"But... there is a level of suspicion and fear directed at Google that just seems extreme. Has Google actually done something "Evil" that I missed?"
They might have. Would we be able to know, at this point, if they did? Do we still have third parties able to compete with them and provide checks and balances over the information they feed us?
The problem with Google (and the other big players, such as the social networks) is that they are increasingly *centralising* control over the data we see. In the 1990s, the Net was a very decentralised place. You'd get an IP address, DNS lookup and SMTP from your ISP, a domain name from a domain registrar, web hosting somewhere else, webmail from a fourth place, search from a fifth place... and all of those would be different from your hardware and your operating system... and all this decentralisation kept the big corps mostly honest. There were people like AOL and Microsoft trying for lock-in and vertical integration, yes. Which is why Google initially seemed like a shining knight, a different force. And them funding Mozilla gave us a breathing space from the Microsoft lock-in empire.
But now Google themselves are becoming the Microsoft of the Web. Not in terms of abusive practices - necessarily. But in terms of edging towards single-provider monopoly power, which gives the *potential* for abusive practices on a huge scale.
Remember Sandra Bullock, The Net, mid 1990s? Back then it seemed total science fiction because it was really silly to think that any one organisation could get censorship control over the fractious, decentralised Net of that era. It's not so funny now. You could now have:
* a Google Android phone or a Google ChromeOS device * running Google Chrome * getting DNS from Google DNS * using Gmail for mail * using Google Wave for social networking * using Google Search for all searching * getting their news from Google News * buying their books from Google Books * doing academic research on Google Scholar and patent searches on Google Patents * sharing documents on Google Docs * viewing Usenet through Google Groups
and all of that information is logged, analysed, data-mined and cross-checked by a single organisation answerable to a very few people. And potentially modified in transit.
Fortunately it's still possible to compare most of what Google tells us with the source websites, so they can't easily change the information we receive. Yet. But they certainly can get a very close-up view of exactly who we are and what lines of knowledge we're interested in, and flick this on to whatever organisation - private, criminal, government - asks nicely enough.
Centralisation is always scary, because you just. don't. KNOW. what is being done with that data, either coming or going.
Google's best weapon against paranoia is openness... but what if we end up seeing just the *appearance* of openness and not openness itself?
For that reason I hope Google never becomes the only information service we use on the Web, and I'm even unhappy with the way we all rely on its search results to such a huge extent. It's a potential choke point in the Net, a single point of failure. Right now it seems okay... but.... loss of alternatives is never a safe place to be. Why has open source search never taken off?
"At that point, the company has no motivation to keep on the guy with 20 years of experience "
No motivation other than human decency and compassion and desire to maintain the social fabric of kindness which keeps civilisation running smoothly, because what goes around comes around.
But those effects don't show on the balance sheet until a few generations down the track, and by then it's too late.
A corporation which doesn't give a damn about the well-being of its employees and customers is, simply stated, a psychopath. And a management philosophy which promotes psychopathology will do no good to any part of our economy, ecology or society in the long run. But it might make huge profits in the meantime. So be careful what you choose to measure and reward as a measure of economic 'rationality'.
You do realise that, snide 'science' writers to the contrary, anomalous heat production in deuterated systems has long been proven to be a real effect, right?
"Yes, the science data is for all mankind, but there is usually a 'hold back period' of a year or two where only the science team (usually from outside NASA) has access to it."
Because it takes this long for Majestic-12 to photoshop out all the aliens and boy, are their mouse fingers tired.
"This is only fair, as they're the guys who fought for funding for the instrument"
'I need a hundred million dollars to count all the left-handed spiral galaxies. It will revolutionise science!'
'No I need TWO hundred million dollars to count all the RIGHT handed spiral galaxies. The leftists must not triumph!'
'Gentlemen, you both make good points. Shall we decide this by asking the person whose money it actually is? The US taxpayer?'
'....'
'Haha, no of course not. The usual procedure it is, then... rocket pistols at dawn, Pad 39-B.'
