Don't get me wrong, I certainly ain't anti-science. But with this kind of research we get contradicting results every other year. First milk was important for you, now milk is harmful. Eggs used to be the way to an early grave, now eggs are the fountain of youth. Cholesterol was deadly, now we need it like a drug.
Or maybe it is already the other way around again, I don't keep track to be honest.
And in between all that we have various other food crazes from low-carb to neanderthal diet. What the fuck, people?
I think you - and perhaps the majority of intelligent people - should stop reading popular science; or rather start learning what real science is actually like, so they can see through what popularisations of science say. Popular science is entertainment, simply; all attempts at making science "exciting" or "fun" are simply entertainment - it's like talking about "the biggest horse that ever was", which may give you a "wow", but it won't teach you much about farming. Real science is not primarily exciting - it consists of years of careful collection and analysis of data, little by little accumulating enough knowledge that either confirms or disproves one or more hypotheses. For every big "Wow!" there is usually a long, long series of "Hmm, this seems to point that way, but we need further study".
To a scientist reading this header over an article, it says "There has been a study that shows a correlation between brain health and diet - this is compatible with other, similar findings in other studies". It seems plausible, in my view, that a Mediterranean diet would be beneficial for the brain, unlike fad diets like low-carb or paleo. The reason I say this is that we have already known for many years, that people tend to be healthy and live long in certain areas - without even trying - and the main difference seems to be the diet. On the other hand, low-carb and paleo-diets are built mainly on speculation; we don't know the least bit about what humans ate 100K years ago - well, we do now, actually, and it was a lot of plants and fruit and not too much meat - plus, of course, we don't know much about how long they lived due to lack of data. As I understand it, they didn't often get as old as 50 or 60.
It's your fucking coal plants. You have a ton of them and no emission regulations. Either clean their output or get rid of them.
But that's not why you created this force, is it? You'd rather use this PR stunt to blame random Chinese people grilling out in their yard.
They are investing very heavily in renewable energy, so they are hardly likely to be blind to the issue with coal. And if you have been to Beijing (you haven't, have you?) then you'll know that:
1) Next to nobody in Beijing has a 'yard' or garden in which to barbecue anything, and I have never seen people having barbecues in the parks and communal spaces around where they live. What the mayor is referring to is the enormous number of more or less illegal street vendors who offer various foods, very often things like lamb-kebabs, roasted sweet potatoes etc. They have tried to get rid of them for years, not least because of health concerns. Whether it actually contributes much to the smog, I can't say, but I'm open to the possibility.
2) The road dust is probably a far more important problem - that and private cars - since it is a very find powder: loess that blows in from the deserts to the north-west. It covers everything, and it the major component of what you see in the dramatic photos that get pulled out of the archive every time, as far as I can see. Not really smog, as far as I know - my wife's in Beijing at the moment, and she tells me that there isn't anything like what Western press reports; I can't see why she would lie to me about this, but I can see how a newspaper could make a dramatic write-up without checking facts too carefully.
The real problems causing air pollution in Beijing, apart from the dust-storms, are coal fired power plants and private cars. There is an absurd number of cars in Beijing. People in Beijing, for the most part, don't live in terraces (like in UK) or in American style sprawl; they live in high-rise apartment blocks, and since every family insists on having at least one car - or preferably more - they have huge problems not only driving around, but also finding a parking space in the evening. If you visit any of the residential areas after 5 PM, you will see cars parked almost in layers everywhere, most of them illegally.
So, you are right - the environment police is not there to keep an eye on people enjoying a quiet barbecue in the privacy of their leafy gardens. But it is actually a very good idea, all the same - the Chinese have a relaxed attitude to the law, is my impression; it is only one of several, interesting options in many cases, and rich people in particular feel that they are somewhat above laws that are clearly meant for the lower classes (this is not particularly a Chinese thing, rich Americans, Britons etc feel the same way). The main problem for the central government in China has always been that local governments have tended to ignore them in favour of building very friendly relations with whoever is a big shot in their area: in the past, rich landowners and war-lords, now-a-days perhaps more rich businessmen. In that context it makes good sense to have a centralized, independent police force to crack down on things like corruption and now also environmental crimes.
The question that never seems to get asked is: Why do these executives get these incredible salaries? Does anybody - apart from the tiny elite at the top - really think it is good value for money?
