You've likely encountered this quote, but it bears repeating:
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. -- Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)
One only needs to define the photon as a thermodynamic reexpansion of spacetime that was compressed by nearby matter.
Unfortunately that is not a meaningful statement. I have no idea what a "thermodynamic reexpansion" is versus a "non-thermodynamic reexpansion", for example. Nor is it clear how this would be expressed mathematically as a generalization of Maxwell's equations. Nor does your paper do anything more than repeat this meaningless statement.
There may be something meaningful and interesting to say about the thermodynamics of electromagnetism and space-time, but until you give us a mathematical statement of the physical principles you are trying to enunciate it is going to be very difficult for anyone to understand what, if anything, you are talking about.
I'm waiting for someone to explain why so many seem so sure that it actually is some form of exotic matter.
You'll forgive me for believing that that is a lie, because this has been explained many, many times. On the balance of probabilities, you are an irrational nutjob who is resistant to any actual explanation or evidence.
That said, I'll waste few minutes of my precious time pretending your question is sincere and you have a non-zero chance of changing your mind.
The reason why we focus on exotic matter is because observational evidence for a source of anomalous gravitational attraction is robust and diverse and alternative theories have either failed to account for it, or have failed other observational tests.
It isn't as if we have a single measurement on one system. We have detailed measurements of the rotation curves of many spiral galaxies. We have the motion of galaxies in clusters. We have the motion of clusters themselves. We have gravitational lensing studies--which probe the dark matter distribution in a completely different way from dynamical studies. We have cosmological simulations that can't explain galaxy formation without dark matter. We have structure in the cosmic microwave background that is evidence for dark matter, in that it can be explained easily with it, but only with great difficulty without, just as hearing a dog bark is evidence for a dog because a dog easily explains barking, while alternative explanations have much lower priors and so are less plausible. To deny this is to deny Bayes.
Did I have to dig deeply into some mysterious literature to find this? No. I had to look at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Do you see why I think your question is dishonest?
So that makes "maybe the measurements are in error" much less plausible than "dark matter exists".
With regard to new physics, the problem is that the low-hanging fruit have been picked, and what remains has a hard time explaining all the diverse observational evidence. It is hard to find a theory that explains all the phenomena that are observed that is not "there is some kind of exotic matter out there". None-the-less, we are actively testing a few such theories. Again from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So now your question has been answered. You need wait no more. You can either change your mind, and agree that dark matter is the most plausible explanation of the robust and diverse observations, or you can explain why you find some alternative hypothesis more plausible. But you can never again honestly ask, "Why don't people take observational error or alternative theories more seriously?"
As far as we know, humans are the only organisms that kill for sport.
As others have pointed out, this is false. Multiple species kill for fun.
War is mate competition pursued by other means. The reasons why humans kill each other is because it is an evolved, adaptive, behaviour carried over into a world that we are desperately trying to engineer in such a way that killing is no longer necessary or functional. The problem is that it's still fun: it feels good because we are the descendents of individuals who were selected to be good at it, and part of being good at it was enjoying it, getting an immediate, internal, biochemical reward for behaviour that was also adaptive (that produced more offspring).
As such, sports and other forms of competition that allow us to activate that in-built reward system without actually killing people are really important to keeping human society reasonably peaceful.
the rest was still a garbage heap of warring tribes, mainly until the Renaissance.
The tipping point was around the Gregorian revolution in the late 11th century (1050-1150 or thereabouts.) That was the point when Eastern civilizations were starting to stagnate and Western Europe was starting to get its act together. So the Renaissance was less of a "tremendous leap forward" than the bursting in to flower of a plant that had been growing for several centuries.
With regard to concerns about autonomous weapons, the things that people are pointing out as dangers are features from the point of view of the kind of person who thinks that mass organized violence is a useful way to address human problems (because it always works so well?)
Deniability and muddied legal responsibility are just what killers are looking for. They'll claim with every software release that civilian deaths are decreasing, and that might even be true, but the important thing is it will give idiots the ability to kill without accountability.
How stupid is war? Hitler wanted to secure German food supplies by using war to create an agrarian empire in Eastern Europe. This resulted in the utter destruction of Germany. If instead he had used Germany's expertise in phosphate and nitrate chemistry to investigate fertilizers instead of high explosives, the Green Revolution would have come decades early and he'd be remembered as a great man. This is not an isolated example: war almost never produces the outcome it's instigators intend, to the extent that if your name is not Bismark you're better off not starting one. There are always cheaper, more reliable means of achieving any end.
Unfortunately the news report carefully leaves out any numbers from the new study. It notes that over the past 200 years the average pH of the oceans have increased from 8.25 to 8.14, but makes no mention of the size of the increase studied in the report, so there is no way to tell if the headline is sensationalist nonsense or not.
Given the quality of scientific journalism, however, my prior is pretty heavily biased toward sensationalist nonsense.
There are actually quite a number of environmentalists who have suggested that we should use nuclear power in order to get off of fossil fuels.
While there are a few, no leading environmental organization is pro-nuclear. Greenpeace in particular is adamantly opposed to nuclear, even though they treat the IPCC reports as Biblically certain when it supports their anti-capitalist political agenda, and the IPCC clearly states that nuclear is one way to address CO2 pollution (particularly from base-load coal, which is very hard to replace otherwise).
