The bottom line is that we don't know whether there is any randomness in the universe, and there is certainly considerable evidence that there might be.
What we do know is that the question is almost completely uninteresting, which is proven by the fact that it is so hard to tell the difference between "true" randomness and merely insanely-hard-to-predict non-random phenomena. If it mattered, it would be easy to tell which kind of world we lived in. We can't, so it doesn't matter.
There may be some insanely esoteric situation where the kind of randomness the universe contains does make a difference, but why anyone would care deeply about a question whose answer is completely irrelevant to every known aspect of life is unclear, unless it's for purely aesthetic reasons (which is quite reasonable, just not particularly interesting to people who have different aesthetic tastes.)
When you question it, yes. When Scientists question it, no. See the difference.
We are all scientists. Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. Do that and you are a scientist. Some of us have much more specialized knowledge that allow us do make more relevant, detailed or complex observations and experiments, and reason from those observations to create tests that are more subtle and rigorous, but there is nothing to stop anyone from doing so at a basic level.
As an example of the latter, so far as I know there are no computational physicists working in climate science. There are only climatologists. This shows when you get into the details of GCMs, which vary in quality but typically have a number of extremely problematic assumptions that no computational physicist would ever countenance. My favourite is a model that "conserved energy" by adjusting cell temperatures by hand at the end of every time step. This was considered a good model five years or so ago. Anyone with a computational physics background would never suggest basing public policy on such a model or any other model that has similar kludges: we have seen too many "simple" corrections of this kind result in wildly non-physical results for models of systems that are far, far simpler than the climate.
And yet there is no argument of any kind beyond the crudest first-order hand-waving (which won't do for well-known reasons) that the currently observed fluctuations in Earth's climate are caused by human activity that is not fundamentally dependent on climate models. I became an AGW skeptic because I was trying to produce such an argument and kept getting pulled back to climate models. I am a computational physicist--which again, no climatologist anywhere actually is, so far as I can tell--and was simply appalled by what I saw in the code and documentation.
There are plenty of reasons to stop dumping gigatonnes of shit into the air, and I will happily put my carbon footprint up against anyone else in the developed world, but the quality of computational physics in climate models, while scientifically excellent given the difficulty of the problem, is no where near what is required to justify major public policy changes (I consider cap and trade to be relatively minor and a generally good thing for protecting the atmospheric commons, as anyone in favour of free-market solutions to human problems ought to be.)
Thinking that way is entirely useless as a way of making scientific discoveries, but there is nothing that says science has to have the answers to *everything*.
But there is something (the Jaynes/Cox derivation of Bayes' rule, which depends only on a consistency condition) that says that if science doesn't have the answer, neither does anything else.
Nonsense. To a Bayesian theory and fact are merely convenient labels for propositions of differing complexity and degree of inference.
No one with a mature understanding of the logic of science uses "theory" and "fact" as anything other than convenience markers. All propositional knowledge is subject to the same rules (Bayesian logic) regardless of how near (fact) or far (theory) it is from sense experience.
To argue otherwise is to declare oneself ignorant of almost everything regarding our knowledge of the world, which is never certain. The difference between someone who has faith the Bible is inerrant and someone who knows that evolution is responsible for the diversity of life is that the latter can revise their knowledge in the face of new evidence whereas the former will not change their belief regardless of the evidence. Faith, like all forms of certainty, is an epistemic error.
And no, I am not "100% certain" of that, in the sense that I am open to counter-arguments, although the Jayne/Cox derivation of Bayesian logic as the only consistent rules for updating our beliefs is compelling enough that I don't lose any sleep over the possibility it will be proven wrong, any more than I lose sleep over any other uncertain proposition, like the answers to "What is my name?" and "Where are my socks?" We get along with knowledge--which is inherently uncertain--just fine in all walks of life, and only an idiot insists on certainty as some kind of virtue when it is actually just a mistake.
Likewise, to use the uncertainty of all knowledge as an excuse to believe just anything is also a failure to grasp Bayesian logic, which says that we should accept the most plausible propositions, not just any old things we happen to want to believe.
People with an archaic, pre-modern notion of knowledge find all this mind-boggling, and I guess people in the southern US are going to be a lot slower than the rest of the world to learn any of it.
Nope. Because the US is (mostly, there are obvious and absurd exceptions) governed in a way that assumes consenting adults can engage in mutually beneficial relationships without a nanny telling them what to do as if they were five year old children
What? You mean there are no corporations in the US?
