It's a wonder to me that I had to look so deep to find this suggestion.
I don't even think you need to have the "checked-out-at-one-time" caveat.
Simple: form a not-for-profit institution, owned by it's members, and calling itself a library. Members can donate the CD's. Possibly, the physical location of the CD is irrelevant: members simply need to stamp "property of the InternetMusicLibraryOrg" on the CD.
At this point, everyone in the organization is part owner of the CD, and is a member of the library services. So, everyone in the organization has the fair-rights use to make a copy of the CD in a new form (i.e. mp3) for institutional use.
No, this sounds like the students had no idea why they were in school: if they wanted to IM each other, why pay huge quantities of money to ignore a professor while doing it?
There are two fundamentals that apply here: 1) Students must take responsibility for their own learning. It is not the job of the instructor to 'maintain the interest of the students'. It is the instructor's job to show them the path, to tell them where to go, and to try to instill enthusiasm for the subject. Note that 'enthusiasm' does not mean 'entertainment'! I can't "generate interest" in anybody.. all I can do is say, "this is cool, come study it with me".
This responsibility MIGHT include messaging other students, typing notes, passing notes, whatever, but..
2) students and instructors must also keep the environment as conducive to learning and to teaching as possible. Having a bunch of kids playing Quake in the lecture hall is will not result in good lectures. Having some dweeb in the next row IM you while you're taking notes isn't good either.
I think something to remember is that a _real_ classroom isn't like television: a proper lecture takes a great deal of concentration to understand, let alone absorb.
I've got some experience with this. I work on medium-scale (i.e. 100-200 collaborator) particle physics experiments, and I've built and used smaller test-bench apparati as well. I always perfer to use a linux-based system.. if the hardware allows you.
That's the bottom line, of course: if you're going to go the Linux route, you have to buy equipment that you can talk to. Your job, of course, is to get research done. Frequently, the best case is to go ahead and use the windoze solution, export your data file and do your processing on whatever platform you like.
That said, I've had some reasonably good experience. You can use linux to get a CAMAC or VME-based data aquisition systems if you're willing to do the hacking and have the right interface board, if you're doing high-throughput stuff.
On the low end, like running a stepper motor or reading a simple device, the serial port is your best friend. Although it sometimes requires much hacking to get more than two serial ports working, you can do it, and most low-tech equipment can be accessed through a serial interface.
The great thing about using linux is that you can write in whatever script or language you want with whatever front- or back- end you want. You can output your data direcly into the analysis format that you want, rather than having to do things like export and massage and import and such. (This is important if your little test stand is generating gigabytes of data a day!) You can do stuff like imbed a simple version of your analysis for prompt feedback. You can use well-established tools to do your I/O (our system is based upon ROOT ( http://root.cern.ch ) which has some nice features if you're doing lots of ntuple-based data.
The problem comes if you find yourself needing to talk to USB or, even worse, a card in a slot somewhere... here, you're likely to get creamed. Five years ago companies would often ship products will a full technical description, but now they're just too lazy.. even if you're willing to do all the leg work, they can't be bothered to document their codes and data structures for you.
So: if you have the option, it's really nice, but be prepared to do a lot of work to get some badly-documented things working, and give up if you just can't find the supplier.
We need women involved in physics because we want to be able to let women into physics.
(Huh?)
There is a huge barrier to women who are interested in physics; there aren't any other women. This may sound stupid to some of you, but think about it: how many women do you know that feel perfectly at home sitting completely outnumbered in a group of geeky males. Sure, a few do, but they are in the minority. Having a stronger female presence (at every level: prof, TA, postdoc, grad student, undergrad, high school teacher, etc) will help to alliveiate this.