So let's not kid ourselves: the environmental left wants to treat CO2 pollution as a moral and social problem, and they react to any suggestion that we treat it as a technological problem in the same way conservative Christians react to the suggestion that we treat teen pregnancy as a technological problem, and fix it via education and easily-available contraception. For the environmental left, smashing global capitalism, not saving the planet is the goal, and they strongly oppose anything that will save the latter without destroying the former (see Naiomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" for a textbook example of this position, all laid out in black and white.)
We can't directly observe a particle being in an indeterminate state
And this central mystery is still with us: why can't we? Decoherence people sometimes claim to have the answer, but they don't: they can explain why we don't see interference, not why interference is the only way we can be aware that particles are in indeterminate (classical) states.
The difference between the Internet on April Fool's Day and on other days is on the one it is packed with false stories full of pandering nonsense written by charlatans to gain page views, and on the other it is the first day of April.
there is an infinitesimally small chance that it was engaged by accident.
And since air disasters necessarily depend on extremely low-probability events, this is not an argument for the proposition "therefore this was most likely not the cause".
We know that whatever happened it had an outrageously low probability. This makes speculation in advance of data useless, because there are an almost unlimited number of highly improbable things that could have happened, and anyone who thinks they can imagine their way to the correct one is innumerate: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...
From the tortured summary the only thing that's clear is that this technology is nothing like anything in Star Wars or Star Trek, but some illiterate in PR has decided that whatever they actually do is so boring, obscure or useless that the only way to drum up any attention for them is to describe them in terms of something completely unrelated.
Does anyone have any idea what they actually do and how they do it?
This is not even wrong. Payne had the idea first, Russell thought it was wrong, Russell later changed his mind and gave Payne credit: http://blogs.britannica.com/20... His work cites hers.
This is how science is supposed to work, although there is always a factor of fame involved in credit-giving, and women have in general not been as forceful in claiming or defending credit as men.
Furthermore, how many people claiming to be "outraged" by this were even aware of who had been given credit for figuring out the composition of the sun in the first place? Who amongst us is "shocked, shocked" that Russell--whom they had been giving credit to all these years, citing in papers, talking up at cocktail parties--didn't actually make the discovery that is commonly and incorrectly attributed to him?
What's being debated is whether it's right to make experiments who's consequences a person who can't consent to them has to carry.
And this differs from having children the old fashioned way how?
That is the crux: every child born is a genetic experiment today. We hope that it doesn't end up with too many defects. We hope that it's born with eyes (I know someone who wasn't). We hope that it's born without any non-lethal developmental defects (I know a couple of people who have them, caught and fixed by surgery before they became fatal.) We hope they won't develop Type I diabetes (like several of my friends have)... and so on.
Every one of these things is a crap-shoot, and everyone who has kids today is performing an uncontrolled genetic experiment every time.
To claim that this process is necessarily going to be made worse by adding some human intelligence to the mix is problematic. The claim that there is no conceivable therapeutic benefit to engineering certain classes of genetic defect out of the germline is disingenuous, unless you think everyone everywhere for the rest of time is going to have good gene therapy available to them while growing up, which is insane.
To claim "we can't predict what the effects might be so we shouldn't do the research" is bizarre: if we don't do the research, admittedly mostly on animal models, how will we ever know what the effects are? Once we've done the research, we will have a high confidence in the effects, just as we do with any other therapeutic intervention. We all know that iatrogenic disease is a major cause of death and suffering, so wringing our hands about germline modification as if it was unique in that respect is at the very least strange and at worst deeply hypocritical.
All power gets used, and it's understandable that people should be concerned about how the power to edit the human germline will be used. The possibilities for abuse are considerable. If we are ever able to create Brave-New-World style designer slaves, happy in their subjugation, we probably will, for some value of "we".
But the debate should be about how to use this power wisely, not whether we should develop it at all. Someone will, and it's better that that happen out in the open than in some secret lab in $EVIL_NATION or funded by $EVIL_BILLIONAIRE.
Cover design is hard, and most people do judge books by the cover. These books have content that is likely reflected by their covers pretty well, so in that sense I'd say most of them are pretty good.
The one a few pages in about the guy who's annoyed is really quite good: blunt, angry, simple. Since that's what the book looks to be like, how can the cover be bad?
For my book (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1400044028&sr=1-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem) one of my first readers was an artist, so I hired her to do the cover art. It captures a lot of things about the book, and it's beautiful on its own, so it's a win.
But I'm sure a purist would find a million things wrong with it, from the ambiguities of the image to my choice of font (not papyrus or comic sans, but any font can be mocked if you work at it hard enough) to the choice of colours (too blue, not enough contrast) to the overall look (too cluttered, too busy)... and so on.
Still, my hope was to keep it reasonably low on the mockability scale, and while it's fun to mock stuff, but I have a depressing feeling that many of these mocked books are selling a lot better than a lot of less-mockable stuff. So maybe I should replace my cover with unicorns and rainbows and leather-clad half-dressed bikers to see if that boosts sales...
