"
...but I just got a cease and desist letter from my mother. Apparently she holds the copyright." -- limekiller4
Did your dad give up his share of the copyright on your face for your mother's share of the trademark on your name? And don't these expire after eighteen years? Or is it twenty-one?
I used the word "casual" to indicate the distinction between being a lay and a professional student of history. My familiarity with the development of the bomb is not at a professional level, but is quite intimate.
Contrary to what you say, it isn't the case that the bombs were developed to be used. Would you say that all the subsequent bombs were built to be used? All the bombs, including the first two, were built to be used, if necessary. And there was a range of opinion as to what constituted necessity.
The senior military, and Groves, wanted to use the bomb because it would give them a victory that would otherwise be very expensive in terms of casualties. The president and some people on his staff wanted to use the bomb to send a powerful message to Stalin. But the majority of the senior Los Alamos scientists didn't want the bomb dropped on a city unless it was absolutely necessary; and they felt that since they were going to have two bombs available, one of which they were virtually certain would work, then a demonstration/warning detonation would be the most moral action to take. The wanted their opinions heard directly, but, failing that, they pleaded with Oppenheimer to take that recommendation to the White House. Oppie himself was ambivalent, and he did promise to voice these concerns. Groves got wind of this and made it clear to Oppenheimer in no uncertain terms that he was not to air those opinions and was to support the use of the bombs on civilian targets. Oppenheimer did as he was told.
All your arguments are the arguments that have long been used to justify the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They superficially make sense. But they don't survive scrutiny. They could have had three bombs if they hadn't "wasted" one at Trinity.
I am not arguing that "doing the right thing" would have been to forego the bombs entirely and invade mainland Japan. I am arguing that the right thing would have been to do quite a bit more to avoid having to use those weapons on a civilian population. We now know that one of the reasons the Japanese military refused an unconditional surrender after Hiroshima was because they had very little information about what happened there. After Nagasaki, it became obvious how terrible these bombs really were and the Emperor over-rode their desire to fight to the bloody end. That decision perhaps could have come without such a great cost in civilian lives. It seems to me that the arguments you make are exceedingly weak when counted against all those innocent lives.
"
But then, imagine: Cause of death: crushed by Beowulf cluster. That's a geek's dream come true!" - ryochiji
Yeah, the kind of dream you wake from out of breath and with your heart racing. I, for one, am not yearning for a violent, ignoble death. But for those of you that are, it's probably easy to arrange.
You mean "...doubting Christopher Columbus's trip to Asia and to prove that the world is really just about as big as people thought it was". No one thought the world was flat.
Hey, what do you know? Turns out that all the naysayers were right and Columbus was a deluded nutcase.
Fair enough. I should mention that I would not be that worried about living in Los Alamos; even on your street. (I wouldn't let my kids play in that canyon if it hasn't been cleaned up, though.) Just driving my car around every day is a larger risk.
"
The atomic bomb was not especially violent or heinous, except that it killed either instantly - or over a long time period. - danheskett"
Bullshit. The results of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific. Outside of two kilometers, a significant number of people survived the blast itself and died of injuries within minutes, hours, and days. These were horrible deaths. There are numerous accounts of survivors from nearer the blast wandering around trailing their skin behind them, as they had blistered over their entire bodies and their skins sloughed off.
I will not argue that the firestorms in Dresden and other cities were less horrific than the atomic bombings.
I will argue that the targeting and wholesale slaughter of large civilian populations is inexcusable. It is an atrocity. It is a war crime.
I am a casual student of the Manhattan Project and its result. There was a time when I accepted the official justification for the use of those two bombs. I no longer do. One of them, the implosion bomb which was not certain to work, could have been detonated over the sea as a demonstration. Yes, as it happened the Japanese warlords refused to surrender even after the destruction of Hiroshima. That has no relevance whatsoever. Even if doing the right thing wouldn't have worked, we still had the responsibility to do it. We had no way of knowing it wouldn't work. And we knew that the gun-type bomb would work, so we could still have used it on a city. (Not that I think that that is a morally justifiable action, either.)
There is quite a lot of evidence to indicate that, ultimately, the decision to use the bombs was more political than military in nature.
I think that, aside from the firebombing and nuking of civilian populations, the Allies acted nobly during WWII and they rid the world of two rapacious regimes that were arguably deeply evil. I believe in the essential goodness, or at least decency, of my government and of my fellow citizens and I have no desire to be in any sense a self-hating American. In fact, I despise those who have made this the core of their beliefs.
But I also despise the equally unthinking, and jingoistic and narcissistic hypocrisy that takes a self-righteous accusatory stance against the actions of other nations but which is incapable of critically evaluating our own. The US has committed atrocities.
