Why don't the theorists stick to explaining what can actually be observed and measured, instead of making up stuff in order to prop up theories that have more likely found their limits. I can just feel which way Occam's Razor is eventually going to cut on this one.
Unfortunately for you, the universe doesn't care a fig for your feelings. Cardinal Bellarmine could "just feel" which way Occam's Razor was going to cut on the whole heliocentric thing, but that didn't make a damn bit of difference to how best to describe the universe in the most parsimonious way.
This is what differentiates science from religion: becoming a scientist involves training in a kind of epistemological ruthlessness, so that enough of us to get the edge on our feelings often enough that we learn something now and then about how the universe actually is, rather than how we'd like it to be.
The article contains one of the nicest comments I've seen on the whole galactic-dynamics, large-scale cosmology situation:
"Dark Matter particles come naturally from physics, with beautiful symmetries and explain cosmology beautifully; they tend to be everywhere. The real mystery is how to keep them away from some corners of the universe. Also Dark Matter comes hand- in-hand with Dark Energy. It would be more beautiful if there were one simple answer to all these mysteries"
This is the essential point: the large family of unrelated dark matter particles required to explain different aspects of large-scale dynamics without messing up anything else is just not very elegant or pretty. That doesn't mean it is wrong, but when we start multiplying entities in the way that is required to use dark matter to explain dynamics on different scales it gives us pause. When we further have to fine-tune the properties of the different, unrelated particles to ensure they don't have any effect in places where they are not needed...well, with enough free parameters you can fit an elephant.
As an ad hoc rule for theory selection, we would like our theories to have as few free parameters as possible, and when the number of free parameters starts getting close to the number of phenomena we are trying to explain we start to get queazy. Newtonian gravity is beautiful because with one free parameter (G) we get to explain the motion of the wandering stars, tides, and falling bodies. General relativity has at least one more free parameter--the cosmological constant, which is not an "addition" to the theory but a perfectly ordinary constant of integration that has a formal mathematical place in the theory even if it happens to have a value of zero. But GR explains a lot of stuff that Newton does not, so it makes people happy too.
The problem with non-dark-matter explanations of large scale dynamics has been that they have so far had a large and basically arbitrary number of free parameters, and beyond that they have had some nasty mathematical properties. So if this really is a "simple" non-Newtonian theory of gravity it would be quite exciting. This, of course, is why theorists need to keep freebasing new ideas: it can take decades of sifting through speculation and failure before someone finds a viable way forward.
Cheap tabletop neutrons means cheap Pu-239 without the cost & mess of having a breeder fission reactor...
The neutron flux you get from sources like this is orders of magnitude smaller than reactor fluxes. They have no practical utility in transmutation. Even in reactors the fraction of 238U transmuted to 239Pu is miniscule, and no matter what the process of neutron production is the activated fuel is extremely radioactive, making the chemical processing for reprocessing a delicate and dangerous thing. Fortunately, we aren't likely to see anyone but a nation-state building plutonium bombs any time soon.
So the production of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups is just not a risk. However, the use of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups is an (eventual) certainty, given that we're up to our necks in the things. In round figures there are something like 10,000 nuclear weapons on the planet today, or one for every 600,000 people. With that many lying around we are bound to have one wind up in the wrong hands eventually, and when it does it will be used.
Back in the '50's it was common to argue that nuclear weapons would require a world government to regulate their use. The Cold War made that both impossible and unnecessary. Today, it is looking more plausible again, particularly as the international community is making strong and stronger moves toward violating Iranian sovereignity to prevent them from even creating power reactors.
This attitude is a religion in itself - and your generalizations are basically based on observations of religion based purely on the media or by listening to others like yourself.
Fascinating--you apparently know all about me, my religious upbringing, my studies in ancient Christianity and the history of the English church, and my broad reading in non-Christian religions. This is a fine example of religious thinking: when faced with something that challenged an article of your faith, you made something up that protected your faith.
I grant you that many minor Christian sects have at one time or the other questioned the divinity of Christ. The Gnostics were at it pretty much from the off. But no major Christian denomination would even consider recognizing such sects as Christian until the latter half of the twentieth century, and the Christian denominations to which the majority of Christians have been subject since the Middle Ages have spent far more time killing people for questioning Christ's divinity than encouraging them.
You need to look at Christianity beyond what a few atypical modern sects believe. I've known UU's who call themselves "Christians", but that does not make them so. Based on my deep and extensive knowledge of Christianity across the last two thousand years and across the world today, including many years of personal experience as a Christian I am comfortable standing by my assessment of Christ's divinity as central to Christianity's mythos (in saying "divinity" I intend to be agnostic regarding person/body distinctions.) If you take away the divinity of Christ you are left with just another Jewish preacher, a footnote to history whose sacrifice on the cross was simply an unfortunate turn of political events, no different from any other Jewish prophet who came to a bad end at the hands of secular or religious authority.
You and people like you may want to call yourself Christians, but I am willing to bet you are in fact Christian-inspired humanists, and that you do not believe anything that the majority of Christian thinkers or followers at any time in the past two thousand years would recognize as being doctrinally close to the teachings of Jesus or the Pauline church. You cannot simply believe whatever you damn well please and claim on that basis that you are a Christian. The Nicen Creed, the 39 Articles, something has to be held in common between Christians, or the word means nothing.
Finally, if being willing to question everything is in your view a religion, then what in your view is not a religion? Or by "religion" do you simply mean "any set of foundational beliefs whatsoever, however tentative, however open to revision, however empirical"? If so, then I can only say, "that word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means." It is certainly nothing like what most people mean by it, as most people have no difficulty at all distinguishing religious beliefs from empirical, scientific, or humanist ones.
I think such absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain in the face of how much there is in the world to understand.
The general principle should be not "to doubt and question everything", but to be willing to doubt and question anything.
It is simply silly to actually doubt and question everything. It would be a huge and pointless mental burden.
But the willingness to question anything seems to me to be an essential attribute of a civilized, rational person. I know damned well I don't have all the answers, but it seems to me insane to suggest that there are some questions that ought not to be asked.
The opposite of this view is religion. All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. Jews are not allowed to question their special relationship with God. Muslims are not allowed to question the unity of God. None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
This kind of willful epistemological blindness will always be opposed to science, which holds that we should be willing to ask any meaningful question.
This is false. To you all the nice people who have thoughtfully replied to my comment with pedantic outrage, let me remind you what hummassa (157160) has pointed out in a mysteriously low-moderated response:
C++/CLI will not compile the STL.
This has been my own experience with C++/CLI, and one of the primary reasons for my being so hard-assed about the name. This is not a minor deviation from the standard. It is a radical deficiency. The STL is a core piece of any C++ programmer's toolkit, and any compiler in 2006 that will not compile it is not a C++ compiler, and should never be refered to as C++, and should not have a name that could possibly be confused with C++.
This is like having a FORTRAN compiler that can't handle LAPACK. If I created something called FORTRAN/CLI that couldn't compile LAPACK people would rightly yell at me. MS deserves to be smacked on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for doing the equivalent to C++.