Others have pointed out that these were serials, not fixups, although some Victorian authors may have published fixups: the concept is ancient.
Two examples:
1) the Iliad is probably a fixup. The first bunch of books are heavily focused on Diomedes, who then more-or-less disappears completely from the story. There is some contention that the parts of books V and VI dealing with him were once a separate story.
2) going even further back, Gilgamesh is probably a fixup. There's a good deal of evidence that it was assembled from pre-existing stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu (and also Utnapishtim, the Chaldean "Noah" who was lifted by the early Hebrews along with so much else).
3) and the Bible itself, which seems to have been written rather late in Jewish history, almost certainly assembled from pre-existing stand-alone tales, which explains the contradictions in the two stories of creation and so on.
But for me it is not one language but a pairing that has caught my heart.
I'm in the same boat, with the same languages. Python for convenience, C++ for speed. I also use C for really low level embedded (PIC) stuff, but that's it.
This combination gives me the optimal mix of portability and power for the problem domains I'm interested in, and at this point I don't see any reason to leave C++ for anything else. The big trick is to adopt and strictly adhere to a set of reasonable coding standards that keeps you from doing all the stupid things the language lets you do.
C++ demands a higher level of discipline and maturity from developers than most languages because Linus is right: it is incredibly easy to abuse. A bad programmer will write bad code in any language, but C++ makes it really easy for bad programmers to express themselves, and that's a bad thing. That doesn't mean the language is bad, but it does mean it should only be used where its advantages (portability, efficiency, expressive power) are sufficiently great to overcome its weaknesses (excessive complexity, mediocre type safety, excessive complexity.)
Those are great links. Thanks for posting them. But they appear to show the models almost exactly as bad as the the grandparent: both indicate reality is at the very bottom of the model prediction distribution. It's unfortunate that the grandparent is from such a sketchy source, as it demonstrates greater respect for the principles of visual display of information. It shows one thing, it shows it well, and axis that people care about (the vertical) is given reasonable scaling instead of being compressed away by cramming in multiple additional graphs.
Furthermore, consider the lameness of the first claim in the AR5 chapter you like: "Predictions for averages of temperature, over large regions of the planet and for the global mean, exhibit positive skill when verified against observations for forecast periods up to ten years"
This sounds good, until you realize that the best thing that can be said of the models' predictive capacity is that it is better than chance. That is what "positive skill means", and that is all it means.
As someone who has worked in predictive modelling, this is something that people only say when their model has no practical predictive utility. It is easy to get models that show results that are by any measure many standard deviations away from chance, but that are still completely useless for the kind of predictions required by policy makers. To take a trivial concrete example: a model that tells you to "drive east" when your destination is in fact in the eastern half-plane will give results that are far better than chance (which would be driving in any random direction) but it will only rarely get you anywhere close to where you want to go.
The report goes on to list a variety of positive results with varying confidence, but none of them add up to "predictively useful for policy makers" and that's for global and large-scale regional climate. Local climates--which are what we really care about--are far harder to predict.
This is not to say that models are bad science or "global warming is a hoax" or any such nonsense. There is fairly strong evidence that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are a significant contributor to climate change by adding 0.3% to Earth's heat budget at the surface, and that anthropogenic aerosols are likely removing about 0.1% of the effective insolation at the surface, for a net 0.2% gain. These conclusions come from observations on the ocean heat budget, the temporal distribution of warming (which is greater at night than in the day, for example, ruling out solar variation) and the geographic distribution of the warming. It's possible to say all of this--and so have fairly high confidence that humans are having a significant impact on Earth's climate--but still not have much of a clue how the highly non-linear climate system is going to respond in the near or long term.
In some ways, because our economic systems are relatively fine-tuned to the historical climate, which we can predict will undergo fairly significant variation even if we don't know precisely where or what, the details of the future climate matter less than the high confidence it is going to change. We should be investing in robust systems, or we will be facing a significant, ongoing global recession as climate conditions trash economic assumptions.
But claims like the one in TFA are necessarily strongly dependent on model details, and while it's an interesting study, it was done by climatologists, not computational physicists, and that shows in the excessive confidence they place in the detailed model results.
I'm a Canadian who has worked in the US as a non-resident alien, so had to file an American return some years. My Canadian accountant had a tame American accountant she sent clients like me to for stuff like that: US tax law is just too complex for foreigners to bother with.
But taxes aren't the only issue. The OP says, correctly, "My son would have to register for the draft".
This is not a small thing. I know someone who grew up in the US in the '60's--a Canadian born to Canadian parents in Canada whose family had moved to the US--who was refused permission to leave the country at the age of 18 because he was draft-eligible. He got out eventually, but it was a big legal hassle.
The draft is on hiatus just now, but there is no certainty it always will be.
Dyson is a physicist and mathematician, so his opinion on this matters exactly the same as yours - not a jot
So will you take my word as a computational physicist that climate models--which are nothing but computational physics done by climate scientists rather than computational physicists--are far too uncertain to be robust guides to public policy?
Because that is my professional opinion, and it happens that my profession is the one that matters when judging computational physics, whether it's done by climate scientists, Freeman Dyson, or anyone else.