Corporations are a pure act of interference with the operations of free adults in a free market. The exist precisely to restrict consenting adults in their behaviour. We are not allowed to sue individuals who act under corporate auspices, and corporate owners are protected from all sorts of legal action. All of this is done by statute: the Companies Act and its various descendents.
No one who is strictly in favour of free markets can be in favour of corporations (I am in favour of corporations and in fact am the founder of one, but I'm also in favour of heavily regulating corporations so they serve the limited purposes for which they were intended and do not run rampant over the freedoms of the individuals they were created to serve.)
I've never understood why does USA have such a complex system that the government doesn't know how much they should pay taxes...
Because the US federal system is completely broken, and has been for at least 50 years, possibly 100. It was intended to ride herd on a bunch of quasi-autonomous states (though not nearly so autonomous as they were under the Crown or the Articles of Confederation) and is now being used to maintain a world-wide empire.
American libertarians almost make sense when you consider they deal with a completely broken system of government at all levels all the time. Because every government they deal with is completely screwed up, they think all governments are screwed up, and simply do not believe it when foreigners tell them how much better things are for us.
As a "religious person," I feel entirely convinced you have logically come to this conclusion.
Depends what you mean by "religious person". I believe "religious person" means "a person who bases some aspects of their behaviour on a written work or oral tradition that they claim to either not require or to be impossible to subject to empirical, Bayesian scrutiny."
Since the claim that any epistemic claim does not require empirical, Bayesian scrutiny is irrational, and the claim that any epistemic claim cannot be subject to empirical, Bayesian scrutiny is insane, it would seem quite safe to say that religious people must be incapable of logical reasoning in the general case, and that this deficiency puts them on a slippery slope to either secularism (accepting empirical Bayesianism in all things) or fundamentalism (accepting their received tradition in the face of the facts and probabilistic inferences is flies in the face of.)
So you may feel you are a "logical" religious person. But that is just your feeling, and while feelings are facts about our state of mind, they are not facts that are relevant to claims such as the one you appear to be making.
Besides, Ontario isn't exactly the best place for wind, let alone solar. Even right off the lakes you don't get wind and it can be like that months at a time.
Actually the Eastern end of Lake Ontario is one of the best places in Canada for wind power, which is why we have a large wind farm on Wolfe Island and there is talk of more turbines out in the lake itself. Goodness for wind power comes from a combination of wind and being close to power usage. Southern Ontario is pretty good on both counts.
I hope Prof. Ereditato hasn't been made to regret the very great open service he did for contemporary science.
It wasn't a service, it was a mistake. All else being equal the collaboration would have spent another year and found the cause of the problem before they published. I'm sure plenty of people in the collaboration argued for that and were swayed by Prof Ereditato and others. Large collaborations involve a lot of politics, and leaders need to take responsibility for their mistakes--not their scientific errors, but their political ones. And the political error here was choosing to publish less than six months before the source of the scientific error was found.
Sounds lie proper science to me. Why was he forced to step down? Are we now saying that only scientist whose experiments are successful can do experiments?
Not at all. In any large collaboration politics comes into play, and no doubt there was much soul-searching on the part of all involved. Five people quit the collaboration rather than put their names to this paper, which is very high. It took them less than a year to find their mistake. Many people must have counseled caution and been swayed by the collaboration's leadership.
This is not science working the way it is supposed to, but rather politics working the way it is supposed to. The head of the collaboration made a serious error in judgment and lost the confidence of enough people that it was best for him to resign.
Consequently, science does not lead iteratively toward truth -- a popular misunderstanding.
It isn't clear why this is considered a "popular" misunderstanding when smug ignoramuses have been responding to it with nonsense like yours for decades. Idiots saying, "Science is about building models..." are at least ten times more common than idiots saying, "Science is about truth..."
Science is Bayesian. If you understand that you can drop all your nonsense about "models" and similar pseudo-Cartesian gibberish. If you don't understand that you aren't talking about science, but some imaginary philosophical construct that's completely irrelevant to any discussion of science.
While it's true that not all foreign words are valid English, we've imported an awful lot of words without making any changes.
This is a common mistake. In fact, all "foreign" words are valid English. Some of them are just spoken by people who use different grammars. Although one of my Russian friends once told me, "English has no grammar," so I guess we need to make up in vocabulary what we lack in grammar.
But the point still stands: the barrier to entry for words into the English language is fantastically low compared to almost all other languages.
