I used to love this show as a kid! But a couple years ago I saw an episode of it, and found it completely unwatchable. I think it was a relatively good episode, too. With the formulaic plots, cheesy dialog, and an endless supply of smug, I felt embarrassed by my early fanatical devotion.
Just thought I'd actually take that comment as half-serious and present the usual argument that some rare cosmic rays have been found to have many times the energies than the design energy of the LHC. I think the LHC runs at about 7 GeV, and cosmic rays can go up to at least 100 GeV. So nothing really new is going to happen at the LHC.
The new part is that these interactions will now be made to take place right inside the two most sophisticated particle detectors on Earth. It's fun stuff, and you should be excited to hear about it! At our present understanding, there are four fundamental forces at work in the world. But it would be nice to understand more completely how these forces came to be (are unified). The LHC at CERN is designed to probe energies at just the point where evidence should be found illuminating the unification of two of these four: the weak and electromagnetic forces. Unification of strong and electroweak, or gravity and everything else, takes place at energies *way* out of reach of modern experiments, so this is our best hope in the forseeable future to help answer dozens of questions that have been burning in the hearts of physicists since the late 1960's! So I hope they get those magnets sorted out soon.
Do you think that if you instantiate a global system to control climate, be it political, technical or something else, will make the world a better place? Well, you haven't tried so you don't know for sure. Not doing it might be the better option here, too. Sorry, can't help replying to this. What we have at the moment is a technological system to control climate. Except that it's not designed to produce change for the good. I'm advocating making a special, costly effort to not change our environment, or at least not nearly this quickly. It is the rate of change to our atmosphere, compared with geologic time scales, that is so alarming.
And no I'm not a climatologist. I'm a physicist, which qualifies me to judge the scientific process but nothing more.
You say that climate models cannot be tested. I don't believe that is true. I think that's like saying that cosmological models cannot be tested since there is only one universe. But they can be tested in many ways. Inflationary cosmology offers many predictions (and also allows for a lot of tuning) that have been borne out by observations. Big bang nucleosynthesis offers precise predictions (without tuning or arbitrariness except the assumption that the laws of physics are not changing in time) on abundances of primordial helium, lithium, and other elements. The observations are in impressive agreement with the predictions. Inflationary cosmology does a great job explaining the structure in the cosmic microwave background, and resolves a host of theoretical problems as well. I think Stephen Weinberg (probably the brightest physicist alive today) wrote that the big bang theory is on even firmer footing than the theory of evolution. That said, Martin Rees (GB's Astronomer Royal etc.) claims that cosmology interests him partly because the universe is so simple in comparison with things like the Earth or people.
Climate models can be tested by their historical predictions -- predictions of data that they were not tuned up on. And they can also be judged according to their internal physics. I would probably trust a model based on fluid dynamics more than one based on neural nets, for example, all else being equal.
Doesn't the greater concentration of greenhouse gases fundamentally imbalance a kind of global energy accounting? One poster replied saying that CO2 concentrations prior to mass human production have already maximized the reflected radiation. I don't see anything else supporting that idea, but if it's true then it would seem to debunk most global warming models. Actually, the very fact that climate scientists still take all this stuff so seriously suggests to me that there is not such a trivial answer.
My cyanide example (yes, embarrassingly dramatic) should have been more creative. I should have found some new method of suicide that hasn't been tried before, so there was not existing data for other humans. (Although no two people are identical.) Well, how about death-by-inhaling-a-lungful-of-molten-lead? I doubt anyone has tried that and written it up in a journal. But there are lots of obvious reasons why I don't want to be the first. This is a bad analogy because it's so obviously unhealthy. Apparently global warming is a bit less obvious. But this is what analogies are for anyway, to make obscure points obvious. One immediately can form a "model" of what would happen to someone with a lungful of molten lead, and without even having to write a computer program. Your first model will be lacking in detail, but will be trustworthy enough to prevent you from recommending the experiment to any of your closest friends. Better?
It would be ridiculous to be specific about how a 10cm change in water level would affect everybody, partly because 10cm is a number that is in dispute anyway. No, it wouldn't look like water world, but the uncertainties in 10cm are big. I think it's a very conservative scenario looking at only a decade off anyway. And the water level itself is only one of many, many changes. Changing weather patterns is a more severe problem.
Now, one could imagine life and human population adapting to these kinds of changes, the new hot Earth, given enough time. For humans, enough time might be a couple hundred years. That just might be enough time for many of the well-developed countries to rearrange their economies and relocate most of the major cities, given that there are no political problems to work around and other fantastic idealizations. For wildlife, I imagine that a couple thousand years would not be enough to establish a healthy new ecosystem. Most global warming scenarios are presenting the picture of a mass extinction.
Now they're projecting, based on very solid reasoning, after roughly 50 years of business as usual the global climate change would be a few times greater than that of the natural cycle of ice ages. Except that this time the change will take a few tens of years instead of hundreds or thousands.
Again, there are many details that are still in dispute, but these broad-strokes arguments remain undisputed since... well I think since the 80's.
To completely ignore this line of reasoning and support the status-quo is not good. It goes beyond mere neglect or self-imposed ignorance. I think it takes a kind of criminal mind, deeply self-interested and/or anti-social, to brush off global warming concerns as hyperbole.
Yet while there is a big demand on us as citizens to respond to this crisis, there is still the necessity of scientists to be free to debate over whether or not this or that line of evidence is caused by man-made greenhouse gases, or increased solar activity, or what-not. Without this rigorous internal debate, we could not trust the final, specific conclusions.
The public have a disturbing lack of understanding of the scientific process. Yes, climate change is a hot issue, and rightly so! It takes an extraordinary level of public awareness of global warming just to push against a government that is normally driven by corporate interest. In many other fields, the government has demonstrated incredibly poor management of scientific programs, and also a complete disregard of scientific rationale when it comes to policy-making.
Now that the stakes are so high, the public simply has to get involved. That presents a new difficulty for the scientists. The scientific process is that of constant questioning and evaluation. One has to be as objective as possible, exploring different sides of an argument, and so on. To attack a scientist for their professional opinion in their own field is to attack the scientific process. But the result of this process (which when you look at forefront research may seem chaotic and governed by sociology more than science) is firm conclusions that have withstood the storms of controversy.
