Look at the recommendations for body composition. A 6' male should weigh no more than 170lbs. At 190lbs he would be obese. At what, 210, he'd be morbidly obese
You need to make up more plausible figures. A 6' (183 cm) male with a mass of 220 lbs (100 kg) has a BMI of 29.9 kg/m**2, which is the top of the "overweight" range (25-29.9). The top of the normal range is 184 lbs, a mere 14 lbs greater than the figure you made up. Obesity starts above 220 and morbidly obese doesn't kick in until way above that.
the parent will just follow their kid only via technology, instead of talking to the kid, learning the kid to talk about what it's doing, keeping to its boundaries, etc.
As well as talking to your kids and actually having real interaction with them rather than treating them as a burden (watch the "back to school" commericals at the end of summer to find out how most parents feel about their kids) you can also live in a smaller community. I live in a town of about 100,000 people, and my kids can't go anywhere without someone they know being in the vicinity. It's loose enough that they have room to act like idiots and get into a certain amount of trouble, but secure enough that if anything really bad happens the odds of someone they know being nearby are really good. Being involved in your community--community theatre, sports, school stuff, etc--helps a lot as well.
This is the way human beings who actually care about their kids behave, rather than sticking a chip in a phone and hoping that keeping an eye on a dot on a screen will substitute for genuine engagement with their children's lives.
But the point is, other entities have the explicit purpose to cure illnesses: nonprofits and universities.
Universities are amongst the most mercenary organizations on Earth, and over the past twenty years there has been increasing focus on research that has a chance of bringing the university profits via licensing fees. In the worst case, universities are becoming cheap R&D labs for corporations via in-kind funded research, with both pure science and public health being allowed to fall through the cracks.
This will never change unless we go to socialized medicine, because people fundamentally go to see a doctor when they are sick, and not to manage their future potential illness burdens.
This does not follow. "Socialized medicine" is a very broad abstraction that can take on a wide variety of forms. Canada has what is normally thought of as socialized medicine, but our health care delivery system is still very much oriented toward "people go to see a doctor when they are sick." We do a better job of some aspects of prophylaxis, particularly with regard to peri-natal care, than the United States does, but because our system is one of socialized health insurance where doctors are still nominally private practitioners we have many of the same ills the U.S. health care system has, albeit at vastly lower cost and with somewhat better outcomes in terms of overall lifespan.
How a health care system is organized is fundamentally independent of whether or not it is socialized in some respects. One could have doctors as salaried employees of health-care corporations in a private system, or one could have doctors as mostly private practitioners in a socialized model as we do in Canada. Far more important than "who pays" is the nature of the payment system, and so long as we think of health care insurance as insurance there will be fundamental problems, because unlike other forms of insurance, absolutely everyone who has health care insurance will eventually get sick and die, unless it is offered only on a term basis, which most people would find unsatisfactory.
Canada's socialized system is not totally dissimilar from HMOs in the U.S., and both systems do pay more attention to preventative care than traditional insurance, but there are much easier ways to improve the finances of such organizations: de facto rationing of care (as in Canada) and practical selection of patients so that you serve primarily the healthiest part of the population (as in the U.S.)
I don't have any solution to these issues. Having lived in the both the U.S. and Canada, and as an businessperson, I am much happier with health care services and costs in Canada than in the U.S.--the extra I pay here in taxes is about equal to what I paid in health care premiums in the U.S. as an employee of a large institution, and if I were still in the U.S. I would not have been able to start my own business due to the risk of losing coverage. But no one sane is going to claim that the system here is ideal.
As to the question of why "consumers" don't choose generics: who is the consumer? The patient? The doctor who writes the perscription? Or the insurance company that pays for it? Even assuming it is the patient, the bulk of big pharma budgets are spent on advertising and marketing, and generics don't generally have the kind of profit margins required to compete with that.
However, I believe the AutoCAD _is_ the standard for 2D architectural drawing.
According to my architect ex-g/f, that is correct: her office uses AutoCAD pretty much exclusively, and have not been at all happy with Revit, the newer AutoDesk product being aimed at that market.
Part of the problem is that AutoCAD the program has been around forever, and architect/draughtsperson productivity with it is high because they know all its quirks and oddities. Autodesk would love to move toward more advanced tools, but the only way to do it is to either evolve the AutoCAD code base (which is probably a real mess by now) or to compete with themselves via things like Revit.
Successful companies compete with a mixture of excellent marketing and adequate technology. Failing companies compete with lawsuits and restraining orders.
Furthermore, it doesn't explain what the basic properties of a positive refraction index are (aside from saying that it's normal), let alone what negative indexes could do.
In ordinary optics, refractive index is the ratio of the velocity of light in vacuum (c) to the velocity in the material (v):
n = c/v
Since v <= c, n >= 1 is always true.
But light, being wavelike, has two velocities associated with it: the phase velocity, which is the velocity of an individual crest in a monochromatic light wave, and the group velocity, which is the velocity of a wave packet consisting of many frequencies. Depending on which velocity you care about, and how you deal with wave packets, it appears that you can extend the definition of refractive index in such a way that negative refractive index is meaningful. The discussions of this that I have seen online are uniformly confusing, so I'm not clear on exactly what is going on, although it is clear that negative extended refractive indices do make sense.
One analogy to think about is the conventional definition of resistance: R = V/I. Clearly by this definition resistance is always positive. But if instead you think of resistance as being the slope of the V/I curve, it is clearly possible for a device whose (conventional) resistance decreases with increasing current it is possible to have a slope that is negative, and this can be treated as "negative resistance". Tunnel diodes exhibit this effect.
If one were to be gloriously pedantic about this, one would only use the terms "negative extended refractive index" and "negative extended resistance", because "negative refractive index" and "negative resistance" are confusing oxymorons to the vast majority of people in the world who are at best familiar with the conventional definitions. And in fact, we usually do make this kind of distinction. We use terms like "electric car" because "car" means "internal combustion engine hydrocarbon-powered road vehicle" to the vast majority of people. Therefore headlines like, "New Car Does Not Need Gasline" would be obviously misleading and confusing if they actually meant "New Electric Car Does Not Need Gasoline."
Awards of 100% of real damages plus statutory punitive damages of $100 per victim per incident if negligence is demonstrated would do the trick real quick, I'd imagine.
Unfortunately, your imagination does not conform to reality. Punitive measures rarely have a dramatic effect on human behaviour.
This can easily be seen in actual data. Consider the death penalty.
The rate of executions in Texas jumped from about 5 per year in the 80's to over 20 per year in the 90's, and this four-fold increase seems correlated with a ~20% drop in the homocide rate over the next decade, but no one who is arguing from the data, rather from their imagination, would suggest that increasing punitive measures is the best way to alter human behaviour. If a five-fold increase in killing convicted murderers brings about only a 20% drop in the murder rate, and yet making Texas more like North Dakota (but warmer!) brings about a ten-fold drop in the murder rate, an objective observer might suggest that we spend our resources figuring out what it is about North Dakota (or other north-central states, or Japan, or Canada, or Switzerland) that results in fewer people killing each other.