I've read climate modelling papers. I've looked at climate modelling codes and there documentation (mostly AR4, which is somewhat out of date now.) I was appalled by what I saw: it's all a good attempt to work things out, there's nothing wrong with it as science at all, but I'd rather use Wall Street financial models to guide public spending policy than climate models to guide climate policy. They have a much greater chance of being accurate.
This is not to say that climate models aren't useful inputs to the policy debate, but their accuracy if fantastically over-estimated by policymakers. GCMs have gotten Arctic warming badly wrong (the Arctic has warmed much faster than anyone anticipated) and missed the current--likely temporary--flattening of "global average temperature" increase. This is no surprise you a) look at the models and b) have the professional competency of a computational physicist to judge them. They just don't do the things that accurate models integrated over long timescales have to do, like conserve mass and energy natively.
Models before around 2005 were especially bad with energy conservation, fixing it up by redistributing energy across cells after each time step. Climate scientists were apparently OK with that, because they didn't know enough computational physics. Anyone who has spent a career building models that eventually get checked against reality knows that that is a virtual guarantee that the result will be unphysical nonsense. This is not a political statement: it is simply a fact.
So by all means dis Dyson for not being a climate scientist. But since GCMs are computational physics, you must take my word as a computational physicist over climate scientists, or admit you really don't care who is saying what so long as they say what you agree with.
This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.
There are different ways of stating the problem.
1) "Technology is eliminating jobs! How will we cope with the unemployment?"
2) "Technology is increasing productivity! How will we distribute the gains?"
3) "Technology is reducing total workforce requirements! How will we reduce the work week?"
Each of these assumes a different fixed aspect of the economy. The first assumes that industrial capitalism will chug on, basically unchanged, while unemployment rises to unprecedented levels. History suggests this is unlikely.
The second assumes that productivity gains will continue without the incentive of paid work.
The third assumes that paid work will remain the only way of distributing productivity gains.
The rise of industrial capitalism saw enormous social upheaval. It is likely that the rise of total automation will produce something similar. We have no idea what that will be (I certainly don't) but it's important that we recognize that while not everything will change, everything could, and not confine our imaginary futures too narrowly. We're going to be wrong regardless (because our imaginations are terrible tools for knowing reality) but in this case we're more likely to fail by being too narrow in our view than too broad.
Science denial is probably more strongly correlated with politics/emotions not intelligence level.
One common thread in science denial is post-modernism. The American Right is dominated by post-modernists at the moment, and the Left has been for decades.
By "post-modernists" I mean people who believe that objectivity is not just impossible but actually pernicious, that truth is a social construct, and that "different ways of knowing" are equally legitimate and culturally dependent.
This is in contrast to the scientific mindset that understands that while there is no view from nowhere there is also no view of nowhere, and works hard to see that place that exists independently of the knowing subject as clearly as possible. Pro-science people are Bayesians, so they know certainty is impossible (knowledge is uncertain; faith is certain, and also an epistemic error) and that Bayes' rule provides the only consistent way of updating our beliefs in the face of new evidence, so it doesn't matter what your ancestors or you pastor tells you, there is only one way of knowing.
I'd bet a lot of these "highly educated" anti-vaxxers are victims of post-modernism in this sense. It should be relatively easy to find out how well they know their Derrida, Laccan, Leotard and Foucoult compared to their more vaccination-friendly neighbours.
The odds aren't appreciably closer to zero, the enjoyment is the same or greater, there is no chance of disappointment, and the cost is zero.
If you invest the $104 a year you'd otherwise spend on lottery tickets then with interest at the end of 40 years (from age 20 to age 60) you will have accumulated about $9K, assuming 3.5% interest.
Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
There are two things to say about this:
1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it is easy to wander around in the noise.
This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you its precise location. They take any minor wobble that scientists identify--which based on evolution is almost certainly noise--and declare it the One True Location of Perfect Health.
2) The alternative is stories. Science fails to get traction with the public because it lacks narrative, which is an idea I explore in a lot more depth here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...
My friend was at least smart and professional enough to refuse all such advances, not all are so.
Your own answer makes clear what anyone who isn't a sociopath knows: people in positions of power and respect--which includes professors and college instructors--have a professional obligation to refuse all such advances.
There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, but a big one is that even if you can't imagine it[*] people in such positions have a ridiculous amount of influence over some individuals, a degree that amounts to coercion.
[*] though why anyone would think what they can or cannot imagine is interesting or relevant to any question of what is real is unclear... however I've seen some commenters here announce their imaginary ideas as if they were somehow important to the question.
To make up for it, and make you feel like our technology is more advanced, we put plastic guards and bezels on top of the engine. It makes the engine look larger for someone who doesnt know what an engine looks like outside of a car or truck, and that sells.
To people who do know what an engine looks like, it looks like your engine is made out of mostly plastic. I've never been able to get used to this.
With regard to sounds, once upon a time engine noise used to be a diagnostic, and it kind of bugs me to see it over-ridden by artifice. But in reality, modern vehicles have so much onboard intelligence and are so much better made than cars of decades past that the lost diagnostic capability in the engine noise is almost irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
You've likely encountered this quote, but it bears repeating:
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. -- Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)
One only needs to define the photon as a thermodynamic reexpansion of spacetime that was compressed by nearby matter.