It took about 800 years for temperatures to drop 0.4 C to the minimum before the Industrial Revolution and only 200 years since then to rise 0.8 C, an 8X difference in rate of change.
It appears temperatures were flat between 1860 and somewhere between 1910 and 1920, then rose sharply until somewhere around 1940 when they became flat again for 40 years, after which we have experienced another sharp increase between 1980 and the early 2000's. So rather than having had a global warming trend for the past 200 years, we appear to have had 80 years of warming where the rise in temperature has been far faster than 0.8 C/200 years.
Is anyone doing research on this structure? It is extremely pronounced. There is a temptation to dismiss this micro-structure as irrelevant sub-variation on uninteresting scales, but I don't think we know enough about climate to say that.
Anthropogenic greenhouse forcing is still unproven, although it appears pretty compelling to everyone but the anti-scientific true believers whose faith told them that this article said the earth was only as warm as it was in 800 AD. Detailed study of the decade-scale variations in recent global temperatures might produce more definitive proof regarding the major drivers of contemporary climate change, one way or the other.
Why didn't they have a third group that could see everything group #1 saw, and *randomly generated* download counts? If I see a song has been downloaded numerous times, listen to it, and it's crap, I'm sure as hell not downloading a copy to save if it sucks. I don't care how many people listen to something, but I would consider download counts an indicator of what I should try first... At least until I realized the download counts were meaningless. If they repeat the experiment with the third group and that group downloads random crap like lemmings then maybe they have something worth reporting... Otherwise, they've proven nothing.
False. The probability of a song becoming popular in the group that saw the download numbers was poorly correlated with the rating given the song by the group who did not see the download numbers. These two pieces of information are sufficient to untangle the relative importance of perceived quality vs popularity. Any competent statistical analyst would know that.
Simply because you cannot see how to do something does not mean it cannot be done, or that that people who designed an experiment that you are not competent to analyze are stupid. This study has all the information required to show that we do exactly what you say you would never do: we tend to follow the crowd, regardless of the crowd's taste. I have no doubt I do this, and I am equally sure you do. This sort of group-think tendency is one of the fundamental aspects of human behaviour that makes us such successful animals, able to form large social groups and communities spontaneously on the most flimsy bases.
Denial of a scientific result because it runs contrary to what you would like to believe about yourself is very popular in places like Syria and the Whitehouse just now, but it is no sort of behaviour for any self-respecting human being living in a secular age.
C++/CLI seems to be a (standardized) proprietary extension to the C++ language that allows it to interface well with the rest of the.Net architecture. It's not a huge departure from the core language by any means, at least not enough of one to require a complete name change.
Compilers have no sense of humour. If a language is not ISO C++, it is not C++ and should not have C++ as part of the name. I'm dating myself, but I've worked with "FORTRAN" compilers that didn't support FORTRAN 77 (which was the standard at the time) and to all intents and purposes they were not FORTRAN compilers--they were "some proprietary FORTRAN-like-language compilers" and completely useless if you wanted to compile many perfectly ordinary FORTRAN programmes.
The issue here is that the use of the C++ name is a big marketing issue. But to apply the C++ name in any variant to a language that is not C++ is fundamentally misleading and dishonest. This is because humans are lazy and stupid, and tend to drop the modifier and think of "C++/CLI" as simple "C++"--the article points out that MS documentation has many examples of code samples labelled "C++" with no "CLI" modifier that are not, in fact, C++. They are C++/CLI.
And as I said, compilers have no sense of humour--they don't care that "C++/CLI" is "almost" C++. They see non-standard syntax and barf. So it is very important for those of us who want our code to compile and who want to be able to communicate with others to keep the name "C++" as pure as possible. This isn't being uptight--it is a purely pragmatic concern about keeping marketing droids as far from technology as possible so that software professionals can communicate with each other as clearly and unambigously as possible given the limitations we all have as human beings.
Nope, I'm pretty sure that's more due to the fact that they don't do stupid things as often.
Yeah, like doing all the dangerous jobs. Although the stereotypical testosterone-driven behaviour you cite can't be completely discounted, it is not nearly as important as differences in employment choices, which account for a significant part of the difference in male/female lifespan in the developed world. The most dangerous professions--farmer, faller*, miner, etc--are all male-dominated, and men dominate in workplace areas where hazardous chemicals and carcinogens are most common.
We, as a society, are continually failing our men--encouraging them to behave in ways that shorten their lives and lower their quality of life.
[* a faller is a logger, the guy who actually cuts down trees. It's a good way to die.]
Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts.
This is the difference between science and politics.
In politics, the only thing that matters is the impression that you create. People vote for the impression, and live with the result.
In science, we try to keep politics to the minimum, and experimental investigation of empirical reality is one of the primary means of doing so. So a scientist, unaware of the impressions created by the two political parties in the U.S., looking at the data, would conclude that Democrats were the party of fiscal probity and Republicans were the party of spending money like drunken cowboys.
That people continue to trot out this incredible statement that the Republicans are less likely to run up a huge deficit and Democrats are less likely to balance the budget, when for the past twenty years exactly the opposite has been true, is a measure of how alien and anomalous science is in human experience.
This is why science is precious and must be defended. It is the only way we know of getting past impressions to something that at the very least is not the diametric opposite of the truth.
I find the quote interesting because it relates a similar experience to religious conversion, ie: acceptance of the unknowable.
Godel's theorem says nothing about "unknowability". It is about provability within a consistent axiomatic system.
I know any amount of stuff by means other than proving it within a consistent axiomatic system. I know my name. I know my favourite colour. I know I'm wasting my time trying to explain something on Slashdot.
Likewise, it is perfectly possible to know if a given theorem is true or false within a system of formal logic without being able to prove that theorem. It may be very hard to know in any given case, but nothing in Godel's proof puts an absolute barrier to knowability.
Only people who are confused about the nature of knowledge, and for some unaccountable reason think formal proof is the only means of knowledge (I'd like to see a formal proof of that proposition) are able to experience the "revelation" of Godel's insight. And they certainly need it.
None of this says that there are not unknowable things (there are--quantum mechanics tells us that there are things we cannot know). Just that Godel's theorem addresses only formal proof, not knowability.
Heavy use of code generators is always a good place to start--the less code you write, the fewer bugs you will create.
Distributed applications are very, very hard. It has all the joy of multi-threaded code with latency and communications issues added in. Stability of the overall system can only be achieved by a layered design: I've never seen the design patter described, but there is a "Manager Pattern" in which one process takes responsibility for controlling another process or set of processes. Autonomous restart is not a good idea because the single node that has experienced a crash does not have all the information required to make a good judgement about what to do. An external manager process that has an overview of the whole system status will do better.
Also, restarting a process and hoping the crash does not happen again is not in general the right thing to do, as students of the Ariane V disaster will realize. In that case there were multiple redundant processors that all had the same bug (relative to the inputs they were getting from the new vehicle). In most cases restarting after a crash will just result in another crash. Realistically, you need to be able to inform the user that something bad has happened and ideally give the user the opportunity to intervene (change parameters, for example) before restarting the process. This may require that the whole data analysis run be restarted, again indicating the need for an external manager process to co-ordinate everything.