"Except that science only requires observation as a postulate and no other 'leaps of faith'. That is the difference between science and religion. "
Not quite. Religion - the practical, mystical, experiential psychological kind, as practiced by, say, Quakers, Sufis, Pentecostals, Buddhists, and Catholic monks - also only requires observation.
The word 'religion' is often blurred, you see, between two very different concepts: spirituality, and authority. In each religion, the mystics are the experimentalists; the theologians are the theorists. Often the two camps do not agree.
I think what would be a more coherent argument would be to say that BOTH the physical and the spiritual/metaphysical worlds can be investigated using EITHER direct personal observation, or inferred third-party observation based on trusted authorities, and that both ways of observation and both fields of enquiry are ech useful and problematic in their separate ways.
If you're trying to argue that the metaphysical world simply does not exist and therefore any writing which refers to it is a priori false, that's factually incorrect. Stuff which does not play by the current laws of physics is out there and it does pop up and go 'hi' every now and then.
Which is cool really, because the world would be a very boring and frightening place if it were exactly as the current dogma of science (to be distinguished from the methods of science) tell us it is: mostly empty, devoid of intelligent life for thousands of years, limited to lightspeed, and ending in personal extinction.
Fortunately it's not like that. But coming to terms with this knowledge will be a challenge for both science and religion together.
"Religions all require you to believe in things that cannot be proven"
Not really, at least not in the mystical faiths. Mysticism is all about personal experience and has a lot in common with psi investigation. Some scientists arbitrarily declare these fields to be off-limits on the circular grounds that "science has proven that non-physical reality does not exist, therefore only insane people have these kinds of experiences", but that isn't actually correct. There's at least 150 years worth of evidence for the existence of the spiritual which does not require blind faith.
"But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Or any sufficiently compelling cause, such as Communism, Fascism, Free Market Economics, or Manifest National Destiny. All of which accomplished a lot of good for some people while also shafting others who got in their way.
Good people doing evil things in the name of a good cause is a fact of human life, not just religion.
"They are a money making / power grabbing scheme dreamed up by a second rate megalomaniac science fiction author that has now taken on a life of its own."
I've often wondered about the parallels between L Ron Hubbard and Gene Roddenberry.
Both ended up creating science-fiction themed military-naval organisations with hordes of loyal fans that generate tons of money...
"I'm not fan of scientology, or any cult really - but a mainstream organization with illegal work camps? I just never expected that, at all. You'd think the lid would have come off something that extreme some time ago."
It has, if you were paying attention.
CoS's 'Rehabilitation Project Force' labour camps and other extreme 'Ethics' measures have been common knowledge since the 1990s - just check the extensive files on Operation Clambake - http://xenu.net/ .
However, CoS tends to sue massively and engage in lots of dirty tricks whenever the mainstream media cover them at all negatively, which is why you may not have heard about this stuff if you don't get your news from the Net.
They tried to censor Usenet back in the early 90s. It didn't work so well for them. Anonymous is just the latest round in a long battle of CoS Versus The Internet.
"This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist."
Another 3-year-old question that bugs me: If they're that big, how can they be 'fundamental'? Doesn't 'big' kinda imply 'composed of smaller things'?
I presume things like the Higgs are 'actually' second-order configurations of quarks or waveforms which we just arbitrarily have chosen to call 'fundamental' rather than 'resonance', right? Because that would be a sensible conclusion, right? (I know, I know, it's modern physics, so sense need not apply... but...)
Another really dumb question: 'how BIG is a photon and what SHAPE is it'? A radio-frequency EM wave can get pretty big in space and time - like several meters to kilometers long for ELF. Its size and shape can be verified by the antenna you build. That entire wave is associated with a number of photons. So... to the extent that those photons actually 'exist' in any real sense and are not just an abstract bookkeeping measure, those photons must somehow extend in time and space way beyond the Planck length. To the extent that they are mapped onto the physical EM wave, they must have a 'shape'. But nobody seems to talk much about this; the question seems to be answered by being defined as invalid. How *does* QED deal with macroscopic quantum entities like ELF radio-frequency photons?
