Having already been accomplished, even having been long accomplished/= "easy". Achieving fusion in a bomb presupposes a fission bomb, which is not "easy" except for national governments with sufficient industry. But it's not just that--in either the context of a bomb or a power plant, simply achieving fusion unconditionally isn't the point any more than it is with fission. Getting something to fission is pretty easy. Stuff does it on its own, of course. Getting something to fission in a self-sustaining reaction is not. Just so with fusion. My point is that getting some small amount of fuel to fuse in a non-self-sustaining reaction by heating it with a fission bomb has almost zero relevance to the issue of building a fusion reactor and so there's not really any point to be made about how "easy" it is. Really, it's not the same thing. Building an h-bomb is hard, by the logical necessity of its design it's harder than building a fission bomb since it's built around a fission bomb. Then you have to solve the problem of creating a self-sustaining reaction, which is also hard. Your teacher was fixating on the idea that you can fuse deuturium if you "merely" heat it up enough, which sounds "easy", without recognizing the fact that doing so is relatively useless even in a bomb. Doing just that does not make a fusion bomb, it makes a "boosted" fission bomb.
I think I understand why your teacher thinks he was saying something meaningful, and why you think he was saying something meaningful; but it was based upon a false evaluation of how "easy" it is to make a fusion bomb, and a wrong-headed sense that the supposed "ease" of inducing fusion with a fission bomb has anything to do with fusion power generation.
Another way to say what I'm trying to say is that there an implicit analogy being made between fission and fusion regarding bombs and power generation. That is, people seem to think that since the reactor came first and the bomb second in fission, that since we've already achieved the bomb in fusion that in some sense we "should" be most of the way to a reactor. But you can't compare fission and fusion in this way in this context, they're qualitatively different things.
Maybe I'm just picking nits. I'd probably like it much better if he was saying what he was trying to say in a different way. I feel like the way he said it gives a whole bunch of wrong impressions.
They're still looking for a tetrachromat, I think. There's certainly some out there. What amazes me is that they expect that a tetrachromat might actually make use of that fourth pigment and see colors that the rest of us don't see. Before I came across this information, I had predicted that as being highly unlikely--why in the world would the vision processing system and the rest of the brain know how to make use of this extra information? I'm still skeptical, actually.
Boy, the people posting in this thread are pretty clueless about color vision and the nature of color, aren't they? Reading the Foveon page that was linked to, I too was annoyed that they seemed to be claiming that the eye sees all three color bandwidths at every point at which it is sensing--something that simply isn't true. CCDs in this sense work more like the human eye does with the significant difference being that there is much, much less sophisticated signal processing being employed in the CCD array. It's not clear to me that CCDs couldn't duplicate what the eye does very closely by achieving the same sensing density as the eye, with sensitivity curves that more closely mimic that of each of the three types of cones.
The problem is that this is all kind of silly. Human vision is highly processed and abstracted information. Designing a camera to see like an eye does is like designing a text copying machine to read like a human does. Any way of capturing accurate spectral information about an image at a density that is greater than the human eye can see is sufficient to reproduce a perfect image. Encoding image data as the human eye sees, including utilizing a three bandwidth sensitivity to reproduce color information, is exactly like using a perceptually-based lossy compression scheme, like MP3, to encode audio information. This is smart assuming that a) you don't ever need the lost information; and b) since people individually differ, your perceptual abstraction accounts for those differences. Then, if both those conditions are true, you're only keeping the data "you need".
But assuming more sophisticated technology, including data storage, why not at least try to faithfully record across the entire visible bandwidth the accurate and precise spectral data at every sensing point, including either recording or deriving the spectral data for the illumination source, at very high resolutions? You've instantly eliminated color management problems, for example, at the image source side. You could accurately "relight" the image using a different color temperature. You'd have a very complete representation of the image from which you could extract much more efficient and compact versions for specialized purposes.
I think that what you describe would be nasty, and I suspect that the practice is already proscribed by our current copyright law. What you describe would amount to copying the image, which copyright law forbids.
Well, there's the rub. From the context of what http is doing, it's not copying the image, the html is only providing the address to the image and the browser is fetching it and including it. But, clearly, the effect is precisely as if you copied the image. Worse, in a way, since you're getting all the benefits of coying without the load on your bandwidth. It's adding insult to injury.
The whole problem here is that http and html were designed under an implicit assumption that all these resources are fully in the public domain. The standards could be rewritten or extended to recognize, er--I hate to use the term--digital rights management. Browsers, for example, wouldn't include copyrighted content outside the context of the site that has ownership. If a resource is marked as "public domain", anyone can encapsulate it into other contexts. This could all be done in the context of XML, could it not? That's the way out of this mess and removing this ambiguity would actually facilitate the embedding of all sorts of content because people would have the option of tagging the content as externally embeddable. I'd like to see this.
The difference is one of expectations and common sense, which matters in law. If you walk around in a city, you have no reasonable expectation that any given building you see is a public building. Most are private, not open to the public, and you know it. You look for explicit signs that indicate a public building to know that it's okay for you to enter it.
Taken as a whole, the Internet is the same way. Most resources available are private, they are not presumed to be public. However, just like signs indicate that a building is public, an Internet protocol can by convention be presumed public, such as HTTP. Most HTTP servers not behind firewalls are public. Placing restrictions on entry, such as password requirements, can act as a "sign" indicating that something is not unrestricted. That's why you don't have a right to go trying to randomly log into telnet servers and password-protected web sites.
I don't think these issues are particularly hard to figure out, but a lot of people seem to have trouble. That's because they often aren't taking common sense expectations into account and instead are arguing from strongly abstracted positions. The public/private building analogy is apt, because it forces one to think about why it is that it's pretty clear that you can't go walking into people's homes even though there's so many public buildings around. The same sort of common sense reasoning about where one has and doesn't have a right to wander in the real world applies in the virtual world.
In this particular issue, these sites that want to prohibit deep linking fail to make convicing arguments because a) they're not actually controlling access to these pages and so there's a presumption that they're fully public; and, b) the whole argument is moot because linking is only a pointer and is not access in any sense.
My high school physics teacher pointed many years ago when we were looking at nuclear energy, that fusion is 'easy'.