For IPC, if you are using a common language on all platforms I strongly favour XML serialization and sockets. Any good code generator will generate serialization code to dump your classes to an XML string, and you can then send the string through a socket. It is relatively easy to do this, and avoids the huge overheads that CORBA involves (the only large project I've used CORBA on has since stripped it all out as being too heavy-weight, a decision I think is quite reasonable.)
Using a solid framework like Qt or wxWidgets (which I've honestly found to be superior to Qt in many respects) will help reduce the amount of code you write. For crash-free code you must use open-source frameworks as much as possible, because every set of libs has bugs, and the only way you can track them down and fix them is if you have the source.
Marriage as conceived in the modern world is fundamentally about mutual aid. This is a new, radical idea, at most a few hundred years old and probably a good deal less than that. There have been at various times and places in history a huge range of marriage arrangements, from arranged marriages to plural marriages to things that to a modern eye look far more like concubinage than marriage. Yet no where did this diversity wind up with "anybody marrying anything."
Homosexual marriage is based on an even more radical variant of the modern idea of marraige: that it is a relationship of mutual aid between equals. Once this definition of marriage is admited, and to many of us it seems like quite a healthy and positive thing, it is obvious that homosexual marriages ought to have the same status in law as heterosexual ones.
If you are willing to live up to the legal, economic and social obligations of marriage with your roommate or a group, then get married, with my blessing.
Isn't it interesting how the trolls like the one you're replying to never seem to notice how trivializing of marriage their focus on the sex is, as if the only thing that distinguished marriage from other relationships is the fact that the parties to it get to have sex with each other with the blessing of the law, the church, god, and everybody.
Marriage is not just--or even primarily--about sex! It is about mutual aid and care, and taking shared responsibility, including shared responsibility for children. How one is wired up sexually is not an issue. That hardly describes a relationship between room-mates.
So here's a guide for trolls: if the only distinguishing feature of a relationship is sex, it's a hookup. If the distinguishing feature of a relationship is an openly-stated intent to help each other and enjoy each other's company through good times and bad for the rest of your lives, it's a marriage. See how the sex of the parties involved just doesn't come into it?
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
This requires that you believe that abstract properties like the sexuality of the partners are more important than the concrete properties of the individuals involved.
This seems to me to be absurd. Two loving, caring parents of the same sex are surely better than two nasty, cruel parents of opposite sexes. I once naively assumed that everyone agrees on this, but I now know for a fact that many Bible-believing Christians do not. Instead, they believe that homosexuality is akin to drug abuse in terms of the harm it does to individuals and their children, although when pressed on the nature of the harm they retreat into abstract, unprovable, or provably false claims.
The very language of the GM reaks of homophobia: "Anyone can report and we will take appropriate action. While it may seem ok because they are truly a heterosexual couple in real life, in game they are two females. Please keep in mind, you need to worry about the other players. While I do understand where you are coming from, there are those who do not have the maturity"
What is "appropriate action"? Sending gifts and good wishes? Isn't that what you do when you hear people are happily married?
What is "ok" about being "a heterosexual couple in real life"? And what is wrong with being two females in-game? Sounds kinda hot to me.
Can someone explain to me in a way that someone who does not believe that the Bible is anything more than a collection of human literature why any of this is a problem? I'm looking for concrete terms that I can understand--if you were to explain why murder was bad it wouldn't be too hard to give concrete details that are true in the case of virtually all murders that I can easily understand are bad because they do concrete, obvious harm to a human being. I just can't see the harm in homosexuality, and despite years of asking no one has ever been able to demonstrate what is harmful without lapsing either into Bible-speak or into claims that are demonstrably false.
And why is it a matter of "maturity" to accept marriage between people who love each other? In my experience homophobia usually hits around adolesence. Small children, who are less mature, don't have anything like the problems with same-sex marriage that many adults do.
One of the fundamental modern Bayesian papers is Jaynes' "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning?", which can be found on the web along with lots of other interesting things. Jaynes' conclusion is that we must be Bayesians under the skull. It's a compelling paper, even now.
These experimental results are exactly what Jaynes theory predicts, which is a very nice confirmation of his work. But they are not the "discovery" of anything--they are empirical confirmation of something we already knew. When light-bending by gravity was measured it was not a discovery, it was the confirmation of a theoretical prediction. This is the same.
A ban on "creating human-animal hybrids" is more debatable but we damn sure better get a line drawn somewhere and we better do it fast or science is going to race out ahead of ethics and make one hell of a mess for someone to clean up.
I would be happier if Bush concentrated on cleaning up the mess he has already created in Iraq with the war and America with the deficit, rather than making noises about cleaning up an entirely hypothetical mess in an area where a great deal of good and important medical research is being done.
This would mean that you can, in fact, learn concepts like "schadenfreude" but also if concepts like "schadenfreude" are present in your language you are probably more attuned to them..
Which is so weak as to be completely uninteresting because it is completely obvious. It is only by the introduction of the strong form of the S-W hypothesis that anyone ever gets any heat in this debate, and yet at the end of the day everyone (sane) agrees that the strong form is trivially wrong.
The whole Sapir-Worf debate is nothing but one big intellectual bait-and-switch. I wish "advocates" of S-W would be honest, and preface their statements with, "I'm not defending the strong form of S-W, which everyone knows to be trivially wrong, but the weak form, which everyone knows to be trivially obvious." Then everyone can throw muffins at them for introducing a completely uninteresting topic of conversation--who wants to talk about something everyone agrees is true?
...but I find it rather hypocritical when many slashbots trash corporations for creating genetically modified foods yet they see absolutely no problem creating genetically modified people. Either genetic modification is OK or it isn't,
"Genetic modification" is an abstract term. It covers a vast range of disparate concretes.
"Killing people" is an abstract term too, and most of us recognize there are situations were killing people is ok and situations where it is not. A lot of people would find the following amazingly shallow: "I find it rather hypocritical when many slashbots trash murderers for killing people yet they see absolutely no problem with soldiers killing people. Either killing people is ok or it isn't."
There are, of course, some who take such a black-and-white stand on killing. But most mature individuals recognize that not all killing is the same--even some of the more extreme pacifists will admit that killing in self-defense as a last resort is justified.
So it is with genetic modification. My own critique of GMOs is simply based on the certainty that the genes will get loose. The issue with Monstanto et al is not that they are genetically modifying organisms, but that they are willfully releasing those organisms into the environment, where their modified genes (particularly the Terminator) will certainly do great damage to innocent people by reducing their yields. This is evil, pure and simple.
Genetic modification of lab animals for medical research is a different situation entirely. Far from being flung willy-nilly into the common environment they are kept very carefully isolated. There is some risk they will get lose, but their numbers are fantastically small compared to crop plants, and the risk of harm coming to innocent people from them is nil in the ordinary sense of the term.