Some other interesting trivia for fellow fungiphiles: As the plants sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere, and failed to rot because of the lignin, CO2 levels dropped below 300ppm and oxygen levels soared to over 35%.
And a corollary: When we burn fossil fuel, we are releasing this carbon and using up the oxygen that was made available to life, when the carbon was stored, back then. Only this time, it will not be stored again - at least not by that process, no matter how many trees we plant. We really do have to stop burn fossil fuels - or otherwise come up with a way to store it permanently away again.
I get that impression from the fact that plants absorb it and in current times they're starved of it (compared to paleo history).
I think "some plants" is a more accurate term, since it not only depends on whether they have adequate access to water, nutrients etc, but as I understand it, it is not actually all plants that benefit from this, even if all other needs are met. Here's an article about this subject: https://www.newscientist.com/a...
I think the only thing you can accuse me of here is cherry picking.
Is that not bad enough? Climate change - as indeed science in general - is far to important to be dragged down to the level of politics.
Who gives a fuck? Seriously. Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere - especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
It is hard to imagine where you get the impression from, that "the biosphere quite likes" CO2. All we know is that a moderate increase in CO2 concentration and temperature makes certain plant species from certain climate zones grow faster; but I don't think there is anything like agreement about whether that translates into some sort of universal benefit for us all. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite: the sea-levels will rise, and more importantly, the weather will be more variable - which will cause increased, coastal erosion. Dry areas, like Sahel, Southern Europe and the American Plains, will most likely become drier, which will cause significantly increased migration away from these areas, and it will probably happen faster than, say, Canada's and Siberia's tundras will become able to sustain a large, human population. Coral reefs will be under severe strain and may die - unfortunately this is where far the most of commercial fisheries take place, if I remember correctly (something like that - they are important is the bottom line). All in all, it doesn't sound good to me.
And of course, this is just when we look at a 2 degrees rise; there are serious concerns that if we go above 4 degrees or so, we may start run-away effects, where the warming drives significant rises in greenhouse gases, which may well have been what happened on Venus. This is still speculative, of course, but even the possibility, that we might be not all that far away from such a tipping point ought to warn us to be less stupidly smug about not giving a fuck.
Preventing people from getting your movies for free does not in fact make them better able to afford your movies, or make it seem more worth it to those who can.
I'm not sure it is the price alone that keeps people from going to the cinema - a significant factor is probably also that what is produced is mostly so bland; the same, overworked clichees in slightly different packaging. Last I went to the cinema was just before Christmas 2014; I have made several attempts at going, but every time it turns out that there just isn't anything I can be bothered to watch. Even stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek seems like little more than run-of-the-mill action movie, slightly fluffed up. And if you can't be bothered to go and watch it, even when you like to go to the cinema, why waste space in your home on a pirated version?
Entertainment, both film, music and games, has run out of inspiration and imagination, that's what's wrong. People can't even be bothered to steal it any more, so all these exercises in DRM and 'anti-piracy' have little effect, that's my theory.
Well, if you want to be that clever, then you'll have to say that it all depends on your choice of frame of reference; you can choose one that keeps Earth at its centre, although it makes your calculations harder. And in fact, if you want to cleverer, you'd say that in the 4-dimensional manifold that is our current model of space-time, a frame of reference is only, at best, a reasonable, local approximation: you will be using a different tangent space at each point as you frame, and you will have to explain how, exactly, we are to interpret time and distance measured at one point, when we are at another point. This isn't entirely irrelevant - the passage of time is influenced by the gravity field, and we have clocks that are precise enough to measure a difference if you have two of them and place them on a staircase, one step apart.
A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election. The US does this all the time.
So that's OK, then? I think it is poor thinking to base your moral judgement on what others do, but that's perhaps beside the point. Yes, we all do it, and somewhere it is morally wrongto some extent, but the question here is: Should we worry about it? And I think the answer is yes - not because this is Russia, the old enemy, but because cyber attacks are increasingly dangerous to modern, industrialised nations. In the past we mostly had to worry about he US being a potential threat to the stability of the world, but now, with the internet and with cybercrime on a steep rise, there is a much more diffuse threat.