Every day one can go to various web forums and read the outraged views of Americans who say, "How can anyone be so evil, so inhuman, so unfeeling as to kill those thousands of innocent civilians in the World Trade Center?". They believe that there must be something fundamentally wrong with "those people". And then they do things like spit on a vaguely Arabic looking person on the street. The evildoer rarely believes that he is an evildoer and, quite often, he believes that he is an agent of righteousness. In WWII we were, in fact, the "Good Guys". That doesn't mean that we didn't do Very Bad Things. Our refusal to recognize or atone for our nuclear destruction and torture of housewives, shopkeepers, tourists, and schoolchildren is a deep stain on our national moral character.
I am not apologizing for the Japanese. They are, perhaps, no less hypocritical. While they would like us to apologize for the hundreds of thousands killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they have, until recently, refused to even acknowledge the millions of people they killed in China, particularly Nanking.
"
There was absolutely no evidence for it." - goldid
What I recall is that there were about four to six people, within a limited age range, clustered around a small area of Los Alamos that developed brain tumors. And I recall that this statistic was close, but not sufficient, to being statistically persuasive. The sample was just too small.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As it is often described, given a random distribution of dots on a piece of paper you can find and circle little clusters that have no significance whatsoever. But that explanation exists to explain that everything that looks like a pattern is not. Where it is weak is that its artficiality ignores the possibiity of the existence of known factors that will affect the distribution. In this case, the cluster does not appear in isolation, it appears in conjuntion with a known cause. Yes, correlation is not causation. Everyone should repeat that phrase three times every day. But people should also repeat three times a day the sentence that starts this paragraph.
When you say "there was absolutely no evidence for it" your tone misrepresents the nature of rational enquiry and standards of evidence. Certainty is rare. What is more precise is that there was no conclusive evidence. The sample was too small to say with any confidence that it wasn't the case, as you put it, that a few people were unlucky. But given the context, it is foolish to dismiss the whole thing and assert that there's no risk. It is the sort of thing you reserve judgment upon and continue to gather more data.
Because of the hysterics of people like the CCNA, the Labs and the people of Los Alamos often feel under siege and, as a result, are defensive. This results in an irrational "dutiful" reflexive defense of LANL's and the DOE's stated positions. But the simple truth is that both organizations have a documented history of not always being truthful about these sorts of things. A wise person remains skeptical about anyone's pronouncements about the health risks (or lack thereof) associated with areas in and around Los Alamos.
And I'd like to again make the point that among health professionals, including, importantly, epidemiologists, there is a difference between what they say publicly and what they say privately. This is because people are irrational. They jump to conclusions. Health professionals are rightly very conservative about what they'll tell the public about this sort of thing because, as I said, people are poor at understanding probability and evaluating risk. But their own standard for watching and being concerned about something like this is not so conservative.
"
There are a lot of alarmists in the area that like to point at things like this and jump up and down and make a whole lot of noise." - milkmandan9
Well, let's not forget the spate of brain tumors that came to light back around 1994. I don't know how that whole issue resolved, but I do know that it hovered just around being statistically significant, especially as there was a correlation to age and growing up adjacent to a particular canyon. My ex-wife knew one of these people, a young man who died from his tumor.
I'm a native New Mexican expatriated in hostile, relentlessly right-wing Texas (but in the oasis of Austin). I'm not sympathetic even the tiniest bit to the nuclear alarmists in northern New Mexico. CCNA's bullshit just infuriates me more than most things, actually. (When I was there last fall, I heard on their little news show on KUNM a story about low-level contaminated stuff recycled into materials incorporated into consumer items and they provided no scientific context whatsoever. I actually shouted at the radio.) I've known many people that worked at LANL (and Sandia), and I know some that still work there.
Having made it clear that I'm skeptical and hostile to nuclear fear-mongers, I think that there's reason for Los Alamosans to be mildly concerned about their risk. As a casual student of the history of the Manhattan Project, I know that a) the health danger of cumulative, long-term radioactive dosages was grossly underestimated at that time (and the acute danger was somewhat underestimated, too); and b) in the interests of expediance justified by national security concerns, they were notoriously careless about safety during and after the Project. Just take a look at Hanford and Rocky Flats for examples of just how careless the DOE has been. Or take note of what the supposedly ex-Oak Ridge employee writes above.
Also, my sister was a tumor registrar. She was not a registrar of that district, but she was a registrar of another district in a different state that included a DOE nuclear-related facility. It was her observation that there was clearly an unusual rate of cancers clustered around the facility, although it didn't reach the rigorous threshold of confident statistical significance. But it was not discussed, and the community remained unaware of any possible risk.
I also know that in the case of the cluster of brain tumors of ten years ago that the LANL and the DOE were shown to have been at the very least uncooperative and at the most actively dissembling.
I really think that people need to consider the implications of the fact that Los Alamos has a unique history. It was in its entirety a government installation on an urgent mission where civilian safety considerations didn't apply. It was only in the early sixties that it stopped being a "closed" city. LANL and the DOE is in the awkward position of worrying about a civilian apple-pie American population living in a city that was once wholly part of a government nuclear installation. Whether or not they were reasonably or unreasonably cavalier about safety in the past is irrelevant to the fact that, today, many people live alongside areas that were contaminated to a greater or lesser extent.