The data suggest that neither firearms ownership nor cultural diversity (Canada is one of the most culturally diverse nations on Earth, with criminal gangs drawn from the four corners of the globe all trying to set up shop here) nor punitive penalties are the most important differentiating factor.
And when one moves from the realm of individual to corporate malfeasence and negligence, it is more than clear that companies are willing to take enormous risks in the name of short-term profits as Merck did with Vioxx.
Ergo, whatever you might want to believe, the facts are pretty clearly in favour of punitive measures being a very poor way to influence human behaviour. They are sometimes necessary, but should be the last tool of social control that we reach for, not the first.
There is no way that he can use the words "...real drop..." in the same sentence as "...it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion...".
I believe the "this conclusion" he is referring to is the conclusion that iTunes sales are "collapsing" (whatever "collapsing" means.) There is a drop over time in the data they examined (which is therefore a "real drop", as opposed to the other kind, I guess) but one cannot make any strong inference about the overall state of iTunes sales from this.
Abstraction has always been a tool for dishonesty. The Marxists were the grandmasters of this approach during the 20th century, and Western governments and media have been playing catch-up for the past few decades. We have not quite achieved the Orwellian heights that places like Iran, Cuba and North Korea are capable of, but we're running a very close second, and we have so much more power than those places that our lies are capable of doing far more damage.
Abstraction is a great convenience, and humans will sacrifice almost anything for the sake of convenience. But like all conveniences, excessive dependence on abstract terms becomes an impediment to thought and communication, particularly when it is not strictly circumscribed by the formalisms of science and scientific discourse. The thing that sets science apart from other human endeavours is just that it employs both formal (mathematical) and social methods that allow humans to use abstractions without being able to lie with them.
That's a pretty impressive achievement, and this little mess with iTunes data is a good demonstration why such limitations are necessary.
Translation: "Lots of JVMs will run this code so slowly that your customers will think their machines have locked up."
In some cases it is possible to control what JVM your customer uses. I once managed a Java dev team that produced great, fast code, including excellent Java3D graphics stuff. But performance on some customer's machines was terrible, because they were running one of those all-too-common JVMs that wasn't so good. My solution was to ship a good JRE as part of our install, hidden away in the application tree and used only by our application (thereby not breaking every other application on the machine that depended on the bad JRE's bugs.) This increased the size of our installer by 15 MB or so, but it was worth it to get a better customer experience. Our support calls dropped to almost nothing after that.
However, not everyone shipping a Java application has this luxury, particularly those writing fo rthe Web. To suggest to those people that they should adopt some particular programming practice because it won't cause major issues with a "good" JVM is like telling a drowning person that water is necessary for life. It's true, but it isn't the least bit relevant to the practical predicament the person is in.
It's never been proposed that hydrogen will magically solve the energy problem, just that it might be a good way to store/transport what energy we do produce.
And the author of this study makes a trivially false claim in this regard: "We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
No, we have an energy carrier problem. We have all kinds of sources of energy. Wind, wave and most of all solar are more than abundant enough to supply the world's energy needs if we could just package and transport that energy with reasonably high volumetric and gravimetric density. If those sources are not enough then nuclear, for all its problems, is perfectly capable of filling the gap. But all of these sources most easily produce electricity, which has limited utility as a carrier of energy, particularly for transportation. The energy density of batteries, to say nothing of the conversion efficiency at anything like full discharge, is far worse than hydrogen.
Beyond that, the author makes a strong claim about the economic feasibility of the hydrogen economy. We all know what an exact science economics is, and how economists routinely make accurate and empirically validated predictions of the future of technological trends. So the author is arguing about the wrong problem and reaching an implausibly strong conclusion.
What evolutionary reason was there to free people from slavery from example? It sure makes a lot of sense evolutionarily speaking to keep slaves.
Slavery is an artefact of agriculture. It was created by agriculture and it was destroyed by industrialization. It is alien to human society and human nature--we are evolved by nature to be more-or-less sympathetic to our fellow-beings, and while we have a lot of flexibility in this regard, societies that do not get enormous economic gain out of violating our tendency to treat each other semi-decently most of the time always fail in the face of societies that allow us to express that tendency.
So in fact, it makes no sense at all evolutionarily speaking to keep slaves, and the OP is absolutely correct: any mode of existence that goes against people's basic desires is, to adopt a useful term, unsustainable. This is as true of fantasies regarding "courses in basic self-mastery" as it is of more obviously coercive approaches.
Religious practices that fly in the face of human desires have resulted in more misery than anything else in the past several thousand years--if you want to see them in action I recommend "Reading Lolita in Tehran", the memoir of a female academic in Iran that gives some insight into the lives of women in a system of oppressive chasity.
Do not mistake individual choice for systematic, coercive imposition of some else's values, which is the only way any large-scale change is going to occur unless it is economically motivated. Look at the history of the early church, which progressed by co-oping pagan rites, rituals and holidays rather than attempting to just impose its own, if you don't believe me. Look at the history of actual changes in values, like the Reformation, if you think this can be done non-coercively.
On the hopeful side of the ledger, humans do have something of a penchant for taking care of their children, and the vast increase in energy efficiency in some sectors in the past thirty years has indicated what we can do if we get our basic desires lined up in the right direction. But simply wishing that we will "completely change our cultural values" in the next few decades or even centuries adds nothing useful to the practical debate as to how to adapt our high-energy lifestyle to the various challenges it is now facing.
I'd like to nominate this for a really terrible piece of science reporting.
Number of probabilities reported: zero.
Number of fractional changes reported: zero.
I'm quite willing to believe that the loss of Arctic sea ice and the shrinking ice cap are significant and we should be worried (although not, of course, about the polar bears, who have weathered far greater climate fluxuations than this.) But this article gives none of the information that a rational person would require to make a judgment on the issue.
The science on global climate change is imperfect, but certainly not junk. The reporting on global climate change is another matter entirely...
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
It is different because F/OSS has never had the single-minded goal that MS did in the 80's and 90's. "A computer on every desktop and in every home" has to be one of the best mission statements of any organization anywhere. It is actionable at all levels, from negotiating ubiquitous OEM deals to ensuring user-friendly features.
The problem facing MS now is that they have achieved their mission and have nothing to replace it with. In a decade we've gone from Win3.1's breakout to XP, which is a stable, fully-featured OS that satisfies the vast majority of needs of the vast majority of users. I run Linux (Slackware, which I've run since 0.96 days) on my servers and one laptop, but XP does everything I want on my business laptop and Windows development machine (some customers want Windows apps--go figure.) It's not like I'm a natural MS customer, it's just that their OS actually serves my needs.
MS is like Alexander the Great after his conquest of the East. Far from weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer, he was purportedly thinking about western conquests when he died. But his great mission in life, the conquest of Persia and it's dependencies, was finished. He had to pause and consider what he was going to do next before going on, whereas before that the mission was clear and all that mattered was its execution. (Note to history pendants: yeah, yeah, yeah.)