Well, he was wrong. It wasn't easy. You can't just somehow heat some nuclear fuel to fusion temperatures and achieve a reaction that will sustain itself. It's possible that the idea of compressing the fuel would have come more quickly if Teller hadn't pounded it into everyone's heads that compression wouldn't make a difference. But it does make a difference in how fast the burning fuel radiates energy away that would otherwise sustain the reaction. Teller started thinking about a fusion bomb as early as 1943, it wasn't until about '49 or so that Ulam had the insight about compression. Of course, his was just a rudimentary idea; Teller quickly proposed using radiation pressure instead and the idea of the "spark plug" at the center quickly followed. There is another way to build a fusion bomb, and it's a layering of fission and fusion in a sphere or something similar. This gets really massive really quick and has an upper yield limit probably less than a megaton. This was how the Russians, independently (which is significant since much of their bomb program was built upon thorough intelligence, not just from Fuchs, about the American and British programs) produced their first h-bomb, about a year or so later, with a yield of about 400kt. But we'd already built pure fission bombs with a greater yield than that, not to mention how we'd already improved our h-bombs very quickly.
Anyway, it's true that just igniting some nuclear fuel into fusion isn't that hugely hard, assuming that you have some tritium, not just deuturium, around. But you don't get that much from it compared to the fission bomb you've exploded to burn that small amount of fuel. In regards to power plants, of course using the heat of the core of a fission explosion is not an option for initiating fusion. And all our current technologies currently use about as much energy to initiate and contain fusion in a fuel than they are to usefully extract from it. The vast gulf seperating fission from fusion power is that once you understand the neutron-capturing cross-sections of various isotopes, cobble together a sufficient mass of an approriate fuel, and find a moderator (and moderator arrangement) to go with it, the actual physical, engineering complexity of the reactor is minimal. You could build one by hand, which is essentially what Fermi did. You can control one by winching a control rod into and out of a pile. In contrast, the fusion reaction is very different in this context and an implementation and control mechaninism is fiendishly complex. I suppose that in a way your teacher was right, in the sense that a fission reactor is very, very different from a bomb; while a fusion reactor must by necessity in some qualitative sense be pretty similar to a fusion bomb.
You're using "gravity wave" in two different ways. That's the problem. Gravity waves are not waves of gravity like light waves are waves of light. Rather, gravity waves are ripples in space/time produced by a changing gravitational field. (Such as, say, two black holes orbiting one another in the same plane as a distant observer. The observer should be able to measure, given sufficient technology, gravity waves. I use black holes here just because they're extreme and the waves would be more easily detected.)
This is also why our perceived direction of the pull of the sun lines up with where it is now instead of where it was 8 minutes ago.
What in the world do you mean by that? If it's something more subtle than what I think you're saying (as will be made clear in a second), then I'd like to know what it is.
Imagine that you wanted to shine a laser on the Sun from the Earth's surface. Where would you point it considering that it takes 8 1/2 minutes for the light to travel from the Earth to the Sun? Why, you'd point it right at the Sun, of course. The Sun isn't moving.
You seem to be parroting Tom Van Flandern's anti-relativistic arguments. The problem is that even though he's a legitimate scientist and a smart guy, he's also something of an anti-relativity crank. You're going to disagree, of course.
Yes, but it's the photon's transfer of momentum into compression of deuturium/tritium that makes fusion possible (because merely heating uncompressed deuturium to fusion will not work--this was the fundamental problem of the H-bomb.
Well, except that in the initial design, at least, they used an intermediate stage to transfer the momentum from the radiation pressure (generated by a conventional fission bomb)...they use the radiation to ablate the outer surface of a cylinder of U-238 (natural uranium) surrounding the deuturium/tritium to use the uranium to compress it, which also trips an initiator placed with some U-235 centered in the center of the deuturium, causing it to fission, which creates two massive pressure waves, an incoming and outgoing, that compresses the deuturium mightily. This ignites fusion in it, which, in turn, releases enough fast neutrons to ignite fission in the normally unfissionable U-238 that surrounds it. The fissioning of U-238 actually produces most of the yield of this device, "Mike", which was about a megaton. Quite an intricate piece of work, really.
Now, what did this have to do with this discussion again? Oh, yeah, the momentum of photons. I guess it's marginally ontopic. (Please forgive me, I just finished reading about the development of the H-bomb and couldn't keep from showing off the neato stuff I just learned.)
I won't deny that that's possible, but in all my reading I don't recall ever seeing it until about two years ago - here online.
TWIAVBP ("The World is a Very Big Place"), but often not for Americans. You've obviously only been reading American publications or web sites dominated by Americans. Slashdot has a large international readership.
A simple Google search would have demonstrated that what I wrote is true; and, in the future, perhaps you should make a bit more effort at verifying the generalizations you make based upon only your own, limited experience. I'm probably being a bit too harsh since we all make this sort of mistake from time to time, but you could have at least made the elementary attempt to verify what I wrote rather than merely continue to assert a generalization based, as you aknowledged, on your own personal experience and conjecture.
Re:Desperate for silent machines
on
Computer Room Hot?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I want to kill whomever started this retarted trend of making companies and organizations plural!
This is standard British English usage. It is not a "trend". American English does not set the "world standard" for English, and neither does British English. And, contrary to assertions made on the East side of the pond, neither (in their current incarnations) has any convincing claims of priority. Some of our American usage is archaic from the British point of view, and vice-versa.
There's quite a bit I agree with in Brin's article, and I certainly do appreciate his intent. It should be recognized that he clearly intended to be provocative (in the best sense of the word), not authoritative or exhaustive.
My one response to Brin's article would be that it is possible to take pleasure in archetypical fantasies like LotR without it indicating a regressive Romantic yearning. This is complex and his chief complaint is persuasive. But the idea he describes--the conservative tendency to idealize the past, to imagine that the present represents perhaps the worst of all worlds, a world where the forces of evil have conspired to makes one's life miserable--is not the only incredibly dangerous idea implied in fantasy. The other dangerous idea is the related fantasy of stark and immediately identifiable divisions and affiliations between Good and Evil. These two ideas which have a deep affinity for each other are, in my opinion, the chief intellectual facades (and I mean "intellectual" in the broadest sense) behind which the most common and yet most virulent human evil hides. Brin mentions that the Nazis were deeply Romantic, and he's right.