These trees are probably not of any real concern. But that doesn't mean that there's not some amount of significantly heightened risk in the area, nor that LANL and the DOE aren't always entirely forthcoming.
(Note: upon reviewing what I've written, I'm uncomfortable that I may give the impression that I'm sympathetic to the people that go berserk and totally irrational at the mention of the word "nuclear". I want to make the point that people are, in general, very very bad at risk analysis. Even though I write above that I believe there's some risk in Los Alamos, I want to make it clear that it is very likely that many people do things, thoughtlessly, on a daily basis that put them at considerably higher risk.)
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...a project that raises ethical and safety issues..." - from WP article
and:
"
...I usually refer to that sensation as 'That little voice that I should have listened to...'" - derubergeek
Both of these comments are just thoughtless. There is no rational justification for feeling that the construction of the most simplistic bacteria possible is more ethically dubious and dangerous than:
Fiddling around with the genes of extent organisms; and
Using extent organisms for our own purposes, especially when it destabilizes an ecology; and
About a bazillion other things that we humans do on a daily basis.
People's fearful reactions to anything involving genetic engineering or anything that violates the supposed sanctity on the creation of life (which is as common as dirt, literally) is mostly an irrational reaction based upon an inappropriate generalization. These sorts of things are no more inherently, and thus implicitly, ethically dubious or dangerous than is technology in general. Some activities are ethically dubious and dangerous; and people that are honestly concerned about these issues should understand that a net that is vastly oversized is useless because it catches too much. Focus on what is clearly dangerous and ethically dubious and scrutinize, regulate, or prevent those particular things.
In this case, trying to build an organism from what is relatively first principals will be the first step in beginning to really understand life; and, more to the point, will probably enable an increase in our comprehension of what truly is and isn't dangerous by increasing our fundamental understanding.
Note that although the distance to this galaxy and when the collision will be observed both just happen to be in the half-billion year range, the two numbers are independent.
(Except that there's the weird possibility that the speed of gravity waves may not be equal to the speed of light. Gravity waves are what the article is presumably referring to when it talks about "warping the fabric of space". BTW, I don't even pretend to understand the "speed of gravity" debate, nor even am I equipped to assess whether it's a legitimate debate or fringe/crank science. I can't even sort out the terms that are used.)
"...warp space so much that nothing can ever collide with them..." - Lord Bitman
I think perhaps you have a fundamental misunderstanding of black holes. The truth is somewhat the opposite: anything that passes within the event horizon can't not "collide" with the black hole.
"If you had a nice apartment in the middle of New York, and you constantly left the front door unlocked, and then one day somebody walked in stole your stereo, I'd feel bad for you. But, you know, not too bad." - fhwang
In the context of violations of one person by another (in the broadest sense, e.g. physical injury, theft, whatever) there is no denying the essential truth that every person has a responsibility to themselves to protect their own safety.
But.
But the most important moral truth in this context is that determination of responsibility is not a zero-sum game. However, people naively tend to think that it is in the sense that they believe there is a generalized "responsibility for action X" and that committing the injury and protecting oneself from injury (or failure to do so) sum together to determine where the balance of responsibility for X lies. When people feel that someone has been extremely negligent in protecting their own safety, they tend to exculpate the attacker and "blame the victim". This is rationally and morally wrong.
Instead, there is no abstracted responsibility for action "X"; there are two separate responsibilities: the attacker's responsibility for his action, and the victim's responsibility for his own safety. Whether the victim was grossly irresponsible or extremely diligent, in either case the attacker's guilt is independent and thus unchanged.
It is reasonable to argue that a victim's negligence can be seen as extending into actual solicitation. But I tend to take the very rigorous view that a person is always ultimately and fully responsible for his actions, even when he has been sorely tempted, possible even coerced.
But even were I to accept the argument that solicitation mitigates the attacker's responsibility, I do not accept the idea that solicitation can be passive, e.g. leaving a car running with the keys in it and the doors unlocked. That is not solicitation. We may colloquially call that an "invitation", but it's not. It's a failure to take specific steps to prevent an attack. It's not an action.
There are two reasons why this is a reasonable position to take on this matter. The first is that there is a fundamental rational asymmetry between acting and failing to act. The set of all "failures to act" is much larger than the set of "acts". If responsibility was measured by "failure to act", we would always in all cases be essentially acting irresponsibly. The second reason is not as abstract: the social contract essentially exists as a validation and institutionalisation of this point of view. The onus is not on the individually weak to protect themselves from the individually strong. Hobbes' Leviathan--government--is the power that enforces the principle that individuals are responsible for their actions. Without it, as a practical matter, the weak would have to live in a state of constant extreme defensiveness where for all intents and purposes they are responsible for whatever happens to them. Hobbes called this the "state of war", and contended that it is man's natural state and extremely undesirable.
When I go to sleep at night, I have to answer to myself for may success or failure to protect my own safety. But whether I made it easy or hard for someone to harm me in no way lessens their responsibility for doing so.