Unfortunately that is not a meaningful statement. I have no idea what a "thermodynamic reexpansion" is versus a "non-thermodynamic reexpansion", for example. Nor is it clear how this would be expressed mathematically as a generalization of Maxwell's equations. Nor does your paper do anything more than repeat this meaningless statement.
There may be something meaningful and interesting to say about the thermodynamics of electromagnetism and space-time, but until you give us a mathematical statement of the physical principles you are trying to enunciate it is going to be very difficult for anyone to understand what, if anything, you are talking about.
I'm waiting for someone to explain why so many seem so sure that it actually is some form of exotic matter.
You'll forgive me for believing that that is a lie, because this has been explained many, many times. On the balance of probabilities, you are an irrational nutjob who is resistant to any actual explanation or evidence.
That said, I'll waste few minutes of my precious time pretending your question is sincere and you have a non-zero chance of changing your mind.
The reason why we focus on exotic matter is because observational evidence for a source of anomalous gravitational attraction is robust and diverse and alternative theories have either failed to account for it, or have failed other observational tests.
It isn't as if we have a single measurement on one system. We have detailed measurements of the rotation curves of many spiral galaxies. We have the motion of galaxies in clusters. We have the motion of clusters themselves. We have gravitational lensing studies--which probe the dark matter distribution in a completely different way from dynamical studies. We have cosmological simulations that can't explain galaxy formation without dark matter. We have structure in the cosmic microwave background that is evidence for dark matter, in that it can be explained easily with it, but only with great difficulty without, just as hearing a dog bark is evidence for a dog because a dog easily explains barking, while alternative explanations have much lower priors and so are less plausible. To deny this is to deny Bayes.
Did I have to dig deeply into some mysterious literature to find this? No. I had to look at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Do you see why I think your question is dishonest?
So that makes "maybe the measurements are in error" much less plausible than "dark matter exists".
With regard to new physics, the problem is that the low-hanging fruit have been picked, and what remains has a hard time explaining all the diverse observational evidence. It is hard to find a theory that explains all the phenomena that are observed that is not "there is some kind of exotic matter out there". None-the-less, we are actively testing a few such theories. Again from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So now your question has been answered. You need wait no more. You can either change your mind, and agree that dark matter is the most plausible explanation of the robust and diverse observations, or you can explain why you find some alternative hypothesis more plausible. But you can never again honestly ask, "Why don't people take observational error or alternative theories more seriously?"
As far as we know, humans are the only organisms that kill for sport.
As others have pointed out, this is false. Multiple species kill for fun.
War is mate competition pursued by other means. The reasons why humans kill each other is because it is an evolved, adaptive, behaviour carried over into a world that we are desperately trying to engineer in such a way that killing is no longer necessary or functional. The problem is that it's still fun: it feels good because we are the descendents of individuals who were selected to be good at it, and part of being good at it was enjoying it, getting an immediate, internal, biochemical reward for behaviour that was also adaptive (that produced more offspring).
As such, sports and other forms of competition that allow us to activate that in-built reward system without actually killing people are really important to keeping human society reasonably peaceful.
the rest was still a garbage heap of warring tribes, mainly until the Renaissance.
The tipping point was around the Gregorian revolution in the late 11th century (1050-1150 or thereabouts.) That was the point when Eastern civilizations were starting to stagnate and Western Europe was starting to get its act together. So the Renaissance was less of a "tremendous leap forward" than the bursting in to flower of a plant that had been growing for several centuries.
With regard to concerns about autonomous weapons, the things that people are pointing out as dangers are features from the point of view of the kind of person who thinks that mass organized violence is a useful way to address human problems (because it always works so well?)
Deniability and muddied legal responsibility are just what killers are looking for. They'll claim with every software release that civilian deaths are decreasing, and that might even be true, but the important thing is it will give idiots the ability to kill without accountability.
How stupid is war? Hitler wanted to secure German food supplies by using war to create an agrarian empire in Eastern Europe. This resulted in the utter destruction of Germany. If instead he had used Germany's expertise in phosphate and nitrate chemistry to investigate fertilizers instead of high explosives, the Green Revolution would have come decades early and he'd be remembered as a great man. This is not an isolated example: war almost never produces the outcome it's instigators intend, to the extent that if your name is not Bismark you're better off not starting one. There are always cheaper, more reliable means of achieving any end.
Unfortunately the news report carefully leaves out any numbers from the new study. It notes that over the past 200 years the average pH of the oceans have increased from 8.25 to 8.14, but makes no mention of the size of the increase studied in the report, so there is no way to tell if the headline is sensationalist nonsense or not.
Given the quality of scientific journalism, however, my prior is pretty heavily biased toward sensationalist nonsense.
There are actually quite a number of environmentalists who have suggested that we should use nuclear power in order to get off of fossil fuels.
While there are a few, no leading environmental organization is pro-nuclear. Greenpeace in particular is adamantly opposed to nuclear, even though they treat the IPCC reports as Biblically certain when it supports their anti-capitalist political agenda, and the IPCC clearly states that nuclear is one way to address CO2 pollution (particularly from base-load coal, which is very hard to replace otherwise).
