If they had symptoms that are actually caused by radiation exposure that would be a matter of concern. My only question is what has disabled 160,000 people? Since radiation exposure does not disable people, there must be something else going on.
Thanks for this information. It's good to know Chernobyl's radiation release had so little negative effect that people are bringing up completely unrelated health claims.
The NRC generally recognizes a zero-threshold proportional model for long-term risk from exposure.
Which is completely unsupported by any of the science of radiation exposure, either in terms of low-dose chronic exposure (people who live at high altitudes) or in terms of what we know about radiation effects at the microscopic level.
In particular, if the zero-threshold proportional model was correct, the quality factor would be unity for all types of radiation.
Nope, because they are stupid, and trying to sell physics to stupid people, who for some unaccountable reason control pretty much all the money in the world.
While it's nice that they're at least putting some money in to it, it really isn't a whole lot. Especially when you consider it's 5 separate projects.
Over five years, so it's a little over 5 million per program per year. A relatively small lab can easily burn half a million a year, so this is funding for maybe ten small labs per program or a couple of larger ones.
What each program is getting on a yearly basis funds the imperial war machine for just about 5 minutes.
This is actually a useful number to remember: 600 billion a year comes out to about a million dollars a minute. So when you hear $130 million you should think, "Wow, two hours of military spending!"
Conservation and passive solar can replace more than 50% of the energy you--not ME--waste
Please don't tell me what you think I waste.
Those of us who have already invested in conservation, passive systems and (secondarily) renewables have been reaping the benefits for a long time, although I am not sure what this "air conditioning" stuff is that you're spending money on--must be some weirdly unnecessary tech that you--not ME--waste money on while I spend more time frolicking naked on the beach.
Simple changes to billing (pay-as-you go, for example) are known to result in significant (>10%) reductions in demand. Every kWhr we do not have to generate is a) free and b) has zero environmental impact and c) free.
But governments subsidize centralized power generation like crazy and do almost nothing that resembles sound public policy around conservation, passive systems and renewables.
Your an idiot. Your household budget doesn't work like the governments and shouldn't. We don't have money to spend on stupid things, but we can print our own money and people are still lining up to lend us money.
This, I'm afraid, is nothing more than the warm assurance of a person falling from the sky that everything is going great so far.
People are still lining up to lend you money, true. But at some point, no matter what Keynes says, they are going to expect to get paid back in constant dollars, or interest rates are going to go through the roof. In the long run, your children will pay your debts.
When it says information passed between the two points is information, does it mean it changes energy states?
No.
The "thing" that is "teleported" is the quantum state, which is completely different to "teleporting" matter or energy. The state of the "receiver" has exactly the same particle quantum numbers (numbers of photons, electrons, etc) immeiately after the "teleportation" as it does immediately before. As such, "teleporting" a quantum state is completely different from "teleporting" a particle, although for some reason ignorant people keep on claiming otherwise.
The reason why I have used scare quotes around "thing" and "teleport" in the above is that it is misleading and wrong to use unadorned ordinary language when trying to speak about quantum reality, which is not bound by the same rules of non-contradiction and causality that the world of experience are bound by. A quantum state is not a "thing" in the usual sense at all, which is why it can be "teleported" when the nominally classical particles that carry the state cannot.
This is/. so I'll try a car analogy, although classical analogies are always tricky with these things. Suppose you have a red car, and a "car colour teleportation device", and I have a blue car, and you trigger your device, which "teleports" the colour of your car to mine (possibliy destroying your car, or its colour, in the process.) So now, whereas before I had a car, I now have a car that is the same colour as yours (was). Then suppose a really ignorant person came along and said, "Wow, a device for teleporting cars! Let me write an article for PopSci on that!" You'd have pretty much the situation we have.
As odd as it sounds, there's not actually any difference between teleporting "only" the quantum state of the photons and teleporting the photons themselves -- provide the state you're teleporting is the entire state of the photon.
This is an oft-repeated falsehood, promulagated by the vast hordes of ignorant people who swarm around quantum weirdness like moths on a flame.