Publishing an exploit with example code, linking to an ftp repository of compiled examples, failing to keep your computer up-to-date on security patches--all these things make the attacker no less wrong or responsible for what they've done.
"Can I just say though: IQ testing is the biggest load of wank..."
...and some more relevant stuff deleted.
I both agree and disagree with you. If you are saying that as a practical matter it's very difficult or impossible to accurately and precisely measure general intelligence, I'll agree with you (at least on the "difficult" part). If you're saying that it's impossible as a matter of principle, or that there's no such thing as general intelligence, then I strongly disagree with you.
Don't believe me? Well, kill off three-quarters of someone's brain and try to convince me that they are not less intelligent. Is there a monolithic thing that is "intelligence"? I very, very much doubt that there is. But that doesn't mean that the term "general intelligence" is senseless. It could be, and probably is, our way of describing what we experience in ourselves and others as the composite level of functioning of most or all mental activities of which we are intuitively aware. Thus, "general intelligence", and even comparing intelligence across species, is meaningful as long as we understand what we mean. D'uh.
By the way, evolutionary psychology specifically (and, I think, correctly) argues on evolutionary grounds that a generalized rational ability doesn't exist in humans.
I'm of the opinion that we have a very long way to go till we achieve what was aimed at when the IQ test was developed. But I think it's possible. I do think that current tests are still greatly hampered by the fact that we understand our own minds so poorly. We do a lot of cognition, of course. Are we really trying to measure a true composite of every important cognitive task? I doubt it. And I doubt that the various tasks are weighed remotely correctly, nor tested without enormous bias.
It seems to me that language processing and abstract/mathematical reasoning are each quite important to us and amenable to measurement. They likely correlate pretty strongly to people's intuitive measure of "intelligence".
When I was in school, we spent a lot of time being very careful about defining our terms. There is something of a quandry when we are trying to talk about concepts expressed in everyday language. Is the thing what we explicitly think it is? That is to say, in this example, is what we're measuring the monolithic abstract intelligence that some people think "intelligence" is? On the other hand, we wouldn't use the word "intelligence" if it isn't meaningful in some sense. So I would always make the point that even if we figure out that we can't really say something like "you're smarter than him" and mean what we think we mean in one regard, that doesn't require that what we're saying is totally meaningless. In fact, it's often very interesting and revealing to discover what it is that we're groping for in language.
"...that the *volume* that is submerged is the same as the volume the equivalent mass of liquid water would occupy..."
Close, but you need to be careful and remember that it's the mass, not the volume, that is equivalent as a matter of simple physics. The volumes also happen to be almost exactly equal because liquid ice and sea water are pretty much exactly the same thing.:) Therefore, the sea level wouldn't change. But it doesn't have to be this way.
In contrast, think about oil and water. Oil, for example, is significantly less dense than water and floats on water as a liquid. So, similarly, imagine some substance, which we'll call "blunge", that acts just like water does (with its relatively unusual decrease in density as a solid relative to liquid) but that both as a solid and liquid it's substantially less dense than water. What would happen?
Frozen, a chunk of blunge would float like water ice does and it would displace a mass of water exactly equal to its mass. Let's call the volume of displaced water x. When blunge thaws, it will no longer displace the water and the water level will fall....but then this liquid blunge, which has volume y, will float on the water and, theoretically (ignoring other factors), will be distributed evenly over the surface of the water. Now we have to ask: is the volume y equal to the volume x? No, we know that y is greater than x. For this reason, the level of the two fluids, with liquid blunge floating on top of the water, will rise relative to the level of water with solid blunge floating in it.
And, as it happens, this is the case with sea water, ice, and melted ice...fresh water. Fresh water is slightly (for these purposes) less dense than sea water; and so when north polar ice thaws, the seal level does, in fact, very, very slightly rise. When the ice in your soft-drink melts, the level very slightly rises. But it's negligible. The naysayers in this thread are technically right, but conceptually wrong.
"Tidal movment (not sure if I spelled it right...) is mostly situated around the equator, its hardly noticable around the poles. And completly gone if you are situated at the geographical poles."
Is that true? It sounds like you're assuming there is a causal, rather than correlative, relationship between the Earth's rotation and the tides. But the tides are caused by the Moon. I don't know if the planes of the Moon's revolution and the Earth's equator are really close or exactly the same or what, but as a practical matter you are probably right.
Disclaimer: Just writing this makes me realize how little I know about the Moon. I know more about all the planets and their motions than I do the Moon. This is an inexcusable bit of ignorance. I'll have to correct that sometime.
I did, in fact, learn what I wrote (that the water level won't change) in school. The AC did not, unless they went to a really bad school, which is possible.
It's too bad it was an AC that wrote this. Someone being that obnoxiously wrong should have to publicly eat crow.
I don't doubt that I have sometimes unknowingly been guilty of being arrogant and pedantic about something I am quite wrong. Certainly I've done it a few times of which I am aware. But I can hardly think of anything more embarassing. I am mortified when I do this.