So it is possible to be in favour of GMOs for medical research and against GMOs for agriculture, because "GMO" is an abstract term that covers things almost completely unlike each other in every respect. Just as knowing that something is an apple tells you nothing about whether it is good to eat (is it rotten? crab? poisoned?) so knowing that someone is creating GMOs tells you nothing about whether they are doing good or evil.
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.
The difficulty with this assertion is that human beings cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be property and therefore cannot be capital. This is true regardless of what the law says. The law can say pi is equal to three. But that does not make it so.
I will grant you that slaves can serve in the economic role of capital, just as 3 can serve in the mathematical role of pi. But economies (and circles) built on the basis of such falsehoods will be grossly distorted, and for much the same reaasons.
the fact that two lightsabers can clash in a duel mean that there is a solid-like boundary to the blade that is inviolable
Clearly there is some kind of quantum coherence going on in the plasma that effectively makes each lightsaber a single giant fermion. Then the Pauli exclusion principle keeps any two lightsabers from occupying the same space. This is why the only thing (other than Chuck Norris) that a lightsaber can't cut through is another lightsaber.
They also generally have a difficult time understanding and picking up on more subtle forms of communication. They only hear the words. They don't hear the emotion or inflection or notice the facial expressions, and they have a difficult time reading (or listening as it were) between the lines. Furthermore, they have a difficult time extrapolating the thoughts and feelings of another person. They can't "put themselves in the other person's shoes." Basically, if something isn't said, it doesn't exist to them. That is a crippling disadvantage in social situations.
Normal people communicate in the opposite way: they hear the emotional cues, inflections and facial expressions very clearly, but have a difficult time with the literal content of the communication. This is why so many people aren't able to grasp the logical consequences of anything that is said, and why so many geeks feel that they are not listened to in business meetings and other non-technical discussions. What we say is encoded in the literal meaning of the words we speak, not the non-verbal cues, and normals are logically tone-deaf in the same way we are emotionally tone-deaf.
I vividly recall telling a former employer that I'd completed a major contract for a very happy client, and that the revenues would keep the company afloat for the rest of the year (we would otherwise have been out of business.) He said, "Yeah, that's good" and then moved on to the next thing, which was the "great job" being done by a charismatic under-achiever who was running a year behind on an eight-month contract and whose inability to do his job was the reason why the company was just about broke. My information didn't have the right emotional cues packaged with it--it was just a factual report of a successfully completed major contract.
In contrast, the only thing the charismatic under-achiever had going for him was a mastery of the non-verbal, emotional aspects of communication. He made people feel good about themselves when he dealt with them.. He would make a great salesperson, but as someone who actually had to deliver working code he was a danger to himself and everyone around him.
He understood that the fundamental purpose of any human interaction is to control how the other person feels. If you can do that, then anything is possible and you don't actually have to have any skills, because people will want you around and will ignore all but the most blatant failures (and sometimes even those, for a while). We are extremely fortunate to live in a society where a small amount of attention is paid to literal content--this is a rare circumstance in human history, and if we aren't careful it will be a short-lived one.
Too true. And anyone who says, "If you have nothing hide you have nothing to worry about" is making a radically incomplete claim. What they should be saying is, "If you have nothing to hide from anyone ever at any time under any circumstances, you have nothing to worry about."
You just better hope that this technology--if it works--never winds up in the hands of a Bible-believing Christian with poltical power, or a dedicated Communist setting out to identify the opponents of the Revolution. In the hands of such unmitigatedly evil individuals the possibility of persecuting people for "thought crime" is very real. And it does no good to claim that "only the guilty will be punished" because the only "crime" would be to believe something other than what is acceptable to a vile lunatic who believes that their own personal interpretation of some old book is the final arbiter of reality and morality.
The naive technological optimiism that the article descibes ("My hope," George said, "would be that it might make the world operate a little bit more openly and honestly.") reminds me of those of us who sincerely believed back in the '70's that one could have purely peaceful uses of nuclear power. We just couldn't imagine the way far too many ordinary humans think.
On the good side, the odds of this technology working are very nearly nil. Ask a Marxist about the benefits of free trade, and they will tell you what they "know". Ask a Bible-believing Christian about the age of the Earth or the history of Israel and they will tell you what they "know." Ask any human being about what they saw on the way to work this morning and they will give you a mish-mash of objective fact from the past few years coupled with some purely invented stuff.
This technology has been tested on a small number of willing volunteers and it only works 90% of the time after very heavy processing, although having seen what passes for image processing in most labs I reserve judgment on what could be done if the data were put in the hands of someone competent. In the real world where people will have strong motivation to defeat it, it is very likely to fall to polygraph-level random results.
Unfortunately, for those that would use it as example, the people are sufficiently obsessed with the job that there pretty much aren't any of them that "have a life."
But this is true of many types of show--cops, doctors, lawyers, you-name-it. They are almost always depicted as having little life outside their job, and if they do, it's almost always a mess because of how much room their jobs take up in their lives. None of that stops people from wanting to be cops or doctors or whatever.
I think CSI is great because it captures the essential thing about science: caring about the evidence and only the evidence, even if it screws up your relationships with your co-workers, family, and everyone else. It's same as cop shows where cops care only about catching the bad guys. A great deal of TV drama is the drama of monomania, where someone with an absolute dedication to a single goal or value is stuck living in a world full of people to whom that goal or value is at most just one of many equally important things.
CSI (the original--dunno about the knock-offs) gives us a major TV character who for the first time is apt to look people in the eye and say, "because I'm a scientist" when they ask him about his odd or anti-social behaviour, in the same way that endless cop dramas have had characters say, "because I'm a cop" when asked about theirs.
CSI is so-so on the techical aspects of science, but very, very good on the attitude of scientists, especially in showing them as ordinary people with ordinary problems who also have this common focus on fact and evidence that really does make them different from most other people. Numb3rs is terrible--full of geeky cliches and lame reasoning. If you set out to create a show that said, "Math is mysterious and hard and only super-geniuses who never bathe can deal with it" you could hardly do better.
I think the real problem this show has is that the writer's heart isn't in it. After all, who would want to watch something written by someone who thinks it's boring: "To quote the show's writer, Tony McHale: 'People say, why don't you do a science soap. My reply is that no-one will commission it, because it's boring.'"
Anything can be made interesting by a talented writer. If someone wants to pay me for a half-hour pilot episode I'll happily write one, and it'll be interesting. It'll be based on the real-life goings on at the physics department where I did my Ph.D.--students beating up thesis advisors, spouses jumping in and out of bed with various profs, people scaling the building with makeshift rope ladders, profs having sex with students, former grad students living clandestinely in the basement of the building to save money on rent... The funny thing is that I know half the people with graduate degrees reading this are thinking, "Shit, did this guy go to school with me?"
There's no end of interesting things that the human beings who do science get up to, and its easy to show enough of the science in the background to make the connection that science is done by ordinary people. The trick is to not make the mistake of thinking that the show is about the science, rather than the people who do it.
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Why don't the theorists stick to explaining what can actually be observed and measured, instead of making up stuff in order to prop up theories that have more likely found their limits. I can just feel which way Occam's Razor is eventually going to cut on this one.