Physics is a rather embarassing case. Other hard sciences have recently allowed their influxes of women: chemistry now has reasonable percentages (if not ideal) and maths are gaining too. Physics remains a holdout.. only a certain type of personality is attracted to physics, and only a fraction of those have the intuition and skills neccessary to make it easy. Take off a fraction for social reasons, and you can get it down to zero.
size of the proton: ~ 1 fm = 10^-15 m age of the universe: ~15 Gyr speed of expansion ~ c = 3 x 10^8 m/s
gives: proton/cosmic radius ~ 10^-42
So you need about 40 places for this. Of course, you might want to calculated it to the Plank scale, so maybe tack on a few more.. say 100 for safety. Yes, a trillion digits does seem a bit like overkill.
Yes, that's why I continue to read slashdot; I don't get enough questionable taste in life, particularly where it deals with plastic toys.
Ok, I'm all for plastic toys, but I'd really prefer if people kept the questionable taste to themselves. Not all geeks are actually _demented_ you know.
Of course I don't give as much money to the EFF as I would to my ISP or to the movie theaters. Although I agree with just about everything the EFF does, and although I disagree with just about everything the movie and music industry do, there is the basic fact that I'm paying for real services.
A more balanced question would be along the lines of "How much are you shoring up private interests with your money?". I'll just take a completely random guess that, say, 5% of what you spend on stuff is profit for the Big Guys. So, do you spend THAT much on countering what their money buys them?
On the other side: yes, the EFF does a hell of a lot for us. No, I don't think I can credit the EFF with any direct wins, but they can be credited with stopping some big problems. Having an effecitve oppostion is important in any democratic system. Since parties to not provide the correct context in the US, this is an effictive (if poor) backup.
Here's my question though: I do not live in the states. I'm a Canadian citizen living in the UK. I care deeply about information privacy and freedom issues in a worldwide sense. I know the US tends to drive some of these issues, but I really don't know: where should my money go for the most efficitive worldwide advocacy?
One point that seems to be ignored in this article is integrated USE out of the technology.
Consider: the US (if he's right) may have the best phone system in the world (in a few years)
But: in Europe, people have been actually USING a working phone system for several years.
One thing I found amazing when I moved to Britian a year ago was how cheap the phones were (compared to cost-of-living, anyway) and how much a part of the culture they are now. Heck, you see twelve-year-olds with phones now, never mind teenagers (which ALL have them). Text messaging is commonplace and somewhat reminicent of early (read: poor) email use. The social use of phones is quite astonishing.
The problem is: the US might develop a killer phone system, but only a few rich elites ever use it. This is not useful.
Hell, who CARES how much better the phones get? The networks in densely populated urban areas work just fine with very high use loads, I can make out what people are saying, and I can write short messages. The camera options may turn out to be neat, but I suspect that they won't be used very much. So, why bother to build a next-generation network?
Pure research doesn't only pay off 'eventually'.. it pays off right now.
First off, these fields aren't as dead as the SF article suggests: topology is a very big game right now with high-level particle theory. I don't pretend to understand it, but building 'topological field theories' is something people spend a good chunk of time trying to do. Although this research probably isn't directly applicable, it's neccessary to push a field generally before you get to something specifically good.
(Of course, many would believe that theoretical particle physics has no application, either, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong.)
Another point to make, though, and I can't stress this enough, is that pure research is valuable even if it leads to NO application, for several reasons: - It creates spin-off technologies. (In the case of mathematics, the 'technology' might be pretty abstract but still useful.)
- It creates a vibrant research community, which is good for a vibrant teaching environment. (Debatable, but at least some people think so.)
- It expands our knowledge of the universe/reality / human experience / art / imagination / etc.
My favorite example: Even though Copernicus didn't really do anything for us but give us a few interplanetary probes, a useless moonshot of two, and slightly improved timetables, most people would be happy to know that the earth goes around the sun, not vice versa, not because it's USEFUL, but because it's TRUE.
---Nathaniel,
Shooting his mouth off about his favorite topic.
A few quick comments about this. Although powerful, such approaches suffer from being somewhat too 'black-box'. That is, you turn control over to the computer to make decisions based upon statistical recurrances. This leaves you very vulnerable to several problems.