If you allow qi, then you can basically allow any foreign word that someone might use in an English sentence (by the same logic, the fact that people say 'je ne sais quoi' in English conversations means that quoi would be a valid Scrabble word).
Every word is an English word. "Pukka sushi, effendi" is a perfectly valid English sentence, for example (even the spell-checker on this thing likes it.)
The ultimate Fermi paradox is why has this not happened yet. We are nearing the technological capability to do this. I think we will have molecular manufacturing within 100 years.
The kind of specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets is incredibly hard to evolve. Every other trick in the evolutionary book has appeared multiple times in multiple guises, all independently of each other: swimming (fish, aquatic reptiles, aquatic mammals, penguins), walking (reptiles, insects, various marine orders), flight (reptiles, birds, mammals and insects), seeing (everything from shellfish on up), teeth, jaws, beaks, tentacles... Everything that can be done has been done many times......Expect for specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets. There is no evidence whatsoever that any other species anywhere ever has reached anything remotely resembling our capacity in this regard. Not amongst other tool-using species, not amongst any species with sophisticated signalling systems, not anywhere (Neanderthal were so closely related to us that even granted the stretch that they had the same human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets it would still only count as once.)
Evolution is an elaborative process: it builds on existing capabilities by differential reproduction of imperfect copies of what already exists. This suggests that with regard to specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets the viable space of starting points must be astonishingly small. Otherwise it would have evolved more than once, here on Earth.
It is therefore possible that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we are the only species in the Galaxy with specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets.
[Sorry about the long repetitive description of the kind of intelligence I'm talking about but every time I raise this point I get answers from people who think it is interesting to introduce irrelevant questions about completely different, totally unrelated evolved characteristics, like feathers and webbed feet and the various other kinds of intelligence that are manifestly not capable of general representation, building spaceships or writing sonnets.]
Then, assuming this idea of 100,000 planets per star is true: with that many planets floating around between the stars, how come we never see them? How come they don't appear to cross our solar system? Distances between the stars may be huge but then there are a lot of those unbound planets, and stars have strong gravitational fields sucking in those unbound planets concentrating them. So the chance of meeting one of those unbound planets should be pretty high.
Do the math.
1E5 planets for our sun.
Volume of ~ (4*3.14E7*3E8)**3 ~ (4E16)**3 = 64E48 m**3 (I've assumed a 4 light-year cube around the Sun, used the fact that there are pretty close to pi times 1E7 seconds in a year, and the velocity of light is ~3E8 m/s.
Volume of our solar system is ~ (4/3)*3.14*(10*3600*3E8)**3 ~ 4*(1E13)**3 = 4E39 (assuming a ten light-hour spherical volume around the Sun, which is generous. Pluto is at about 5 light hours out.)
So you'd expect the average number of nomads in our solar system at any given time to be on average 1E5*4E39/64E48 ~ 1E-5
~0.00001 of a planet is pretty hard to see amidst the ~10 planets we actually have, and remember: most of that volume for our solar system is on the outermost edge! 50% of the volume of a sphere is in the outer 20% of the radius.
To get an idea of the velocity-dependent crossing rate, assume a mean velocity of ~1 km/s (the typical scale of stellar velocities in the disks of spiral galaxies is 10 km/s, so 10% of that value for the local velocity of a nomad is not unreasonable.) This means these objects are basically stationary over historical time: it would take one (absent gravity) thousands of years to cross the outer volume of the solar system (10 light-hours is 1E10 km and 1 km/s is only 3.14E7 km/year.)
Gravity will increase the odds of one entering the inner solar system, but not by much. It's a weak force. The outer planets have very low orbital curvature (kinda by definition) if you want a sense of the scale of the effect of gravity on a body so far out there.
Studying Z convinced me that any kind of sane software specification language is unrealistic without some fundamental change in the way we do things. I have no idea what that change is, but it's not small.
The thing that killed Z for me was the way the specification contaminated the design in his word-processor example. That's like using a CAD program that requires you to only use cast-iron components.
I'm not convinced software specification is impossible, but I am convinced it's far harder than most people appreciate.
There were ground troops 3 blocks away engaged with armed militants at the time.
Which justifies them opening fire on the good samaritans who stopped to aid their first victims how?
The copter was doing forward reconnaissance in support of those ground troops.
Which justifies them opening fire on the good samaritans who stopped to aid their first victims how?
There was even audio of the helicopter pilots getting permission to fire from their commanders who were in turn being advised by JAG lawyers assigned to the group.