Another aspect of science that needs to be understood are the various relationships between theory and experiment. With global warming, I think this translates into climate models and the search for evidence of warming. I'm not aware of *any* climate models that deny any correlation between greenhouse gases and global temperatures. And I even suspect that all reasonable climate models give (within an order of magnitude) the same level of warming. The leading-edge global climate research is concerned with one aspect or another of *evidence* for climate change that's already occurred.
What level of evidence do we require before we change our behavior and set new policies? Does any climate scientist feel that we can continue increasing the levels of CO2 without any serious consequences? I don't think so. Do I think that if I bite a cyanide capsule then I will die? Well, I haven't tried it so I guess I don't know for certain. But there is a well-established theory which strongly suggests cyanide will be fatal to me. I don't know how fast it would kill me, but it would most likely take much less than a day. Do I have enough information on this to decide on a policy of, say, not leaving such capsules lying around the house for my kids to discover? Of course I do! Now, this isn't a perfect analogy since there are many people, some of whom have performed this "experiment" already. But there's only one planet Earth. But even so, even the most simplistic models of the Earth's climate force us to conclude that we're hurtling toward catastrophic climate change.
Yet again I found myself in a situation where I was able to finish off a little side-project or curiosity in a short amount of time purely because of the fantastic availability of open-source software. Then I read this article that tries to be very objective about the "open-source mythos" but completely misses what is for me the main point. Open-source software, including Linux, is empowering in ways that continue to boggle!
I found myself resurrecting a 15-year-old project simulating a double-pendulum and exploring chaotic motion. I did this project as a student, and wanted to restore aspects of this now that I'm a professor. But most of my original code was lost (I had some source code and a binary that worked in DOS) and I didn't have much free time to rewrite it from scratch. But with the virtue of open-source libraries like Glut and the GSL, I was able to make the simulation live again! And beyond that, by using public documentation on a FITS image standard and some astronomical image analysis software (SAOImage DS9), I was able to go even beyond the original project with a minimum of programming fuss and create some beautiful fractal images that delineate between chaotic and periodic motion of the double-pendulum system. It's a great teaching tool now.
This was probably the 100th time open source tools and libraries have benefited my work in ways that could not be replaced by anything else. And that's not even counting high-level languages and their open-source interpreters like Tcl, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.
If you overlook the synergies in open source software, you miss the point of it completely.
I disagree somewhat with your reasons for third-party candidates not getting elected. I think the primary reason for this is our Neanderthal voting system. If a popular third-party candidate starts getting a significant number of votes, it will split the vote of their nearest major-party neighbor and both will loose. I believe that we won't have third-party candidates that are successful in any sense of the word until we have an improved voting system such as instant runoff elections. I also believe that we won't have meaningful campaign dialog or even decent representation without such voting reform.
Incidentally, I think Obama has actually supported instant runoff elections at the state level. He showed up on my radar for this reason, before I even knew he was a US senator and long before talk of the 2008 election. I still don't know enough about Obama to vote for him or not, but I have a positive bias already.
That method will only deliver a local maximum of a polynomial function. If your game has any complexity at all, your proposed method is even less useful than trial and error. I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Mathematical tuning can help fine-tune game parameters for one player one strategy or another. These are like finding a local minimum. But clever players will come up with clever strategies that would represent other isolated, remote minima.
Even so, there are mathematical methods to search for these other minima as well, and I suppose they could be applied to the topic of game balancing. I very much doubt anyone has tried this yet (with any success at least).
This article seems to be about adjusting for what's considered easy, medium, or hard, based on player statistics. There's nothing creative, unusual, or even important about that idea. I guess it involves mathematics a little bit but I'm completely unimpressed.
More complex balancing is required for games like RTS and CRPG with strong strategic elements. Lack of good game balance is a common thing, and isn't given enough attention. If a game designer comes up with a great new unit ability or game mechanic, but it isn't carefully balanced, then it becomes either irrelevant to gameplay (under-useful) or makes everything else in the game irrelevant (over-powered). To actually add cool aspects to a game in a way that improves the playing experience is extremely difficult and requires careful tuning. So I would think mathematical techniques would be given more attention by developers than they seem to be.
I completely agree here. Dissent is necessary in science just as much as in a free society! But more then that, shrewd skepticism is also necessary for science.
In the field of particle physics, I gradually discovered that the theorists are much more trusting of experimental results than the experimentalists, and similarly the experimentalists are much more trusting of the theorists' calculations and predictions then the theorists themselves! This hints at how a high level of skepticism is valuable in any scientific discipline, and sharpens the standards of research. But that skepticism is kind of an internal one, mostly helping to maintain scientific integrity as well as finding new approaches to old problems.
So the very attitude of a successful scientist should be one of constant scrutiny and almost disapproval.
But this is completely different from false reports of controversy, which takes recent ideas in science that are not yet tested, even unlikely theories, and presents these alongside well-established facts.
I did a fair amount of programming in Fortran 77 (plus usual enhancements) not long ago. I agree that compiling programs with bounds-checking is extremely useful and easy to do. With C or C++ programs, that's possible but quite a bit harder and much slower. That said, I still prefer C or C++ in general since it tends to encourage better design, which in turn makes things easier in the long run.
At about that same time ('95-'01), I discovered Perl. It really worked well in conjunction with the Fortran programs! Perl's one serious weakness is efficiency, both in terms of memory and speed, for number-crunching. Fortran's primary weakness is in its user interface possibilities, string handling, and job control. Those two languages really support each other well! These days I love writing in Python whenever it's a reasonable choice. When you aren't pushing the envelope of a computer, which is probably the case far more often than not, these scripting languages are fantastic!
Keep in mind two kinds of programmer: One who writes programs for others to use, and one who writes programs for their own use. Fortran and probably Fortress are really designed for the latter group. I'm arguing that in that environment, a scripting language is also tremendously helpful.