For instance, the author remarks that he believes a bigger corpus of spam would help train filters. That's true, but misleading: it would help train filters that distinguish between his 'nonspam' corpus and his 'spam' corpus. In this case, he is surely increasing his true-positives.. his rejection of things that really are spam. But his false-positive rate is not helped at all, because his samples are so biased.
(Example: 10 spams get the word 'blunderbuss' but he has no regular email with that word. Therefore, any future email may be rejected because of the word 'blunderbuss', even though there is no basis to know whether the word CAN be used legitamately.)
If the system is done intelligently, this will simply mean that having a lopsided sample will do nothing (the resolving power will be dominated by the smaller of the two samples), but this may be counterintutive to some.
Another problem is that you don't know WHY choices are being made, and that's bad science. Ok, ok, so this isn't science, it's Spam prevention, but I like science.
First, I do tend to agree with you, to some extent: particle physics needs to reinvent itself, and soon.. it's getting bogged down. I'm personally in one of the more dynamic areas: neutrino physics, which for the last 10 or 20 years has been driven primarily by experiment, not theory, and so has been a nice place to be. It's now starting to move in the direction of 'precision' science, rather than discovery, but that may change again
And, OK, I was lying about the rad count. I'm a _neutrino_ physicist, after all. But I think I once inhaled some 57Co.. does that count?
Well, my first sincere, if unhelpful answer is "Are you sure that you want to?" It isn't really an industry in the traditional sense -- there is little or no job security, there are long hours typically with no overtime paid, the stress can be extreme and the rewards are not great. There are almost no rational reasons to choose CG visual effects as a career.
Boy, that sounds just like every other job I've ever heard of that sounded like it was worth doing.
--Nathaniel, the particle physicist with low pay, long hours, and occasional high stress, not to mention occasional high rad count
I don't understand why 'we're all going to be shmushed by a wandering rock' makes the Slashdot front page, and 'thank god, we're not going to be shmushed by a wandering rock' only gets slashback. The only interesting press is the sensationalist, rather than the status-quo (i.e. we all get to live)?
"Yes, I use gee-en-ewe-forward-slash-linux. I think everyone should use gee-en-ewe-forward-slash-linux. It's very easy to use, even if it's not easy to say."
Jesting aside, it is quite true that credit for the GNU part should be made. But why should credit go in the _name_? I'm sick to death of acronyms (even recursive ones) and I think it's OK for someone to, say, bundle up a bunch of stuff and call it 'Red Hat' or 'Mandrake' or even 'Linux'. Why the heck not? Give credit where it's due: by _author_.
I've been looking for a place that sells the game (preferrably from the UK) but I can't seem to find it. The Freespace 2 site directs you to Interplay... which seems to have no knowledge of this game.
It wasn't exactly discovered; although I believe that the results from SN1987A are in rough agreement with the theory.
The idea is a collapsing star is opaque, like a light bulb painted black: the light is being made, but can't get out. Because of the very high temperatures and the density of the neutron soup in the centre, making neutrinos by pair-production becomes a method for the supernova to shed all that energy without using photons.
This is in addition to the neutronization burst that comes at the start, when the neutron star is formed.
This might be a good place to mention my calculation that looks at a quote from the late latmented Douglas Adams:
"It all depends on what you mean by 'hit' of course, seeing as matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, and egg sandwich."
Also incidently, the neutrino toaster is not an invetion, it's a discovery: being close to a supernova would make you feel mighty warm, even if you did have shielding to protect you from the light and the matter shockwaves. Supernovae release 90% of their energy as neutrinos.
---Nathaniel, on the Neutrino Prowl, co-author on the recent SNO papers.