Which justifies them opening fire on the good samaritans who stopped to aid their first victims how?
The rules of war are very, very clear on this: civilians aiding the wounded are not to be fired upon.
Note that I am not talking about the original attack. I am not talking about all the cases where the use of deadly force conformed to the rules of engagement the helicopter crew were operating under. If you reply to justify those attacks as if I was arguing about them it will just show you are an idiot.
I am specifically and only asking about the illegal attack on the good samaritans who came to the aid of the victims of the previous, legal attack.
How do you justify that attack on those good samaritans, who were taking their kids to their music lessons and happened upon dying people in the road?
I work in a radiation industry and know a considerable amount about X-ray physics and medical imaging, and these scanners should never have been taken into use for public screening.
It seems like a large percentage of people believe that if everyone stopped smoking there would be no more cancer.
Weird, I've never met anyone who believes that.
Smoking is a major cause of lung cancer, and I guess if you're an idiot who thinks entirely in abstractions so that "lung cancer" == "cancer" you might get this idea, but personally I have never met anyone quite that stupid.
We don't know what the actual causative factors are, but one thing is clear: regular use of toothpaste should not present a risk
I'm not sure why you're mentioning something completely irrelevant to the question at hand. What does the regular use of toothpaste have to do with diesel exhaust, which are rich in complex organic compounds due to incomplete combustion and non-hydrocarbon impurities.
I've never understood why people believe that saying, "If the universe was completely different from the way it actually is such that this completely irrelevant fact was relevant, there would be no problem here."
In fact, we live in world where diesel exhaust has absolutely nothing to do with regular toothpaste use, complete combustion of pure hydrocarbons, and quite a few other things besides. Did you just drop in from an alternate reality where some of those things are relevant to the health effects of diesel exhaust?
People with psychopathic tendencies are more prevalent than you might think, and they tend to rise quickly within corporate,union, government, military and political structures if they're highly functioning.
Don't fall into the error that there is anything uniquely evil about corporations: all forms of collective human organization are subject to colonization by co-evolving parasites, which is what the sort of psychopath you're describing is best understood as. Political parties, unions and bureaucracies have the same issues, as does the military in many cases, although military structures are better at weeding these things out than most.
Like the fools at political rallies who throw bottles at police and overturn cars, they actively _discredit_ the political causes they occasionally espouse.
Those people are all professional provocateurs. I mean, what else could they be? No one who uses violence in the nominal pursuit of a political cause could possibly be an actual supporter of that cause because the data shows conclusively that violence does nothing but move the cause backward.
So if you see anyone using violence of any kind at any political demonstration they MUST be being paid by groups opposed to the cause to smear it. The only alternative explanation is that there are people out there so brain-dead stupid that they think using violence somehow increases the odds that their cause will be achieved, and I mean really, how plausible is that?
The gist of the article is that a succession of droughts over several years meant that they no longer had enough water to support their population numbers. Which caused resource wars between different city states, resulting in the self destruction of the civilisation.
So what you're saying is that scarcity "caused" them to behave in a manner that is certain to create more scarcity.
How does that work, exactly?
How does scarcity "cause" people to say, "I know the solution to scarcity: it is to take people and resources out of productive economic roles and put them into roles where at best they are a deadweight loss and at worst will result in the active destruction of productive economic resources amongst our neighbours!"
It isn't scarcity that is causing this behaviour, but stupidity.
Or to restate that, whatever our intelligence, in full, is, computers can't do it.
No, Turning machines can't do it. But computers are not Turing machines any more than humans are. Computers have interrupts, which allow them to do real-time I/O. Turing's model does not contain anything like that. So computers can do things Turing machines can't: they CONTAIN a Turing machine (the same could be said of humans) but they are MORE than just a Turing machine.
Furthermore it has been known for a long time (there's a theorem due to Church about it) that we can solve problems that Turing machines can't.
The only reason why any of these things are considered remotely open issues is because of incredibly lazy thinking on the part of a great many people who for unaccountable reasons blithely assume that "computable" equals "knowable" when there is absolutely no reason to make that assumption and a vast number of painfully obvious reasons not to.
But Canada is too polite and has no balls, so that will never happen.
Actually we've been doing that for quite a while. We just do it politely, and y'all are too stupid to see how tough we are under the polite veneer (hint: watch a hockey game sometime. That'll tell you what we're like when the gloves come off...)
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The bottom line is that we don't know whether there is any randomness in the universe, and there is certainly considerable evidence that there might be.