So let's not kid ourselves: the environmental left wants to treat CO2 pollution as a moral and social problem, and they react to any suggestion that we treat it as a technological problem in the same way conservative Christians react to the suggestion that we treat teen pregnancy as a technological problem, and fix it via education and easily-available contraception. For the environmental left, smashing global capitalism, not saving the planet is the goal, and they strongly oppose anything that will save the latter without destroying the former (see Naiomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" for a textbook example of this position, all laid out in black and white.)
We can't directly observe a particle being in an indeterminate state
And this central mystery is still with us: why can't we? Decoherence people sometimes claim to have the answer, but they don't: they can explain why we don't see interference, not why interference is the only way we can be aware that particles are in indeterminate (classical) states.
Reality is very strange.
The difference between the Internet on April Fool's Day and on other days is on the one it is packed with false stories full of pandering nonsense written by charlatans to gain page views, and on the other it is the first day of April.
there is an infinitesimally small chance that it was engaged by accident.
And since air disasters necessarily depend on extremely low-probability events, this is not an argument for the proposition "therefore this was most likely not the cause".
We know that whatever happened it had an outrageously low probability. This makes speculation in advance of data useless, because there are an almost unlimited number of highly improbable things that could have happened, and anyone who thinks they can imagine their way to the correct one is innumerate: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...
From the tortured summary the only thing that's clear is that this technology is nothing like anything in Star Wars or Star Trek, but some illiterate in PR has decided that whatever they actually do is so boring, obscure or useless that the only way to drum up any attention for them is to describe them in terms of something completely unrelated.
Does anyone have any idea what they actually do and how they do it?
This is not even wrong. Payne had the idea first, Russell thought it was wrong, Russell later changed his mind and gave Payne credit: http://blogs.britannica.com/20... His work cites hers.
This is how science is supposed to work, although there is always a factor of fame involved in credit-giving, and women have in general not been as forceful in claiming or defending credit as men.
Furthermore, how many people claiming to be "outraged" by this were even aware of who had been given credit for figuring out the composition of the sun in the first place? Who amongst us is "shocked, shocked" that Russell--whom they had been giving credit to all these years, citing in papers, talking up at cocktail parties--didn't actually make the discovery that is commonly and incorrectly attributed to him?
What's being debated is whether it's right to make experiments who's consequences a person who can't consent to them has to carry.
And this differs from having children the old fashioned way how?
That is the crux: every child born is a genetic experiment today. We hope that it doesn't end up with too many defects. We hope that it's born with eyes (I know someone who wasn't). We hope that it's born without any non-lethal developmental defects (I know a couple of people who have them, caught and fixed by surgery before they became fatal.) We hope they won't develop Type I diabetes (like several of my friends have)... and so on.
Every one of these things is a crap-shoot, and everyone who has kids today is performing an uncontrolled genetic experiment every time.
To claim that this process is necessarily going to be made worse by adding some human intelligence to the mix is problematic. The claim that there is no conceivable therapeutic benefit to engineering certain classes of genetic defect out of the germline is disingenuous, unless you think everyone everywhere for the rest of time is going to have good gene therapy available to them while growing up, which is insane.
To claim "we can't predict what the effects might be so we shouldn't do the research" is bizarre: if we don't do the research, admittedly mostly on animal models, how will we ever know what the effects are? Once we've done the research, we will have a high confidence in the effects, just as we do with any other therapeutic intervention. We all know that iatrogenic disease is a major cause of death and suffering, so wringing our hands about germline modification as if it was unique in that respect is at the very least strange and at worst deeply hypocritical.
All power gets used, and it's understandable that people should be concerned about how the power to edit the human germline will be used. The possibilities for abuse are considerable. If we are ever able to create Brave-New-World style designer slaves, happy in their subjugation, we probably will, for some value of "we".
But the debate should be about how to use this power wisely, not whether we should develop it at all. Someone will, and it's better that that happen out in the open than in some secret lab in $EVIL_NATION or funded by $EVIL_BILLIONAIRE.
Cover design is hard, and most people do judge books by the cover. These books have content that is likely reflected by their covers pretty well, so in that sense I'd say most of them are pretty good.
The one a few pages in about the guy who's annoyed is really quite good: blunt, angry, simple. Since that's what the book looks to be like, how can the cover be bad?
For my book (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1400044028&sr=1-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem) one of my first readers was an artist, so I hired her to do the cover art. It captures a lot of things about the book, and it's beautiful on its own, so it's a win.
But I'm sure a purist would find a million things wrong with it, from the ambiguities of the image to my choice of font (not papyrus or comic sans, but any font can be mocked if you work at it hard enough) to the choice of colours (too blue, not enough contrast) to the overall look (too cluttered, too busy)... and so on.
Still, my hope was to keep it reasonably low on the mockability scale, and while it's fun to mock stuff, but I have a depressing feeling that many of these mocked books are selling a lot better than a lot of less-mockable stuff. So maybe I should replace my cover with unicorns and rainbows and leather-clad half-dressed bikers to see if that boosts sales...