And the fact that America has, shamefully, interfered in the elections and other internal affairs of both democratic and un-democratic nations all over the world doesn't mean that it is OK; on the contrary. If the people of a democratic country can't trust that they got the government is legitimate, how can that not end badly? It will inevitably lead to uprisings or even civil war - I would have thought Americans in particular would have reason to feel cautious about that prospect.
I always thought rape was "sex without consent". Is that no longer true?
Borderline, I'd say - it ties in with the many cases of child molestation by famous people (like Jimmy Savill in UK), where the victims may have be argued to have consented in some cases (not a view that agree with, it has to be said), but they only did so because they were overawed ("star-struck"). It is also somewhat reminicent of the situation, where a manager uses his senior position to bully a junior, female employee to have sex with him. All in all, I think there is definitely an argument for calling this rape - consent was only acquired by false means and would not otherwise have been given. This is clearly worse than simple fraud and close to rape.
We can deny the reality of, well, reality as much as we like, but it is still reality. Climate change is real, and humans being the cause is real, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
BTW: The subject line is the motto of Galileo Academy of Science and Technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Academy_of_Science_and_Technology) - according this is what Galileo said on the way out, after having been ordered to deny that Earth moves around the Sun: "And yet it moves".
Obamacare is a clusterfuck in many ways, just as the previous system was a clusterfuck.
The interesting point here is of course why that is. As someone living in a country where universal, national health care is the norm, I know, quite positively, that this system works, and works very well. If there was the political will - and if the media and the economical interests running the US would allow an honest debate - you guys would be perfectly able to introduce a very good, national health care system of your own, which would run much smoother and more cheaply than what you have now, and you would still be able to have the luxury option of private health insurance if you wished. I know this from experience, as I said; but your whole country is in the pockets of far too powerful, economic interests: the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies etc etc, and that is why Americans are denied the better option of universal health care.
Exactly - if only the US had kept out all those bloody immigrants, like Werner von Braun or Einstein. Or all those people flooding over since the 1500s; the country would have been a quite different place now.
Socialism (defined as no private ownership of 'means of production') at a national level requires a command economy. No price signals, no profit motive, so no way to make it 'self organizing' like capitalism.
You would have an argument, if that was indeed what socialism was. However, just like capitalism isn't simply one thing, socialism has many shapes - it only really means that "things" are owned in common. As you can guess, exactly what "things" we are talking about is a matter of definition, as the definition of "owned in common". So, if all means of production were owned in common by the people working in the factory, on the farm etc, that would be a form of socialism. It would still be socialism, if these units of production were independent of the government and were in active competition with other units. In fact, there is a continuum from "total socialism" (if that makes sense), where everything is owned by everybody, to something very near to capitalism with a small 'c'. In conclusion, it is perfectly possible to have the benefits of a market economy in a socialist society.
There may be other reasons to dislike socialism as an idea, but this isn't it.
All problems are insurmountable if you don't even try to solve them. I can see why using roads could be attractive, if it can be made to work: most roads basically just sit there, unused for about 90% of the time. I think most country lanes are like that - maybe the occasional tractor, a few local inhabitants; and solar panels take up space that could be used for housing, agriculture or other useful purposes (including nature reserves). If you canÃt drive on them, then perhaps you can raise them up as a kind of roof over the roads, who knows; any way, this is an experiment to find out what the problems of doing this actually are.
Right now solar panels are too expensive, fragile, inefficient and a whole lot of other things, but all of these problems can be overcome. The problems we will have if we don't find a better way of producing energy (as well as ways of using it with much more sense), make sustainable energy one of the most pressing issues today (arguably more pressing even than war, disease and famine), and solar energy is one technology that might give us all we need. Other greenish energy production, like wind, fission and fusion, are either further away in time or burdened with other serious problems, and the energy density of solar is quite staggering; apparently you could power New York with the energy that hits a dinner plate (OK; I'm exaggerating, but it is actually quite remarkable how much energy descends from above). Energy storage is the only real problem with solar, and we will find ways, no doubt. We have to try all technologies that might give us sustainable energy production.
If I redefine aether as "the gaseous envelope of earth", this doesn't make the aether real. And neither does redefining aether as "space-time" make aether real.
We don't know what reality is - even the best models are only models. This is true for the ether theory as well as for GR and QM. The ether theory was quite plausible for a time, but as it turned out, it was too elusive and unwieldy, and when relativity came along, it gave a much simpler and more intuitive model. But neither GR and QM are reality - both theories must in the end fail, and we already know something about where: GR's assumptions about smoothness don't hold at the singularity that is assumed to exist in the centre of black holes, for example, and QM's standard model offers no clue to what "dark matter" and "dark energy" may be.