My only "concern" here is that Google is used to producing search engine front-ends for casual users, and not for the scientist. When digging through data like this, new ideas generally require new kinds of searches (new algorithms). So instead of a polished front end, the scientists here really need a sort of library/API they can write high-level programs with.
I'm no expert here -- that's just my gut reaction, coming from the slightly-related field of experimental particle physics.
Your arguments here seem to be mostly made on the basis of present-day economics. "If approach X maximizes profits for company Y, then X is a good thing to do." But why would we judge an essentially ethical decision such licensing on the grounds of profit? Are there any cases where ethics are correctly judged based on one person/company's bottom line? Sure, there is corruption all the time, and lots of companies make decisions on the basis of profitability alone, but please don't argue that it's right, or even justifiable!
Stallman never, AFAIK, argued that free software was going to make businesses more successful. He does argue that a world where free software dominates over proprietary software achieves a greater overall economic superiority, or social welfare. But that's again not something you can gauge by looking at one company's ledgers.
The history of this feature of quantum mechanics is fascinating!
Einstein, Podolski, and Rosen proposed this as a thought-experiment to show that the hocus-pocus in quantum mechanics was silly, and that really the envelope always "knew" what color paper was inside it. They used this setup, together with the understanding that nothing could travel faster than light, to show that the envelopes always had definite papers inside just like you'd imagine, which also means that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory.
But (much later, in the 60's) Bell thought about extending this thought-experiment a little bit, and proved a theorem relating to it: Bell's inequality. This actually proved that the envelope's contents were in fact indeterminate before being inspected, and that quantum mechanics is a complete theory -- you can't do better. Bell's inequality was experimentally tested, decisively in the 70's. The results agreed with Bell's inequality, and therefore confirmed quantum non-locality. It seems now that Einstein's original idea was turned around and used to prove him wrong (or nearly so)!
Although proving and understanding Bell's inequality is just a little bit challenging (but no problem for a physics undergrad), David Mermin came up with a specific, clever example of this inequality that is easy for anyone to understand.
I probably can't explain this idea any better Wikipedia. There's an even more lucid description of this in Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos", around page 107.
So the original idea of sending off two letters, one with a black paper and one with a white one, is not meant to illustrate quantum entanglement. But it does serve to illustrate how information in this case cannot be transmitted. Even if one envelope seems to know instantaneously when the other one was opened and how, that still doesn't really require the transmission of information. I guess it's because the order in which the envelopes are opened doesn't matter.
I just wanted to say that I agree with you here, mostly.
But I think you should vote. That's because you are more intelligent than most voters. I'm not really complimenting you here -- the bar so is very, very low these days. Can you read? Good. Have you read any news lately (I think even Slashdot counts)? Great! You're well above the average! Can you tell the difference between rational argument and propaganda, at least some of the time? Congratulations, you're in the truly elite crowd! Not only are you old enough to vote, you're smart enough to vote for a reason. I would rather have people like you voting than any others. I won't tell the others (the masses) not to vote, but for you it's actually important.
Then the question becomes "For whom do I vote?" Well there's no right answer here, since there are never any popular candidates that a reasonable person would want to have in office. That's okay, it's better to have the lesser of two evils. Believe me, it is!
Then there is the question of whether or not your vote really counts. No, it certainly does not. But if people like me can convince people like you to vote, those people can make a difference. So for you not to vote (and me not to ask you to) is not consistent with your (my) desires.
I think you're basically right about this -- that the stories our news sources choose to run are chosen mostly on the basis of sensationalism and what sells.
But that doesn't mean that being uninformed about global events is an appropriate response. If we only focus only on our immediate needs, we can quickly run into disaster. For example, the "debate" on global warming is not just academic wordplay. It's a major issue that every citizen in every democracy in the world needs to be aware of and actively respond to. The free market economy all by itself is not capable of responding automatically to a future threat like this, so it takes active intervention by intelligent (I mean informed) people. If *most* people aren't worried-to-the-point-of-action about this, then we're *all* doomed.
I agree that there are lots of problems with our news sources. Apparently as consumers of the stuff, we allowed it to get like this. As you pointed out, we don't get a representative mix of the good, the humdrum, and the shocking news from any news source. Also, reporting can be biased by ignoring strong arguments which don't support the writer's thesis. And finally, especially in politics, the real information is overwhelmed by vast amounts of propaganda designed to mislead us.
It's not a good situation, but we all have a duty as citizens to stay informed, digging out the real stories and putting them in their proper perspective. If only more people were aware of these problems and took some action, demanding more of their newspapers etc, then it would get easier.
That's an interesting perspective. Yes, I guess cultural things are more spread out in the US. But I like that. Every city has its own culture. And I like the abundance of national parks that are relatively undisturbed by people. Relatively being the operative word. I've known other people from large European cities that have described the US in a similar way, as a few interesting cities but large vacant distances in between.
I don't think the US has the corner market on athletes. There seems to be much better sportsmanship in soccer, and that's a better measure of an athlete.
And I don't know about the corporations. The intensely competetive US market has created a lot of good companies -- I think the quality of restaurants in NYC are a testament to this -- be exceptional or fold. But pressure on companies from stock holders to constantly expand seems to squeeze ethics and common sense out of the boardrooms. Good enough is never enough. Either compete unfairly or get bought out by someone who will.
And as for science, the US is no longer the best place for that. Science policy for the last decade, really, has been an exit strategy. This present year is an exception to the trend, but it's too little, too late. Most long-term (20-year) projects have been aborted, and the momentum has shifted to several European nations, Japan, and (slowly) China.
I'm replying to this comment since it was the best one I found answering the basic question "What's a singularity?"
I wanted to add that string theory, I believe, has a solution to the problem of a singularity. I believe string theorists claim to have a way of representing black holes without a singularity.
The two well-established theories in physics are general relativity (GR) and the standard model of particle physics. Unfortunately these are not self-consistent. This is an unsatifsying situation for any science, so neither of these two theories can be absolutely correct. But there is good reason, based on experimental evidence like in the original post, to believe that GR is completely valid for describing the event horizon of a black hole. The theory breaks down at the center since a singularity is not physically reasonable. Unfortunately we cannot perform experiments there as they are "hidden" by the horizon.