Yes, this is strongly implied by neutrino data, in combination with the oscillation hypothesis. It's not implied with THIS neutrino data alone: SNO looks only at a small-branching-ratio chain in the sun that occours only once in about 10^4 proton-proton fusion reactions. That is.. we don't see MOST of the neutrinos coming from the sun, although other experiements (notably the GALLEX and SAGE gallium experiments) do. However, those same experiments don't see enough neutrinos to account for the fusion models to be correct.
The latest SNO results prove (i.e. show evidence at a very high probability) that the deficit of neutrinos is due to flavour-changing: that is, the neutrinos were all there, but the gallium experiments just couldn't see them. As a matter of fact, SNO nails the Standard Solar Model predictions (J. Bachall et al) right on the nose, so it all remains pretty convincing.
" Yes, but I'm sure no one was thinking of those applications when Copernicus was around. Which is probably the point - just because you don't see any applications for a new theory doesn't mean it won't prove extremely useful."
No, that ISN'T the point.. although it IS another reason to do pure research.
The point is: it's worth knowing things for reasons OTHER than practical. To give even more obvious examples: we want to know if God exists even if he DOESN'T answer prayers. We want to know if the universe will collapse even if we're not around to see it. We want to know how the Romans dug wells even if we have better ways to do it ourselves. We want to understand Napoleonic history, even if it's not applicable to the modern age.
We want to know a lot of things, becuase knowing them gives us insight into our world, insight into ourselves. They are things worth knowing for the sake of simple understanding, not having ANYTHING to do with practical application.
Those of you out there who are purely pragmatic about science should ask yourselves why you bother. What is the use of practical things if they don't serve some greater utility? We don't need computers to feed ourselves or house ourselves; survival or success should not be humanity's only motive. For some, the motive might be religious or hedontistic, but for myself, I belive in an _academic_ progressivism, where learning about our universe is the end, not the means.
Slashdot Mirror
..until it's a preposition.
"So I put the toothpaste google the breakbasket..."
It's a wonder to me that I had to look so deep to find this suggestion.
I don't even think you need to have the "checked-out-at-one-time" caveat.
Simple: form a not-for-profit institution, owned by it's members, and calling itself a library. Members can donate the CD's. Possibly, the physical location of the CD is irrelevant: members simply need to stamp "property of the InternetMusicLibraryOrg" on the CD.
At this point, everyone in the organization is part owner of the CD, and is a member of the library services. So, everyone in the organization has the fair-rights use to make a copy of the CD in a new form (i.e. mp3) for institutional use.
No, this sounds like the students had no idea why they were in school: if they wanted to IM each other, why pay huge quantities of money to ignore a professor while doing it?
There are two fundamentals that apply here:
1) Students must take responsibility for their own learning. It is not the job of the instructor to 'maintain the interest of the students'. It is the instructor's job to show them the path, to tell them where to go, and to try to instill enthusiasm for the subject. Note that 'enthusiasm' does not mean 'entertainment'! I can't "generate interest" in anybody.. all I can do is say, "this is cool, come study it with me".
This responsibility MIGHT include messaging other students, typing notes, passing notes, whatever, but..
2) students and instructors must also keep the environment as conducive to learning and to teaching as possible. Having a bunch of kids playing Quake in the lecture hall is will not result in good lectures. Having some dweeb in the next row IM you while you're taking notes isn't good either.
I think something to remember is that a _real_ classroom isn't like television: a proper lecture takes a great deal of concentration to understand, let alone absorb.
--Nathaniel
I've got some experience with this. I work on medium-scale (i.e. 100-200 collaborator) particle physics experiments, and I've built and used smaller test-bench apparati as well. I always perfer to use a linux-based system.. if the hardware allows you.
That's the bottom line, of course: if you're going to go the Linux route, you have to buy equipment that you can talk to. Your job, of course, is to get research done. Frequently, the best case is to go ahead and use the windoze solution, export your data file and do your processing on whatever platform you like.
That said, I've had some reasonably good experience. You can use linux to get a CAMAC or VME-based data aquisition systems if you're willing to do the hacking and have the right interface board, if you're doing high-throughput stuff.