A lot of the concepts used in physics are just placeholders for things we donÃt understand, but which we can describe phenomenologically: force fields, particles, mass, electric charge etc. This enables us to make calculations, but it doesn't really add to our understanding in the sense that is explains these things in terms of something more fundamental - only general relativity attempts that with some success, in that it replaces the force of gravity with the interaction between inertial mass and the shape of space-time.
It'd be hilarious if this turns out to be pushing against some aspect of the normally intangible fabric of space-time, after physicists so thoroughly debunked luminiferous ether.
Well, I think the luminiferous ether perhaps didn't go away as much as it was reinterpreted in a form that was much easier to model and eventually became the space-time of GR. The ether was in many ways a sound enough idea - a kind of field of substance in which light propagated and which was sort of pulled along with things that moved. In many ways it was just one more field amongst the many we have been piling on since then to describe things we don't understand all that well.
Or maybe Newton's 3rd law isn't true in some circumstances. Now that would be exciting.
Quite so - possibly a bit too exciting. It would indicate a violation of Lorentz invariance symmetry, apparently; don't ask, I haven't spent the time understand it, but I'm sure a lot of things would look very different, if the fundamental conservation laws that follow from this were broken. No, if this works, and it does look that way, then there is something we have overlooked - there must be some momentum that is emitted in some way to produce a reaction-force.
Cheap comes in all sizes, I suppose. When you are old enough that your children have left to live their own lives, and you look back at nearly 30 years of experience with development, you begin to notice that you always seem to have money left over every month, and after a while you look differently at certain things like the price of a phone. For what I've got for my money, I think $600 was cheap - also considering that I don't buy a new one every few years. There are certainly phones out there that are far more expensive thatn what I would pay; but that goes for anything, really - hotels are my favourite in that respect: to me a cheap, but reasonable hotel would cost about 25 - 30 euro, and would have only just what is needed to stay overnight - that is what I prefer. But I came across one hotel in London where you can get a "room" that costs £18,000 per night. Admittedly, you do get 8 or 12 luxurious bedrooms, exclusive use of a butler, free use of one of the hotel's Rolls Royces (incl chauffeur) etc etc. Seen in that light, a mere £1500 per night probably looks very cheap, but I'm more into the basic options when it comes to accomodation - I can't see why I would stay in a hotel room for any length of time except when sleeping.
Human cells also gobble up asbestos fibres, if I remember correctly. I would be interested in knowing what studies are being made to check out potential negative consequences - as well as, of course, what this research promisis.
I haven't. One of the reasons I have stayed away from cyanogen and rooting until now is that when I have looked at what I can find about this subject, I can't shake off the feeling that this is mostly a bunch of script kiddies, who try to sound like they are cool and with it, but are actually rather dim - Beavis and Butthead trying to get you to blindly download and install something in the hope that it won't brick the device you have paid actual money for. My last, cheap phone still cost something like $600, so I will only start playing around with it like that, if I feel really confident in the guidance and the SW; and that means open source software and good quality documentation. And by good quality documentation I don't mean lots of pictures of how you click on menues, but thorough explanations of what to do, why to do it, and what to do if/when things go wrong.Unless you are very familiar with things, the worst experience you can have is to get stuck halfways with no idea what the hell to do next. That simply must not happen.
Correlation does not imply causation.... Perhaps people who are depressed and anxious seek out more social media.
There was a time, when saying this would have made you seem insightful, but that time is long gone. Surprising as it may be to you, the people who actually work with the scientific study of depression and anxiety are generally capable of thinking about several aspects of their material, and it would be really, really weird if they hadn't already spotted this one, thought it through and realised why the causality doesn't go that way. It's good to be skeptical - that is what scientists are, and that is why fundamentalists always hate them - but if you want your views to be respected, then you have to show respect in return, among other things by not assuming the scientists are complete idiots.
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Don't get me wrong, I certainly ain't anti-science. But with this kind of research we get contradicting results every other year. First milk was important for you, now milk is harmful. Eggs used to be the way to an early grave, now eggs are the fountain of youth. Cholesterol was deadly, now we need it like a drug.