What we know about MS is: they are sitting on a mountain of cash, and they have a history of flailing around before figuring out what to do next. I expect we'll see a lot of very expensive flailing on the next few years. It'll be an interesting show that we all should enjoy watching.
Not only is the idea of "activities, not applications" old, it is not even a good idea. It puts a very important kind of choice in the hands of the person with the least information about what the user wants to do, which is extremely bad design.
People have heirarchies of goals. For example, I want to pass some course so I need to edit some document so I need to start... What I want to do at each level and how it relates to the other levels is entirely up to me, and no one else is going to be able to figure out what the appropriate choices are for me because they lack almost all of the relevant information about my heirarchy of goals. The "activities not applications" idea ties these levels together in a way that cannot be generally appropriate because the person doing the tying is perfectly ignorant of what the user actually wants to do.
To take a hardware example, a nail gun is not a replacement for a hammer, as it is almost completely useless for many of the functions that hammers are routinely used for, like smashing things. Frequently, I want to use a hammer for something other than driving nails, and if some idiot developer handed me a nail gun because they presumed they knew what I was going to do with the hammer it would be annoying to say the least. Why should a developer be choosing what tool I use? And what business does a developer have in deciding what "activities" are legitimate? I want a toolbox that I can do with what I please, not a finite, static list of "activities" that are tied to a bunch of tools that are unrelated to those activities except in some developer's imagination.
There is a role for guidance in UI design--a system that suggests a tool for a given job--but to design the whole UI around the notion that the UI designer personally knows what activities a user will want to perform and that the UI designer personally knows how the user will want to perform them is simply a mistake. There are some tasks where the association is sort of clear, but the fact that "some A are B" does not imply that "all A are B", now does it? To defend this kind of design one needs to be able to prove that in the majority of cases the UI desiger, who has no clue about the user's actual goals, is more likely to make appropriate judgments about how to achieve them than the user ever will. This is a tall order.
The fact is that a lot of what users do is ill-defined and amorphous and not easily subject to classification. For example: what "activity" am I engaged in right now? Posting to/.? Editing a text field in a form? Editing a document? Maybe I type all my posts off-line and then paste them to the form so I maintain a local copy, and thankfully I am not limited in my choices by the bounds of someone else's imagination.
If you have a system that requires a bunch of things to happen before any natural selection advantage is given, I would find that unreasonable.
Unfortunately, this statement is indistinguishable from, "If you have a system that requires a bunch of things to happen before it is indisputably obvious to me personally that any natural selection advantage is given, I would find that unreasonable."
So the question is: does your inability to see the advantage in something constitute evidence against evolution by variation and natural selection? Obviously not. Scientific truth is independent of your abilities.
To give your position any scientific strength you need to specify what measure of advange you are going to apply, so that everyone can apply the same measure of advantage. Also, you need to make clear what you are arguing for. Obviously no one sane believes that evolution by variation and natural selection has no role whatsoever in the diversity of life. To deny that would be to deny the factual basis of the bulk of chemistry and physics on top of biology. So undoubtedly any measure of advantage will reveal many cases where evolution has taken place.
You presumeably believe that in some cases there will be an increase in the diversity of life that is not accompanied by any selective advantage. Thus, you will have proven that evolution is true and correct in a limited domain--this is the normal process of scientific development. Newtonian physics is not wrong, just limited to a given domain. Likewise, no one who understands what evolution is thinks that it will ever be replaced as one of the primary explanation for the diversity of life. There are simply too many cases where all the transitional forms have been found and documented for that to happen.
But in the case where you find conserved non-advantageous characteristics, what would you do next in terms of figuring out the cause of that process? Certainly you cannot invoke "God does it", because by invoking ideas of advantage and so on you are speaking in scientific terms, and it would be completely dishonest to pull that kind of bait-and-switch. So what do you think might drive evolution in cases where variation and natural selection does not?
There is a colossal difference between the happenings of genetic material changing vs the structure of genetic material changing.
I believe you mean that the re-ordering of specific nucleotide sequences is somehow different from larger-scale changes, such as chromosome fusion, or perhaps the RNA->DNA change that is postulated to have happened ~1 billion years ago.
It is not clear what this difference would be. Chemistry is chemistry, and when you get down to it, all "evolutionary" changes are just chemical changes to the genome. So to claim that some changes are believable and others are not would require some difference in the chemistry of various changes. But no such difference exists.
And we have plenty of evidence that genetic changes occur on all scales. Most obviously, human chromosome 2 is clearly the fusion of two other chromosomes (which have been given the rather antropocentric names of 2p and 2q) in other primates. There is nothing that prevents such fusions from occuring, and we have evidence that they do, and such large changes undoubtedly have a big effect on that ability of individuals to interbreed, which is the basic requirement for the creation of a new species.
So you can (and no doubt will) believe what you like. But you need to be aware that you are not just denying the well-known facts underpinning evolutionary biology. You are also denying a great deal of chemistry (and by implication physics).
They certainly didn't get into how it was pretty much a miracle that we actually won that war.
That would be a miracle, because you didn't.:-)
Both sides claim victory in the War of 1812 because neither side lost, and if you didn't lose you must have won, right? For some reason no one has ever introduced the concept of a tie into warfare. It's a bit odd when you think about it.
The de-militarization of the Great Lakes was arguably a win for both sides, but like most wars the losses on both sides were more significant than the gains. Economists tell us that rational individuals would never go to war, because it makes no economic sense. This was certainly the case in 1812, and the fact that both sides claim victory when both should have accepted it as a defeat says something about the level of rationality amongst humans.
Remember that Monty Python quote: "But what have the Romans given us?" "Roads" "Ok, besides that, what have the Romans given us?" "Sewerage systems." And so on.
Rome "gave" the world roads by conquering it, and those roads were fundamentally military technology--their purpose was primarily to facilitate the rapid movement of troops about the Empire. And to give aid to Africans rather than Africa would in fact require conquest or something like it. Somalia. Rawanda. Darfur.
If one were to use Rome as a model, it would be an argument in favour of military spending on technology in the fond hope that some benefits will trickle down to the wider polity, and there is evidence that this has happened in the past. There is no doubt that WWII gave a great boost to a wide range of technologies. The space program also had significant spin-off benefits. Not all government subisdies are wasteful dead losses, although many certainly are.
On the face of it, it appears doubtful that this "Solider of the Future" program will result in comparable benefits, and certain that if the kind of money being expended on it were focused on, say, public health initiatives, that it would save far more lives.
This is an excellent paper that highlights many of the issues that will be encountered as the naive realists promoting the semantic web hit the hard fact that data quality is poor and identitification is hard. From the paper's conclusions:
The goal of full/complete automation is some years away. Currently, quality and availability of data is often a key challenge given the limited number of high quality and useful data sources. Significant work is required in certain tasks, such as entity disambiguation.
As a practical tool the Semantic Web has all of the problems that no-fly lists have. People share names with each other and one individual may appear under multiple names. Datasets are radically incomplete, and an awareness of the possible uses to which data may be put will encourage the less scrupulous amongst us to deliberatly devalue datasets by including misleading or incomplete information.
