trump telling journalists "We're going to open up [sic] libel laws, and we're going to have people sue you like you've never got sued before."
Wow. Just wow.
I get this feeling too about Consumer Reports. While I think some of their studies are helpful, and they try to fill an important role, I always end up wanting more detail than what they offer. They collect a lot of data but withhold all the details. I don't feel that their data analysis is very good. But maybe I just get that impression because I want to see statistical uncertainties, ranges, actual numbers, etc. Since that's all hidden from readers, I tend to assume their ratings are bogus.
I think your rhetorical question is exactly the right one to be asking. Or at least a variant of it. How do we end up with having to choose the lesser of two evils every election? It's been this way for the past several elections at least, but it seems to be getting progressively worse. And it's not just the major parties -- even our minor-party and leading independents have said some ridiculously screwball things that no one I know personally would have said.
There is something about the economics (in a broad sense) of our political process that brings the worst of our nation into the highest offices. I'll take a stab at answering this, but I'm certainly wrong and/or missing some pieces. It's really worth digging into though!
1) Human nature -> shocking, negative info is more memorable and motivating
2) Plurality voting -> 3rd-party spoiler -> Exactly two parties -> Mud-slinging becomes optimal politicking strategy
(1) and (2) lead to nearly 100% mudslinging, so it's perfectly natural for us to focus on how evil our candidates are.
On top of this, we have huge amounts of money now being spent by both the DNC and RNC, which are using increasingly-large datasets and the tools of the scientist to hone and optimize their election chances. Therefore we are inundated with 21st-century propaganda and demagoguery on a daily/hourly basis. Even those citizens that are well-educated can't help but be influenced.
The kinds of people who are best suited for government would never want to get involved with all this, and hence would never even register on the radar of the public and would have no chance getting far in a political career.
I think that was fixed in 5.6, although on my laptop I still have issues connecting to and from a docking station with external monitors. I've been using Cinnamon recently and thinking about even going (back to) XFCE. The problems are most likely related to X.org drivers and xrandr support, but the various DEs handle failure cases differently.
I like KDE in general because it supports what I find to be efficient workflows, and the customization is relatively user-friendly and complete. But I've gotten increasingly frustrated with it over the years because it seems bugs are addressed slowly if at all, and there is rarely backporting of bugfixes like that display-port-related crash. That may be a little unfair, but that's the impression I get when using KDE.
Very late post but I still have to add my $.02. I feel like your objection here is too strong and artificial.
I've used both Python and C-style languages including Go for a long time now (15 and 30+ years). I don't really mind either block system. I've had problems with editors doing unexpected things with Python code blocks, and I have to be watchful of that. But in practice I agree with the gp -- it's very rarely a problem except with beginners.
Curly braces are good for auto-formatting, and gofmt really seems to fit with the philosophy of Go in general, so I disagree with what Have is attempting to do in this case since I don't see how gofmt can do its job in this case. But I've also seen some really bad code with curly-braces. Recently I've had to work with a large (million lines) C++ code base that's completely inconsistent, mixing tabs and spaces with no one tab width making sense even within a single file. Every developer had their own editor and settings. Reading that was a major PITA and literally dozens of bugs ended up being wrong-code-block (indent level) types of bugs. And how often have you found yourself counting braces, brackets, and parentheses to find that balancing problem? That doesn't go away with Python, but it helps a little.
I also kind of hate this style that's so popular:
if (stuff)
{
something;
}
else
{
something_else;
}
Reading lots of code written this way is significantly more taxing for me than the more compact styles, especially as outer blocks stretch out over multiple pages of text.
So: You have to be careful when editing indent-sensitive code like Python. But you also have to be careful when editing code with block delineators. Both styles can be bug-prone and are sensitive to accidental editor actions as well as mixed-developer consistency issues. For me the pros and cons of the two are closely balanced.
I think I can partially answer my own question. The protons and neutrons in the nucleus can be described as being in a sort of quantum fluid with essentially no viscosity. So Although in some sense the nucleus is hard and almost incompressible, it's more like a superfluid than it is like a crystal. So I'm guessing that the "pear" shape is an unexpected nucleon wave function. Again I'm no nuclear physicist but maybe the situation is something a little bit like that?
I am not a nuclear physicist, but I still don't get the distinction here. Nuclei are formed through processes that are full of asymmetries. For example, two nuclei collide, or a neutron is captured, or whatever. Is there some theory that asserts that nuclei must obey certain symmetries regardless of the constituent parts? These are unstable nuclei to be sure. Maybe they are an excited state that decays via gammas to a more symmetric one (which could be even less stable)? I'm not sold here but hoped some slashdotter could help illuminate this better.
Take snowflakes for example. They aren't all perfectly symmetric even though the bonds have a certain symmetry. The history of their formation manifests in the shape of the snowflake and causes deviations from the prevailing symmetry.