What we do know is that the question is almost completely uninteresting, which is proven by the fact that it is so hard to tell the difference between "true" randomness and merely insanely-hard-to-predict non-random phenomena. If it mattered, it would be easy to tell which kind of world we lived in. We can't, so it doesn't matter.
There may be some insanely esoteric situation where the kind of randomness the universe contains does make a difference, but why anyone would care deeply about a question whose answer is completely irrelevant to every known aspect of life is unclear, unless it's for purely aesthetic reasons (which is quite reasonable, just not particularly interesting to people who have different aesthetic tastes.)
When you question it, yes. When Scientists question it, no. See the difference.
We are all scientists. Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. Do that and you are a scientist. Some of us have much more specialized knowledge that allow us do make more relevant, detailed or complex observations and experiments, and reason from those observations to create tests that are more subtle and rigorous, but there is nothing to stop anyone from doing so at a basic level.
As an example of the latter, so far as I know there are no computational physicists working in climate science. There are only climatologists. This shows when you get into the details of GCMs, which vary in quality but typically have a number of extremely problematic assumptions that no computational physicist would ever countenance. My favourite is a model that "conserved energy" by adjusting cell temperatures by hand at the end of every time step. This was considered a good model five years or so ago. Anyone with a computational physics background would never suggest basing public policy on such a model or any other model that has similar kludges: we have seen too many "simple" corrections of this kind result in wildly non-physical results for models of systems that are far, far simpler than the climate.
And yet there is no argument of any kind beyond the crudest first-order hand-waving (which won't do for well-known reasons) that the currently observed fluctuations in Earth's climate are caused by human activity that is not fundamentally dependent on climate models. I became an AGW skeptic because I was trying to produce such an argument and kept getting pulled back to climate models. I am a computational physicist--which again, no climatologist anywhere actually is, so far as I can tell--and was simply appalled by what I saw in the code and documentation.
There are plenty of reasons to stop dumping gigatonnes of shit into the air, and I will happily put my carbon footprint up against anyone else in the developed world, but the quality of computational physics in climate models, while scientifically excellent given the difficulty of the problem, is no where near what is required to justify major public policy changes (I consider cap and trade to be relatively minor and a generally good thing for protecting the atmospheric commons, as anyone in favour of free-market solutions to human problems ought to be.)
Thinking that way is entirely useless as a way of making scientific discoveries, but there is nothing that says science has to have the answers to *everything*.
But there is something (the Jaynes/Cox derivation of Bayes' rule, which depends only on a consistency condition) that says that if science doesn't have the answer, neither does anything else.
Theory and fact are two very different things.
Nonsense. To a Bayesian theory and fact are merely convenient labels for propositions of differing complexity and degree of inference.
No one with a mature understanding of the logic of science uses "theory" and "fact" as anything other than convenience markers. All propositional knowledge is subject to the same rules (Bayesian logic) regardless of how near (fact) or far (theory) it is from sense experience.
To argue otherwise is to declare oneself ignorant of almost everything regarding our knowledge of the world, which is never certain. The difference between someone who has faith the Bible is inerrant and someone who knows that evolution is responsible for the diversity of life is that the latter can revise their knowledge in the face of new evidence whereas the former will not change their belief regardless of the evidence. Faith, like all forms of certainty, is an epistemic error.
And no, I am not "100% certain" of that, in the sense that I am open to counter-arguments, although the Jayne/Cox derivation of Bayesian logic as the only consistent rules for updating our beliefs is compelling enough that I don't lose any sleep over the possibility it will be proven wrong, any more than I lose sleep over any other uncertain proposition, like the answers to "What is my name?" and "Where are my socks?" We get along with knowledge--which is inherently uncertain--just fine in all walks of life, and only an idiot insists on certainty as some kind of virtue when it is actually just a mistake.
Likewise, to use the uncertainty of all knowledge as an excuse to believe just anything is also a failure to grasp Bayesian logic, which says that we should accept the most plausible propositions, not just any old things we happen to want to believe.
People with an archaic, pre-modern notion of knowledge find all this mind-boggling, and I guess people in the southern US are going to be a lot slower than the rest of the world to learn any of it.
Nope. Because the US is (mostly, there are obvious and absurd exceptions) governed in a way that assumes consenting adults can engage in mutually beneficial relationships without a nanny telling them what to do as if they were five year old children
What? You mean there are no corporations in the US?