Or maybe it is already the other way around again, I don't keep track to be honest.
And in between all that we have various other food crazes from low-carb to neanderthal diet. What the fuck, people?
I think you - and perhaps the majority of intelligent people - should stop reading popular science; or rather start learning what real science is actually like, so they can see through what popularisations of science say. Popular science is entertainment, simply; all attempts at making science "exciting" or "fun" are simply entertainment - it's like talking about "the biggest horse that ever was", which may give you a "wow", but it won't teach you much about farming. Real science is not primarily exciting - it consists of years of careful collection and analysis of data, little by little accumulating enough knowledge that either confirms or disproves one or more hypotheses. For every big "Wow!" there is usually a long, long series of "Hmm, this seems to point that way, but we need further study".
To a scientist reading this header over an article, it says "There has been a study that shows a correlation between brain health and diet - this is compatible with other, similar findings in other studies". It seems plausible, in my view, that a Mediterranean diet would be beneficial for the brain, unlike fad diets like low-carb or paleo. The reason I say this is that we have already known for many years, that people tend to be healthy and live long in certain areas - without even trying - and the main difference seems to be the diet. On the other hand, low-carb and paleo-diets are built mainly on speculation; we don't know the least bit about what humans ate 100K years ago - well, we do now, actually, and it was a lot of plants and fruit and not too much meat - plus, of course, we don't know much about how long they lived due to lack of data. As I understand it, they didn't often get as old as 50 or 60.
It's your fucking coal plants. You have a ton of them and no emission regulations. Either clean their output or get rid of them.
But that's not why you created this force, is it? You'd rather use this PR stunt to blame random Chinese people grilling out in their yard.
They are investing very heavily in renewable energy, so they are hardly likely to be blind to the issue with coal. And if you have been to Beijing (you haven't, have you?) then you'll know that:
1) Next to nobody in Beijing has a 'yard' or garden in which to barbecue anything, and I have never seen people having barbecues in the parks and communal spaces around where they live. What the mayor is referring to is the enormous number of more or less illegal street vendors who offer various foods, very often things like lamb-kebabs, roasted sweet potatoes etc. They have tried to get rid of them for years, not least because of health concerns. Whether it actually contributes much to the smog, I can't say, but I'm open to the possibility.
2) The road dust is probably a far more important problem - that and private cars - since it is a very find powder: loess that blows in from the deserts to the north-west. It covers everything, and it the major component of what you see in the dramatic photos that get pulled out of the archive every time, as far as I can see. Not really smog, as far as I know - my wife's in Beijing at the moment, and she tells me that there isn't anything like what Western press reports; I can't see why she would lie to me about this, but I can see how a newspaper could make a dramatic write-up without checking facts too carefully.
The real problems causing air pollution in Beijing, apart from the dust-storms, are coal fired power plants and private cars. There is an absurd number of cars in Beijing. People in Beijing, for the most part, don't live in terraces (like in UK) or in American style sprawl; they live in high-rise apartment blocks, and since every family insists on having at least one car - or preferably more - they have huge problems not only driving around, but also finding a parking space in the evening. If you visit any of the residential areas after 5 PM, you will see cars parked almost in layers everywhere, most of them illegally.
So, you are right - the environment police is not there to keep an eye on people enjoying a quiet barbecue in the privacy of their leafy gardens. But it is actually a very good idea, all the same - the Chinese have a relaxed attitude to the law, is my impression; it is only one of several, interesting options in many cases, and rich people in particular feel that they are somewhat above laws that are clearly meant for the lower classes (this is not particularly a Chinese thing, rich Americans, Britons etc feel the same way). The main problem for the central government in China has always been that local governments have tended to ignore them in favour of building very friendly relations with whoever is a big shot in their area: in the past, rich landowners and war-lords, now-a-days perhaps more rich businessmen. In that context it makes good sense to have a centralized, independent police force to crack down on things like corruption and now also environmental crimes.
The question that never seems to get asked is: Why do these executives get these incredible salaries? Does anybody - apart from the tiny elite at the top - really think it is good value for money?
Some other interesting trivia for fellow fungiphiles: As the plants sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere, and failed to rot because of the lignin, CO2 levels dropped below 300ppm and oxygen levels soared to over 35%.