Unfortunately for you, the universe doesn't care a fig for your feelings. Cardinal Bellarmine could "just feel" which way Occam's Razor was going to cut on the whole heliocentric thing, but that didn't make a damn bit of difference to how best to describe the universe in the most parsimonious way.
This is what differentiates science from religion: becoming a scientist involves training in a kind of epistemological ruthlessness, so that enough of us to get the edge on our feelings often enough that we learn something now and then about how the universe actually is, rather than how we'd like it to be.
The article contains one of the nicest comments I've seen on the whole galactic-dynamics, large-scale cosmology situation:
"Dark Matter particles come naturally from physics, with beautiful symmetries and explain cosmology beautifully; they tend to be everywhere. The real mystery is how to keep them away from some corners of the universe. Also Dark Matter comes hand- in-hand with Dark Energy. It would be more beautiful if there were one simple answer to all these mysteries"
This is the essential point: the large family of unrelated dark matter particles required to explain different aspects of large-scale dynamics without messing up anything else is just not very elegant or pretty. That doesn't mean it is wrong, but when we start multiplying entities in the way that is required to use dark matter to explain dynamics on different scales it gives us pause. When we further have to fine-tune the properties of the different, unrelated particles to ensure they don't have any effect in places where they are not needed...well, with enough free parameters you can fit an elephant.
As an ad hoc rule for theory selection, we would like our theories to have as few free parameters as possible, and when the number of free parameters starts getting close to the number of phenomena we are trying to explain we start to get queazy. Newtonian gravity is beautiful because with one free parameter (G) we get to explain the motion of the wandering stars, tides, and falling bodies. General relativity has at least one more free parameter--the cosmological constant, which is not an "addition" to the theory but a perfectly ordinary constant of integration that has a formal mathematical place in the theory even if it happens to have a value of zero. But GR explains a lot of stuff that Newton does not, so it makes people happy too.
The problem with non-dark-matter explanations of large scale dynamics has been that they have so far had a large and basically arbitrary number of free parameters, and beyond that they have had some nasty mathematical properties. So if this really is a "simple" non-Newtonian theory of gravity it would be quite exciting. This, of course, is why theorists need to keep freebasing new ideas: it can take decades of sifting through speculation and failure before someone finds a viable way forward.
Cheap tabletop neutrons means cheap Pu-239 without the cost & mess of having a breeder fission reactor...
The neutron flux you get from sources like this is orders of magnitude smaller than reactor fluxes. They have no practical utility in transmutation. Even in reactors the fraction of 238U transmuted to 239Pu is miniscule, and no matter what the process of neutron production is the activated fuel is extremely radioactive, making the chemical processing for reprocessing a delicate and dangerous thing. Fortunately, we aren't likely to see anyone but a nation-state building plutonium bombs any time soon.
So the production of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups is just not a risk. However, the use of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups is an (eventual) certainty, given that we're up to our necks in the things. In round figures there are something like 10,000 nuclear weapons on the planet today, or one for every 600,000 people. With that many lying around we are bound to have one wind up in the wrong hands eventually, and when it does it will be used.
Back in the '50's it was common to argue that nuclear weapons would require a world government to regulate their use. The Cold War made that both impossible and unnecessary. Today, it is looking more plausible again, particularly as the international community is making strong and stronger moves toward violating Iranian sovereignity to prevent them from even creating power reactors.
This attitude is a religion in itself - and your generalizations are basically based on observations of religion based purely on the media or by listening to others like yourself.
Fascinating--you apparently know all about me, my religious upbringing, my studies in ancient Christianity and the history of the English church, and my broad reading in non-Christian religions. This is a fine example of religious thinking: when faced with something that challenged an article of your faith, you made something up that protected your faith.
I grant you that many minor Christian sects have at one time or the other questioned the divinity of Christ. The Gnostics were at it pretty much from the off. But no major Christian denomination would even consider recognizing such sects as Christian until the latter half of the twentieth century, and the Christian denominations to which the majority of Christians have been subject since the Middle Ages have spent far more time killing people for questioning Christ's divinity than encouraging them.
You need to look at Christianity beyond what a few atypical modern sects believe. I've known UU's who call themselves "Christians", but that does not make them so. Based on my deep and extensive knowledge of Christianity across the last two thousand years and across the world today, including many years of personal experience as a Christian I am comfortable standing by my assessment of Christ's divinity as central to Christianity's mythos (in saying "divinity" I intend to be agnostic regarding person/body distinctions.) If you take away the divinity of Christ you are left with just another Jewish preacher, a footnote to history whose sacrifice on the cross was simply an unfortunate turn of political events, no different from any other Jewish prophet who came to a bad end at the hands of secular or religious authority.
You and people like you may want to call yourself Christians, but I am willing to bet you are in fact Christian-inspired humanists, and that you do not believe anything that the majority of Christian thinkers or followers at any time in the past two thousand years would recognize as being doctrinally close to the teachings of Jesus or the Pauline church. You cannot simply believe whatever you damn well please and claim on that basis that you are a Christian. The Nicen Creed, the 39 Articles, something has to be held in common between Christians, or the word means nothing.
Finally, if being willing to question everything is in your view a religion, then what in your view is not a religion? Or by "religion" do you simply mean "any set of foundational beliefs whatsoever, however tentative, however open to revision, however empirical"? If so, then I can only say,
"that word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means." It is certainly nothing like what most people mean by it, as most people have no difficulty at all distinguishing religious beliefs from empirical, scientific, or humanist ones.
I think such absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain in the face of how much there is in the world to understand.
The general principle should be not "to doubt and question everything", but to be willing to doubt and question anything.
It is simply silly to actually doubt and question everything. It would be a huge and pointless mental burden.
But the willingness to question anything seems to me to be an essential attribute of a civilized, rational person. I know damned well I don't have all the answers, but it seems to me insane to suggest that there are some questions that ought not to be asked.
The opposite of this view is religion. All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. Jews are not allowed to question their special relationship with God. Muslims are not allowed to question the unity of God. None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
This kind of willful epistemological blindness will always be opposed to science, which holds that we should be willing to ask any meaningful question.
C++/CLI or C++/.NET is essentially: C++.
This is false. To you all the nice people who have thoughtfully replied to my comment with pedantic outrage, let me remind you what hummassa (157160) has pointed out in a mysteriously low-moderated response:
C++/CLI will not compile the STL.
This has been my own experience with C++/CLI, and one of the primary reasons for my being so hard-assed about the name. This is not a minor deviation from the standard. It is a radical deficiency. The STL is a core piece of any C++ programmer's toolkit, and any compiler in 2006 that will not compile it is not a C++ compiler, and should never be refered to as C++, and should not have a name that could possibly be confused with C++.
This is like having a FORTRAN compiler that can't handle LAPACK. If I created something called FORTRAN/CLI that couldn't compile LAPACK people would rightly yell at me. MS deserves to be smacked on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for doing the equivalent to C++.