Others have pointed out that these were serials, not fixups, although some Victorian authors may have published fixups: the concept is ancient.
Two examples:
1) the Iliad is probably a fixup. The first bunch of books are heavily focused on Diomedes, who then more-or-less disappears completely from the story. There is some contention that the parts of books V and VI dealing with him were once a separate story.
2) going even further back, Gilgamesh is probably a fixup. There's a good deal of evidence that it was assembled from pre-existing stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu (and also Utnapishtim, the Chaldean "Noah" who was lifted by the early Hebrews along with so much else).
3) and the Bible itself, which seems to have been written rather late in Jewish history, almost certainly assembled from pre-existing stand-alone tales, which explains the contradictions in the two stories of creation and so on.
But for me it is not one language but a pairing that has caught my heart.
I'm in the same boat, with the same languages. Python for convenience, C++ for speed. I also use C for really low level embedded (PIC) stuff, but that's it.
This combination gives me the optimal mix of portability and power for the problem domains I'm interested in, and at this point I don't see any reason to leave C++ for anything else. The big trick is to adopt and strictly adhere to a set of reasonable coding standards that keeps you from doing all the stupid things the language lets you do.
C++ demands a higher level of discipline and maturity from developers than most languages because Linus is right: it is incredibly easy to abuse. A bad programmer will write bad code in any language, but C++ makes it really easy for bad programmers to express themselves, and that's a bad thing. That doesn't mean the language is bad, but it does mean it should only be used where its advantages (portability, efficiency, expressive power) are sufficiently great to overcome its weaknesses (excessive complexity, mediocre type safety, excessive complexity.)
Those are great links. Thanks for posting them. But they appear to show the models almost exactly as bad as the the grandparent: both indicate reality is at the very bottom of the model prediction distribution. It's unfortunate that the grandparent is from such a sketchy source, as it demonstrates greater respect for the principles of visual display of information. It shows one thing, it shows it well, and axis that people care about (the vertical) is given reasonable scaling instead of being compressed away by cramming in multiple additional graphs.
Furthermore, consider the lameness of the first claim in the AR5 chapter you like: "Predictions for averages of temperature, over large regions of the planet and for the global mean, exhibit positive skill when verified against observations for forecast periods up to ten years"
This sounds good, until you realize that the best thing that can be said of the models' predictive capacity is that it is better than chance. That is what "positive skill means", and that is all it means.
As someone who has worked in predictive modelling, this is something that people only say when their model has no practical predictive utility. It is easy to get models that show results that are by any measure many standard deviations away from chance, but that are still completely useless for the kind of predictions required by policy makers. To take a trivial concrete example: a model that tells you to "drive east" when your destination is in fact in the eastern half-plane will give results that are far better than chance (which would be driving in any random direction) but it will only rarely get you anywhere close to where you want to go.
The report goes on to list a variety of positive results with varying confidence, but none of them add up to "predictively useful for policy makers" and that's for global and large-scale regional climate. Local climates--which are what we really care about--are far harder to predict.
This is not to say that models are bad science or "global warming is a hoax" or any such nonsense. There is fairly strong evidence that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are a significant contributor to climate change by adding 0.3% to Earth's heat budget at the surface, and that anthropogenic aerosols are likely removing about 0.1% of the effective insolation at the surface, for a net 0.2% gain. These conclusions come from observations on the ocean heat budget, the temporal distribution of warming (which is greater at night than in the day, for example, ruling out solar variation) and the geographic distribution of the warming. It's possible to say all of this--and so have fairly high confidence that humans are having a significant impact on Earth's climate--but still not have much of a clue how the highly non-linear climate system is going to respond in the near or long term.
In some ways, because our economic systems are relatively fine-tuned to the historical climate, which we can predict will undergo fairly significant variation even if we don't know precisely where or what, the details of the future climate matter less than the high confidence it is going to change. We should be investing in robust systems, or we will be facing a significant, ongoing global recession as climate conditions trash economic assumptions.
But claims like the one in TFA are necessarily strongly dependent on model details, and while it's an interesting study, it was done by climatologists, not computational physicists, and that shows in the excessive confidence they place in the detailed model results.
I'm a Canadian who has worked in the US as a non-resident alien, so had to file an American return some years. My Canadian accountant had a tame American accountant she sent clients like me to for stuff like that: US tax law is just too complex for foreigners to bother with.
But taxes aren't the only issue. The OP says, correctly, "My son would have to register for the draft".
This is not a small thing. I know someone who grew up in the US in the '60's--a Canadian born to Canadian parents in Canada whose family had moved to the US--who was refused permission to leave the country at the age of 18 because he was draft-eligible. He got out eventually, but it was a big legal hassle.
The draft is on hiatus just now, but there is no certainty it always will be.
Dyson is a physicist and mathematician, so his opinion on this matters exactly the same as yours - not a jot
So will you take my word as a computational physicist that climate models--which are nothing but computational physics done by climate scientists rather than computational physicists--are far too uncertain to be robust guides to public policy?
Because that is my professional opinion, and it happens that my profession is the one that matters when judging computational physics, whether it's done by climate scientists, Freeman Dyson, or anyone else.