"The particle would not see its own time-dilation so to speak, in the particles rest frame it still decays very quickly and the length contraction then allows it to travel further. From the lab frame the particle is time dilated so decays slowly but the lab equipment is not length contracted in that frame so there are no length contraction effects. "
Here's something that still confuses me about special relativity: wouldn't both the particle and the accelerator see *each other* as length contracted? So the particle should see the accelerator as contracted, therefore it travels faster... but the accelerator sees the particle as contracted, so shouldn't it travel slower?
How does SR resolve this? Or is it just a shrug and 'one hand clapping, the zen you can understand is not the true zen' kind of thing?
"Keeper of the Secret of Setting Digital Watches."
You have that Secret? I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!
Bet you don't have the Secret of Programming the VCR though. Only Initiates of the Illuminated Numerati of the Eighty-Eighth Segment of the the Liquid Crystal got that one. And after the Tivo Purges, they're all dead.
Slashdot Mirror
"But ... there is a level of suspicion and fear directed at Google that just seems extreme. Has Google actually done something "Evil" that I missed?"
They might have. Would we be able to know, at this point, if they did? Do we still have third parties able to compete with them and provide checks and balances over the information they feed us?
The problem with Google (and the other big players, such as the social networks) is that they are increasingly *centralising* control over the data we see. In the 1990s, the Net was a very decentralised place. You'd get an IP address, DNS lookup and SMTP from your ISP, a domain name from a domain registrar, web hosting somewhere else, webmail from a fourth place, search from a fifth place... and all of those would be different from your hardware and your operating system... and all this decentralisation kept the big corps mostly honest. There were people like AOL and Microsoft trying for lock-in and vertical integration, yes. Which is why Google initially seemed like a shining knight, a different force. And them funding Mozilla gave us a breathing space from the Microsoft lock-in empire.
But now Google themselves are becoming the Microsoft of the Web. Not in terms of abusive practices - necessarily. But in terms of edging towards single-provider monopoly power, which gives the *potential* for abusive practices on a huge scale.
Remember Sandra Bullock, The Net, mid 1990s? Back then it seemed total science fiction because it was really silly to think that any one organisation could get censorship control over the fractious, decentralised Net of that era. It's not so funny now. You could now have:
* a Google Android phone or a Google ChromeOS device
* running Google Chrome
* getting DNS from Google DNS
* using Gmail for mail
* using Google Wave for social networking
* using Google Search for all searching
* getting their news from Google News
* buying their books from Google Books
* doing academic research on Google Scholar and patent searches on Google Patents
* sharing documents on Google Docs
* viewing Usenet through Google Groups
and all of that information is logged, analysed, data-mined and cross-checked by a single organisation answerable to a very few people. And potentially modified in transit.
Fortunately it's still possible to compare most of what Google tells us with the source websites, so they can't easily change the information we receive. Yet. But they certainly can get a very close-up view of exactly who we are and what lines of knowledge we're interested in, and flick this on to whatever organisation - private, criminal, government - asks nicely enough.
Centralisation is always scary, because you just. don't. KNOW. what is being done with that data, either coming or going.
Google's best weapon against paranoia is openness... but what if we end up seeing just the *appearance* of openness and not openness itself?
For that reason I hope Google never becomes the only information service we use on the Web, and I'm even unhappy with the way we all rely on its search results to such a huge extent. It's a potential choke point in the Net, a single point of failure. Right now it seems okay... but.... loss of alternatives is never a safe place to be. Why has open source search never taken off?
It's Joyce? I thought it was Dan Brown!
"At that point, the company has no motivation to keep on the guy with 20 years of experience "
No motivation other than human decency and compassion and desire to maintain the social fabric of kindness which keeps civilisation running smoothly, because what goes around comes around.
But those effects don't show on the balance sheet until a few generations down the track, and by then it's too late.