On the low end, like running a stepper motor or reading a simple device, the serial port is your best friend. Although it sometimes requires much hacking to get more than two serial ports working, you can do it, and most low-tech equipment can be accessed through a serial interface.
The great thing about using linux is that you can write in whatever script or language you want with whatever front- or back- end you want. You can output your data direcly into the analysis format that you want, rather than having to do things like export and massage and import and such. (This is important if your little test stand is generating gigabytes of data a day!) You can do stuff like imbed a simple version of your analysis for prompt feedback. You can use well-established tools to do your I/O (our system is based upon ROOT ( http://root.cern.ch ) which has some nice features if you're doing lots of ntuple-based data.
The problem comes if you find yourself needing to talk to USB or, even worse, a card in a slot somewhere... here, you're likely to get creamed. Five years ago companies would often ship products will a full technical description, but now they're just too lazy.. even if you're willing to do all the leg work, they can't be bothered to document their codes and data structures for you.
So: if you have the option, it's really nice, but be prepared to do a lot of work to get some badly-documented things working, and give up if you just can't find the supplier.
Engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime.....
We need women involved in physics because we want to be able to let women into physics.
(Huh?)
There is a huge barrier to women who are interested in physics; there aren't any other women. This may sound stupid to some of you, but think about it: how many women do you know that feel perfectly at home sitting completely outnumbered in a group of geeky males. Sure, a few do, but they are in the minority. Having a stronger female presence (at every level: prof, TA, postdoc, grad student, undergrad, high school teacher, etc) will help to alliveiate this.
Physics is a rather embarassing case. Other hard sciences have recently allowed their influxes of women: chemistry now has reasonable percentages (if not ideal) and maths are gaining too. Physics remains a holdout.. only a certain type of personality is attracted to physics, and only a fraction of those have the intuition and skills neccessary to make it easy. Take off a fraction for social reasons, and you can get it down to zero.
---N
One female physics student somewhere once commented to a new potential student:
"The odds are good but the goods are odd."
I love that line.
---Nathaniel
Hmm..
size of the proton: ~ 1 fm = 10^-15 m
age of the universe: ~15 Gyr
speed of expansion ~ c = 3 x 10^8 m/s
gives:
proton/cosmic radius ~ 10^-42
So you need about 40 places for this. Of course, you might want to calculated it to the Plank scale, so maybe tack on a few more.. say 100 for safety. Yes, a trillion digits does seem a bit like overkill.
Yes, that's why I continue to read slashdot; I don't get enough questionable taste in life, particularly where it deals with plastic toys.
Ok, I'm all for plastic toys, but I'd really prefer if people kept the questionable taste to themselves. Not all geeks are actually _demented_ you know.
---Nathaniel
Of course I don't give as much money to the EFF as I would to my ISP or to the movie theaters. Although I agree with just about everything the EFF does, and although I disagree with just about everything the movie and music industry do, there is the basic fact that I'm paying for real services.
A more balanced question would be along the lines of "How much are you shoring up private interests with your money?". I'll just take a completely random guess that, say, 5% of what you spend on stuff is profit for the Big Guys. So, do you spend THAT much on countering what their money buys them?
On the other side: yes, the EFF does a hell of a lot for us. No, I don't think I can credit the EFF with any direct wins, but they can be credited with stopping some big problems. Having an effecitve oppostion is important in any democratic system. Since parties to not provide the correct context in the US, this is an effictive (if poor) backup.
Here's my question though: I do not live in the states. I'm a Canadian citizen living in the UK. I care deeply about information privacy and freedom issues in a worldwide sense. I know the US tends to drive some of these issues, but I really don't know: where should my money go for the most efficitive worldwide advocacy?
One point that seems to be ignored in this article is integrated USE out of the technology.
e r-to-do-calculations
Consider: the US (if he's right) may have the best phone system in the world (in a few years)
But: in Europe, people have been actually USING a working phone system for several years.