Being an arrogant jerk is a bad habit. Being an arrogant jerk while being very wrong is to spectacularly make a fool of one's self in public. Discovering this is, or should be, powerfully dissuasive of acting like an arrogant jerk in general. So being an arrogant jerk anonymously is a really, really bad habit.
Which differs from what I wrote in what way, exactly?
The attribution and sequence of posts is confusing. But I wrote one of the first posts pointing out that the water level would be unchanged. This post was just expressing my astonishment that so many people were confused on this matter and didn't stop to check.
Well, you may be right that it's more of a factor than I'm acknowledging. But the important thing to understand is that the thermal expansion of seawater is, for these purposes, linearly and continuously in proportion to the temperature rise. But the addition of fresh water into the ocean as a result of melting ice caps is neither linear nor, more important in the context of your specific point, continuous. This is true in the complex climatological sense; but it's also simply true because ice going from -1.5C to -0.5C isn't nearly as interesting as when it goes from -0.5C to 0.5C. See?
As many people have said, it's basic physics that a floating object displaces exactly as much mass as itself. Put another way, the entire iceberg weighs exactly as much as the water it displaces below its waterline. When it melts, it fills that hole exactly.
Wow, and I thought I phrased it carefully enough so that the people that don't know this basic physics--which isn't a crime--would take a second to think about it before they responded. Oh, well.
I'm not sure if people were being skeptical about my mention of the North Pole being open water last year, but here's a quote:
"Icebreakers like the Yamal usually slowly grind through an ice sheet up to 2 metres thick in summer from Spitsbergen to the North Pole. This year the Yamal crunched through kilometres of thin ice and open water to reach the pole, where water lapped its bow. The captain had to steam 10 kilometres away to find ice thick enough for the 100 passengers to get out and be able to say they had stood on the North Pole--or close to it!"
You can Google to find lots of discussions of this. How reliable the observation was is questionable. (That is to say, was this really exactly at the geographic North Pole?) Also, the NYT article about this erroneously made the claim that this was possibly the first time in millions of years there was open water at the North Pole. This is patently false. The world's been this warm in recent history (thousands, not millions).
No, apparently that's often thought, but that won't be a factor until the climate warms up a lot more than anyone thinks it will. This is because only a thin surface layer of ocean water is heated, and because we're only talking a a few degrees.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the ring that appears to the lower right of the Moon's shadow in that photo taken from Mir?
Contrary to what you say, it isn't the case that the bombs were developed to be used. Would you say that all the subsequent bombs were built to be used? All the bombs, including the first two, were built to be used, if necessary. And there was a range of opinion as to what constituted necessity.
The senior military, and Groves, wanted to use the bomb because it would give them a victory that would otherwise be very expensive in terms of casualties. The president and some people on his staff wanted to use the bomb to send a powerful message to Stalin. But the majority of the senior Los Alamos scientists didn't want the bomb dropped on a city unless it was absolutely necessary; and they felt that since they were going to have two bombs available, one of which they were virtually certain would work, then a demonstration/warning detonation would be the most moral action to take. The wanted their opinions heard directly, but, failing that, they pleaded with Oppenheimer to take that recommendation to the White House. Oppie himself was ambivalent, and he did promise to voice these concerns. Groves got wind of this and made it clear to Oppenheimer in no uncertain terms that he was not to air those opinions and was to support the use of the bombs on civilian targets. Oppenheimer did as he was told.
All your arguments are the arguments that have long been used to justify the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They superficially make sense. But they don't survive scrutiny. They could have had three bombs if they hadn't "wasted" one at Trinity.
I am not arguing that "doing the right thing" would have been to forego the bombs entirely and invade mainland Japan. I am arguing that the right thing would have been to do quite a bit more to avoid having to use those weapons on a civilian population. We now know that one of the reasons the Japanese military refused an unconditional surrender after Hiroshima was because they had very little information about what happened there. After Nagasaki, it became obvious how terrible these bombs really were and the Emperor over-rode their desire to fight to the bloody end. That decision perhaps could have come without such a great cost in civilian lives. It seems to me that the arguments you make are exceedingly weak when counted against all those innocent lives.
Hey, what do you know? Turns out that all the naysayers were right and Columbus was a deluded nutcase.
Fair enough. I should mention that I would not be that worried about living in Los Alamos; even on your street. (I wouldn't let my kids play in that canyon if it hasn't been cleaned up, though.) Just driving my car around every day is a larger risk.
I will not argue that the firestorms in Dresden and other cities were less horrific than the atomic bombings.
I will argue that the targeting and wholesale slaughter of large civilian populations is inexcusable. It is an atrocity. It is a war crime.