If you could "teleport" a photon the photon number at the reciever changes. This is a profound ontological, existential difference from the case where the photon state is "teleported." As it is possible to "teleport" the state of massive particles, perhaps thinking about it in those terms will clear up the mistake for you: if I could "teleport" an electron to the Moon, the electron quantum number, charge, mass and spin of the Moon would be completely different from the case when I "teleport" the state of an electron. Since the two cases are trivially physically distinguishable it is simply false to claim they are the same.
I really don't know why so many people keep repeating this falsehood.
But a very simple explanation is that the device always shoots 1 up, 1 down. Sure you don't know if it's up or down until you measure it, but that doesn't make it spooky at all.
The experimental violation of Bell's Inequalities is inconsistent with this "very simple explanation". That is the whole point of such experiments: they prove that the system is in a (locally) indeterminate state. Anyone who argues otherwise is ignoring the facts of reality, and conclusions rigorously inferred from them.
As for "mate competition" - way off there. Wars are no longer fought in order to "git the'r women an' food".
That whooshing sound you hear is my point passing far over your head. The fact that for some reason you have mentioned "food" in the context of mate competition proves it. War has nothing to do with food, and never has. It's just that really stupid people confabulate impausible bullshit like that to make war sound sensible, when it isn't, ever.
The "rational" motivation for Germany's attacks on its neighbours that started WWII was the need for land and peasantry to feed the German people. This was the NAZI dream: German imperial rule over Eastern Europe to produce food for Greater Germany.
Now suppose for a moment that there really was a looming food shortage in Germany. Here are two possible responses:
1) take a vast quantity of productive labour and other resources out of the economy and put them into killing people and destroying things so that you can repopulate and rebuild in the unlkely event you "win", and after having repopulated and rebuilt in the areas where you have expended enormous otherwise productive labour and resources to kill and destroy, force the people now living there to grow food for you while you continue to expend otherwise productive labour and resources on failing to control the subject population.
2) Invest in agricultural research and free trade to improve your own agricultural yields and import any shortfall from your more agriculturally gifted trading partners.
War has nothing to do with control of resources other than (supposed) mating opportunities. No species anywhere ever fights to the death over anything other than mating opportunities. In some species--including humans and and some varieties of deer and elk--control of resources is directly linked to mating opportunities, but those are the only cases where two individuals of the same species will ever fight to the death.
There is simply no reason to assume that it is any different amongst humans, given that war is always an economic loss: all parties are 100% certain to end up less well off than they would be had they resolved their differences without war. Mate competition is the only motivation that matters.
It is also a primary motivator in politics.
So unsurprisingly, I find quoting the dead German I was deliberately riffing of in my statement, "War is a continuation of mate competition by other means" enitrely unconvincing. Clauswitz knew nothing about evolution or economics, and as such he was incapable of appreciating that war makes absolutely no sense (nor do politics, in most cases, as the insane commentatry on Paul Ryan's statist, anti-libertarian health care proposals demonstrates.)
But to use it efficiently, you have to forget everything that Windows and Ubuntu has tried to teach you for the last decade
Right, so it is bad UI design, violating the principle of least astonishment in the most fundamental way. Design exists in context, and in the context of the world of real humans want to, I don't know, not have to forget everything they've learned about human/computer interaction in the past decade, the GIMP design is not so good.
Really, I have never seen anyone state so clearly why the GIMP UI design is wrong.
American economic growth over the last 20 years has been entirely driven by American companies getting costs down through outsourcing.
That claim makes no sense, as follows: large companies have never been the major drivers of employment growth, but large companies are overwhelmingly the ones that have offshored everything. So you are claiming that the segement of the American economy that is least important to overall wellbeing of workers is the one whose activities have driven economic growth. So either your measure of economic growth is unrelated to the wellbeing of workers, in which case it is a very bad metric to use as an arbiter of public policy, or there's something fishy about your claim that offshoring has been a big important deal for Amerian economic growth.
That was pretty much one of my barometers for choosing a wife. "You either get a house or an expensive ring. Which do you choose?"
Oh c'mon! Nothing says "I love you" more than an overpriced rock dug out the ground by African slave labour and sold to you via a cartel of obscenely wealthy oligarchs!