Corporations are a pure act of interference with the operations of free adults in a free market. The exist precisely to restrict consenting adults in their behaviour. We are not allowed to sue individuals who act under corporate auspices, and corporate owners are protected from all sorts of legal action. All of this is done by statute: the Companies Act and its various descendents.
No one who is strictly in favour of free markets can be in favour of corporations (I am in favour of corporations and in fact am the founder of one, but I'm also in favour of heavily regulating corporations so they serve the limited purposes for which they were intended and do not run rampant over the freedoms of the individuals they were created to serve.)
I've never understood why does USA have such a complex system that the government doesn't know how much they should pay taxes...
Because the US federal system is completely broken, and has been for at least 50 years, possibly 100. It was intended to ride herd on a bunch of quasi-autonomous states (though not nearly so autonomous as they were under the Crown or the Articles of Confederation) and is now being used to maintain a world-wide empire.
American libertarians almost make sense when you consider they deal with a completely broken system of government at all levels all the time. Because every government they deal with is completely screwed up, they think all governments are screwed up, and simply do not believe it when foreigners tell them how much better things are for us.
As a "religious person," I feel entirely convinced you have logically come to this conclusion.
Depends what you mean by "religious person". I believe "religious person" means "a person who bases some aspects of their behaviour on a written work or oral tradition that they claim to either not require or to be impossible to subject to empirical, Bayesian scrutiny."
Since the claim that any epistemic claim does not require empirical, Bayesian scrutiny is irrational, and the claim that any epistemic claim cannot be subject to empirical, Bayesian scrutiny is insane, it would seem quite safe to say that religious people must be incapable of logical reasoning in the general case, and that this deficiency puts them on a slippery slope to either secularism (accepting empirical Bayesianism in all things) or fundamentalism (accepting their received tradition in the face of the facts and probabilistic inferences is flies in the face of.)
So you may feel you are a "logical" religious person. But that is just your feeling, and while feelings are facts about our state of mind, they are not facts that are relevant to claims such as the one you appear to be making.
Besides, Ontario isn't exactly the best place for wind, let alone solar. Even right off the lakes you don't get wind and it can be like that months at a time.
Actually the Eastern end of Lake Ontario is one of the best places in Canada for wind power, which is why we have a large wind farm on Wolfe Island and there is talk of more turbines out in the lake itself. Goodness for wind power comes from a combination of wind and being close to power usage. Southern Ontario is pretty good on both counts.
I hope Prof. Ereditato hasn't been made to regret the very great open service he did for contemporary science.
It wasn't a service, it was a mistake. All else being equal the collaboration would have spent another year and found the cause of the problem before they published. I'm sure plenty of people in the collaboration argued for that and were swayed by Prof Ereditato and others. Large collaborations involve a lot of politics, and leaders need to take responsibility for their mistakes--not their scientific errors, but their political ones. And the political error here was choosing to publish less than six months before the source of the scientific error was found.
Sounds lie proper science to me. Why was he forced to step down? Are we now saying that only scientist whose experiments are successful can do experiments?
Not at all. In any large collaboration politics comes into play, and no doubt there was much soul-searching on the part of all involved. Five people quit the collaboration rather than put their names to this paper, which is very high. It took them less than a year to find their mistake. Many people must have counseled caution and been swayed by the collaboration's leadership.
This is not science working the way it is supposed to, but rather politics working the way it is supposed to. The head of the collaboration made a serious error in judgment and lost the confidence of enough people that it was best for him to resign.
Consequently, science does not lead iteratively toward truth -- a popular misunderstanding.
It isn't clear why this is considered a "popular" misunderstanding when smug ignoramuses have been responding to it with nonsense like yours for decades. Idiots saying, "Science is about building models..." are at least ten times more common than idiots saying, "Science is about truth..."
Science is Bayesian. If you understand that you can drop all your nonsense about "models" and similar pseudo-Cartesian gibberish. If you don't understand that you aren't talking about science, but some imaginary philosophical construct that's completely irrelevant to any discussion of science.
While it's true that not all foreign words are valid English, we've imported an awful lot of words without making any changes.
This is a common mistake. In fact, all "foreign" words are valid English. Some of them are just spoken by people who use different grammars. Although one of my Russian friends once told me, "English has no grammar," so I guess we need to make up in vocabulary what we lack in grammar.
But the point still stands: the barrier to entry for words into the English language is fantastically low compared to almost all other languages.
If you allow qi, then you can basically allow any foreign word that someone might use in an English sentence (by the same logic, the fact that people say 'je ne sais quoi' in English conversations means that quoi would be a valid Scrabble word).