Even without deliberate poisoning of the data, it is doubtful that standard vocabularies will be used in sufficiently consistent ways by various institutions and individuals to create homogenous (and therefore useful) datasets. For example, people who do multi-centre cancer trials expend an enormous amount of energy on data curation and auditing, which includes actual site visits to institutions and periodic audits of data, as well as centralized control of what gets into the final database. And this is for data collected by cancer centers and cancer docs who are nominally committed to following precise protocols and have been given training in what the fields in the various forms are supposed to mean. Yet centres can and do get delisted from studies due to lack of compliance.
The same thing can be seen in nominally standardized data formats like MAGE-ML and its cousins: industry-standard XML-based languages for marking up genomic datasets. There are specific elements that are intended for particular pieces of data, but a depressing amount of the time companies decide to put the really important stuff in a catch-all element, because "it's easier" than understanding the well-documented and clearly defined format.
Likewise, medical images created in DICOM format by major equipment manufacturers not infrequently have clear and blatant violations of the DICOM standard, despite over a decade of effort to ensure a reasonable level of compliance. And these are not subtle violations, but missing required fields, or incorrect data in required fields ("because all our images are 512x512 why should we have to fill in the width and height all the time? It's easier to just leave them zero.")
People are stupid and lazy. I know I am. And we use the same words to mean different things, and different words to mean the same thing. The Semantic Web requires people to be smart and hardworking, and to use standardized vocabularies in standardized ways. Decades of failed or at best partially successful data exchange protocols strongly suggest that these requirements will not be fulfilled.
They do everything but publish a paper in a journal.
They actually do more than that--they often show stuff that does not work. In my applied physics papers I always try to include a section called "Things that did not work so well". Referees sometimes kick at the language, but the spirit is correct: every paper should include at least a mention of the stuff the experimenter tried that did not pan out, because if it seemed like a good idea to YOU, it is going to seem like a good idea to others, and by mentioning the issues you find with it you will save others time and wasted effort.
Jesus was very specific about living by the sword, turning the other cheek to our enemies, and loving all even those who don't love us.
Matthew 10:34: (Jesus instructs his followers) Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Matthew 26:51-54 (Judas betrays Jesus to the high preists) Suddenly, one of those with Jesus put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?"
It is certainly plausible based on the second passage quoted that Jesus had no problem with his followers carrying swords, but didn't want them using them in that particular circumstance. The first quote above is general doctrine the second is regarding the specific circumstances of his arrest. Then again, one can plausibly interpret the first quote allegorically, but then you're on that slippery slope that leads all to quickly to "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" territory. After all, any Inquisitor would tell you with a straight face and pure heart that torturing heretics until they repented was an act of love, because the heretic's immortal soul was being saved from eternal damnation.
So it would be wrong to think that Jesus was very clear on the matter of swords and violence. There is very, very little in the Bible that is clear and unambiguous, and believing there is clarity in the Bible is a sure sign one is at risk of becoming a danger to oneself and others.
Of my colleagues about 5% categorically refuse to travel to the U.S. for conferences or employment.
This conforms to my experience as well. I've worked in the U.S. in the past, as recently as last summer, but with the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends habeas corpus for aliens, I will no longer enter the U.S. for any reason. YMMV, but I'd strongly recommend any non-American who can avoid it, to stay out of the U.S. until the current fight between the government and the consitution is over. There is no doubt that the constitution will win in the end, but who wants to be one of the tens of thousands being tortured in secret prisons while that happens?
America has not been a safe place for foreign high-tech workers for some time, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it a considerably less safe place. You may look at this and think, "Well, I'm not a Syrian-born Muslim, so I'm in no danger." But I'm sure Arar, if the thought crossed his mind at all, thought, "I am a Canadian citizen, going peacefully about my business, in no way connected to terrorism of any kind, so I'm in no danger."
Basically, what he's done with his system is come up with a (completely consistent, as far as I can tell from scanning from his website) framework where singularities now have a defined value
And despite the carping we are seeing here, no doubt prompted in part by how dumb TFA is, this is an interesting pursuit, although as you point out there are some serious issues with it.
Mathematicians sometimes talk about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (the linked essay is by someone named Hamming, who ought to be familiar to/. readers, and is an extremely intelligent response to Wigner's crypto-creationist essay of the same name). But despite this "unreasonable effectivness" the fact is that algebraic descriptions of reality routinely contain singularities and false solutions that are pure artefacts of description. We, as scientists and engineers, routinely avoid the singularities and throw away the false solutions. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a mathematical description of reality that didn't have this quality? As a scientist, I sometimes feel like I have Tourette's Syndrome: in the midst of a clear and lucid description of some physical system I suddenly find myself spewing obscene singularities or hoping no one will notice the outburst of advanced waves that is flooding uncontrollably forth.
For some reason, mathematicians don't spend much time dealing with these gross inadequacies (although let a physicist come up with some new descriptive language and they'll take an interest, as Dirac learned.) They may feel it isn't fruitful, or there may simply be no approach that isn't obviously, trivially, wrong. Or fruitful approaches may require major fixes to other parts of math, as the current one appears to do. But in any case it is a worthy goal, and I don't think this guy deserves quite the rough ride he is getting here.
For some reason the IOP won't let me at the full paper even though I've set up an account, but the mention of emulsion detectors set my radar off. I did work on a possible axion candidate (the anomalous e+/e- pairs from ORANGE and EPOS experiments in Germany in the late 80's, whose results are now widely believed to have been fraudulent after the non-detection at Argonne) and one of the interesting things about digging through data that don't make no sense is that the field tends to become an X-files-like catch-all of weird stuff that no one has ever been able to explain.
Emulsion results figured in a number of speculations, and it became clear that they are not used much because they are extremely hard to interpret and extremely easy to mess up.
The idea of a nuclear emulusion detector is simple: you bang a beam of whatever into a photographic emulsion layer edge on, and then develop it and look for particle tracks. For the tiny fraction of events where everything stays pretty much in the plane of the emulsion, all is well. For the vast majority of events that have lots of transverse momentum, you're pretty much screwed. Properly registered multi-layer emulsions can help, but it is a business fraught with interpretive errors and strange anomalies that no other detector technology finds.
It may be that the flakey emulsion detectors with all of their known problems really are better at what they do than everything else, or it may be that detectors that are known to be problematic are producting problematic results. I know which conclusion Ockham would jump to.
In fairness to the experimenter, the short lifetime of this axion candidate makes emulsions appealing, but I'd be very cautious about any new particle candidate that could only be detected in emulsion experiments. If I were still in the game, I'd be thinking about how to replicate these results in an independent configuration, maybe with some kind of finely-layered scintillation detector.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the recommendations for body composition. A 6' male should weigh no more than 170lbs. At 190lbs he would be obese. At what, 210, he'd be morbidly obese
You need to make up more plausible figures. A 6' (183 cm) male with a mass of 220 lbs (100 kg) has a BMI of 29.9 kg/m**2, which is the top of the "overweight" range (25-29.9). The top of the normal range is 184 lbs, a mere 14 lbs greater than the figure you made up. Obesity starts above 220 and morbidly obese doesn't kick in until way above that.
the parent will just follow their kid only via technology, instead of talking to the kid, learning the kid to talk about what it's doing, keeping to its boundaries, etc.