Still, though, I take pleasure--both emotional and intellectual--in the "Lord of the Rings", and I believe that I do so with no great danger to my soul. That's because I, in short, know better.
Art is not Reality; reality is Reality. Art's job is not to perfectly represent reality--past, future, or possible. Its job is to abstract essences of the human experience of reality in a way that is pleasurable or increases comprehension--or, hopefully, both. Thus, what the art means, what it is doing, may be quite unlike its superficial appearance. In particular, Brin fails to acknowledge that an essential element of narrative art is the identification the reader has with the piece's protagonists. And so even if we have Kings, Elven Lords and elite, ancient Wizards, nevertheless they are common because we are common. In them we are not so much imagining a world ordered where others, or even ourselves, are at the top of the pyramid--we are imagining the expression of the best within each of ourselves. In this way our great stories have always served both great powers, always at war--the proclamation of the divine right of Kings and the inevitability of xenophobia intertwined with the individualism, egalitarianism, and the hope that maybe, just maybe, a peasant boy will seize the sword from the stone. It could be me. Or you.
In truth I wonder if this paradoxical clash of ideals is not one of the driving forces of narrative motion. Just what is it we really want? The thing of it is that we don't quite know. That's what's interesting.
"...is something whose earliest-continous (and most famous) example is the people of the Untied States of America."
This is false in so many ways, I don't know where to begin. How about the Greeks?
Okay, so you perhaps meant continuous up to today. Or perhaps you meant in North America. Either way, you're still wrong. And your main point was to defend your contention that Native Americans weren't democratic. Nope, you're still wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
May I introduce you to the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, known as the "Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth"? The Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited and democratic through most of its history, beginning in the 1400s.
Your objection that democracy needs to be substnatially pan-ethnic and pan-cultural is just silly. It's prima facie silly, but it's also silly because this doesn't describe the people who founded this country.
Also, by the way, no, Sweden's history as a "nation" is not prehistory and the Scandinavian countries mistreatments of the aboriginals exists in modern times. People like to make a big deal out of the American mistreatment of its aboriginies--and they should make a big deal out if it--but they somehow seem to overlook the not so wonderful treatment of aborigines elsehwere, such as in Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, Russia, and, of course, Canada. None of these have anything (except perhaps very recently) to be especially proud of.
Anyway, you might want to do a bit more reading on the history of aboriginal Americans. You've obviously done some reading on "paganism", and I have no quarrel with your correct criticism of its silly newage-ish distortion of history. But you're acting no better than they.
"I find it difficult to sympathize with people who wish to keep academic journals locked away." - Outland Traveler
Yes. It's interesting and revealing to me that there is a presumption on the part of the contributier--a presumption that seems to be confirmed--that the Slashdot community is more friendly to protecting copywritten scientific papers than they are copywritten music. This is fucked-up moral reasoning.
"
I don't think if you go down to a basic level I am sure most people would have to agree that there is almost definetly life on other planets." -- nich37ways
I disagree. Yes, opinion has been changed somewhat in the last twenty years; but it wasn't so long ago that much of the scientific establishment was laughing behind Sagan's back for his exobiology studies. And that represented scientific opinion, not general opinion.
Among the general population my intuition is that there are probably about three distinct groups of people. The really credulous people that believe in alien life because they believe in UFO visitation; the supposedly hard-headed (but really just very anthropocentric) people that think that Earth is the only place in the universe with life; and the much smaller group of we who are skeptically-minded but nevertheless believe in the almost certainty of alien life somewhere and somewhen.
But I think that the largest group of general opinion doesn't believe in life anywhere else in the universe. Consider that the majority of people in the US are Christian, and consider that their theology has no place whatsoever for life away from Earth. I mean, c'mon, a significant minority of Americans don't believe in evolution.
The idea of vampires and elves are widespread in our popular culture. That doesn't mean that many people really think they exist.
Part of why I think that few people believe in extraterrestrial life is because I think that most people are still incredibly anthropocentric. An example is that a large number of people, perhaps the majority, aren't willing to even attribute even rudimentary thought and emotion to higher life forms on out planet, all evidence to the contrary. People still believe that we're so incredibly special, that we must be unique. That hasn't changed that much outside of scientific circles, and not so much even there.
One source I saw said that at least one of Einstein's biographers was confused by the grading change. Perhaps it was this biography that you read.
It's somewhat ironic that I spend much time debunking this UL at all since, I must admit, my own grades were as often "F"s as they were "A"s. (Meaning, most of the time.) I, as a "gifted" young person and still, as an adult, a critic of rote learning and a reliance on supposed "objective" grades, always took comfort in the myth of Einstein's genius and educational non-conformance. I have as much a personal psychological stake as anyone in perpetuating this myth. But it aint true.
Furthermore, I ended up attending an unusual and very rigorous college that, though very difficult, did not utilize grading. Their system managed to work, however, by having one of the very highest student-to-teaching-faculty ratio in the US (perhaps one of the four or five highest, actually) and so there was never any doubt as to the quality of any student's work. And if the work wasn't up to scratch, they were asked to leave. Even there, however, I was both brilliant and an underachiever, so, there ya' go. My point is that it would be nice to hang onto to some sort of idea of the brilliant maverick underachiever who has a revolutionary effect on a field of study; but the truth of the matter is that this is very rarely the case among revolutionary scientists, even prior to the twentieth century.
This calls to mind a discussion I had with my mathematics tutor (that's what faculty are called there). I was always quite brilliant in mathematics and did things effortlessly that others had to struggle over. Nevertheless, there was written work I neglected just because, well, I was lazy and had long since become accustomed to believing that the rules didn't apply to me. In his office, the tutor gestured to the shelves of books behind him, books (or other works) written by the likes of Descartes and Newton and, yes, Einstein; and he asked me, "Do you think that these writers accomplished what they did through nothing more than genius?" He answered his own question: "No, they did not. They were brilliant, but they also worked very hard."