Particle physics also has trouble with gravity. You can't use it to theorize about the center of a black hole. So "We don't know" is really the best answer to your question.
String theory remains problematic because it's still under construction, so to speak. There are some general ideas that have come out of it already. I guess I've heard of three of them. One is that a black hole can be described without a singularity forming. Another is that the entropy of a black hole can be computed based on counting the number of quantum states available, and the result agrees with a result from thermodynamics. Another recent feather in the cap of string theory is that it predicts a non-zero limit for the viscosity of any fluid. And recently experiments at RHIC have measured the viscosity of a quark-gluon plasma and found that it was extremely small but not zero. And very close to (but not below) the limit from string theory. So in a way that was a legitimate test of string theory which it passed.
Even so, string theory, to be taken seriously, will have to make a prediction that is different from the standard model (or GR) which is testable by experiment. This has not yet happened. It is however likely that other theories such as supersymmetry, technocolor, large extra dimensions, and so on may well superceed the standard model some time in the next decade. Experiments like Atlas and CMS are in a good position to help accomplish this. Please stay tuned!
I think Linux in elementary school could be VERY useful for some students, and just as good (or bad) as windows for most other students. Most students would be served well just to learn a word processor, and OpenOffice/kword/abiword is as good as any. You can talk about differences between OpenOffice writer and MS Word, but it will be a high-level discussion for heavy users, and there will be pros and cons. For the elementary student its all the same.
But then there are students that will want to spend some extra time learning about the computer, and will want to program it. Then Linux is far and away the platform of choice, since so many great languages, libraries, and editors are available. And there is lots of "documentation" on how to do interesting stuff in Linux, on the web. A beginner programmer can do amazing things with the languages and libraries available today. Some of these tools have been ported to Windows but the overall environment just isn't as conducive to programming.
I learned programming in Basic in the 4th grade, and have been programming ever since. In school, this has allowed me to learn and explore the abstract concepts in math and science in a more deep and intuitive way. Professionally, the ability to program has been of enormous benefit in a great many situations. And no, I don't have a comp-sci degree and no I've never been a professional programmer or worked in IT.
Being slightly smug, I think of programming as a good skill for everybody. Not at a high level where you're able to design optimizing compilers and the like, but to the point where simple programming tasks are no longer time-consuming. Given that (slightly flawed) perspective, Linux really outshines Windows because it's easy in Linux to write interesting and useful programs.
I've also been thinking lately about the terribly poor quality of political debate in the US. I believe that one major factor in all this is our simplistic voting system, believe it or not!
I would content that our current voting system actually ensures having a two-party system. A popular third party candidate would steal votes from their more closely-aligned major party candidate, and thus voting for such a candidate would be a poor voting strategy. In this way independant parties frequently work against their own objectives.
This would not be the case for a voting system like instant runoff voting. In that case, independant parties can have an entirely positive influence on politics they endorse even if they don't make it into office, because any genuine public support that they have could be made known without causing their nearest major-party candidate to suffer.
Because we have this two-party system, political discussion becomes necessarily polarized on every issue, whether or not it should be. Also individual issues become colored by whatever political party supports it. People don't think in terms of individual issues so much anymore, and when they do, they are largely influenced by the propoganda from their favorite party. For example I would think there should be fiscal conservatives that are religious liberals, torn between the two parties, and the opposite as well. But it seems there are not. Total political alignment is a comforting thing that keeps us from having to think rationally about political issues.
I think your present oppinion of Christian Science (the religion) has been formed by heavily biased and incorrect reports. A lot of "Christian Scientists" (church members, etc.) do accept medical intervention in a variety of cases. It is considered an entirely personal decision. The vast majority of Christian Scientists will rely on prayer for most of their health needs. This is usually because they found healing through prayer to be more complete, immediate, and reliable than through medical means. This has been my experience as well.
I think one type of situation, where seeking medical help is definitely the wisest course of action, is if the patient is fearful about recovery through prayer. Life-threatening situations would often apply here. Then they should get the best medical help they can. That being done, probably the best thing for them to pray for is handling their own fears. There are other situations too, but this one seems pretty clear-cut to me. Again this is just my oppinion, and the church's official position is that anyone is free to choose whatever remedy they determine is the best in any situation, be it medicine, prayer, or both. But getting well is of utmost importance, and if one thing is clearly not working, try something else.
I should also mention that, as expecting healing through prayer alone may seem ridiculous, I really think there is a rational basis for it. And this basis is what Christian Science is all about. As an experimental physicist by trade, I'm a very skeptical individual. But I like Christian Science because it encourages deductive reasoning and as such has no doctrine. I also feel that it helps me understand and appreciate the Bible (all of it, not just certain passages) more and more. So for me it's not really about personal health. I mean, although that's a major aspect of the religion, it is not what attracts me to it. I find that it helps me be a better person, or more nearly reach my full potential so to speak. I think that the majority of other religions, practiced with sincerity, can do the same. And ultimately it doesn't matter what you believe, but how you live your life because of it.
I'm irate that automatic updates will actually reboot your computer without asking!
I was updating my parents computer. They have dialup, so downloads are slow. I had automatic updates turned on (silly me) thinking that they would not otherwise keep things up-to-date. I was downloading some software for them (keeping firefox and thunderbird up to date), which takes about an hour. Near the beginning of the download, I was doing a couple other things on the web and making sure it was progressing. A pop-up window appeared telling me that updates were installed and the computer would reboot in several seconds. There was a button to cancel this. I was furious already with the mere question. What if I were not there and running a time-consuming compute job? Or in the middle of a long download? Well, I was there so I pressed Cancel.
I left the computer a few minutes later, came back a half hour later, and the computer had rebooted. The download had failed. It apparently ignored my request to keep the computer up and running.
How is it possible that no one at MS has gotten fired over this, and that no one else has repaired the flaw? Rebooting without getting confirmation? That's absolutely unthinkable!