And a corollary: When we burn fossil fuel, we are releasing this carbon and using up the oxygen that was made available to life, when the carbon was stored, back then. Only this time, it will not be stored again - at least not by that process, no matter how many trees we plant. We really do have to stop burn fossil fuels - or otherwise come up with a way to store it permanently away again.
I get that impression from the fact that plants absorb it and in current times they're starved of it (compared to paleo history).
I think "some plants" is a more accurate term, since it not only depends on whether they have adequate access to water, nutrients etc, but as I understand it, it is not actually all plants that benefit from this, even if all other needs are met. Here's an article about this subject: https://www.newscientist.com/a...
I think the only thing you can accuse me of here is cherry picking.
Is that not bad enough? Climate change - as indeed science in general - is far to important to be dragged down to the level of politics.
Who gives a fuck? Seriously. Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere - especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
It is hard to imagine where you get the impression from, that "the biosphere quite likes" CO2. All we know is that a moderate increase in CO2 concentration and temperature makes certain plant species from certain climate zones grow faster; but I don't think there is anything like agreement about whether that translates into some sort of universal benefit for us all. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite: the sea-levels will rise, and more importantly, the weather will be more variable - which will cause increased, coastal erosion. Dry areas, like Sahel, Southern Europe and the American Plains, will most likely become drier, which will cause significantly increased migration away from these areas, and it will probably happen faster than, say, Canada's and Siberia's tundras will become able to sustain a large, human population. Coral reefs will be under severe strain and may die - unfortunately this is where far the most of commercial fisheries take place, if I remember correctly (something like that - they are important is the bottom line). All in all, it doesn't sound good to me.
And of course, this is just when we look at a 2 degrees rise; there are serious concerns that if we go above 4 degrees or so, we may start run-away effects, where the warming drives significant rises in greenhouse gases, which may well have been what happened on Venus. This is still speculative, of course, but even the possibility, that we might be not all that far away from such a tipping point ought to warn us to be less stupidly smug about not giving a fuck.
Preventing people from getting your movies for free does not in fact make them better able to afford your movies, or make it seem more worth it to those who can.
I'm not sure it is the price alone that keeps people from going to the cinema - a significant factor is probably also that what is produced is mostly so bland; the same, overworked clichees in slightly different packaging. Last I went to the cinema was just before Christmas 2014; I have made several attempts at going, but every time it turns out that there just isn't anything I can be bothered to watch. Even stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek seems like little more than run-of-the-mill action movie, slightly fluffed up. And if you can't be bothered to go and watch it, even when you like to go to the cinema, why waste space in your home on a pirated version?
Entertainment, both film, music and games, has run out of inspiration and imagination, that's what's wrong. People can't even be bothered to steal it any more, so all these exercises in DRM and 'anti-piracy' have little effect, that's my theory.
Well, if you want to be that clever, then you'll have to say that it all depends on your choice of frame of reference; you can choose one that keeps Earth at its centre, although it makes your calculations harder. And in fact, if you want to cleverer, you'd say that in the 4-dimensional manifold that is our current model of space-time, a frame of reference is only, at best, a reasonable, local approximation: you will be using a different tangent space at each point as you frame, and you will have to explain how, exactly, we are to interpret time and distance measured at one point, when we are at another point. This isn't entirely irrelevant - the passage of time is influenced by the gravity field, and we have clocks that are precise enough to measure a difference if you have two of them and place them on a staircase, one step apart.
A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election. The US does this all the time.
So that's OK, then? I think it is poor thinking to base your moral judgement on what others do, but that's perhaps beside the point. Yes, we all do it, and somewhere it is morally wrongto some extent, but the question here is: Should we worry about it? And I think the answer is yes - not because this is Russia, the old enemy, but because cyber attacks are increasingly dangerous to modern, industrialised nations. In the past we mostly had to worry about he US being a potential threat to the stability of the world, but now, with the internet and with cybercrime on a steep rise, there is a much more diffuse threat.
And the fact that America has, shamefully, interfered in the elections and other internal affairs of both democratic and un-democratic nations all over the world doesn't mean that it is OK; on the contrary. If the people of a democratic country can't trust that they got the government is legitimate, how can that not end badly? It will inevitably lead to uprisings or even civil war - I would have thought Americans in particular would have reason to feel cautious about that prospect.
I always thought rape was "sex without consent". Is that no longer true?