A corporation which doesn't give a damn about the well-being of its employees and customers is, simply stated, a psychopath. And a management philosophy which promotes psychopathology will do no good to any part of our economy, ecology or society in the long run. But it might make huge profits in the meantime. So be careful what you choose to measure and reward as a measure of economic 'rationality'.
It's a bias against bias, and that's the worst kind of bias of all.
"cold fusion"
You do realise that, snide 'science' writers to the contrary, anomalous heat production in deuterated systems has long been proven to be a real effect, right?
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
The problem is that we don't currently have an acceptable mainstream theory for it, not that evidence for the thing itself doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, normal science at high levels seems to involve discrediting evidence that the incumbents don't like - and that's a big problem.
"Yes, the science data is for all mankind, but there is usually a 'hold back period' of a year or two where only the science team (usually from outside NASA) has access to it."
Because it takes this long for Majestic-12 to photoshop out all the aliens and boy, are their mouse fingers tired.
"This is only fair, as they're the guys who fought for funding for the instrument"
'I need a hundred million dollars to count all the left-handed spiral galaxies. It will revolutionise science!'
'No I need TWO hundred million dollars to count all the RIGHT handed spiral galaxies. The leftists must not triumph!'
'Gentlemen, you both make good points. Shall we decide this by asking the person whose money it actually is? The US taxpayer?'
'....'
'Haha, no of course not. The usual procedure it is, then... rocket pistols at dawn, Pad 39-B.'
So was it Sapphire.... or Steel?
"I don't recall a Divine Dictionary in the Garden of Eden... or one assembled from DNA."
Noam Chomsky cries!
"Except that science only requires observation as a postulate and no other 'leaps of faith'. That is the difference between science and religion. "
Not quite. Religion - the practical, mystical, experiential psychological kind, as practiced by, say, Quakers, Sufis, Pentecostals, Buddhists, and Catholic monks - also only requires observation.
The word 'religion' is often blurred, you see, between two very different concepts: spirituality, and authority. In each religion, the mystics are the experimentalists; the theologians are the theorists. Often the two camps do not agree.
I think what would be a more coherent argument would be to say that BOTH the physical and the spiritual/metaphysical worlds can be investigated using EITHER direct personal observation, or inferred third-party observation based on trusted authorities, and that both ways of observation and both fields of enquiry are ech useful and problematic in their separate ways.
If you're trying to argue that the metaphysical world simply does not exist and therefore any writing which refers to it is a priori false, that's factually incorrect. Stuff which does not play by the current laws of physics is out there and it does pop up and go 'hi' every now and then.
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259722267&sr=8-1
Which is cool really, because the world would be a very boring and frightening place if it were exactly as the current dogma of science (to be distinguished from the methods of science) tell us it is: mostly empty, devoid of intelligent life for thousands of years, limited to lightspeed, and ending in personal extinction.
Fortunately it's not like that. But coming to terms with this knowledge will be a challenge for both science and religion together.
"Religions all require you to believe in things that cannot be proven"
Not really, at least not in the mystical faiths. Mysticism is all about personal experience and has a lot in common with psi investigation. Some scientists arbitrarily declare these fields to be off-limits on the circular grounds that "science has proven that non-physical reality does not exist, therefore only insane people have these kinds of experiences", but that isn't actually correct. There's at least 150 years worth of evidence for the existence of the spiritual which does not require blind faith.
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259721768&sr=8-1
"But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Or any sufficiently compelling cause, such as Communism, Fascism, Free Market Economics, or Manifest National Destiny. All of which accomplished a lot of good for some people while also shafting others who got in their way.
Good people doing evil things in the name of a good cause is a fact of human life, not just religion.
"What more is there to learn ?"
4- we can't trust the cloud to launch nuclear missiles.
Ok turns out we can trust it for that just fine.
"They are a money making / power grabbing scheme dreamed up by a second rate megalomaniac science fiction author that has now taken on a life of its own."
I've often wondered about the parallels between L Ron Hubbard and Gene Roddenberry.
Both ended up creating science-fiction themed military-naval organisations with hordes of loyal fans that generate tons of money...