One thing I found amazing when I moved to Britian a year ago was how cheap the phones were (compared to cost-of-living, anyway) and how much a part of the culture they are now. Heck, you see twelve-year-olds with phones now, never mind teenagers (which ALL have them). Text messaging is commonplace and somewhat reminicent of early (read: poor) email use. The social use of phones is quite astonishing.
The problem is: the US might develop a killer phone system, but only a few rich elites ever use it. This is not useful.
Hell, who CARES how much better the phones get? The networks in densely populated urban areas work just fine with very high use loads, I can make out what people are saying, and I can write short messages. The camera options may turn out to be neat, but I suspect that they won't be used very much. So, why bother to build a next-generation network?
---Nathaniel, non-luddite-but-occassionally-uses-pencil-and-pap
Pure research doesn't only pay off 'eventually'.. it pays off right now.
/reality / human experience / art / imagination / etc.
First off, these fields aren't as dead as the SF article suggests: topology is a very big game right now with high-level particle theory. I don't pretend to understand it, but building 'topological field theories' is something people spend a good chunk of time trying to do. Although this research probably isn't directly applicable, it's neccessary to push a field generally before you get to something specifically good.
(Of course, many would believe that theoretical particle physics has no application, either, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong.)
Another point to make, though, and I can't stress this enough, is that pure research is valuable even if it leads to NO application, for several reasons:
- It creates spin-off technologies. (In the case of mathematics, the 'technology' might be pretty abstract but still useful.)
- It creates a vibrant research community, which is good for a vibrant teaching environment. (Debatable, but at least some people think so.)
- It expands our knowledge of the universe
My favorite example: Even though Copernicus didn't really do anything for us but give us a few interplanetary probes, a useless moonshot of two, and slightly improved timetables, most people would be happy to know that the earth goes around the sun, not vice versa, not because it's USEFUL, but because it's TRUE.
---Nathaniel,
Shooting his mouth off about his favorite topic.
A few quick comments about this. Although powerful, such approaches suffer from being somewhat too 'black-box'. That is, you turn control over to the computer to make decisions based upon statistical recurrances. This leaves you very vulnerable to several problems.
For instance, the author remarks that he believes a bigger corpus of spam would help train filters. That's true, but misleading: it would help train filters that distinguish between his 'nonspam' corpus and his 'spam' corpus. In this case, he is surely increasing his true-positives.. his rejection of things that really are spam. But his false-positive rate is not helped at all, because his samples are so biased.
(Example: 10 spams get the word 'blunderbuss' but he has no regular email with that word. Therefore, any future email may be rejected because of the word 'blunderbuss', even though there is no basis to know whether the word CAN be used legitamately.)
If the system is done intelligently, this will simply mean that having a lopsided sample will do nothing (the resolving power will be dominated by the smaller of the two samples), but this may be counterintutive to some.
Another problem is that you don't know WHY choices are being made, and that's bad science. Ok, ok, so this isn't science, it's Spam prevention, but I like science.
---N
First, I do tend to agree with you, to some extent: particle physics needs to reinvent itself, and soon.. it's getting bogged down. I'm personally in one of the more dynamic areas: neutrino physics, which for the last 10 or 20 years has been driven primarily by experiment, not theory, and so has been a nice place to be. It's now starting to move in the direction of 'precision' science, rather than discovery, but that may change again
And, OK, I was lying about the rad count. I'm a _neutrino_ physicist, after all. But I think I once inhaled some 57Co.. does that count?
---N
Ah.. flashbacks to the old BBS days...
---N
I don't understand why 'we're all going to be shmushed by a wandering rock' makes the Slashdot front page, and 'thank god, we're not going to be shmushed by a wandering rock' only gets slashback. The only interesting press is the sensationalist, rather than the status-quo (i.e. we all get to live)?
Did you READ the letter? Nader didn't propose any kind of government regulation.