As well as talking to your kids and actually having real interaction with them rather than treating them as a burden (watch the "back to school" commericals at the end of summer to find out how most parents feel about their kids) you can also live in a smaller community. I live in a town of about 100,000 people, and my kids can't go anywhere without someone they know being in the vicinity. It's loose enough that they have room to act like idiots and get into a certain amount of trouble, but secure enough that if anything really bad happens the odds of someone they know being nearby are really good. Being involved in your community--community theatre, sports, school stuff, etc--helps a lot as well.
This is the way human beings who actually care about their kids behave, rather than sticking a chip in a phone and hoping that keeping an eye on a dot on a screen will substitute for genuine engagement with their children's lives.
But the point is, other entities have the explicit purpose to cure illnesses: nonprofits and universities.
Universities are amongst the most mercenary organizations on Earth, and over the past twenty years there has been increasing focus on research that has a chance of bringing the university profits via licensing fees. In the worst case, universities are becoming cheap R&D labs for corporations via in-kind funded research, with both pure science and public health being allowed to fall through the cracks.
This will never change unless we go to socialized medicine, because people fundamentally go to see a doctor when they are sick, and not to manage their future potential illness burdens.
This does not follow. "Socialized medicine" is a very broad abstraction that can take on a wide variety of forms. Canada has what is normally thought of as socialized medicine, but our health care delivery system is still very much oriented toward "people go to see a doctor when they are sick." We do a better job of some aspects of prophylaxis, particularly with regard to peri-natal care, than the United States does, but because our system is one of socialized health insurance where doctors are still nominally private practitioners we have many of the same ills the U.S. health care system has, albeit at vastly lower cost and with somewhat better outcomes in terms of overall lifespan.
How a health care system is organized is fundamentally independent of whether or not it is socialized in some respects. One could have doctors as salaried employees of health-care corporations in a private system, or one could have doctors as mostly private practitioners in a socialized model as we do in Canada. Far more important than "who pays" is the nature of the payment system, and so long as we think of health care insurance as insurance there will be fundamental problems, because unlike other forms of insurance, absolutely everyone who has health care insurance will eventually get sick and die, unless it is offered only on a term basis, which most people would find unsatisfactory.
Canada's socialized system is not totally dissimilar from HMOs in the U.S., and both systems do pay more attention to preventative care than traditional insurance, but there are much easier ways to improve the finances of such organizations: de facto rationing of care (as in Canada) and practical selection of patients so that you serve primarily the healthiest part of the population (as in the U.S.)
I don't have any solution to these issues. Having lived in the both the U.S. and Canada, and as an businessperson, I am much happier with health care services and costs in Canada than in the U.S.--the extra I pay here in taxes is about equal to what I paid in health care premiums in the U.S. as an employee of a large institution, and if I were still in the U.S. I would not have been able to start my own business due to the risk of losing coverage. But no one sane is going to claim that the system here is ideal.
As to the question of why "consumers" don't choose generics: who is the consumer? The patient? The doctor who writes the perscription? Or the insurance company that pays for it? Even assuming it is the patient, the bulk of big pharma budgets are spent on advertising and marketing, and generics don't generally have the kind of profit margins required to compete with that.
However, I believe the AutoCAD _is_ the standard for 2D architectural drawing.
According to my architect ex-g/f, that is correct: her office uses AutoCAD pretty much exclusively, and have not been at all happy with Revit, the newer AutoDesk product being aimed at that market.
Part of the problem is that AutoCAD the program has been around forever, and architect/draughtsperson productivity with it is high because they know all its quirks and oddities. Autodesk would love to move toward more advanced tools, but the only way to do it is to either evolve the AutoCAD code base (which is probably a real mess by now) or to compete with themselves via things like Revit.
Successful companies compete with a mixture of excellent marketing and adequate technology. Failing companies compete with lawsuits and restraining orders.
Furthermore, it doesn't explain what the basic properties of a positive refraction index are (aside from saying that it's normal), let alone what negative indexes could do.
In ordinary optics, refractive index is the ratio of the velocity of light in vacuum (c) to the velocity in the material (v):
n = c/v
Since v <= c, n >= 1 is always true.
But light, being wavelike, has two velocities associated with it: the phase velocity, which is the velocity of an individual crest in a monochromatic light wave, and the group velocity, which is the velocity of a wave packet consisting of many frequencies. Depending on which velocity you care about, and how you deal with wave packets, it appears that you can extend the definition of refractive index in such a way that negative refractive index is meaningful. The discussions of this that I have seen online are uniformly confusing, so I'm not clear on exactly what is going on, although it is clear that negative extended refractive indices do make sense.
One analogy to think about is the conventional definition of resistance: R = V/I. Clearly by this definition resistance is always positive. But if instead you think of resistance as being the slope of the V/I curve, it is clearly possible for a device whose (conventional) resistance decreases with increasing current it is possible to have a slope that is negative, and this can be treated as "negative resistance". Tunnel diodes exhibit this effect.
If one were to be gloriously pedantic about this, one would only use the terms "negative extended refractive index" and "negative extended resistance", because "negative refractive index" and "negative resistance" are confusing oxymorons to the vast majority of people in the world who are at best familiar with the conventional definitions. And in fact, we usually do make this kind of distinction. We use terms like "electric car" because "car" means "internal combustion engine hydrocarbon-powered road vehicle" to the vast majority of people. Therefore headlines like, "New Car Does Not Need Gasline" would be obviously misleading and confusing if they actually meant "New Electric Car Does Not Need Gasoline."
Awards of 100% of real damages plus statutory punitive damages of $100 per victim per incident if negligence is demonstrated would do the trick real quick, I'd imagine.
Unfortunately, your imagination does not conform to reality. Punitive measures rarely have a dramatic effect on human behaviour.
This can easily be seen in actual data. Consider the death penalty.
North Dakota has one of the lowest homocide rates in the U.S. and has not had the death penatly since the 1930's. The homocide rate in Texas is ten times higher, and yet Texas executes people on a regular basis.
The rate of executions in Texas jumped from about 5 per year in the 80's to over 20 per year in the 90's, and this four-fold increase seems correlated with a ~20% drop in the homocide rate over the next decade, but no one who is arguing from the data, rather from their imagination, would suggest that increasing punitive measures is the best way to alter human behaviour. If a five-fold increase in killing convicted murderers brings about only a 20% drop in the murder rate, and yet making Texas more like North Dakota (but warmer!) brings about a ten-fold drop in the murder rate, an objective observer might suggest that we spend our resources figuring out what it is about North Dakota (or other north-central states, or Japan, or Canada, or Switzerland) that results in fewer people killing each other.