It took about 800 years for temperatures to drop 0.4 C to the minimum before the Industrial Revolution and only 200 years since then to rise 0.8 C, an 8X difference in rate of change.
e mperature_Record.png
There is some curious micro-structure in the warming trend of the past 200 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_T
It appears temperatures were flat between 1860 and somewhere between 1910 and 1920, then rose sharply until somewhere around 1940 when they became flat again for 40 years, after which we have experienced another sharp increase between 1980 and the early 2000's. So rather than having had a global warming trend for the past 200 years, we appear to have had 80 years of warming where the rise in temperature has been far faster than 0.8 C/200 years.
Is anyone doing research on this structure? It is extremely pronounced. There is a temptation to dismiss this micro-structure as irrelevant sub-variation on uninteresting scales, but I don't think we know enough about climate to say that.
Anthropogenic greenhouse forcing is still unproven, although it appears pretty compelling to everyone but the anti-scientific true believers whose faith told them that this article said the earth was only as warm as it was in 800 AD. Detailed study of the decade-scale variations in recent global temperatures might produce more definitive proof regarding the major drivers of contemporary climate change, one way or the other.
Why didn't they have a third group that could see everything group #1 saw, and *randomly generated* download counts? If I see a song has been downloaded numerous times, listen to it, and it's crap, I'm sure as hell not downloading a copy to save if it sucks. I don't care how many people listen to something, but I would consider download counts an indicator of what I should try first... At least until I realized the download counts were meaningless. If they repeat the experiment with the third group and that group downloads random crap like lemmings then maybe they have something worth reporting... Otherwise, they've proven nothing.
False. The probability of a song becoming popular in the group that saw the download numbers was poorly correlated with the rating given the song by the group who did not see the download numbers. These two pieces of information are sufficient to untangle the relative importance of perceived quality vs popularity. Any competent statistical analyst would know that.
Simply because you cannot see how to do something does not mean it cannot be done, or that that people who designed an experiment that you are not competent to analyze are stupid. This study has all the information required to show that we do exactly what you say you would never do: we tend to follow the crowd, regardless of the crowd's taste. I have no doubt I do this, and I am equally sure you do. This sort of group-think tendency is one of the fundamental aspects of human behaviour that makes us such successful animals, able to form large social groups and communities spontaneously on the most flimsy bases.
Denial of a scientific result because it runs contrary to what you would like to believe about yourself is very popular in places like Syria and the Whitehouse just now, but it is no sort of behaviour for any self-respecting human being living in a secular age.
C++/CLI seems to be a (standardized) proprietary extension to the C++ language that allows it to interface well with the rest of the .Net architecture. It's not a huge departure from the core language by any means, at least not enough of one to require a complete name change.
Compilers have no sense of humour. If a language is not ISO C++, it is not C++ and should not have C++ as part of the name. I'm dating myself, but I've worked with "FORTRAN" compilers that didn't support FORTRAN 77 (which was the standard at the time) and to all intents and purposes they were not FORTRAN compilers--they were "some proprietary FORTRAN-like-language compilers" and completely useless if you wanted to compile many perfectly ordinary FORTRAN programmes.
The issue here is that the use of the C++ name is a big marketing issue. But to apply the C++ name in any variant to a language that is not C++ is fundamentally misleading and dishonest. This is because humans are lazy and stupid, and tend to drop the modifier and think of "C++/CLI" as simple "C++"--the article points out that MS documentation has many examples of code samples labelled "C++" with no "CLI" modifier that are not, in fact, C++. They are C++/CLI.
And as I said, compilers have no sense of humour--they don't care that "C++/CLI" is "almost" C++. They see non-standard syntax and barf. So it is very important for those of us who want our code to compile and who want to be able to communicate with others to keep the name "C++" as pure as possible. This isn't being uptight--it is a purely pragmatic concern about keeping marketing droids as far from technology as possible so that software professionals can communicate with each other as clearly and unambigously as possible given the limitations we all have as human beings.
Nope, I'm pretty sure that's more due to the fact that they don't do stupid things as often.
Yeah, like doing all the dangerous jobs. Although the stereotypical testosterone-driven behaviour you cite can't be completely discounted, it is not nearly as important as differences in employment choices, which account for a significant part of the difference in male/female lifespan in the developed world. The most dangerous professions--farmer, faller*, miner, etc--are all male-dominated, and men dominate in workplace areas where hazardous chemicals and carcinogens are most common.
We, as a society, are continually failing our men--encouraging them to behave in ways that shorten their lives and lower their quality of life.
[* a faller is a logger, the guy who actually cuts down trees. It's a good way to die.]
Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts.
This is the difference between science and politics.
In politics, the only thing that matters is the impression that you create. People vote for the impression, and live with the result.
In science, we try to keep politics to the minimum, and experimental investigation of empirical reality is one of the primary means of doing so. So a scientist, unaware of the impressions created by the two political parties in the U.S., looking at the data, would conclude that Democrats were the party of fiscal probity and Republicans were the party of spending money like drunken cowboys.
That people continue to trot out this incredible statement that the Republicans are less likely to run up a huge deficit and Democrats are less likely to balance the budget, when for the past twenty years exactly the opposite has been true, is a measure of how alien and anomalous science is in human experience.
This is why science is precious and must be defended. It is the only way we know of getting past impressions to something that at the very least is not the diametric opposite of the truth.
I find the quote interesting because it relates a similar experience to religious conversion, ie: acceptance of the unknowable.
Godel's theorem says nothing about "unknowability". It is about provability within a consistent axiomatic system.
I know any amount of stuff by means other than proving it within a consistent axiomatic system. I know my name. I know my favourite colour. I know I'm wasting my time trying to explain something on Slashdot.
Likewise, it is perfectly possible to know if a given theorem is true or false within a system of formal logic without being able to prove that theorem. It may be very hard to know in any given case, but nothing in Godel's proof puts an absolute barrier to knowability.
Only people who are confused about the nature of knowledge, and for some unaccountable reason think formal proof is the only means of knowledge (I'd like to see a formal proof of that proposition) are able to experience the "revelation" of Godel's insight. And they certainly need it.
None of this says that there are not unknowable things (there are--quantum mechanics tells us that there are things we cannot know). Just that Godel's theorem addresses only formal proof, not knowability.
Heavy use of code generators is always a good place to start--the less code you write, the fewer bugs you will create.
:-)
Distributed applications are very, very hard. It has all the joy of multi-threaded code with latency and communications issues added in. Stability of the overall system can only be achieved by a layered design: I've never seen the design patter described, but there is a "Manager Pattern" in which one process takes responsibility for controlling another process or set of processes. Autonomous restart is not a good idea because the single node that has experienced a crash does not have all the information required to make a good judgement about what to do. An external manager process that has an overview of the whole system status will do better.
Also, restarting a process and hoping the crash does not happen again is not in general the right thing to do, as students of the Ariane V disaster will realize. In that case there were multiple redundant processors that all had the same bug (relative to the inputs they were getting from the new vehicle). In most cases restarting after a crash will just result in another crash. Realistically, you need to be able to inform the user that something bad has happened and ideally give the user the opportunity to intervene (change parameters, for example) before restarting the process. This may require that the whole data analysis run be restarted, again indicating the need for an external manager process to co-ordinate everything.