He proposed that the US govt simply change their buying policies: i.e. buying non-MS products more often, asking to buy the MS code, etc, etc.
"thank God the good folks at the DoD are relying on solid data..."
No, they aren't relying on it... they're just gathering it. Decisions have yet to be made, I fear.
"Yes, I use gee-en-ewe-forward-slash-linux. I think everyone should use gee-en-ewe-forward-slash-linux. It's very easy to use, even if it's not easy to say."
Jesting aside, it is quite true that credit for the GNU part should be made. But why should credit go in the _name_? I'm sick to death of acronyms (even recursive ones) and I think it's OK for someone to, say, bundle up a bunch of stuff and call it 'Red Hat' or 'Mandrake' or even 'Linux'. Why the heck not? Give credit where it's due: by _author_.
---Nathaniel
I've been looking for a place that sells the game (preferrably from the UK) but I can't seem to find it. The Freespace 2 site directs you to Interplay... which seems to have no knowledge of this game.
Where the heck to I buy it?
---Nathaniel
It wasn't exactly discovered; although I believe that the results from SN1987A are in rough agreement with the theory.
The idea is a collapsing star is opaque, like a light bulb painted black: the light is being made, but can't get out. Because of the very high temperatures and the density of the neutron soup in the centre, making neutrinos by pair-production becomes a method for the supernova to shed all that energy without using photons.
This is in addition to the neutronization burst that comes at the start, when the neutron star is formed.
---N
This might be a good place to mention my calculation that looks at a quote from the late latmented Douglas Adams:
"It all depends on what you mean by 'hit' of course, seeing as matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, and egg sandwich."
Also incidently, the neutrino toaster is not an invetion, it's a discovery: being close to a supernova would make you feel mighty warm, even if you did have shielding to protect you from the light and the matter shockwaves. Supernovae release 90% of their energy as neutrinos.
---Nathaniel, on the Neutrino Prowl, co-author on the recent SNO papers.
Yes, this is strongly implied by neutrino data, in combination with the oscillation hypothesis. It's not implied with THIS neutrino data alone: SNO looks only at a small-branching-ratio chain in the sun that occours only once in about 10^4 proton-proton fusion reactions. That is.. we don't see MOST of the neutrinos coming from the sun, although other experiements (notably the GALLEX and SAGE gallium experiments) do. However, those same experiments don't see enough neutrinos to account for the fusion models to be correct.
The latest SNO results prove (i.e. show evidence at a very high probability) that the deficit of neutrinos is due to flavour-changing: that is, the neutrinos were all there, but the gallium experiments just couldn't see them. As a matter of fact, SNO nails the Standard Solar Model predictions (J. Bachall et al) right on the nose, so it all remains pretty convincing.
---Nathaniel
" Yes, but I'm sure no one was thinking of those applications when Copernicus was around. Which is probably the point - just because you don't see any applications for a new theory doesn't mean it won't prove extremely useful."
No, that ISN'T the point.. although it IS another reason to do pure research.
The point is: it's worth knowing things for reasons OTHER than practical. To give even more obvious examples: we want to know if God exists even if he DOESN'T answer prayers. We want to know if the universe will collapse even if we're not around to see it. We want to know how the Romans dug wells even if we have better ways to do it ourselves. We want to understand Napoleonic history, even if it's not applicable to the modern age.
We want to know a lot of things, becuase knowing them gives us insight into our world, insight into ourselves. They are things worth knowing for the sake of simple understanding, not having ANYTHING to do with practical application.
Those of you out there who are purely pragmatic about science should ask yourselves why you bother. What is the use of practical things if they don't serve some greater utility? We don't need computers to feed ourselves or house ourselves; survival or success should not be humanity's only motive. For some, the motive might be religious or hedontistic, but for myself, I belive in an _academic_ progressivism, where learning about our universe is the end, not the means.
---Nathaniel, waxing philisophical