I am a casual student of the Manhattan Project and its result. There was a time when I accepted the official justification for the use of those two bombs. I no longer do. One of them, the implosion bomb which was not certain to work, could have been detonated over the sea as a demonstration. Yes, as it happened the Japanese warlords refused to surrender even after the destruction of Hiroshima. That has no relevance whatsoever. Even if doing the right thing wouldn't have worked, we still had the responsibility to do it. We had no way of knowing it wouldn't work. And we knew that the gun-type bomb would work, so we could still have used it on a city. (Not that I think that that is a morally justifiable action, either.)
There is quite a lot of evidence to indicate that, ultimately, the decision to use the bombs was more political than military in nature.
I think that, aside from the firebombing and nuking of civilian populations, the Allies acted nobly during WWII and they rid the world of two rapacious regimes that were arguably deeply evil. I believe in the essential goodness, or at least decency, of my government and of my fellow citizens and I have no desire to be in any sense a self-hating American. In fact, I despise those who have made this the core of their beliefs.
But I also despise the equally unthinking, and jingoistic and narcissistic hypocrisy that takes a self-righteous accusatory stance against the actions of other nations but which is incapable of critically evaluating our own. The US has committed atrocities.
Every day one can go to various web forums and read the outraged views of Americans who say, "How can anyone be so evil, so inhuman, so unfeeling as to kill those thousands of innocent civilians in the World Trade Center?". They believe that there must be something fundamentally wrong with "those people". And then they do things like spit on a vaguely Arabic looking person on the street. The evildoer rarely believes that he is an evildoer and, quite often, he believes that he is an agent of righteousness. In WWII we were, in fact, the "Good Guys". That doesn't mean that we didn't do Very Bad Things. Our refusal to recognize or atone for our nuclear destruction and torture of housewives, shopkeepers, tourists, and schoolchildren is a deep stain on our national moral character.
I am not apologizing for the Japanese. They are, perhaps, no less hypocritical. While they would like us to apologize for the hundreds of thousands killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they have, until recently, refused to even acknowledge the millions of people they killed in China, particularly Nanking.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As it is often described, given a random distribution of dots on a piece of paper you can find and circle little clusters that have no significance whatsoever. But that explanation exists to explain that everything that looks like a pattern is not. Where it is weak is that its artficiality ignores the possibiity of the existence of known factors that will affect the distribution. In this case, the cluster does not appear in isolation, it appears in conjuntion with a known cause. Yes, correlation is not causation. Everyone should repeat that phrase three times every day. But people should also repeat three times a day the sentence that starts this paragraph.
When you say "there was absolutely no evidence for it" your tone misrepresents the nature of rational enquiry and standards of evidence. Certainty is rare. What is more precise is that there was no conclusive evidence. The sample was too small to say with any confidence that it wasn't the case, as you put it, that a few people were unlucky. But given the context, it is foolish to dismiss the whole thing and assert that there's no risk. It is the sort of thing you reserve judgment upon and continue to gather more data.
Because of the hysterics of people like the CCNA, the Labs and the people of Los Alamos often feel under siege and, as a result, are defensive. This results in an irrational "dutiful" reflexive defense of LANL's and the DOE's stated positions. But the simple truth is that both organizations have a documented history of not always being truthful about these sorts of things. A wise person remains skeptical about anyone's pronouncements about the health risks (or lack thereof) associated with areas in and around Los Alamos.
And I'd like to again make the point that among health professionals, including, importantly, epidemiologists, there is a difference between what they say publicly and what they say privately. This is because people are irrational. They jump to conclusions. Health professionals are rightly very conservative about what they'll tell the public about this sort of thing because, as I said, people are poor at understanding probability and evaluating risk. But their own standard for watching and being concerned about something like this is not so conservative.
I'm a native New Mexican expatriated in hostile, relentlessly right-wing Texas (but in the oasis of Austin). I'm not sympathetic even the tiniest bit to the nuclear alarmists in northern New Mexico. CCNA's bullshit just infuriates me more than most things, actually. (When I was there last fall, I heard on their little news show on KUNM a story about low-level contaminated stuff recycled into materials incorporated into consumer items and they provided no scientific context whatsoever. I actually shouted at the radio.) I've known many people that worked at LANL (and Sandia), and I know some that still work there.
Having made it clear that I'm skeptical and hostile to nuclear fear-mongers, I think that there's reason for Los Alamosans to be mildly concerned about their risk. As a casual student of the history of the Manhattan Project, I know that a) the health danger of cumulative, long-term radioactive dosages was grossly underestimated at that time (and the acute danger was somewhat underestimated, too); and b) in the interests of expediance justified by national security concerns, they were notoriously careless about safety during and after the Project. Just take a look at Hanford and Rocky Flats for examples of just how careless the DOE has been. Or take note of what the supposedly ex-Oak Ridge employee writes above.
Also, my sister was a tumor registrar. She was not a registrar of that district, but she was a registrar of another district in a different state that included a DOE nuclear-related facility. It was her observation that there was clearly an unusual rate of cancers clustered around the facility, although it didn't reach the rigorous threshold of confident statistical significance. But it was not discussed, and the community remained unaware of any possible risk.