Every word is an English word. "Pukka sushi, effendi" is a perfectly valid English sentence, for example (even the spell-checker on this thing likes it.)
The ultimate Fermi paradox is why has this not happened yet. We are nearing the technological capability to do this. I think we will have molecular manufacturing within 100 years.
The kind of specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets is incredibly hard to evolve. Every other trick in the evolutionary book has appeared multiple times in multiple guises, all independently of each other: swimming (fish, aquatic reptiles, aquatic mammals, penguins), walking (reptiles, insects, various marine orders), flight (reptiles, birds, mammals and insects), seeing (everything from shellfish on up), teeth, jaws, beaks, tentacles... Everything that can be done has been done many times... ...Expect for specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets. There is no evidence whatsoever that any other species anywhere ever has reached anything remotely resembling our capacity in this regard. Not amongst other tool-using species, not amongst any species with sophisticated signalling systems, not anywhere (Neanderthal were so closely related to us that even granted the stretch that they had the same human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets it would still only count as once.)
Evolution is an elaborative process: it builds on existing capabilities by differential reproduction of imperfect copies of what already exists. This suggests that with regard to specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets the viable space of starting points must be astonishingly small. Otherwise it would have evolved more than once, here on Earth.
It is therefore possible that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we are the only species in the Galaxy with specifically human intelligence capable of general representation that builds spaceships and writes sonnets.
[Sorry about the long repetitive description of the kind of intelligence I'm talking about but every time I raise this point I get answers from people who think it is interesting to introduce irrelevant questions about completely different, totally unrelated evolved characteristics, like feathers and webbed feet and the various other kinds of intelligence that are manifestly not capable of general representation, building spaceships or writing sonnets.]
Then, assuming this idea of 100,000 planets per star is true: with that many planets floating around between the stars, how come we never see them? How come they don't appear to cross our solar system? Distances between the stars may be huge but then there are a lot of those unbound planets, and stars have strong gravitational fields sucking in those unbound planets concentrating them. So the chance of meeting one of those unbound planets should be pretty high.
Do the math.
1E5 planets for our sun.
Volume of ~ (4*3.14E7*3E8)**3 ~ (4E16)**3 = 64E48 m**3 (I've assumed a 4 light-year cube around the Sun, used the fact that there are pretty close to pi times 1E7 seconds in a year, and the velocity of light is ~3E8 m/s.
Volume of our solar system is ~ (4/3)*3.14*(10*3600*3E8)**3 ~ 4*(1E13)**3 = 4E39 (assuming a ten light-hour spherical volume around the Sun, which is generous. Pluto is at about 5 light hours out.)
So you'd expect the average number of nomads in our solar system at any given time to be on average 1E5*4E39/64E48 ~ 1E-5
~0.00001 of a planet is pretty hard to see amidst the ~10 planets we actually have, and remember: most of that volume for our solar system is on the outermost edge! 50% of the volume of a sphere is in the outer 20% of the radius.
To get an idea of the velocity-dependent crossing rate, assume a mean velocity of ~1 km/s (the typical scale of stellar velocities in the disks of spiral galaxies is 10 km/s, so 10% of that value for the local velocity of a nomad is not unreasonable.) This means these objects are basically stationary over historical time: it would take one (absent gravity) thousands of years to cross the outer volume of the solar system (10 light-hours is 1E10 km and 1 km/s is only 3.14E7 km/year.)
Gravity will increase the odds of one entering the inner solar system, but not by much. It's a weak force. The outer planets have very low orbital curvature (kinda by definition) if you want a sense of the scale of the effect of gravity on a body so far out there.
This is also the point of Z...
Studying Z convinced me that any kind of sane software specification language is unrealistic without some fundamental change in the way we do things. I have no idea what that change is, but it's not small.
The thing that killed Z for me was the way the specification contaminated the design in his word-processor example. That's like using a CAD program that requires you to only use cast-iron components.
I'm not convinced software specification is impossible, but I am convinced it's far harder than most people appreciate.
There were ground troops 3 blocks away engaged with armed militants at the time.
Which justifies them opening fire on the good samaritans who stopped to aid their first victims how?
The copter was doing forward reconnaissance in support of those ground troops.
Which justifies them opening fire on the good samaritans who stopped to aid their first victims how?
There was even audio of the helicopter pilots getting permission to fire from their commanders who were in turn being advised by JAG lawyers assigned to the group.