For IPC, if you are using a common language on all platforms I strongly favour XML serialization and sockets. Any good code generator will generate serialization code to dump your classes to an XML string, and you can then send the string through a socket. It is relatively easy to do this, and avoids the huge overheads that CORBA involves (the only large project I've used CORBA on has since stripped it all out as being too heavy-weight, a decision I think is quite reasonable.)
Using a solid framework like Qt or wxWidgets (which I've honestly found to be superior to Qt in many respects) will help reduce the amount of code you write. For crash-free code you must use open-source frameworks as much as possible, because every set of libs has bugs, and the only way you can track them down and fix them is if you have the source.
Finally, you should think about hiring someone who's done it before
That said, anybody marrying anything has a few problems
So it is a good thing that no one here or anywhere else is advocating "anybody marrying anything."
Marriage as conceived in the modern world is fundamentally about mutual aid. This is a new, radical idea, at most a few hundred years old and probably a good deal less than that. There have been at various times and places in history a huge range of marriage arrangements, from arranged marriages to plural marriages to things that to a modern eye look far more like concubinage than marriage. Yet no where did this diversity wind up with "anybody marrying anything."
Homosexual marriage is based on an even more radical variant of the modern idea of marraige: that it is a relationship of mutual aid between equals. Once this definition of marriage is admited, and to many of us it seems like quite a healthy and positive thing, it is obvious that homosexual marriages ought to have the same status in law as heterosexual ones.
If you are willing to live up to the legal, economic and social obligations of marriage with your roommate or a group, then get married, with my blessing.
Isn't it interesting how the trolls like the one you're replying to never seem to notice how trivializing of marriage their focus on the sex is, as if the only thing that distinguished marriage from other relationships is the fact that the parties to it get to have sex with each other with the blessing of the law, the church, god, and everybody.
Marriage is not just--or even primarily--about sex! It is about mutual aid and care, and taking shared responsibility, including shared responsibility for children. How one is wired up sexually is not an issue. That hardly describes a relationship between room-mates.
So here's a guide for trolls: if the only distinguishing feature of a relationship is sex, it's a hookup. If the distinguishing feature of a relationship is an openly-stated intent to help each other and enjoy each other's company through good times and bad for the rest of your lives, it's a marriage. See how the sex of the parties involved just doesn't come into it?
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
This requires that you believe that abstract properties like the sexuality of the partners are more important than the concrete properties of the individuals involved.
This seems to me to be absurd. Two loving, caring parents of the same sex are surely better than two nasty, cruel parents of opposite sexes. I once naively assumed that everyone agrees on this, but I now know for a fact that many Bible-believing Christians do not. Instead, they believe that homosexuality is akin to drug abuse in terms of the harm it does to individuals and their children, although when pressed on the nature of the harm they retreat into abstract, unprovable, or provably false claims.
The very language of the GM reaks of homophobia: "Anyone can report and we will take appropriate action. While it may seem ok because they are truly a heterosexual couple in real life, in game they are two females. Please keep in mind, you need to worry about the other players. While I do understand where you are coming from, there are those who do not have the maturity"
What is "appropriate action"? Sending gifts and good wishes? Isn't that what you do when you hear people are happily married?
What is "ok" about being "a heterosexual couple in real life"? And what is wrong with being two females in-game? Sounds kinda hot to me.
Can someone explain to me in a way that someone who does not believe that the Bible is anything more than a collection of human literature why any of this is a problem? I'm looking for concrete terms that I can understand--if you were to explain why murder was bad it wouldn't be too hard to give concrete details that are true in the case of virtually all murders that I can easily understand are bad because they do concrete, obvious harm to a human being. I just can't see the harm in homosexuality, and despite years of asking no one has ever been able to demonstrate what is harmful without lapsing either into Bible-speak or into claims that are demonstrably false.
And why is it a matter of "maturity" to accept marriage between people who love each other? In my experience homophobia usually hits around adolesence. Small children, who are less mature, don't have anything like the problems with same-sex marriage that many adults do.
One of the fundamental modern Bayesian papers is Jaynes' "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning?", which can be found on the web along with lots of other interesting things. Jaynes' conclusion is that we must be Bayesians under the skull. It's a compelling paper, even now.
These experimental results are exactly what Jaynes theory predicts, which is a very nice confirmation of his work. But they are not the "discovery" of anything--they are empirical confirmation of something we already knew. When light-bending by gravity was measured it was not a discovery, it was the confirmation of a theoretical prediction. This is the same.
A ban on "creating human-animal hybrids" is more debatable but we damn sure better get a line drawn somewhere and we better do it fast or science is going to race out ahead of ethics and make one hell of a mess for someone to clean up.
I would be happier if Bush concentrated on cleaning up the mess he has already created in Iraq with the war and America with the deficit, rather than making noises about cleaning up an entirely hypothetical mess in an area where a great deal of good and important medical research is being done.
This would mean that you can, in fact, learn concepts like "schadenfreude" but also if concepts like "schadenfreude" are present in your language you are probably more attuned to them..
Which is so weak as to be completely uninteresting because it is completely obvious. It is only by the introduction of the strong form of the S-W hypothesis that anyone ever gets any heat in this debate, and yet at the end of the day everyone (sane) agrees that the strong form is trivially wrong.
The whole Sapir-Worf debate is nothing but one big intellectual bait-and-switch. I wish "advocates" of S-W would be honest, and preface their statements with, "I'm not defending the strong form of S-W, which everyone knows to be trivially wrong, but the weak form, which everyone knows to be trivially obvious." Then everyone can throw muffins at them for introducing a completely uninteresting topic of conversation--who wants to talk about something everyone agrees is true?
...but I find it rather hypocritical when many slashbots trash corporations for creating genetically modified foods yet they see absolutely no problem creating genetically modified people. Either genetic modification is OK or it isn't,
"Genetic modification" is an abstract term. It covers a vast range of disparate concretes.
"Killing people" is an abstract term too, and most of us recognize there are situations were killing people is ok and situations where it is not. A lot of people would find the following amazingly shallow: "I find it rather hypocritical when many slashbots trash murderers for killing people yet they see absolutely no problem with soldiers killing people. Either killing people is ok or it isn't."
There are, of course, some who take such a black-and-white stand on killing. But most mature individuals recognize that not all killing is the same--even some of the more extreme pacifists will admit that killing in self-defense as a last resort is justified.
So it is with genetic modification. My own critique of GMOs is simply based on the certainty that the genes will get loose. The issue with Monstanto et al is not that they are genetically modifying organisms, but that they are willfully releasing those organisms into the environment, where their modified genes (particularly the Terminator) will certainly do great damage to innocent people by reducing their yields. This is evil, pure and simple.
Genetic modification of lab animals for medical research is a different situation entirely. Far from being flung willy-nilly into the common environment they are kept very carefully isolated. There is some risk they will get lose, but their numbers are fantastically small compared to crop plants, and the risk of harm coming to innocent people from them is nil in the ordinary sense of the term.