Slashdot Mirror
I used to love this show as a kid! But a couple years ago I saw an episode of it, and found it completely unwatchable. I think it was a relatively good episode, too. With the formulaic plots, cheesy dialog, and an endless supply of smug, I felt embarrassed by my early fanatical devotion.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Just thought I'd actually take that comment as half-serious and present the usual argument that some rare cosmic rays have been found to have many times the energies than the design energy of the LHC. I think the LHC runs at about 7 GeV, and cosmic rays can go up to at least 100 GeV. So nothing really new is going to happen at the LHC.
The new part is that these interactions will now be made to take place right inside the two most sophisticated particle detectors on Earth. It's fun stuff, and you should be excited to hear about it! At our present understanding, there are four fundamental forces at work in the world. But it would be nice to understand more completely how these forces came to be (are unified). The LHC at CERN is designed to probe energies at just the point where evidence should be found illuminating the unification of two of these four: the weak and electromagnetic forces. Unification of strong and electroweak, or gravity and everything else, takes place at energies *way* out of reach of modern experiments, so this is our best hope in the forseeable future to help answer dozens of questions that have been burning in the hearts of physicists since the late 1960's! So I hope they get those magnets sorted out soon.
Okay, yours is a good rebuttal.
And no I'm not a climatologist. I'm a physicist, which qualifies me to judge the scientific process but nothing more.
You say that climate models cannot be tested. I don't believe that is true. I think that's like saying that cosmological models cannot be tested since there is only one universe. But they can be tested in many ways. Inflationary cosmology offers many predictions (and also allows for a lot of tuning) that have been borne out by observations. Big bang nucleosynthesis offers precise predictions (without tuning or arbitrariness except the assumption that the laws of physics are not changing in time) on abundances of primordial helium, lithium, and other elements. The observations are in impressive agreement with the predictions. Inflationary cosmology does a great job explaining the structure in the cosmic microwave background, and resolves a host of theoretical problems as well. I think Stephen Weinberg (probably the brightest physicist alive today) wrote that the big bang theory is on even firmer footing than the theory of evolution. That said, Martin Rees (GB's Astronomer Royal etc.) claims that cosmology interests him partly because the universe is so simple in comparison with things like the Earth or people.
Climate models can be tested by their historical predictions -- predictions of data that they were not tuned up on. And they can also be judged according to their internal physics. I would probably trust a model based on fluid dynamics more than one based on neural nets, for example, all else being equal.
Doesn't the greater concentration of greenhouse gases fundamentally imbalance a kind of global energy accounting? One poster replied saying that CO2 concentrations prior to mass human production have already maximized the reflected radiation. I don't see anything else supporting that idea, but if it's true then it would seem to debunk most global warming models. Actually, the very fact that climate scientists still take all this stuff so seriously suggests to me that there is not such a trivial answer.
My cyanide example (yes, embarrassingly dramatic) should have been more creative. I should have found some new method of suicide that hasn't been tried before, so there was not existing data for other humans. (Although no two people are identical.) Well, how about death-by-inhaling-a-lungful-of-molten-lead? I doubt anyone has tried that and written it up in a journal. But there are lots of obvious reasons why I don't want to be the first. This is a bad analogy because it's so obviously unhealthy. Apparently global warming is a bit less obvious. But this is what analogies are for anyway, to make obscure points obvious. One immediately can form a "model" of what would happen to someone with a lungful of molten lead, and without even having to write a computer program. Your first model will be lacking in detail, but will be trustworthy enough to prevent you from recommending the experiment to any of your closest friends. Better?
It would be ridiculous to be specific about how a 10cm change in water level would affect everybody, partly because 10cm is a number that is in dispute anyway. No, it wouldn't look like water world, but the uncertainties in 10cm are big. I think it's a very conservative scenario looking at only a decade off anyway. And the water level itself is only one of many, many changes. Changing weather patterns is a more severe problem.
... well I think since the 80's.
Now, one could imagine life and human population adapting to these kinds of changes, the new hot Earth, given enough time. For humans, enough time might be a couple hundred years. That just might be enough time for many of the well-developed countries to rearrange their economies and relocate most of the major cities, given that there are no political problems to work around and other fantastic idealizations. For wildlife, I imagine that a couple thousand years would not be enough to establish a healthy new ecosystem. Most global warming scenarios are presenting the picture of a mass extinction.
Now they're projecting, based on very solid reasoning, after roughly 50 years of business as usual the global climate change would be a few times greater than that of the natural cycle of ice ages. Except that this time the change will take a few tens of years instead of hundreds or thousands.
Again, there are many details that are still in dispute, but these broad-strokes arguments remain undisputed since
To completely ignore this line of reasoning and support the status-quo is not good. It goes beyond mere neglect or self-imposed ignorance. I think it takes a kind of criminal mind, deeply self-interested and/or anti-social, to brush off global warming concerns as hyperbole.
Yet while there is a big demand on us as citizens to respond to this crisis, there is still the necessity of scientists to be free to debate over whether or not this or that line of evidence is caused by man-made greenhouse gases, or increased solar activity, or what-not. Without this rigorous internal debate, we could not trust the final, specific conclusions.
The public have a disturbing lack of understanding of the scientific process. Yes, climate change is a hot issue, and rightly so! It takes an extraordinary level of public awareness of global warming just to push against a government that is normally driven by corporate interest. In many other fields, the government has demonstrated incredibly poor management of scientific programs, and also a complete disregard of scientific rationale when it comes to policy-making.
Now that the stakes are so high, the public simply has to get involved. That presents a new difficulty for the scientists. The scientific process is that of constant questioning and evaluation. One has to be as objective as possible, exploring different sides of an argument, and so on. To attack a scientist for their professional opinion in their own field is to attack the scientific process. But the result of this process (which when you look at forefront research may seem chaotic and governed by sociology more than science) is firm conclusions that have withstood the storms of controversy.
Another aspect of science that needs to be understood are the various relationships between theory and experiment. With global warming, I think this translates into climate models and the search for evidence of warming. I'm not aware of *any* climate models that deny any correlation between greenhouse gases and global temperatures. And I even suspect that all reasonable climate models give (within an order of magnitude) the same level of warming. The leading-edge global climate research is concerned with one aspect or another of *evidence* for climate change that's already occurred.