I also know that in the case of the cluster of brain tumors of ten years ago that the LANL and the DOE were shown to have been at the very least uncooperative and at the most actively dissembling.
I really think that people need to consider the implications of the fact that Los Alamos has a unique history. It was in its entirety a government installation on an urgent mission where civilian safety considerations didn't apply. It was only in the early sixties that it stopped being a "closed" city. LANL and the DOE is in the awkward position of worrying about a civilian apple-pie American population living in a city that was once wholly part of a government nuclear installation. Whether or not they were reasonably or unreasonably cavalier about safety in the past is irrelevant to the fact that, today, many people live alongside areas that were contaminated to a greater or lesser extent.
These trees are probably not of any real concern. But that doesn't mean that there's not some amount of significantly heightened risk in the area, nor that LANL and the DOE aren't always entirely forthcoming.
(Note: upon reviewing what I've written, I'm uncomfortable that I may give the impression that I'm sympathetic to the people that go berserk and totally irrational at the mention of the word "nuclear". I want to make the point that people are, in general, very very bad at risk analysis. Even though I write above that I believe there's some risk in Los Alamos, I want to make it clear that it is very likely that many people do things, thoughtlessly, on a daily basis that put them at considerably higher risk.)
Perhaps you should think more about what you are both wary and fascinated with.
Fiddling around with the genes of extent organisms; and
Using extent organisms for our own purposes, especially when it destabilizes an ecology; and
About a bazillion other things that we humans do on a daily basis. People's fearful reactions to anything involving genetic engineering or anything that violates the supposed sanctity on the creation of life (which is as common as dirt, literally) is mostly an irrational reaction based upon an inappropriate generalization. These sorts of things are no more inherently, and thus implicitly, ethically dubious or dangerous than is technology in general. Some activities are ethically dubious and dangerous; and people that are honestly concerned about these issues should understand that a net that is vastly oversized is useless because it catches too much. Focus on what is clearly dangerous and ethically dubious and scrutinize, regulate, or prevent those particular things.
In this case, trying to build an organism from what is relatively first principals will be the first step in beginning to really understand life; and, more to the point, will probably enable an increase in our comprehension of what truly is and isn't dangerous by increasing our fundamental understanding.
(Except that there's the weird possibility that the speed of gravity waves may not be equal to the speed of light. Gravity waves are what the article is presumably referring to when it talks about "warping the fabric of space". BTW, I don't even pretend to understand the "speed of gravity" debate, nor even am I equipped to assess whether it's a legitimate debate or fringe/crank science. I can't even sort out the terms that are used.)
But.
But the most important moral truth in this context is that determination of responsibility is not a zero-sum game. However, people naively tend to think that it is in the sense that they believe there is a generalized "responsibility for action X" and that committing the injury and protecting oneself from injury (or failure to do so) sum together to determine where the balance of responsibility for X lies. When people feel that someone has been extremely negligent in protecting their own safety, they tend to exculpate the attacker and "blame the victim". This is rationally and morally wrong.
Instead, there is no abstracted responsibility for action "X"; there are two separate responsibilities: the attacker's responsibility for his action, and the victim's responsibility for his own safety. Whether the victim was grossly irresponsible or extremely diligent, in either case the attacker's guilt is independent and thus unchanged.
It is reasonable to argue that a victim's negligence can be seen as extending into actual solicitation. But I tend to take the very rigorous view that a person is always ultimately and fully responsible for his actions, even when he has been sorely tempted, possible even coerced.
But even were I to accept the argument that solicitation mitigates the attacker's responsibility, I do not accept the idea that solicitation can be passive, e.g. leaving a car running with the keys in it and the doors unlocked. That is not solicitation. We may colloquially call that an "invitation", but it's not. It's a failure to take specific steps to prevent an attack. It's not an action.
There are two reasons why this is a reasonable position to take on this matter. The first is that there is a fundamental rational asymmetry between acting and failing to act. The set of all "failures to act" is much larger than the set of "acts". If responsibility was measured by "failure to act", we would always in all cases be essentially acting irresponsibly. The second reason is not as abstract: the social contract essentially exists as a validation and institutionalisation of this point of view. The onus is not on the individually weak to protect themselves from the individually strong. Hobbes' Leviathan--government--is the power that enforces the principle that individuals are responsible for their actions. Without it, as a practical matter, the weak would have to live in a state of constant extreme defensiveness where for all intents and purposes they are responsible for whatever happens to them. Hobbes called this the "state of war", and contended that it is man's natural state and extremely undesirable.
When I go to sleep at night, I have to answer to myself for may success or failure to protect my own safety. But whether I made it easy or hard for someone to harm me in no way lessens their responsibility for doing so.
Publishing an exploit with example code, linking to an ftp repository of compiled examples, failing to keep your computer up-to-date on security patches--all these things make the attacker no less wrong or responsible for what they've done.
I both agree and disagree with you. If you are saying that as a practical matter it's very difficult or impossible to accurately and precisely measure general intelligence, I'll agree with you (at least on the "difficult" part). If you're saying that it's impossible as a matter of principle, or that there's no such thing as general intelligence, then I strongly disagree with you.