As an adult pushing forty years of age, and as someone who's spent much of my life discovering that, yes indeed I am very talented....I've come to understand that talent is cheap and in great supply, hard work is expensive and rare. I may indeed have one or two ideas that could revolutionize a field of study; but then even my most arrogant and narcissistic estimates would have at least many thousands of other people similarly capable. Nothing I am capable of doing is relying only upon me to achieve it. Even though it has felt that way at many points in my life, it is simply unreasonable to expect that I'm very important at all merely by existing. Only through the combination of talent and hard work and perhaps a bit of luck could I be "important".
I have a great affection for Einstein and an abiding interest in Relativity (though I'm certainly barely competent to even mention it--I know and have dated an astrophysicist and certainly know the vast intellectual and competency gulf that separates us). And something resonates deep within me at his quote that he knew Relativity must be true because anything so beautiful must be true, God would make it so (not a direct quote). But when it is said and done, even in his case it's true that he worked hard all his life, and he paid his dues, and he worked within the system. That's just simply true.
In this guy's case (the hydronic guy), the fact that he's apparently competent at the field he's trying to revolutionize should work in his favor. In my opinion the first acid test for separating the cranks from the (possible) honest-to-goodness revolutionaries is whether or not they're competent in the fields they are challenging. Most would-be revolutionaries are not.
Well, a quick web search shows that this error is both repeated and debunked at many sites.[1]
An old USENET post on alt.folklore.urban contains almost the entire text of a New York Times article on this subject.
I'm posting both the link to the AFU article here, but I'm also posting the full text of the NYT article (as it appears in the AFU post), just because I can, fair use be damned[2]:
Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company February 14, 1984, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition (SECTION: Section C; Page 1, Column 5; Science Desk)
EINSTEIN REVEALED AS BRILLIANT IN YOUTHBy WALTER SULLIVAN
Contrary to a popular legend that has given comfort to countless slow
starters, young Albert Einstein was remarkably gifted in mathematics, algebra
and physics, academic records recently acquired from Swiss archives show.
The records, contained in a collection of the great theorist's papers now
being prepared for publication at Princeton, confirm that Einstein was a
child prodigy, conversant in college physics before he was 11 years old, a
"brilliant" violin player who got high marks in Latin and Greek. But his
inability to master French was the bane of his school days, and may have been
chiefly responsible for his failing college entrance examinations.
The documents "place Einstein in the context of his times much more
than in the past, providing details of his education in Germany and
Switzerland and his more human contacts," said Dr. John Stachel, editor
of the papers.
A prime objective of Princeton University Press, which plans to
publish the first volume of the Einstein papers in 1985 after years of
controversy and lawsuits, is to seek out the roots of Einstein's sudden
penetration to a deeper understanding of nature. The series may run to 38
volumes when complete.
The initial volume includes Einstein's first scientific essay, dealing
with the effect of magnetism on the hypothetical "ether." It was written
when he was 16, apparently as part of his first, unsuccessful effort to gain
admission to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Although some Einstein biographers have disputed the widely held
belief that Einstein was a poor student, the papers at Princeton lay this
to rest, once and for all. According to Dr. Stachel, those who saw
Einstein's academic records may have been misled by a reversal in the
grading system of his school in Aargau, Switzerland.
Those records show that, for two successive terms, when Einstein was
16, his mark in arithmetic and algebra was 1 on a scale of 6, in which 1
was the highest grade. For the next term his mark was 6, which would have
been the lowest grade,except that the grading scale had been reversed by
school officials.
Examination of the papers, now numbering in the tens of thousands, is a
journey into the academic world of the 19th century, with emphasis, in
Einstein's elementary school experience in Munich, on regimentation and
learning by rote. The curriculum, however, was less rigid in the
preparatory school heattended in Switzerland.
...(Stuff deleted by the AFU poster)
Neglected Math for Physics
His academic records there were destroyed in World War II, but Dr. Stachel
and his colleagues at Princeton have in hand a letter sent to a Munich
newspaper in 1929 by H. Wieleitner, then principal of the Luitpold
Gymnasium. He had examined Einstein's school record to refute a report
in a Berlin magazine that Einstein had been a very poor student.
With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported,
Einstein's marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1
and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math. Nevertheless, as
pointed out by Banesh Hoffmann of Queens College in his book on Einstein, the
latter confessed that he later neglected mathematics in favor of physics.
Another testament to his childhood precocity comes from Dr. Max
Talmey, who, as a medical student in Munich, knew Einstein when he was
ten and a half years old. His "exceptional intelligence," Talmey wrote
later in a book, enabled him to discuss with a college graduate "subjects far
beyond the comprehension" of so young a child.
Talmey gave him two books on physics, one of which was entitled
"Force and Matter," as though anticipating Einstein's famous definition
of the relationship between mass and energy.
A Weakness in French
It was chiefly Einstein's weakness in French that led to his failure to
pass the entrance examinations for the Federal Technical Institute in Zurich.
According to the documents assembled at Princeton, he had been allowed to
take the examinations even though he was two years younger than the normal
admission age of 18, thanks in part to intervention by a family friend.
The friend was Gustav Maier, whose banking house in Ulm, Germany, many
years earlier had been on the same street as the feather-bedding factory
of Einstein'sgrandfather. Maier wrote to Albin Herzog, head of the Zurich
institute, which was then as now of international repute, extolling
Einstein's genius and urging that he be allowed to take the exam even though
he lacked a school diploma.
While Maier's letter has not been found, the archives of the Zurich
institutehave produced Herzog's reply. "In my opinion," he wrote, "it
is not advisableto remove even so-called 'Wunderkinder' from an
institution in which they have begun studies before they have been fully
completed."
He recommended that Einstein finish his preparatory studies, but said he
could take the examinations if he wished. When Einstein failed them, Herzog
suggested that he enter the Aargau Cantonal School, whose graduates were
automatically admitted to the institute. This was the course that Einstein
followed and he was admitted to the Zurich institute in 1896.
Faulty Essay Gives Insights
Before that, at Aargau, French was almost his nemesis. Swiss archives have
produced the minutes of a teacher's conference held on March 15, 1899, in
which it was noted that a written reprimand from the French teacher had
been entered in Einstein's record.
When he finally graduated this blemish was again noted. He was "promoted
with protest in French," his transcript read.
It may be that Einstein, reared in a German-speaking environment, had
difficulty competing with Swiss students who, though in the German- speaking
region, were taught French from childhood.