Borderline, I'd say - it ties in with the many cases of child molestation by famous people (like Jimmy Savill in UK), where the victims may have be argued to have consented in some cases (not a view that agree with, it has to be said), but they only did so because they were overawed ("star-struck"). It is also somewhat reminicent of the situation, where a manager uses his senior position to bully a junior, female employee to have sex with him. All in all, I think there is definitely an argument for calling this rape - consent was only acquired by false means and would not otherwise have been given. This is clearly worse than simple fraud and close to rape.
We can deny the reality of, well, reality as much as we like, but it is still reality. Climate change is real, and humans being the cause is real, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
BTW: The subject line is the motto of Galileo Academy of Science and Technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Academy_of_Science_and_Technology) - according this is what Galileo said on the way out, after having been ordered to deny that Earth moves around the Sun: "And yet it moves".
That'd be the legislature: as unaccountable, secretive and corrupt as ever.
As befitting a democracy, no?
Obamacare is a clusterfuck in many ways, just as the previous system was a clusterfuck.
The interesting point here is of course why that is. As someone living in a country where universal, national health care is the norm, I know, quite positively, that this system works, and works very well. If there was the political will - and if the media and the economical interests running the US would allow an honest debate - you guys would be perfectly able to introduce a very good, national health care system of your own, which would run much smoother and more cheaply than what you have now, and you would still be able to have the luxury option of private health insurance if you wished. I know this from experience, as I said; but your whole country is in the pockets of far too powerful, economic interests: the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies etc etc, and that is why Americans are denied the better option of universal health care.
Exactly - if only the US had kept out all those bloody immigrants, like Werner von Braun or Einstein. Or all those people flooding over since the 1500s; the country would have been a quite different place now.
Socialism (defined as no private ownership of 'means of production') at a national level requires a command economy. No price signals, no profit motive, so no way to make it 'self organizing' like capitalism.
You would have an argument, if that was indeed what socialism was. However, just like capitalism isn't simply one thing, socialism has many shapes - it only really means that "things" are owned in common. As you can guess, exactly what "things" we are talking about is a matter of definition, as the definition of "owned in common". So, if all means of production were owned in common by the people working in the factory, on the farm etc, that would be a form of socialism. It would still be socialism, if these units of production were independent of the government and were in active competition with other units. In fact, there is a continuum from "total socialism" (if that makes sense), where everything is owned by everybody, to something very near to capitalism with a small 'c'. In conclusion, it is perfectly possible to have the benefits of a market economy in a socialist society.
There may be other reasons to dislike socialism as an idea, but this isn't it.
All problems are insurmountable if you don't even try to solve them. I can see why using roads could be attractive, if it can be made to work: most roads basically just sit there, unused for about 90% of the time. I think most country lanes are like that - maybe the occasional tractor, a few local inhabitants; and solar panels take up space that could be used for housing, agriculture or other useful purposes (including nature reserves). If you canÃt drive on them, then perhaps you can raise them up as a kind of roof over the roads, who knows; any way, this is an experiment to find out what the problems of doing this actually are.
Right now solar panels are too expensive, fragile, inefficient and a whole lot of other things, but all of these problems can be overcome. The problems we will have if we don't find a better way of producing energy (as well as ways of using it with much more sense), make sustainable energy one of the most pressing issues today (arguably more pressing even than war, disease and famine), and solar energy is one technology that might give us all we need. Other greenish energy production, like wind, fission and fusion, are either further away in time or burdened with other serious problems, and the energy density of solar is quite staggering; apparently you could power New York with the energy that hits a dinner plate (OK; I'm exaggerating, but it is actually quite remarkable how much energy descends from above). Energy storage is the only real problem with solar, and we will find ways, no doubt. We have to try all technologies that might give us sustainable energy production.
If I redefine aether as "the gaseous envelope of earth", this doesn't make the aether real. And neither does redefining aether as "space-time" make aether real.
We don't know what reality is - even the best models are only models. This is true for the ether theory as well as for GR and QM. The ether theory was quite plausible for a time, but as it turned out, it was too elusive and unwieldy, and when relativity came along, it gave a much simpler and more intuitive model. But neither GR and QM are reality - both theories must in the end fail, and we already know something about where: GR's assumptions about smoothness don't hold at the singularity that is assumed to exist in the centre of black holes, for example, and QM's standard model offers no clue to what "dark matter" and "dark energy" may be.