Don't believe me? Well, kill off three-quarters of someone's brain and try to convince me that they are not less intelligent. Is there a monolithic thing that is "intelligence"? I very, very much doubt that there is. But that doesn't mean that the term "general intelligence" is senseless. It could be, and probably is, our way of describing what we experience in ourselves and others as the composite level of functioning of most or all mental activities of which we are intuitively aware. Thus, "general intelligence", and even comparing intelligence across species, is meaningful as long as we understand what we mean. D'uh.
By the way, evolutionary psychology specifically (and, I think, correctly) argues on evolutionary grounds that a generalized rational ability doesn't exist in humans.
I'm of the opinion that we have a very long way to go till we achieve what was aimed at when the IQ test was developed. But I think it's possible. I do think that current tests are still greatly hampered by the fact that we understand our own minds so poorly. We do a lot of cognition, of course. Are we really trying to measure a true composite of every important cognitive task? I doubt it. And I doubt that the various tasks are weighed remotely correctly, nor tested without enormous bias.
It seems to me that language processing and abstract/mathematical reasoning are each quite important to us and amenable to measurement. They likely correlate pretty strongly to people's intuitive measure of "intelligence".
When I was in school, we spent a lot of time being very careful about defining our terms. There is something of a quandry when we are trying to talk about concepts expressed in everyday language. Is the thing what we explicitly think it is? That is to say, in this example, is what we're measuring the monolithic abstract intelligence that some people think "intelligence" is? On the other hand, we wouldn't use the word "intelligence" if it isn't meaningful in some sense. So I would always make the point that even if we figure out that we can't really say something like "you're smarter than him" and mean what we think we mean in one regard, that doesn't require that what we're saying is totally meaningless. In fact, it's often very interesting and revealing to discover what it is that we're groping for in language.
In contrast, think about oil and water. Oil, for example, is significantly less dense than water and floats on water as a liquid. So, similarly, imagine some substance, which we'll call "blunge", that acts just like water does (with its relatively unusual decrease in density as a solid relative to liquid) but that both as a solid and liquid it's substantially less dense than water. What would happen?
Frozen, a chunk of blunge would float like water ice does and it would displace a mass of water exactly equal to its mass. Let's call the volume of displaced water x. When blunge thaws, it will no longer displace the water and the water level will fall....but then this liquid blunge, which has volume y, will float on the water and, theoretically (ignoring other factors), will be distributed evenly over the surface of the water. Now we have to ask: is the volume y equal to the volume x? No, we know that y is greater than x. For this reason, the level of the two fluids, with liquid blunge floating on top of the water, will rise relative to the level of water with solid blunge floating in it.
And, as it happens, this is the case with sea water, ice, and melted ice...fresh water. Fresh water is slightly (for these purposes) less dense than sea water; and so when north polar ice thaws, the seal level does, in fact, very, very slightly rise. When the ice in your soft-drink melts, the level very slightly rises. But it's negligible. The naysayers in this thread are technically right, but conceptually wrong.
Disclaimer: Just writing this makes me realize how little I know about the Moon. I know more about all the planets and their motions than I do the Moon. This is an inexcusable bit of ignorance. I'll have to correct that sometime.
It's too bad it was an AC that wrote this. Someone being that obnoxiously wrong should have to publicly eat crow.
I don't doubt that I have sometimes unknowingly been guilty of being arrogant and pedantic about something I am quite wrong. Certainly I've done it a few times of which I am aware. But I can hardly think of anything more embarassing. I am mortified when I do this.
Being an arrogant jerk is a bad habit. Being an arrogant jerk while being very wrong is to spectacularly make a fool of one's self in public. Discovering this is, or should be, powerfully dissuasive of acting like an arrogant jerk in general. So being an arrogant jerk anonymously is a really, really bad habit.
The attribution and sequence of posts is confusing. But I wrote one of the first posts pointing out that the water level would be unchanged. This post was just expressing my astonishment that so many people were confused on this matter and didn't stop to check.
Well, you may be right that it's more of a factor than I'm acknowledging. But the important thing to understand is that the thermal expansion of seawater is, for these purposes, linearly and continuously in proportion to the temperature rise. But the addition of fresh water into the ocean as a result of melting ice caps is neither linear nor, more important in the context of your specific point, continuous. This is true in the complex climatological sense; but it's also simply true because ice going from -1.5C to -0.5C isn't nearly as interesting as when it goes from -0.5C to 0.5C. See?
As many people have said, it's basic physics that a floating object displaces exactly as much mass as itself. Put another way, the entire iceberg weighs exactly as much as the water it displaces below its waterline. When it melts, it fills that hole exactly.
They should read some Archimedes.
No, apparently that's often thought, but that won't be a factor until the climate warms up a lot more than anyone thinks it will. This is because only a thin surface layer of ocean water is heated, and because we're only talking a a few degrees.