So it is possible to be in favour of GMOs for medical research and against GMOs for agriculture, because "GMO" is an abstract term that covers things almost completely unlike each other in every respect. Just as knowing that something is an apple tells you nothing about whether it is good to eat (is it rotten? crab? poisoned?) so knowing that someone is creating GMOs tells you nothing about whether they are doing good or evil.
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.
The difficulty with this assertion is that human beings cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be property and therefore cannot be capital. This is true regardless of what the law says. The law can say pi is equal to three. But that does not make it so.
I will grant you that slaves can serve in the economic role of capital, just as 3 can serve in the mathematical role of pi. But economies (and circles) built on the basis of such falsehoods will be grossly distorted, and for much the same reaasons.
the fact that two lightsabers can clash in a duel mean that there is a solid-like boundary to the blade that is inviolable
Clearly there is some kind of quantum coherence going on in the plasma that effectively makes each lightsaber a single giant fermion. Then the Pauli exclusion principle keeps any two lightsabers from occupying the same space. This is why the only thing (other than Chuck Norris) that a lightsaber can't cut through is another lightsaber.
They also generally have a difficult time understanding and picking up on more subtle forms of communication. They only hear the words. They don't hear the emotion or inflection or notice the facial expressions, and they have a difficult time reading (or listening as it were) between the lines. Furthermore, they have a difficult time extrapolating the thoughts and feelings of another person. They can't "put themselves in the other person's shoes." Basically, if something isn't said, it doesn't exist to them. That is a crippling disadvantage in social situations.
Normal people communicate in the opposite way: they hear the emotional cues, inflections and facial expressions very clearly, but have a difficult time with the literal content of the communication. This is why so many people aren't able to grasp the logical consequences of anything that is said, and why so many geeks feel that they are not listened to in business meetings and other non-technical discussions. What we say is encoded in the literal meaning of the words we speak, not the non-verbal cues, and normals are logically tone-deaf in the same way we are emotionally tone-deaf.
I vividly recall telling a former employer that I'd completed a major contract for a very happy client, and that the revenues would keep the company afloat for the rest of the year (we would otherwise have been out of business.) He said, "Yeah, that's good" and then moved on to the next thing, which was the "great job" being done by a charismatic under-achiever who was running a year behind on an eight-month contract and whose inability to do his job was the reason why the company was just about broke. My information didn't have the right emotional cues packaged with it--it was just a factual report of a successfully completed major contract.
In contrast, the only thing the charismatic under-achiever had going for him was a mastery of the non-verbal, emotional aspects of communication. He made people feel good about themselves when he dealt with them.. He would make a great salesperson, but as someone who actually had to deliver working code he was a danger to himself and everyone around him.
He understood that the fundamental purpose of any human interaction is to control how the other person feels. If you can do that, then anything is possible and you don't actually have to have any skills, because people will want you around and will ignore all but the most blatant failures (and sometimes even those, for a while). We are extremely fortunate to live in a society where a small amount of attention is paid to literal content--this is a rare circumstance in human history, and if we aren't careful it will be a short-lived one.
Everyone has something to hide.
Too true. And anyone who says, "If you have nothing hide you have nothing to worry about" is making a radically incomplete claim. What they should be saying is, "If you have nothing to hide from anyone ever at any time under any circumstances, you have nothing to worry about."
You just better hope that this technology--if it works--never winds up in the hands of a Bible-believing Christian with poltical power, or a dedicated Communist setting out to identify the opponents of the Revolution. In the hands of such unmitigatedly evil individuals the possibility of persecuting people for "thought crime" is very real. And it does no good to claim that "only the guilty will be punished" because the only "crime" would be to believe something other than what is acceptable to a vile lunatic who believes that their own personal interpretation of some old book is the final arbiter of reality and morality.
The naive technological optimiism that the article descibes ("My hope," George said, "would be that it might make the world operate a little bit more openly and honestly.") reminds me of those of us who sincerely believed back in the '70's that one could have purely peaceful uses of nuclear power. We just couldn't imagine the way far too many ordinary humans think.
On the good side, the odds of this technology working are very nearly nil. Ask a Marxist about the benefits of free trade, and they will tell you what they "know". Ask a Bible-believing Christian about the age of the Earth or the history of Israel and they will tell you what they "know." Ask any human being about what they saw on the way to work this morning and they will give you a mish-mash of objective fact from the past few years coupled with some purely invented stuff.
This technology has been tested on a small number of willing volunteers and it only works 90% of the time after very heavy processing, although having seen what passes for image processing in most labs I reserve judgment on what could be done if the data were put in the hands of someone competent. In the real world where people will have strong motivation to defeat it, it is very likely to fall to polygraph-level random results.
Unfortunately, for those that would use it as example, the people are sufficiently obsessed with the job that there pretty much aren't any of them that "have a life."
But this is true of many types of show--cops, doctors, lawyers, you-name-it. They are almost always depicted as having little life outside their job, and if they do, it's almost always a mess because of how much room their jobs take up in their lives. None of that stops people from wanting to be cops or doctors or whatever.
I think CSI is great because it captures the essential thing about science: caring about the evidence and only the evidence, even if it screws up your relationships with your co-workers, family, and everyone else. It's same as cop shows where cops care only about catching the bad guys. A great deal of TV drama is the drama of monomania, where someone with an absolute dedication to a single goal or value is stuck living in a world full of people to whom that goal or value is at most just one of many equally important things.
CSI (the original--dunno about the knock-offs) gives us a major TV character who for the first time is apt to look people in the eye and say, "because I'm a scientist" when they ask him about his odd or anti-social behaviour, in the same way that endless cop dramas have had characters say, "because I'm a cop" when asked about theirs.
CSI is so-so on the techical aspects of science, but very, very good on the attitude of scientists, especially in showing them as ordinary people with ordinary problems who also have this common focus on fact and evidence that really does make them different from most other people. Numb3rs is terrible--full of geeky cliches and lame reasoning. If you set out to create a show that said, "Math is mysterious and hard and only super-geniuses who never bathe can deal with it" you could hardly do better.
I think the real problem this show has is that the writer's heart isn't in it. After all, who would want to watch something written by someone who thinks it's boring: "To quote the show's writer, Tony McHale: 'People say, why don't you do a science soap. My reply is that no-one will commission it, because it's boring.'"
Anything can be made interesting by a talented writer. If someone wants to pay me for a half-hour pilot episode I'll happily write one, and it'll be interesting. It'll be based on the real-life goings on at the physics department where I did my Ph.D.--students beating up thesis advisors, spouses jumping in and out of bed with various profs, people scaling the building with makeshift rope ladders, profs having sex with students, former grad students living clandestinely in the basement of the building to save money on rent... The funny thing is that I know half the people with graduate degrees reading this are thinking, "Shit, did this guy go to school with me?"
There's no end of interesting things that the human beings who do science get up to, and its easy to show enough of the science in the background to make the connection that science is done by ordinary people. The trick is to not make the mistake of thinking that the show is about the science, rather than the people who do it.