The essay that Einstein wrote in French on his original examination for
acceptance at the institute in Zurich was full of errors, but also very
revealing. It is quoted in part by Abraham Pais in his recent book on
Einstein, "Subtle Is the Lord."
Entitled "My Future Projects," the essay says he hopes to concentrate on
mathematics and physics. "I see myself becoming a teacher of these
branches of natural science, chosing the theoretical part of these
sciences."
"Here are the causes which have led me to this plan," he continued.
"It is above all my personal disposition toward abstract thought and
mathematics, lack of imagination and of practical talent."
The Aargau records include an "inspector's report" on 17 students of the
violin and piano. "One student, named Einstein" it says, "gave a
brilliant, as well as understanding, rendition of an adagio from a
Beethoven sonata." Einstein continued to play the violin during his
years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until his death
in 1955.
[1] I won't go into the issue of the reliability of the web, except to say that my experience has been that the sheer breadth of information available on the web makes it more easy to seperate the wheat from the chafe than is the case with supposedly more reliable sources. I have never relied exclusively upon mere reputation or authority to guide my opinion of what is true and correct, and as a result I find the web a superior resource because out of the melange--most of which is crap--it's easier to distinguish the cream that floats to the top.
[2] I tend to be a supporter of intellectual property rights (though very definitely not a supporter of those who, like the RIAA et al want to abuse them); but, in this case, I do object to the locking away into for-pay archives all sorts of information that would otherwise be of great and frequent benefit to the public weal.
"I guess it is up to both of us to be diligent and go do the research in hard facts..."
Absolutely! I'm a little ashamed that I didn't do so before answering your post. I'm getting lazy in my old age. I was going on the results of the last time I actually did go to the trouble to research this. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details and, as such, cannot be trusted to be reliable. For all I know, the issue of his grades during his adolescence and during what we would call his "higher education" are two seperate issues.
However, I will research this now and report back immediately.
No, he didn't. His grades were uniformly excellent. This whole misconeption arose because the gymnasium he attended reversed its grading scheme at one point, making it appear to the unsuspecting that good grades were bad grades. (If I recall correctly, it was a numerical 1 to 5 scheme.)
Does anyone else find that so called scientists that dismiss something new out of hand aren't really worthy of being called scientists?
I don't think that's a fair characterization. They don't reject new things out of hand, they reject revolutionary things out of hand. As well they should.
Why? Because there are an infinity of false revolutionary "scientific" ideas possible. A scientist's job is to be skeptical, not credulous. Yes, scientists are "going where no man has split infinitives before" but they go there with intellectual rigor, not having sex with whatever has blue skin and big tits.
And this story, with the upcoming paper, just demonstrates that the system is working quite well.
If you think that scientists should be more interested in bizarre and revolutionary ideas, then you should spend some time in sci.relativity and sci.physics (just to name a couple of newsgroups) and see how many crazy, ignorant people with crazy, ignorant theories there really are out there who complain that "they're being persecuted" and "Einstein got bad grades and nobody believed him, either" (he didn't and they did).
"
But it would be just as irresponsible for us to run in and fix something we don't understand (and may well not be 'broken') as it would to wontonly destroy our atmosphere (which is what some are claiming we do)."
Replace "would" in that sentence with "might".
If we were to go about a risk and cost/benefit analysis as rationally as possible, we'd have to acknowledge that there's a considerable amount of uncertainty as to the side of the equation involving the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We do know that it will cost something, and we know an approximate range, and we know that that cost can be translated into other tangible things, like money diverted from reducing non-greenhouse pollutants that cause disease.
For the sake of the argument, let's invent a fictional economic unit, the "fubar". Let's assume that the cost of eliminating 80% of the production of greenhouse gases is somewhere between 50 and 100 fubars. (Note that I use an 80% reduction amount to imply what is almost certainly true--that approaching 100% reduction would have the cost increase astronomically.)
Now we'll ask what is the cost of not reducing greenhouse emissions.
Since we don't know if we're responsible for global warming at all, we have to place the lower limit of the cost of not reducing emission at zero fubars. But what's the upper limit?
The point here is that the upper limit is very, very high compared to the upper limit of the cost of reducing the greenhouse emissions. I don't really know what the magnitudes are, but I'll guess for the sake of the argument that it's nearly 1000 fubars. And that could be low. Maybe it's 10,000 fubars.
Your point is that the lower limit is zero and that spending 100 fubars on reducing greenhouse emissions is irresponsible. But that's true only if the cost of not doing so is actually zero. Your default assumption that it's zero is clearly also irresposible. It may be zero, but it may not be. And if it isn't, it's not likely to be 10 or 100, it's likely to be 1000 or 10,000.
How much in possible financial winnings would it take for you to play a single round of Russian Roulette? (Say that if you don't shoot yourself, you get X amoung of money.) I ask because it's not certain that you'll shoot yourself in the head. Lest you try to argue this point on the basis of causation, it's also not certain whether there is a causal relationship between you pulling that trigger one time and a bullet being fired into your brain.
So, since there's a prety good chance that there will be no bullet fired when you pull the trigger, will you do it for a dollar? Or ten? Or a thousand? Or, more likely, a million?
Not spending money on reducing greenhouse emissions is like getting that dollar (or ten) in the Russian Roulette example. If the magnitude of the risk is so large compared to the benefit of not trying to avoid the risk, then it is clearly foolish to fail to avoid the risk, even when it is an uncertain risk. In fact, part of my point here is that the certainty (or lack thereof) of the risk makes no qualitative difference. It just means that the lower value of the range of the risk magnitude is zero. It doesn't mean that this is a special case where it's rational to defer making any judgment at all.
I've been using IP on 1394 from my desktop box to my Sony laptop. I just bridge my ethernet and firewire NICs on my desktop PC, and the Sony has an Internet connection over Firewire (which they call "i.Link"). It works great. Theoretically, I should be seeing four times the bandwidth on the 1394 link than I see with 100 Ethernet, but in reality it's not that big of a difference. As people are saying about gig-ethernet, other things, like the PCI bus, start to be limiting factors.
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I think I understand why your teacher thinks he was saying something meaningful, and why you think he was saying something meaningful; but it was based upon a false evaluation of how "easy" it is to make a fusion bomb, and a wrong-headed sense that the supposed "ease" of inducing fusion with a fission bomb has anything to do with fusion power generation.