Washington Times, yes. And also a private fleet of submarines. Or did he flick them on to North Korea?
http://www.albionmonitor.com/9801a/darkmoon.html
Moon is pretty much a James Bond villain. It's a funny old world eh!
"The bigger the group the bigger the target, the harder to keep secrets."
That's why it's not a secret. www.xenu.net have covered the story for over a decade. Did you try Googling?
"I'm not fan of scientology, or any cult really - but a mainstream organization with illegal work camps? I just never expected that, at all. You'd think the lid would have come off something that extreme some time ago."
It has, if you were paying attention.
CoS's 'Rehabilitation Project Force' labour camps and other extreme 'Ethics' measures have been common knowledge since the 1990s - just check the extensive files on Operation Clambake - http://xenu.net/ .
However, CoS tends to sue massively and engage in lots of dirty tricks whenever the mainstream media cover them at all negatively, which is why you may not have heard about this stuff if you don't get your news from the Net.
They tried to censor Usenet back in the early 90s. It didn't work so well for them. Anonymous is just the latest round in a long battle of CoS Versus The Internet.
And then Hugo Chavez dumps some silver iodide and you lose all your work.
"the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain"
Gibbous Farms ShoggoSteak (tm): A taste too delicious for mortal mind to comprehend!
Available now in all non-Riemannian manifolds.
ShoggoSteak. The OTHER other other white meat.
"Sometimes it seems the only way to win is not to play."
Or to nuke Las Vegas.
I think I saw that episode of MacGyver!
"now that is not funny either. And one does not laugh."
No, the mental image of (snk) Tiger Woods being whacked with a golf club by his wife is (snurf) most definitely not funny. Not even in abstract.
Sorry, something in my eye. I'll be right back.
"This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist."
Another 3-year-old question that bugs me: If they're that big, how can they be 'fundamental'? Doesn't 'big' kinda imply 'composed of smaller things'?
I presume things like the Higgs are 'actually' second-order configurations of quarks or waveforms which we just arbitrarily have chosen to call 'fundamental' rather than 'resonance', right? Because that would be a sensible conclusion, right? (I know, I know, it's modern physics, so sense need not apply... but...)
Another really dumb question: 'how BIG is a photon and what SHAPE is it'? A radio-frequency EM wave can get pretty big in space and time - like several meters to kilometers long for ELF. Its size and shape can be verified by the antenna you build. That entire wave is associated with a number of photons. So... to the extent that those photons actually 'exist' in any real sense and are not just an abstract bookkeeping measure, those photons must somehow extend in time and space way beyond the Planck length. To the extent that they are mapped onto the physical EM wave, they must have a 'shape'. But nobody seems to talk much about this; the question seems to be answered by being defined as invalid. How *does* QED deal with macroscopic quantum entities like ELF radio-frequency photons?
"The particle would not see its own time-dilation so to speak, in the particles rest frame it still decays very quickly and the length contraction then allows it to travel further. From the lab frame the particle is time dilated so decays slowly but the lab equipment is not length contracted in that frame so there are no length contraction effects. "
Here's something that still confuses me about special relativity: wouldn't both the particle and the accelerator see *each other* as length contracted? So the particle should see the accelerator as contracted, therefore it travels faster... but the accelerator sees the particle as contracted, so shouldn't it travel slower?
How does SR resolve this? Or is it just a shrug and 'one hand clapping, the zen you can understand is not the true zen' kind of thing?
"When does the Science ever begin with a particle accelerator project? "
The same time it always does: When the lead physicist steps into the acceleration chamber... and vanishes.
Oh boy.
"Seriously, Rutan had it right when he said that we are not killing enough. The simple fact is, that to be cutting edge WILL involve loss of life."
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to book a passenger flight on your spaceline.
"Keeper of the Secret of Setting Digital Watches."
You have that Secret? I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!
Bet you don't have the Secret of Programming the VCR though. Only Initiates of the Illuminated Numerati of the Eighty-Eighth Segment of the the Liquid Crystal got that one. And after the Tivo Purges, they're all dead.