A lot of the concepts used in physics are just placeholders for things we donÃt understand, but which we can describe phenomenologically: force fields, particles, mass, electric charge etc. This enables us to make calculations, but it doesn't really add to our understanding in the sense that is explains these things in terms of something more fundamental - only general relativity attempts that with some success, in that it replaces the force of gravity with the interaction between inertial mass and the shape of space-time.
It'd be hilarious if this turns out to be pushing against some aspect of the normally intangible fabric of space-time, after physicists so thoroughly debunked luminiferous ether.
Well, I think the luminiferous ether perhaps didn't go away as much as it was reinterpreted in a form that was much easier to model and eventually became the space-time of GR. The ether was in many ways a sound enough idea - a kind of field of substance in which light propagated and which was sort of pulled along with things that moved. In many ways it was just one more field amongst the many we have been piling on since then to describe things we don't understand all that well.
Or maybe Newton's 3rd law isn't true in some circumstances. Now that would be exciting.
Quite so - possibly a bit too exciting. It would indicate a violation of Lorentz invariance symmetry, apparently; don't ask, I haven't spent the time understand it, but I'm sure a lot of things would look very different, if the fundamental conservation laws that follow from this were broken. No, if this works, and it does look that way, then there is something we have overlooked - there must be some momentum that is emitted in some way to produce a reaction-force.
Yet, here you are, doing what exactly? ;-)
Cheap comes in all sizes, I suppose. When you are old enough that your children have left to live their own lives, and you look back at nearly 30 years of experience with development, you begin to notice that you always seem to have money left over every month, and after a while you look differently at certain things like the price of a phone. For what I've got for my money, I think $600 was cheap - also considering that I don't buy a new one every few years. There are certainly phones out there that are far more expensive thatn what I would pay; but that goes for anything, really - hotels are my favourite in that respect: to me a cheap, but reasonable hotel would cost about 25 - 30 euro, and would have only just what is needed to stay overnight - that is what I prefer. But I came across one hotel in London where you can get a "room" that costs £18,000 per night. Admittedly, you do get 8 or 12 luxurious bedrooms, exclusive use of a butler, free use of one of the hotel's Rolls Royces (incl chauffeur) etc etc. Seen in that light, a mere £1500 per night probably looks very cheap, but I'm more into the basic options when it comes to accomodation - I can't see why I would stay in a hotel room for any length of time except when sleeping.
Not to belittle their achievement, but it has to be said (with a tongue in the eye/twinkle in cheek): China achieved this already in the 7th century!
Human cells also gobble up asbestos fibres, if I remember correctly. I would be interested in knowing what studies are being made to check out potential negative consequences - as well as, of course, what this research promisis.
has anyone tried CyanogenMod on it?
I haven't. One of the reasons I have stayed away from cyanogen and rooting until now is that when I have looked at what I can find about this subject, I can't shake off the feeling that this is mostly a bunch of script kiddies, who try to sound like they are cool and with it, but are actually rather dim - Beavis and Butthead trying to get you to blindly download and install something in the hope that it won't brick the device you have paid actual money for. My last, cheap phone still cost something like $600, so I will only start playing around with it like that, if I feel really confident in the guidance and the SW; and that means open source software and good quality documentation. And by good quality documentation I don't mean lots of pictures of how you click on menues, but thorough explanations of what to do, why to do it, and what to do if/when things go wrong.Unless you are very familiar with things, the worst experience you can have is to get stuck halfways with no idea what the hell to do next. That simply must not happen.
Correlation does not imply causation. ...
Perhaps people who are depressed and anxious seek out more social media.
There was a time, when saying this would have made you seem insightful, but that time is long gone. Surprising as it may be to you, the people who actually work with the scientific study of depression and anxiety are generally capable of thinking about several aspects of their material, and it would be really, really weird if they hadn't already spotted this one, thought it through and realised why the causality doesn't go that way. It's good to be skeptical - that is what scientists are, and that is why fundamentalists always hate them - but if you want your views to be respected, then you have to show respect in return, among other things by not assuming the scientists are complete idiots.
Trump is hobbling the EPA so badly that by the time he's done our smog will be so bad that we can't land airplanes either.
Not true - the smog will be so dense, you can land on top of it.