Another way to say what I'm trying to say is that there an implicit analogy being made between fission and fusion regarding bombs and power generation. That is, people seem to think that since the reactor came first and the bomb second in fission, that since we've already achieved the bomb in fusion that in some sense we "should" be most of the way to a reactor. But you can't compare fission and fusion in this way in this context, they're qualitatively different things.
Maybe I'm just picking nits. I'd probably like it much better if he was saying what he was trying to say in a different way. I feel like the way he said it gives a whole bunch of wrong impressions.
They're still looking for a tetrachromat, I think. There's certainly some out there. What amazes me is that they expect that a tetrachromat might actually make use of that fourth pigment and see colors that the rest of us don't see. Before I came across this information, I had predicted that as being highly unlikely--why in the world would the vision processing system and the rest of the brain know how to make use of this extra information? I'm still skeptical, actually.
Boy, the people posting in this thread are pretty clueless about color vision and the nature of color, aren't they? Reading the Foveon page that was linked to, I too was annoyed that they seemed to be claiming that the eye sees all three color bandwidths at every point at which it is sensing--something that simply isn't true. CCDs in this sense work more like the human eye does with the significant difference being that there is much, much less sophisticated signal processing being employed in the CCD array. It's not clear to me that CCDs couldn't duplicate what the eye does very closely by achieving the same sensing density as the eye, with sensitivity curves that more closely mimic that of each of the three types of cones.
The problem is that this is all kind of silly. Human vision is highly processed and abstracted information. Designing a camera to see like an eye does is like designing a text copying machine to read like a human does. Any way of capturing accurate spectral information about an image at a density that is greater than the human eye can see is sufficient to reproduce a perfect image. Encoding image data as the human eye sees, including utilizing a three bandwidth sensitivity to reproduce color information, is exactly like using a perceptually-based lossy compression scheme, like MP3, to encode audio information. This is smart assuming that a) you don't ever need the lost information; and b) since people individually differ, your perceptual abstraction accounts for those differences. Then, if both those conditions are true, you're only keeping the data "you need".
But assuming more sophisticated technology, including data storage, why not at least try to faithfully record across the entire visible bandwidth the accurate and precise spectral data at every sensing point, including either recording or deriving the spectral data for the illumination source, at very high resolutions? You've instantly eliminated color management problems, for example, at the image source side. You could accurately "relight" the image using a different color temperature. You'd have a very complete representation of the image from which you could extract much more efficient and compact versions for specialized purposes.
The whole problem here is that http and html were designed under an implicit assumption that all these resources are fully in the public domain. The standards could be rewritten or extended to recognize, er--I hate to use the term--digital rights management. Browsers, for example, wouldn't include copyrighted content outside the context of the site that has ownership. If a resource is marked as "public domain", anyone can encapsulate it into other contexts. This could all be done in the context of XML, could it not? That's the way out of this mess and removing this ambiguity would actually facilitate the embedding of all sorts of content because people would have the option of tagging the content as externally embeddable. I'd like to see this.
Taken as a whole, the Internet is the same way. Most resources available are private, they are not presumed to be public. However, just like signs indicate that a building is public, an Internet protocol can by convention be presumed public, such as HTTP. Most HTTP servers not behind firewalls are public. Placing restrictions on entry, such as password requirements, can act as a "sign" indicating that something is not unrestricted. That's why you don't have a right to go trying to randomly log into telnet servers and password-protected web sites.
I don't think these issues are particularly hard to figure out, but a lot of people seem to have trouble. That's because they often aren't taking common sense expectations into account and instead are arguing from strongly abstracted positions. The public/private building analogy is apt, because it forces one to think about why it is that it's pretty clear that you can't go walking into people's homes even though there's so many public buildings around. The same sort of common sense reasoning about where one has and doesn't have a right to wander in the real world applies in the virtual world.
In this particular issue, these sites that want to prohibit deep linking fail to make convicing arguments because a) they're not actually controlling access to these pages and so there's a presumption that they're fully public; and, b) the whole argument is moot because linking is only a pointer and is not access in any sense.
Anyway, it's true that just igniting some nuclear fuel into fusion isn't that hugely hard, assuming that you have some tritium, not just deuturium, around. But you don't get that much from it compared to the fission bomb you've exploded to burn that small amount of fuel. In regards to power plants, of course using the heat of the core of a fission explosion is not an option for initiating fusion. And all our current technologies currently use about as much energy to initiate and contain fusion in a fuel than they are to usefully extract from it. The vast gulf seperating fission from fusion power is that once you understand the neutron-capturing cross-sections of various isotopes, cobble together a sufficient mass of an approriate fuel, and find a moderator (and moderator arrangement) to go with it, the actual physical, engineering complexity of the reactor is minimal. You could build one by hand, which is essentially what Fermi did. You can control one by winching a control rod into and out of a pile. In contrast, the fusion reaction is very different in this context and an implementation and control mechaninism is fiendishly complex. I suppose that in a way your teacher was right, in the sense that a fission reactor is very, very different from a bomb; while a fusion reactor must by necessity in some qualitative sense be pretty similar to a fusion bomb.
You're using "gravity wave" in two different ways. That's the problem. Gravity waves are not waves of gravity like light waves are waves of light. Rather, gravity waves are ripples in space/time produced by a changing gravitational field. (Such as, say, two black holes orbiting one another in the same plane as a distant observer. The observer should be able to measure, given sufficient technology, gravity waves. I use black holes here just because they're extreme and the waves would be more easily detected.)
Yours is my favorite post in this thread, by far. Especially that last little bit.
Imagine that you wanted to shine a laser on the Sun from the Earth's surface. Where would you point it considering that it takes 8 1/2 minutes for the light to travel from the Earth to the Sun? Why, you'd point it right at the Sun, of course. The Sun isn't moving.
You seem to be parroting Tom Van Flandern's anti-relativistic arguments. The problem is that even though he's a legitimate scientist and a smart guy, he's also something of an anti-relativity crank. You're going to disagree, of course.