The data suggest that neither firearms ownership nor cultural diversity (Canada is one of the most culturally diverse nations on Earth, with criminal gangs drawn from the four corners of the globe all trying to set up shop here) nor punitive penalties are the most important differentiating factor.
And when one moves from the realm of individual to corporate malfeasence and negligence, it is more than clear that companies are willing to take enormous risks in the name of short-term profits as Merck did with Vioxx.
Ergo, whatever you might want to believe, the facts are pretty clearly in favour of punitive measures being a very poor way to influence human behaviour. They are sometimes necessary, but should be the last tool of social control that we reach for, not the first.
There is no way that he can use the words "...real drop..." in the same sentence as "...it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion...".
I believe the "this conclusion" he is referring to is the conclusion that iTunes sales are "collapsing" (whatever "collapsing" means.) There is a drop over time in the data they examined (which is therefore a "real drop", as opposed to the other kind, I guess) but one cannot make any strong inference about the overall state of iTunes sales from this.
Abstraction has always been a tool for dishonesty. The Marxists were the grandmasters of this approach during the 20th century, and Western governments and media have been playing catch-up for the past few decades. We have not quite achieved the Orwellian heights that places like Iran, Cuba and North Korea are capable of, but we're running a very close second, and we have so much more power than those places that our lies are capable of doing far more damage.
Abstraction is a great convenience, and humans will sacrifice almost anything for the sake of convenience. But like all conveniences, excessive dependence on abstract terms becomes an impediment to thought and communication, particularly when it is not strictly circumscribed by the formalisms of science and scientific discourse. The thing that sets science apart from other human endeavours is just that it employs both formal (mathematical) and social methods that allow humans to use abstractions without being able to lie with them.
That's a pretty impressive achievement, and this little mess with iTunes data is a good demonstration why such limitations are necessary.
A good JVM will run this code nearly as fast...
Translation: "Lots of JVMs will run this code so slowly that your customers will think their machines have locked up."
In some cases it is possible to control what JVM your customer uses. I once managed a Java dev team that produced great, fast code, including excellent Java3D graphics stuff. But performance on some customer's machines was terrible, because they were running one of those all-too-common JVMs that wasn't so good. My solution was to ship a good JRE as part of our install, hidden away in the application tree and used only by our application (thereby not breaking every other application on the machine that depended on the bad JRE's bugs.) This increased the size of our installer by 15 MB or so, but it was worth it to get a better customer experience. Our support calls dropped to almost nothing after that.
However, not everyone shipping a Java application has this luxury, particularly those writing fo rthe Web. To suggest to those people that they should adopt some particular programming practice because it won't cause major issues with a "good" JVM is like telling a drowning person that water is necessary for life. It's true, but it isn't the least bit relevant to the practical predicament the person is in.
It's never been proposed that hydrogen will magically solve the energy problem, just that it might be a good way to store/transport what energy we do produce.
And the author of this study makes a trivially false claim in this regard: "We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
No, we have an energy carrier problem. We have all kinds of sources of energy. Wind, wave and most of all solar are more than abundant enough to supply the world's energy needs if we could just package and transport that energy with reasonably high volumetric and gravimetric density. If those sources are not enough then nuclear, for all its problems, is perfectly capable of filling the gap. But all of these sources most easily produce electricity, which has limited utility as a carrier of energy, particularly for transportation. The energy density of batteries, to say nothing of the conversion efficiency at anything like full discharge, is far worse than hydrogen.
Beyond that, the author makes a strong claim about the economic feasibility of the hydrogen economy. We all know what an exact science economics is, and how economists routinely make accurate and empirically validated predictions of the future of technological trends. So the author is arguing about the wrong problem and reaching an implausibly strong conclusion.
What evolutionary reason was there to free people from slavery from example? It sure makes a lot of sense evolutionarily speaking to keep slaves.
Slavery is an artefact of agriculture. It was created by agriculture and it was destroyed by industrialization. It is alien to human society and human nature--we are evolved by nature to be more-or-less sympathetic to our fellow-beings, and while we have a lot of flexibility in this regard, societies that do not get enormous economic gain out of violating our tendency to treat each other semi-decently most of the time always fail in the face of societies that allow us to express that tendency.
So in fact, it makes no sense at all evolutionarily speaking to keep slaves, and the OP is absolutely correct: any mode of existence that goes against people's basic desires is, to adopt a useful term, unsustainable. This is as true of fantasies regarding "courses in basic self-mastery" as it is of more obviously coercive approaches.
Religious practices that fly in the face of human desires have resulted in more misery than anything else in the past several thousand years--if you want to see them in action I recommend "Reading Lolita in Tehran", the memoir of a female academic in Iran that gives some insight into the lives of women in a system of oppressive chasity.
Do not mistake individual choice for systematic, coercive imposition of some else's values, which is the only way any large-scale change is going to occur unless it is economically motivated. Look at the history of the early church, which progressed by co-oping pagan rites, rituals and holidays rather than attempting to just impose its own, if you don't believe me. Look at the history of actual changes in values, like the Reformation, if you think this can be done non-coercively.
On the hopeful side of the ledger, humans do have something of a penchant for taking care of their children, and the vast increase in energy efficiency in some sectors in the past thirty years has indicated what we can do if we get our basic desires lined up in the right direction. But simply wishing that we will "completely change our cultural values" in the next few decades or even centuries adds nothing useful to the practical debate as to how to adapt our high-energy lifestyle to the various challenges it is now facing.
...it may not.
I'd like to nominate this for a really terrible piece of science reporting.
Number of probabilities reported: zero.
Number of fractional changes reported: zero.
I'm quite willing to believe that the loss of Arctic sea ice and the shrinking ice cap are significant and we should be worried (although not, of course, about the polar bears, who have weathered far greater climate fluxuations than this.) But this article gives none of the information that a rational person would require to make a judgment on the issue.
The science on global climate change is imperfect, but certainly not junk. The reporting on global climate change is another matter entirely...
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
It is different because F/OSS has never had the single-minded goal that MS did in the 80's and 90's. "A computer on every desktop and in every home" has to be one of the best mission statements of any organization anywhere. It is actionable at all levels, from negotiating ubiquitous OEM deals to ensuring user-friendly features.
The problem facing MS now is that they have achieved their mission and have nothing to replace it with. In a decade we've gone from Win3.1's breakout to XP, which is a stable, fully-featured OS that satisfies the vast majority of needs of the vast majority of users. I run Linux (Slackware, which I've run since 0.96 days) on my servers and one laptop, but XP does everything I want on my business laptop and Windows development machine (some customers want Windows apps--go figure.) It's not like I'm a natural MS customer, it's just that their OS actually serves my needs.
MS is like Alexander the Great after his conquest of the East. Far from weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer, he was purportedly thinking about western conquests when he died. But his great mission in life, the conquest of Persia and it's dependencies, was finished. He had to pause and consider what he was going to do next before going on, whereas before that the mission was clear and all that mattered was its execution. (Note to history pendants: yeah, yeah, yeah.)