What level of evidence do we require before we change our behavior and set new policies? Does any climate scientist feel that we can continue increasing the levels of CO2 without any serious consequences? I don't think so. Do I think that if I bite a cyanide capsule then I will die? Well, I haven't tried it so I guess I don't know for certain. But there is a well-established theory which strongly suggests cyanide will be fatal to me. I don't know how fast it would kill me, but it would most likely take much less than a day. Do I have enough information on this to decide on a policy of, say, not leaving such capsules lying around the house for my kids to discover? Of course I do! Now, this isn't a perfect analogy since there are many people, some of whom have performed this "experiment" already. But there's only one planet Earth. But even so, even the most simplistic models of the Earth's climate force us to conclude that we're hurtling toward catastrophic climate change.
Yet again I found myself in a situation where I was able to finish off a little side-project or curiosity in a short amount of time purely because of the fantastic availability of open-source software. Then I read this article that tries to be very objective about the "open-source mythos" but completely misses what is for me the main point. Open-source software, including Linux, is empowering in ways that continue to boggle!
I found myself resurrecting a 15-year-old project simulating a double-pendulum and exploring chaotic motion. I did this project as a student, and wanted to restore aspects of this now that I'm a professor. But most of my original code was lost (I had some source code and a binary that worked in DOS) and I didn't have much free time to rewrite it from scratch. But with the virtue of open-source libraries like Glut and the GSL, I was able to make the simulation live again! And beyond that, by using public documentation on a FITS image standard and some astronomical image analysis software (SAOImage DS9), I was able to go even beyond the original project with a minimum of programming fuss and create some beautiful fractal images that delineate between chaotic and periodic motion of the double-pendulum system. It's a great teaching tool now.
This was probably the 100th time open source tools and libraries have benefited my work in ways that could not be replaced by anything else. And that's not even counting high-level languages and their open-source interpreters like Tcl, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.
If you overlook the synergies in open source software, you miss the point of it completely.
If the arguments in these articles are actually interchangeable, then either:
1) These arguments have no rational basis, and both are BS (unjustified opinions).
2) There are serious factual errors in at least one article.
I wonder which one of these is closer to the truth? I'm guessing it's #1. Either way, the author can no longer be taken seriously.
I disagree somewhat with your reasons for third-party candidates not getting elected. I think the primary reason for this is our Neanderthal voting system. If a popular third-party candidate starts getting a significant number of votes, it will split the vote of their nearest major-party neighbor and both will loose. I believe that we won't have third-party candidates that are successful in any sense of the word until we have an improved voting system such as instant runoff elections. I also believe that we won't have meaningful campaign dialog or even decent representation without such voting reform.
Incidentally, I think Obama has actually supported instant runoff elections at the state level. He showed up on my radar for this reason, before I even knew he was a US senator and long before talk of the 2008 election. I still don't know enough about Obama to vote for him or not, but I have a positive bias already.
Even so, there are mathematical methods to search for these other minima as well, and I suppose they could be applied to the topic of game balancing. I very much doubt anyone has tried this yet (with any success at least).
This article seems to be about adjusting for what's considered easy, medium, or hard, based on player statistics. There's nothing creative, unusual, or even important about that idea. I guess it involves mathematics a little bit but I'm completely unimpressed.
More complex balancing is required for games like RTS and CRPG with strong strategic elements. Lack of good game balance is a common thing, and isn't given enough attention. If a game designer comes up with a great new unit ability or game mechanic, but it isn't carefully balanced, then it becomes either irrelevant to gameplay (under-useful) or makes everything else in the game irrelevant (over-powered). To actually add cool aspects to a game in a way that improves the playing experience is extremely difficult and requires careful tuning. So I would think mathematical techniques would be given more attention by developers than they seem to be.
I completely agree here. Dissent is necessary in science just as much as in a free society! But more then that, shrewd skepticism is also necessary for science.
In the field of particle physics, I gradually discovered that the theorists are much more trusting of experimental results than the experimentalists, and similarly the experimentalists are much more trusting of the theorists' calculations and predictions then the theorists themselves! This hints at how a high level of skepticism is valuable in any scientific discipline, and sharpens the standards of research. But that skepticism is kind of an internal one, mostly helping to maintain scientific integrity as well as finding new approaches to old problems.
So the very attitude of a successful scientist should be one of constant scrutiny and almost disapproval.
But this is completely different from false reports of controversy, which takes recent ideas in science that are not yet tested, even unlikely theories, and presents these alongside well-established facts.
I did a fair amount of programming in Fortran 77 (plus usual enhancements) not long ago. I agree that compiling programs with bounds-checking is extremely useful and easy to do. With C or C++ programs, that's possible but quite a bit harder and much slower. That said, I still prefer C or C++ in general since it tends to encourage better design, which in turn makes things easier in the long run.
At about that same time ('95-'01), I discovered Perl. It really worked well in conjunction with the Fortran programs! Perl's one serious weakness is efficiency, both in terms of memory and speed, for number-crunching. Fortran's primary weakness is in its user interface possibilities, string handling, and job control. Those two languages really support each other well! These days I love writing in Python whenever it's a reasonable choice. When you aren't pushing the envelope of a computer, which is probably the case far more often than not, these scripting languages are fantastic!
Keep in mind two kinds of programmer: One who writes programs for others to use, and one who writes programs for their own use. Fortran and probably Fortress are really designed for the latter group. I'm arguing that in that environment, a scripting language is also tremendously helpful.
This reminds me of last Sunday's Doonesbury strip! I laughed until it hurt, with that I-wish-it-weren't-so-true kind of pain.
My only "concern" here is that Google is used to producing search engine front-ends for casual users, and not for the scientist. When digging through data like this, new ideas generally require new kinds of searches (new algorithms). So instead of a polished front end, the scientists here really need a sort of library/API they can write high-level programs with.
I'm no expert here -- that's just my gut reaction, coming from the slightly-related field of experimental particle physics.