Which justifies them opening fire on the good samaritans who stopped to aid their first victims how?
The rules of war are very, very clear on this: civilians aiding the wounded are not to be fired upon.
Note that I am not talking about the original attack. I am not talking about all the cases where the use of deadly force conformed to the rules of engagement the helicopter crew were operating under. If you reply to justify those attacks as if I was arguing about them it will just show you are an idiot.
I am specifically and only asking about the illegal attack on the good samaritans who came to the aid of the victims of the previous, legal attack.
How do you justify that attack on those good samaritans, who were taking their kids to their music lessons and happened upon dying people in the road?
I work in a radiation industry and know a considerable amount about X-ray physics and medical imaging, and these scanners should never have been taken into use for public screening.
I'm a physicist who has worked in radiation transport, and couldn't agree more.
It seems like a large percentage of people believe that if everyone stopped smoking there would be no more cancer.
Weird, I've never met anyone who believes that.
Smoking is a major cause of lung cancer, and I guess if you're an idiot who thinks entirely in abstractions so that "lung cancer" == "cancer" you might get this idea, but personally I have never met anyone quite that stupid.
We don't know what the actual causative factors are, but one thing is clear: regular use of toothpaste should not present a risk
I'm not sure why you're mentioning something completely irrelevant to the question at hand. What does the regular use of toothpaste have to do with diesel exhaust, which are rich in complex organic compounds due to incomplete combustion and non-hydrocarbon impurities.
I've never understood why people believe that saying, "If the universe was completely different from the way it actually is such that this completely irrelevant fact was relevant, there would be no problem here."
In fact, we live in world where diesel exhaust has absolutely nothing to do with regular toothpaste use, complete combustion of pure hydrocarbons, and quite a few other things besides. Did you just drop in from an alternate reality where some of those things are relevant to the health effects of diesel exhaust?
People with psychopathic tendencies are more prevalent than you might think, and they tend to rise quickly within corporate,union, government, military and political structures if they're highly functioning.
Don't fall into the error that there is anything uniquely evil about corporations: all forms of collective human organization are subject to colonization by co-evolving parasites, which is what the sort of psychopath you're describing is best understood as. Political parties, unions and bureaucracies have the same issues, as does the military in many cases, although military structures are better at weeding these things out than most.
Like the fools at political rallies who throw bottles at police and overturn cars, they actively _discredit_ the political causes they occasionally espouse.
Those people are all professional provocateurs. I mean, what else could they be? No one who uses violence in the nominal pursuit of a political cause could possibly be an actual supporter of that cause because the data shows conclusively that violence does nothing but move the cause backward.
So if you see anyone using violence of any kind at any political demonstration they MUST be being paid by groups opposed to the cause to smear it. The only alternative explanation is that there are people out there so brain-dead stupid that they think using violence somehow increases the odds that their cause will be achieved, and I mean really, how plausible is that?
The gist of the article is that a succession of droughts over several years meant that they no longer had enough water to support their population numbers. Which caused resource wars between different city states, resulting in the self destruction of the civilisation.
So what you're saying is that scarcity "caused" them to behave in a manner that is certain to create more scarcity.
How does that work, exactly?
How does scarcity "cause" people to say, "I know the solution to scarcity: it is to take people and resources out of productive economic roles and put them into roles where at best they are a deadweight loss and at worst will result in the active destruction of productive economic resources amongst our neighbours!"
It isn't scarcity that is causing this behaviour, but stupidity.
Or to restate that, whatever our intelligence, in full, is, computers can't do it.
No, Turning machines can't do it. But computers are not Turing machines any more than humans are. Computers have interrupts, which allow them to do real-time I/O. Turing's model does not contain anything like that. So computers can do things Turing machines can't: they CONTAIN a Turing machine (the same could be said of humans) but they are MORE than just a Turing machine.
Furthermore it has been known for a long time (there's a theorem due to Church about it) that we can solve problems that Turing machines can't.
The only reason why any of these things are considered remotely open issues is because of incredibly lazy thinking on the part of a great many people who for unaccountable reasons blithely assume that "computable" equals "knowable" when there is absolutely no reason to make that assumption and a vast number of painfully obvious reasons not to.
But Canada is too polite and has no balls, so that will never happen.
Actually we've been doing that for quite a while. We just do it politely, and y'all are too stupid to see how tough we are under the polite veneer (hint: watch a hockey game sometime. That'll tell you what we're like when the gloves come off...)