What we know about MS is: they are sitting on a mountain of cash, and they have a history of flailing around before figuring out what to do next. I expect we'll see a lot of very expensive flailing on the next few years. It'll be an interesting show that we all should enjoy watching.
This is new?
... What I want to do at each level and how it relates to the other levels is entirely up to me, and no one else is going to be able to figure out what the appropriate choices are for me because they lack almost all of the relevant information about my heirarchy of goals. The "activities not applications" idea ties these levels together in a way that cannot be generally appropriate because the person doing the tying is perfectly ignorant of what the user actually wants to do.
/.? Editing a text field in a form? Editing a document? Maybe I type all my posts off-line and then paste them to the form so I maintain a local copy, and thankfully I am not limited in my choices by the bounds of someone else's imagination.
Not only is the idea of "activities, not applications" old, it is not even a good idea. It puts a very important kind of choice in the hands of the person with the least information about what the user wants to do, which is extremely bad design.
People have heirarchies of goals. For example, I want to pass some course so I need to edit some document so I need to start
To take a hardware example, a nail gun is not a replacement for a hammer, as it is almost completely useless for many of the functions that hammers are routinely used for, like smashing things. Frequently, I want to use a hammer for something other than driving nails, and if some idiot developer handed me a nail gun because they presumed they knew what I was going to do with the hammer it would be annoying to say the least. Why should a developer be choosing what tool I use? And what business does a developer have in deciding what "activities" are legitimate? I want a toolbox that I can do with what I please, not a finite, static list of "activities" that are tied to a bunch of tools that are unrelated to those activities except in some developer's imagination.
There is a role for guidance in UI design--a system that suggests a tool for a given job--but to design the whole UI around the notion that the UI designer personally knows what activities a user will want to perform and that the UI designer personally knows how the user will want to perform them is simply a mistake. There are some tasks where the association is sort of clear, but the fact that "some A are B" does not imply that "all A are B", now does it? To defend this kind of design one needs to be able to prove that in the majority of cases the UI desiger, who has no clue about the user's actual goals, is more likely to make appropriate judgments about how to achieve them than the user ever will. This is a tall order.
The fact is that a lot of what users do is ill-defined and amorphous and not easily subject to classification. For example: what "activity" am I engaged in right now? Posting to
If you have a system that requires a bunch of things to happen before any natural selection advantage is given, I would find that unreasonable.
Unfortunately, this statement is indistinguishable from, "If you have a system that requires a bunch of things to happen before it is indisputably obvious to me personally that any natural selection advantage is given, I would find that unreasonable."
So the question is: does your inability to see the advantage in something constitute evidence against evolution by variation and natural selection? Obviously not. Scientific truth is independent of your abilities.
To give your position any scientific strength you need to specify what measure of advange you are going to apply, so that everyone can apply the same measure of advantage. Also, you need to make clear what you are arguing for. Obviously no one sane believes that evolution by variation and natural selection has no role whatsoever in the diversity of life. To deny that would be to deny the factual basis of the bulk of chemistry and physics on top of biology. So undoubtedly any measure of advantage will reveal many cases where evolution has taken place.
You presumeably believe that in some cases there will be an increase in the diversity of life that is not accompanied by any selective advantage. Thus, you will have proven that evolution is true and correct in a limited domain--this is the normal process of scientific development. Newtonian physics is not wrong, just limited to a given domain. Likewise, no one who understands what evolution is thinks that it will ever be replaced as one of the primary explanation for the diversity of life. There are simply too many cases where all the transitional forms have been found and documented for that to happen.
But in the case where you find conserved non-advantageous characteristics, what would you do next in terms of figuring out the cause of that process? Certainly you cannot invoke "God does it", because by invoking ideas of advantage and so on you are speaking in scientific terms, and it would be completely dishonest to pull that kind of bait-and-switch. So what do you think might drive evolution in cases where variation and natural selection does not?
There is a colossal difference between the happenings of genetic material changing vs the structure of genetic material changing.
I believe you mean that the re-ordering of specific nucleotide sequences is somehow different from larger-scale changes, such as chromosome fusion, or perhaps the RNA->DNA change that is postulated to have happened ~1 billion years ago.
It is not clear what this difference would be. Chemistry is chemistry, and when you get down to it, all "evolutionary" changes are just chemical changes to the genome. So to claim that some changes are believable and others are not would require some difference in the chemistry of various changes. But no such difference exists.
And we have plenty of evidence that genetic changes occur on all scales. Most obviously, human chromosome 2 is clearly the fusion of two other chromosomes (which have been given the rather antropocentric names of 2p and 2q) in other primates. There is nothing that prevents such fusions from occuring, and we have evidence that they do, and such large changes undoubtedly have a big effect on that ability of individuals to interbreed, which is the basic requirement for the creation of a new species.
So you can (and no doubt will) believe what you like. But you need to be aware that you are not just denying the well-known facts underpinning evolutionary biology. You are also denying a great deal of chemistry (and by implication physics).
Isn't it delightful that you can post a lengthy and fact-filled response to a nutjob's falsehoods and get modded as a troll?
I wonder what the moderator thought you were trolling for? Truth?
They certainly didn't get into how it was pretty much a miracle that we actually won that war.
:-)
That would be a miracle, because you didn't.
Both sides claim victory in the War of 1812 because neither side lost, and if you didn't lose you must have won, right? For some reason no one has ever introduced the concept of a tie into warfare. It's a bit odd when you think about it.
The de-militarization of the Great Lakes was arguably a win for both sides, but like most wars the losses on both sides were more significant than the gains. Economists tell us that rational individuals would never go to war, because it makes no economic sense. This was certainly the case in 1812, and the fact that both sides claim victory when both should have accepted it as a defeat says something about the level of rationality amongst humans.
Remember that Monty Python quote: "But what have the Romans given us?" "Roads" "Ok, besides that, what have the Romans given us?" "Sewerage systems." And so on.
Rome "gave" the world roads by conquering it, and those roads were fundamentally military technology--their purpose was primarily to facilitate the rapid movement of troops about the Empire. And to give aid to Africans rather than Africa would in fact require conquest or something like it. Somalia. Rawanda. Darfur.
If one were to use Rome as a model, it would be an argument in favour of military spending on technology in the fond hope that some benefits will trickle down to the wider polity, and there is evidence that this has happened in the past. There is no doubt that WWII gave a great boost to a wide range of technologies. The space program also had significant spin-off benefits. Not all government subisdies are wasteful dead losses, although many certainly are.
On the face of it, it appears doubtful that this "Solider of the Future" program will result in comparable benefits, and certain that if the kind of money being expended on it were focused on, say, public health initiatives, that it would save far more lives.
This is an excellent paper that highlights many of the issues that will be encountered as the naive realists promoting the semantic web hit the hard fact that data quality is poor and identitification is hard. From the paper's conclusions:
The goal of full/complete automation is some years away. Currently, quality and availability of data is often a key challenge given the limited number of high quality and useful data sources. Significant work is required in certain tasks, such as entity disambiguation.