Your arguments here seem to be mostly made on the basis of present-day economics. "If approach X maximizes profits for company Y, then X is a good thing to do." But why would we judge an essentially ethical decision such licensing on the grounds of profit? Are there any cases where ethics are correctly judged based on one person/company's bottom line? Sure, there is corruption all the time, and lots of companies make decisions on the basis of profitability alone, but please don't argue that it's right, or even justifiable!
Stallman never, AFAIK, argued that free software was going to make businesses more successful. He does argue that a world where free software dominates over proprietary software achieves a greater overall economic superiority, or social welfare. But that's again not something you can gauge by looking at one company's ledgers.
The history of this feature of quantum mechanics is fascinating!
l e_for_Bell_Inequalities
Einstein, Podolski, and Rosen proposed this as a thought-experiment to show that the hocus-pocus in quantum mechanics was silly, and that really the envelope always "knew" what color paper was inside it. They used this setup, together with the understanding that nothing could travel faster than light, to show that the envelopes always had definite papers inside just like you'd imagine, which also means that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory.
But (much later, in the 60's) Bell thought about extending this thought-experiment a little bit, and proved a theorem relating to it: Bell's inequality. This actually proved that the envelope's contents were in fact indeterminate before being inspected, and that quantum mechanics is a complete theory -- you can't do better. Bell's inequality was experimentally tested, decisively in the 70's. The results agreed with Bell's inequality, and therefore confirmed quantum non-locality. It seems now that Einstein's original idea was turned around and used to prove him wrong (or nearly so)!
Although proving and understanding Bell's inequality is just a little bit challenging (but no problem for a physics undergrad), David Mermin came up with a specific, clever example of this inequality that is easy for anyone to understand.
Wikipedia has a pretty good section on Mermin's exemplary experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_Theorem#Examp
I probably can't explain this idea any better Wikipedia. There's an even more lucid description of this in Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos", around page 107.
So the original idea of sending off two letters, one with a black paper and one with a white one, is not meant to illustrate quantum entanglement. But it does serve to illustrate how information in this case cannot be transmitted. Even if one envelope seems to know instantaneously when the other one was opened and how, that still doesn't really require the transmission of information. I guess it's because the order in which the envelopes are opened doesn't matter.
Hope that helps.
I just wanted to say that I agree with you here, mostly.
But I think you should vote. That's because you are more intelligent than most voters. I'm not really complimenting you here -- the bar so is very, very low these days. Can you read? Good. Have you read any news lately (I think even Slashdot counts)? Great! You're well above the average! Can you tell the difference between rational argument and propaganda, at least some of the time? Congratulations, you're in the truly elite crowd! Not only are you old enough to vote, you're smart enough to vote for a reason. I would rather have people like you voting than any others. I won't tell the others (the masses) not to vote, but for you it's actually important.
Then the question becomes "For whom do I vote?" Well there's no right answer here, since there are never any popular candidates that a reasonable person would want to have in office. That's okay, it's better to have the lesser of two evils. Believe me, it is!
Then there is the question of whether or not your vote really counts. No, it certainly does not. But if people like me can convince people like you to vote, those people can make a difference. So for you not to vote (and me not to ask you to) is not consistent with your (my) desires.
I think you're basically right about this -- that the stories our news sources choose to run are chosen mostly on the basis of sensationalism and what sells.
But that doesn't mean that being uninformed about global events is an appropriate response. If we only focus only on our immediate needs, we can quickly run into disaster. For example, the "debate" on global warming is not just academic wordplay. It's a major issue that every citizen in every democracy in the world needs to be aware of and actively respond to. The free market economy all by itself is not capable of responding automatically to a future threat like this, so it takes active intervention by intelligent (I mean informed) people. If *most* people aren't worried-to-the-point-of-action about this, then we're *all* doomed.
I agree that there are lots of problems with our news sources. Apparently as consumers of the stuff, we allowed it to get like this. As you pointed out, we don't get a representative mix of the good, the humdrum, and the shocking news from any news source. Also, reporting can be biased by ignoring strong arguments which don't support the writer's thesis. And finally, especially in politics, the real information is overwhelmed by vast amounts of propaganda designed to mislead us.
It's not a good situation, but we all have a duty as citizens to stay informed, digging out the real stories and putting them in their proper perspective. If only more people were aware of these problems and took some action, demanding more of their newspapers etc, then it would get easier.
That's an interesting perspective. Yes, I guess cultural things are more spread out in the US. But I like that. Every city has its own culture. And I like the abundance of national parks that are relatively undisturbed by people. Relatively being the operative word. I've known other people from large European cities that have described the US in a similar way, as a few interesting cities but large vacant distances in between.
I don't think the US has the corner market on athletes. There seems to be much better sportsmanship in soccer, and that's a better measure of an athlete.
And I don't know about the corporations. The intensely competetive US market has created a lot of good companies -- I think the quality of restaurants in NYC are a testament to this -- be exceptional or fold. But pressure on companies from stock holders to constantly expand seems to squeeze ethics and common sense out of the boardrooms. Good enough is never enough. Either compete unfairly or get bought out by someone who will.
And as for science, the US is no longer the best place for that. Science policy for the last decade, really, has been an exit strategy. This present year is an exception to the trend, but it's too little, too late. Most long-term (20-year) projects have been aborted, and the momentum has shifted to several European nations, Japan, and (slowly) China.
I'm replying to this comment since it was the best one I found answering the basic question "What's a singularity?"
I wanted to add that string theory, I believe, has a solution to the problem of a singularity. I believe string theorists claim to have a way of representing black holes without a singularity.
The two well-established theories in physics are general relativity (GR) and the standard model of particle physics. Unfortunately these are not self-consistent. This is an unsatifsying situation for any science, so neither of these two theories can be absolutely correct. But there is good reason, based on experimental evidence like in the original post, to believe that GR is completely valid for describing the event horizon of a black hole. The theory breaks down at the center since a singularity is not physically reasonable. Unfortunately we cannot perform experiments there as they are "hidden" by the horizon.