I've read climate modelling papers. I've looked at climate modelling codes and there documentation (mostly AR4, which is somewhat out of date now.) I was appalled by what I saw: it's all a good attempt to work things out, there's nothing wrong with it as science at all, but I'd rather use Wall Street financial models to guide public spending policy than climate models to guide climate policy. They have a much greater chance of being accurate.
This is not to say that climate models aren't useful inputs to the policy debate, but their accuracy if fantastically over-estimated by policymakers. GCMs have gotten Arctic warming badly wrong (the Arctic has warmed much faster than anyone anticipated) and missed the current--likely temporary--flattening of "global average temperature" increase. This is no surprise you a) look at the models and b) have the professional competency of a computational physicist to judge them. They just don't do the things that accurate models integrated over long timescales have to do, like conserve mass and energy natively.
Models before around 2005 were especially bad with energy conservation, fixing it up by redistributing energy across cells after each time step. Climate scientists were apparently OK with that, because they didn't know enough computational physics. Anyone who has spent a career building models that eventually get checked against reality knows that that is a virtual guarantee that the result will be unphysical nonsense. This is not a political statement: it is simply a fact.
So by all means dis Dyson for not being a climate scientist. But since GCMs are computational physics, you must take my word as a computational physicist over climate scientists, or admit you really don't care who is saying what so long as they say what you agree with.
This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.
There are different ways of stating the problem.
1) "Technology is eliminating jobs! How will we cope with the unemployment?"
2) "Technology is increasing productivity! How will we distribute the gains?"
3) "Technology is reducing total workforce requirements! How will we reduce the work week?"
Each of these assumes a different fixed aspect of the economy. The first assumes that industrial capitalism will chug on, basically unchanged, while unemployment rises to unprecedented levels. History suggests this is unlikely.
The second assumes that productivity gains will continue without the incentive of paid work.
The third assumes that paid work will remain the only way of distributing productivity gains.
The rise of industrial capitalism saw enormous social upheaval. It is likely that the rise of total automation will produce something similar. We have no idea what that will be (I certainly don't) but it's important that we recognize that while not everything will change, everything could, and not confine our imaginary futures too narrowly. We're going to be wrong regardless (because our imaginations are terrible tools for knowing reality) but in this case we're more likely to fail by being too narrow in our view than too broad.
Science denial is probably more strongly correlated with politics/emotions not intelligence level.
One common thread in science denial is post-modernism. The American Right is dominated by post-modernists at the moment, and the Left has been for decades.
By "post-modernists" I mean people who believe that objectivity is not just impossible but actually pernicious, that truth is a social construct, and that "different ways of knowing" are equally legitimate and culturally dependent.
This is in contrast to the scientific mindset that understands that while there is no view from nowhere there is also no view of nowhere, and works hard to see that place that exists independently of the knowing subject as clearly as possible. Pro-science people are Bayesians, so they know certainty is impossible (knowledge is uncertain; faith is certain, and also an epistemic error) and that Bayes' rule provides the only consistent way of updating our beliefs in the face of new evidence, so it doesn't matter what your ancestors or you pastor tells you, there is only one way of knowing.
I'd bet a lot of these "highly educated" anti-vaxxers are victims of post-modernism in this sense. It should be relatively easy to find out how well they know their Derrida, Laccan, Leotard and Foucoult compared to their more vaccination-friendly neighbours.
The odds aren't appreciably closer to zero, the enjoyment is the same or greater, there is no chance of disappointment, and the cost is zero.
If you invest the $104 a year you'd otherwise spend on lottery tickets then with interest at the end of 40 years (from age 20 to age 60) you will have accumulated about $9K, assuming 3.5% interest.
Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
There are two things to say about this:
1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it is easy to wander around in the noise.
This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you its precise location. They take any minor wobble that scientists identify--which based on evolution is almost certainly noise--and declare it the One True Location of Perfect Health.
2) The alternative is stories. Science fails to get traction with the public because it lacks narrative, which is an idea I explore in a lot more depth here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...
My friend was at least smart and professional enough to refuse all such advances, not all are so.
Your own answer makes clear what anyone who isn't a sociopath knows: people in positions of power and respect--which includes professors and college instructors--have a professional obligation to refuse all such advances.
There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, but a big one is that even if you can't imagine it[*] people in such positions have a ridiculous amount of influence over some individuals, a degree that amounts to coercion.
[*] though why anyone would think what they can or cannot imagine is interesting or relevant to any question of what is real is unclear... however I've seen some commenters here announce their imaginary ideas as if they were somehow important to the question.
To make up for it, and make you feel like our technology is more advanced, we put plastic guards and bezels on top of the engine. It makes the engine look larger for someone who doesnt know what an engine looks like outside of a car or truck, and that sells.
To people who do know what an engine looks like, it looks like your engine is made out of mostly plastic. I've never been able to get used to this.
With regard to sounds, once upon a time engine noise used to be a diagnostic, and it kind of bugs me to see it over-ridden by artifice. But in reality, modern vehicles have so much onboard intelligence and are so much better made than cars of decades past that the lost diagnostic capability in the engine noise is almost irrelevant.