As a practical tool the Semantic Web has all of the problems that no-fly lists have. People share names with each other and one individual may appear under multiple names. Datasets are radically incomplete, and an awareness of the possible uses to which data may be put will encourage the less scrupulous amongst us to deliberatly devalue datasets by including misleading or incomplete information.
Even without deliberate poisoning of the data, it is doubtful that standard vocabularies will be used in sufficiently consistent ways by various institutions and individuals to create homogenous (and therefore useful) datasets. For example, people who do multi-centre cancer trials expend an enormous amount of energy on data curation and auditing, which includes actual site visits to institutions and periodic audits of data, as well as centralized control of what gets into the final database. And this is for data collected by cancer centers and cancer docs who are nominally committed to following precise protocols and have been given training in what the fields in the various forms are supposed to mean. Yet centres can and do get delisted from studies due to lack of compliance.
The same thing can be seen in nominally standardized data formats like MAGE-ML and its cousins: industry-standard XML-based languages for marking up genomic datasets. There are specific elements that are intended for particular pieces of data, but a depressing amount of the time companies decide to put the really important stuff in a catch-all element, because "it's easier" than understanding the well-documented and clearly defined format.
Likewise, medical images created in DICOM format by major equipment manufacturers not infrequently have clear and blatant violations of the DICOM standard, despite over a decade of effort to ensure a reasonable level of compliance. And these are not subtle violations, but missing required fields, or incorrect data in required fields ("because all our images are 512x512 why should we have to fill in the width and height all the time? It's easier to just leave them zero.")
People are stupid and lazy. I know I am. And we use the same words to mean different things, and different words to mean the same thing. The Semantic Web requires people to be smart and hardworking, and to use standardized vocabularies in standardized ways. Decades of failed or at best partially successful data exchange protocols strongly suggest that these requirements will not be fulfilled.
They do everything but publish a paper in a journal.
They actually do more than that--they often show stuff that does not work. In my applied physics papers I always try to include a section called "Things that did not work so well". Referees sometimes kick at the language, but the spirit is correct: every paper should include at least a mention of the stuff the experimenter tried that did not pan out, because if it seemed like a good idea to YOU, it is going to seem like a good idea to others, and by mentioning the issues you find with it you will save others time and wasted effort.
Jesus was very specific about living by the sword, turning the other cheek to our enemies, and loving all even those who don't love us.
Matthew 10:34: (Jesus instructs his followers) Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Matthew 26:51-54 (Judas betrays Jesus to the high preists) Suddenly, one of those with Jesus put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?"
It is certainly plausible based on the second passage quoted that Jesus had no problem with his followers carrying swords, but didn't want them using them in that particular circumstance. The first quote above is general doctrine the second is regarding the specific circumstances of his arrest. Then again, one can plausibly interpret the first quote allegorically, but then you're on that slippery slope that leads all to quickly to "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" territory. After all, any Inquisitor would tell you with a straight face and pure heart that torturing heretics until they repented was an act of love, because the heretic's immortal soul was being saved from eternal damnation.
So it would be wrong to think that Jesus was very clear on the matter of swords and violence. There is very, very little in the Bible that is clear and unambiguous, and believing there is clarity in the Bible is a sure sign one is at risk of becoming a danger to oneself and others.
Of my colleagues about 5% categorically refuse to travel to the U.S. for conferences or employment.
This conforms to my experience as well. I've worked in the U.S. in the past, as recently as last summer, but with the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends habeas corpus for aliens, I will no longer enter the U.S. for any reason. YMMV, but I'd strongly recommend any non-American who can avoid it, to stay out of the U.S. until the current fight between the government and the consitution is over. There is no doubt that the constitution will win in the end, but who wants to be one of the tens of thousands being tortured in secret prisons while that happens?
America has not been a safe place for foreign high-tech workers for some time, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it a considerably less safe place. You may look at this and think, "Well, I'm not a Syrian-born Muslim, so I'm in no danger." But I'm sure Arar, if the thought crossed his mind at all, thought, "I am a Canadian citizen, going peacefully about my business, in no way connected to terrorism of any kind, so I'm in no danger."
Basically, what he's done with his system is come up with a (completely consistent, as far as I can tell from scanning from his website) framework where singularities now have a defined value
/. readers, and is an extremely intelligent response to Wigner's crypto-creationist essay of the same name). But despite this "unreasonable effectivness" the fact is that algebraic descriptions of reality routinely contain singularities and false solutions that are pure artefacts of description. We, as scientists and engineers, routinely avoid the singularities and throw away the false solutions. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a mathematical description of reality that didn't have this quality? As a scientist, I sometimes feel like I have Tourette's Syndrome: in the midst of a clear and lucid description of some physical system I suddenly find myself spewing obscene singularities or hoping no one will notice the outburst of advanced waves that is flooding uncontrollably forth.
And despite the carping we are seeing here, no doubt prompted in part by how dumb TFA is, this is an interesting pursuit, although as you point out there are some serious issues with it.
Mathematicians sometimes talk about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (the linked essay is by someone named Hamming, who ought to be familiar to
For some reason, mathematicians don't spend much time dealing with these gross inadequacies (although let a physicist come up with some new descriptive language and they'll take an interest, as Dirac learned.) They may feel it isn't fruitful, or there may simply be no approach that isn't obviously, trivially, wrong. Or fruitful approaches may require major fixes to other parts of math, as the current one appears to do. But in any case it is a worthy goal, and I don't think this guy deserves quite the rough ride he is getting here.
So, the claim that it's a particle is dubious.
For some reason the IOP won't let me at the full paper even though I've set up an account, but the mention of emulsion detectors set my radar off. I did work on a possible axion candidate (the anomalous e+/e- pairs from ORANGE and EPOS experiments in Germany in the late 80's, whose results are now widely believed to have been fraudulent after the non-detection at Argonne) and one of the interesting things about digging through data that don't make no sense is that the field tends to become an X-files-like catch-all of weird stuff that no one has ever been able to explain.
Emulsion results figured in a number of speculations, and it became clear that they are not used much because they are extremely hard to interpret and extremely easy to mess up.
The idea of a nuclear emulusion detector is simple: you bang a beam of whatever into a photographic emulsion layer edge on, and then develop it and look for particle tracks. For the tiny fraction of events where everything stays pretty much in the plane of the emulsion, all is well. For the vast majority of events that have lots of transverse momentum, you're pretty much screwed. Properly registered multi-layer emulsions can help, but it is a business fraught with interpretive errors and strange anomalies that no other detector technology finds.
It may be that the flakey emulsion detectors with all of their known problems really are better at what they do than everything else, or it may be that detectors that are known to be problematic are producting problematic results. I know which conclusion Ockham would jump to.
In fairness to the experimenter, the short lifetime of this axion candidate makes emulsions appealing, but I'd be very cautious about any new particle candidate that could only be detected in emulsion experiments. If I were still in the game, I'd be thinking about how to replicate these results in an independent configuration, maybe with some kind of finely-layered scintillation detector.