Particle physics also has trouble with gravity. You can't use it to theorize about the center of a black hole. So "We don't know" is really the best answer to your question.
String theory remains problematic because it's still under construction, so to speak. There are some general ideas that have come out of it already. I guess I've heard of three of them. One is that a black hole can be described without a singularity forming. Another is that the entropy of a black hole can be computed based on counting the number of quantum states available, and the result agrees with a result from thermodynamics. Another recent feather in the cap of string theory is that it predicts a non-zero limit for the viscosity of any fluid. And recently experiments at RHIC have measured the viscosity of a quark-gluon plasma and found that it was extremely small but not zero. And very close to (but not below) the limit from string theory. So in a way that was a legitimate test of string theory which it passed.
Even so, string theory, to be taken seriously, will have to make a prediction that is different from the standard model (or GR) which is testable by experiment. This has not yet happened. It is however likely that other theories such as supersymmetry, technocolor, large extra dimensions, and so on may well superceed the standard model some time in the next decade. Experiments like Atlas and CMS are in a good position to help accomplish this. Please stay tuned!
A late reply but oh well...
I think Linux in elementary school could be VERY useful for some students, and just as good (or bad) as windows for most other students. Most students would be served well just to learn a word processor, and OpenOffice/kword/abiword is as good as any. You can talk about differences between OpenOffice writer and MS Word, but it will be a high-level discussion for heavy users, and there will be pros and cons. For the elementary student its all the same.
But then there are students that will want to spend some extra time learning about the computer, and will want to program it. Then Linux is far and away the platform of choice, since so many great languages, libraries, and editors are available. And there is lots of "documentation" on how to do interesting stuff in Linux, on the web. A beginner programmer can do amazing things with the languages and libraries available today. Some of these tools have been ported to Windows but the overall environment just isn't as conducive to programming.
I learned programming in Basic in the 4th grade, and have been programming ever since. In school, this has allowed me to learn and explore the abstract concepts in math and science in a more deep and intuitive way. Professionally, the ability to program has been of enormous benefit in a great many situations. And no, I don't have a comp-sci degree and no I've never been a professional programmer or worked in IT.
Being slightly smug, I think of programming as a good skill for everybody. Not at a high level where you're able to design optimizing compilers and the like, but to the point where simple programming tasks are no longer time-consuming. Given that (slightly flawed) perspective, Linux really outshines Windows because it's easy in Linux to write interesting and useful programs.
I appreciate the debunking reference. Thanks!
I've also been thinking lately about the terribly poor quality of political debate in the US. I believe that one major factor in all this is our simplistic voting system, believe it or not!
I would content that our current voting system actually ensures having a two-party system. A popular third party candidate would steal votes from their more closely-aligned major party candidate, and thus voting for such a candidate would be a poor voting strategy. In this way independant parties frequently work against their own objectives.
This would not be the case for a voting system like instant runoff voting. In that case, independant parties can have an entirely positive influence on politics they endorse even if they don't make it into office, because any genuine public support that they have could be made known without causing their nearest major-party candidate to suffer.
Because we have this two-party system, political discussion becomes necessarily polarized on every issue, whether or not it should be. Also individual issues become colored by whatever political party supports it. People don't think in terms of individual issues so much anymore, and when they do, they are largely influenced by the propoganda from their favorite party. For example I would think there should be fiscal conservatives that are religious liberals, torn between the two parties, and the opposite as well. But it seems there are not. Total political alignment is a comforting thing that keeps us from having to think rationally about political issues.
I think your present oppinion of Christian Science (the religion) has been formed by heavily biased and incorrect reports. A lot of "Christian Scientists" (church members, etc.) do accept medical intervention in a variety of cases. It is considered an entirely personal decision. The vast majority of Christian Scientists will rely on prayer for most of their health needs. This is usually because they found healing through prayer to be more complete, immediate, and reliable than through medical means. This has been my experience as well.
I think one type of situation, where seeking medical help is definitely the wisest course of action, is if the patient is fearful about recovery through prayer. Life-threatening situations would often apply here. Then they should get the best medical help they can. That being done, probably the best thing for them to pray for is handling their own fears. There are other situations too, but this one seems pretty clear-cut to me. Again this is just my oppinion, and the church's official position is that anyone is free to choose whatever remedy they determine is the best in any situation, be it medicine, prayer, or both. But getting well is of utmost importance, and if one thing is clearly not working, try something else.
I should also mention that, as expecting healing through prayer alone may seem ridiculous, I really think there is a rational basis for it. And this basis is what Christian Science is all about. As an experimental physicist by trade, I'm a very skeptical individual. But I like Christian Science because it encourages deductive reasoning and as such has no doctrine. I also feel that it helps me understand and appreciate the Bible (all of it, not just certain passages) more and more. So for me it's not really about personal health. I mean, although that's a major aspect of the religion, it is not what attracts me to it. I find that it helps me be a better person, or more nearly reach my full potential so to speak. I think that the majority of other religions, practiced with sincerity, can do the same. And ultimately it doesn't matter what you believe, but how you live your life because of it.
I'm irate that automatic updates will actually reboot your computer without asking!
I was updating my parents computer. They have dialup, so downloads are slow. I had automatic updates turned on (silly me) thinking that they would not otherwise keep things up-to-date. I was downloading some software for them (keeping firefox and thunderbird up to date), which takes about an hour. Near the beginning of the download, I was doing a couple other things on the web and making sure it was progressing. A pop-up window appeared telling me that updates were installed and the computer would reboot in several seconds. There was a button to cancel this. I was furious already with the mere question. What if I were not there and running a time-consuming compute job? Or in the middle of a long download? Well, I was there so I pressed Cancel.
I left the computer a few minutes later, came back a half hour later, and the computer had rebooted. The download had failed. It apparently ignored my request to keep the computer up and running.
How is it possible that no one at MS has gotten fired over this, and that no one else has repaired the flaw? Rebooting without getting confirmation? That's absolutely unthinkable!
Thanks! mrxvt is great! That's what I love about slashdot.
(Just did "emerge mrxvt", and tried it out.)