Well, except that in the initial design, at least, they used an intermediate stage to transfer the momentum from the radiation pressure (generated by a conventional fission bomb)...they use the radiation to ablate the outer surface of a cylinder of U-238 (natural uranium) surrounding the deuturium/tritium to use the uranium to compress it, which also trips an initiator placed with some U-235 centered in the center of the deuturium, causing it to fission, which creates two massive pressure waves, an incoming and outgoing, that compresses the deuturium mightily. This ignites fusion in it, which, in turn, releases enough fast neutrons to ignite fission in the normally unfissionable U-238 that surrounds it. The fissioning of U-238 actually produces most of the yield of this device, "Mike", which was about a megaton. Quite an intricate piece of work, really.
Now, what did this have to do with this discussion again? Oh, yeah, the momentum of photons. I guess it's marginally ontopic. (Please forgive me, I just finished reading about the development of the H-bomb and couldn't keep from showing off the neato stuff I just learned.)
My one response to Brin's article would be that it is possible to take pleasure in archetypical fantasies like LotR without it indicating a regressive Romantic yearning. This is complex and his chief complaint is persuasive. But the idea he describes--the conservative tendency to idealize the past, to imagine that the present represents perhaps the worst of all worlds, a world where the forces of evil have conspired to makes one's life miserable--is not the only incredibly dangerous idea implied in fantasy. The other dangerous idea is the related fantasy of stark and immediately identifiable divisions and affiliations between Good and Evil. These two ideas which have a deep affinity for each other are, in my opinion, the chief intellectual facades (and I mean "intellectual" in the broadest sense) behind which the most common and yet most virulent human evil hides. Brin mentions that the Nazis were deeply Romantic, and he's right.
Still, though, I take pleasure--both emotional and intellectual--in the "Lord of the Rings", and I believe that I do so with no great danger to my soul. That's because I, in short, know better.
Art is not Reality; reality is Reality. Art's job is not to perfectly represent reality--past, future, or possible. Its job is to abstract essences of the human experience of reality in a way that is pleasurable or increases comprehension--or, hopefully, both. Thus, what the art means, what it is doing, may be quite unlike its superficial appearance. In particular, Brin fails to acknowledge that an essential element of narrative art is the identification the reader has with the piece's protagonists. And so even if we have Kings, Elven Lords and elite, ancient Wizards, nevertheless they are common because we are common. In them we are not so much imagining a world ordered where others, or even ourselves, are at the top of the pyramid--we are imagining the expression of the best within each of ourselves. In this way our great stories have always served both great powers, always at war--the proclamation of the divine right of Kings and the inevitability of xenophobia intertwined with the individualism, egalitarianism, and the hope that maybe, just maybe, a peasant boy will seize the sword from the stone. It could be me. Or you.
In truth I wonder if this paradoxical clash of ideals is not one of the driving forces of narrative motion. Just what is it we really want? The thing of it is that we don't quite know. That's what's interesting.
Okay, so you perhaps meant continuous up to today. Or perhaps you meant in North America. Either way, you're still wrong. And your main point was to defend your contention that Native Americans weren't democratic. Nope, you're still wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
May I introduce you to the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, known as the "Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth"? The Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited and democratic through most of its history, beginning in the 1400s.
Your objection that democracy needs to be substnatially pan-ethnic and pan-cultural is just silly. It's prima facie silly, but it's also silly because this doesn't describe the people who founded this country.
Also, by the way, no, Sweden's history as a "nation" is not prehistory and the Scandinavian countries mistreatments of the aboriginals exists in modern times. People like to make a big deal out of the American mistreatment of its aboriginies--and they should make a big deal out if it--but they somehow seem to overlook the not so wonderful treatment of aborigines elsehwere, such as in Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, Russia, and, of course, Canada. None of these have anything (except perhaps very recently) to be especially proud of.
Anyway, you might want to do a bit more reading on the history of aboriginal Americans. You've obviously done some reading on "paganism", and I have no quarrel with your correct criticism of its silly newage-ish distortion of history. But you're acting no better than they.
Among the general population my intuition is that there are probably about three distinct groups of people. The really credulous people that believe in alien life because they believe in UFO visitation; the supposedly hard-headed (but really just very anthropocentric) people that think that Earth is the only place in the universe with life; and the much smaller group of we who are skeptically-minded but nevertheless believe in the almost certainty of alien life somewhere and somewhen.
But I think that the largest group of general opinion doesn't believe in life anywhere else in the universe. Consider that the majority of people in the US are Christian, and consider that their theology has no place whatsoever for life away from Earth. I mean, c'mon, a significant minority of Americans don't believe in evolution.
The idea of vampires and elves are widespread in our popular culture. That doesn't mean that many people really think they exist.
Part of why I think that few people believe in extraterrestrial life is because I think that most people are still incredibly anthropocentric. An example is that a large number of people, perhaps the majority, aren't willing to even attribute even rudimentary thought and emotion to higher life forms on out planet, all evidence to the contrary. People still believe that we're so incredibly special, that we must be unique. That hasn't changed that much outside of scientific circles, and not so much even there.
It's somewhat ironic that I spend much time debunking this UL at all since, I must admit, my own grades were as often "F"s as they were "A"s. (Meaning, most of the time.) I, as a "gifted" young person and still, as an adult, a critic of rote learning and a reliance on supposed "objective" grades, always took comfort in the myth of Einstein's genius and educational non-conformance. I have as much a personal psychological stake as anyone in perpetuating this myth. But it aint true.
Furthermore, I ended up attending an unusual and very rigorous college that, though very difficult, did not utilize grading. Their system managed to work, however, by having one of the very highest student-to-teaching-faculty ratio in the US (perhaps one of the four or five highest, actually) and so there was never any doubt as to the quality of any student's work. And if the work wasn't up to scratch, they were asked to leave. Even there, however, I was both brilliant and an underachiever, so, there ya' go. My point is that it would be nice to hang onto to some sort of idea of the brilliant maverick underachiever who has a revolutionary effect on a field of study; but the truth of the matter is that this is very rarely the case among revolutionary scientists, even prior to the twentieth century.
This calls to mind a discussion I had with my mathematics tutor (that's what faculty are called there). I was always quite brilliant in mathematics and did things effortlessly that others had to struggle over. Nevertheless, there was written work I neglected just because, well, I was lazy and had long since become accustomed to believing that the rules didn't apply to me. In his office, the tutor gestured to the shelves of books behind him, books (or other works) written by the likes of Descartes and Newton and, yes, Einstein; and he asked me, "Do you think that these writers accomplished what they did through nothing more than genius?" He answered his own question: "No, they did not. They were brilliant, but they also worked very hard."
As an adult pushing forty years of age, and as someone who's spent much of my life discovering that, yes indeed I am very talented....I've come to understand that talent is cheap and in great supply, hard work is expensive and rare. I may indeed have one or two ideas that could revolutionize a field of study; but then even my most arrogant and narcissistic estimates would have at least many thousands of other people similarly capable. Nothing I am capable of doing is relying only upon me to achieve it. Even though it has felt that way at many points in my life, it is simply unreasonable to expect that I'm very important at all merely by existing. Only through the combination of talent and hard work and perhaps a bit of luck could I be "important".
I have a great affection for Einstein and an abiding interest in Relativity (though I'm certainly barely competent to even mention it--I know and have dated an astrophysicist and certainly know the vast intellectual and competency gulf that separates us). And something resonates deep within me at his quote that he knew Relativity must be true because anything so beautiful must be true, God would make it so (not a direct quote). But when it is said and done, even in his case it's true that he worked hard all his life, and he paid his dues, and he worked within the system. That's just simply true.
In this guy's case (the hydronic guy), the fact that he's apparently competent at the field he's trying to revolutionize should work in his favor. In my opinion the first acid test for separating the cranks from the (possible) honest-to-goodness revolutionaries is whether or not they're competent in the fields they are challenging. Most would-be revolutionaries are not.
An old USENET post on alt.folklore.urban contains almost the entire text of a New York Times article on this subject. I'm posting both the link to the AFU article here, but I'm also posting the full text of the NYT article (as it appears in the AFU post), just because I can, fair use be damned[2]:
[1] I won't go into the issue of the reliability of the web, except to say that my experience has been that the sheer breadth of information available on the web makes it more easy to seperate the wheat from the chafe than is the case with supposedly more reliable sources. I have never relied exclusively upon mere reputation or authority to guide my opinion of what is true and correct, and as a result I find the web a superior resource because out of the melange--most of which is crap--it's easier to distinguish the cream that floats to the top.
[2] I tend to be a supporter of intellectual property rights (though very definitely not a supporter of those who, like the RIAA et al want to abuse them); but, in this case, I do object to the locking away into for-pay archives all sorts of information that would otherwise be of great and frequent benefit to the public weal.
However, I will research this now and report back immediately.
No, he didn't. His grades were uniformly excellent. This whole misconeption arose because the gymnasium he attended reversed its grading scheme at one point, making it appear to the unsuspecting that good grades were bad grades. (If I recall correctly, it was a numerical 1 to 5 scheme.)
Why? Because there are an infinity of false revolutionary "scientific" ideas possible. A scientist's job is to be skeptical, not credulous. Yes, scientists are "going where no man has split infinitives before" but they go there with intellectual rigor, not having sex with whatever has blue skin and big tits.
And this story, with the upcoming paper, just demonstrates that the system is working quite well.
If you think that scientists should be more interested in bizarre and revolutionary ideas, then you should spend some time in sci.relativity and sci.physics (just to name a couple of newsgroups) and see how many crazy, ignorant people with crazy, ignorant theories there really are out there who complain that "they're being persecuted" and "Einstein got bad grades and nobody believed him, either" (he didn't and they did).
If we were to go about a risk and cost/benefit analysis as rationally as possible, we'd have to acknowledge that there's a considerable amount of uncertainty as to the side of the equation involving the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We do know that it will cost something, and we know an approximate range, and we know that that cost can be translated into other tangible things, like money diverted from reducing non-greenhouse pollutants that cause disease.
For the sake of the argument, let's invent a fictional economic unit, the "fubar". Let's assume that the cost of eliminating 80% of the production of greenhouse gases is somewhere between 50 and 100 fubars. (Note that I use an 80% reduction amount to imply what is almost certainly true--that approaching 100% reduction would have the cost increase astronomically.)
Now we'll ask what is the cost of not reducing greenhouse emissions.
Since we don't know if we're responsible for global warming at all, we have to place the lower limit of the cost of not reducing emission at zero fubars. But what's the upper limit?
The point here is that the upper limit is very, very high compared to the upper limit of the cost of reducing the greenhouse emissions. I don't really know what the magnitudes are, but I'll guess for the sake of the argument that it's nearly 1000 fubars. And that could be low. Maybe it's 10,000 fubars.
Your point is that the lower limit is zero and that spending 100 fubars on reducing greenhouse emissions is irresponsible. But that's true only if the cost of not doing so is actually zero. Your default assumption that it's zero is clearly also irresposible. It may be zero, but it may not be. And if it isn't, it's not likely to be 10 or 100, it's likely to be 1000 or 10,000.
How much in possible financial winnings would it take for you to play a single round of Russian Roulette? (Say that if you don't shoot yourself, you get X amoung of money.) I ask because it's not certain that you'll shoot yourself in the head. Lest you try to argue this point on the basis of causation, it's also not certain whether there is a causal relationship between you pulling that trigger one time and a bullet being fired into your brain.
So, since there's a prety good chance that there will be no bullet fired when you pull the trigger, will you do it for a dollar? Or ten? Or a thousand? Or, more likely, a million?
Not spending money on reducing greenhouse emissions is like getting that dollar (or ten) in the Russian Roulette example. If the magnitude of the risk is so large compared to the benefit of not trying to avoid the risk, then it is clearly foolish to fail to avoid the risk, even when it is an uncertain risk. In fact, part of my point here is that the certainty (or lack thereof) of the risk makes no qualitative difference. It just means that the lower value of the range of the risk magnitude is zero. It doesn't mean that this is a special case where it's rational to defer making any judgment at all.
I've been using IP on 1394 from my desktop box to my Sony laptop. I just bridge my ethernet and firewire NICs on my desktop PC, and the Sony has an Internet connection over Firewire (which they call "i.Link"). It works great. Theoretically, I should be seeing four times the bandwidth on the 1394 link than I see with 100 Ethernet, but in reality it's not that big of a difference. As people are saying about gig-ethernet, other things, like the PCI bus, start to be limiting factors.