I actually do think the whole "three months salary" thing is a great invention, though. Any woman who wants a ring worth that much is one to run, not walk, away from, so it's a great litmus test of a life partner.
So with that kind of logic in place there is no way to defeat piracy.
Excatly. Right. "There is no way to defeat piracy". End of story.
Big Media are flailing around like mad trying to make water not wet and bytes incapable of being copied. None of their solutions will work. Ergo, their business model is doomed. The ability to get rich creating mass-produced art was an artefact of a narrow technological window, between Chaucer's invention of the printing press and Al Gore's creation of the Internet.
It only meant really big money in the past 150 years, and it is now over, done, dead, buried. It is an ex-business model.
Also, compared to some other "adventures", [wikipedia.org] the whole thing would be rather cheap
The challenge for space travel is to get buy-in from the broader population, and to do that it has to have the same visceral, senseless emotional response that warfare has. War is mate competition carried out by other means, and as such engages our deepest emotional responses.
While exploration is daring and dangerous, the vast majority of people can't participate in it in an active way. We sent 12 people to the Moon, compared to hundreds of thousands rotated through Iraq.
So from my point of view the problem with exploring other worlds is that we aren't doing enough of it to engage a large enough segment of the population. If some country were to commit to militarizing the Moon, say, we'd see a vast increase in resources flung at space travel, and at this point I'm not sure that wouldn't be a bad thing. Even done by an organization as stupid and inefficient as any standing army, it would be cheaper and vastly less destructive than even a fairly tiny war.
Voila, a nuclear rocket with no radioactive exhaust.
False. Quartz is also transparent to neutrons, which will be copiuously produced by the fission reaction going on. I haven't looked at the link, and don't need to. If this thing is fission powered, there are neutrons. If there are neutrons the exhaust is going to be radioactive, unless the gas is pure helium-4, in which case the whole gas vortex UV thing is irrelevant. You can run 4He through a pebble bed reactor and have it come out non-radioactive (more or less.)
However that surrenders the initiative to the enemy. Something that from Mahan to Clausewitz to Sun Tzu has been taught to be a losing strategy.
Yeah, man, look at Solidarity in Poland, or Gandhi's movement in India! They left the enemy all kinds of initiative, and look how badly that ended for them.
Whereas the Palestinians and Israelis are both working every day to take the initiative, so the war will end in their favour any day now for sure! And the Tamils took the initiative in Sri Lanka, too, and the IRA in Ireland and the ETA in Spain. Clearly a totally successful strategy, all done with the approval of some dead theorists who barely knew the Earth was round, much less the role evolutionary pyschology plays in the entirely irrational act of war-making.
Hypothetical causes of the war are irrelevant... They could have quite literally been starved into submission had they only possessed a coastal defense.
Hypothetical outcomes are irrelevant to the point being made.
The Battle of Britain was fought almost exclusively by land-based forces
Unlike the Battle of the Atlantic, which was fought to keep Britain supplied during the Battle of Britain, and wasn't won until some years later.
I'm not defending deadweight loss military spending (which is what all military spending is). People who hate free markets, hate productivity and hate creativity are all doing more than enough of that. I'm just saying that once you accept the "logic" of war it is unfortunately possible to justify all kinds of crazy.
So my observation does not invalidate your point. Once you recognize war as an economically irrational activity that is nothing but mate competition carried out by other means you can step back from the emotionally-driven, undisciplined, unreflective thinking of the miliary and realize that anyone arguing from within the frame of "the war model" of human conflict resolution is so far off the real axis they need to be approached at right angles to all conventional thinking, or their dementia will suck you in.
Still, if it weren't for Jean Chretien more or less giving the finger to the U.S. after 9/11, Canadians at least would still be able to cross the border relatively hassle-free.
JTF2 was in Afghanistan before anyone but the CIA. How exactly is that "giving the finger to the US"? Or do you just like using abstract, metaphorical claims to hide the absence of factual content behind your position?
Chretien declined to get Canada involved in Iraq, showing more sense and guts than many other Western leaders. Given how close our ties are to the US it was a damned gutsy move, and most Canadians are deeply grateful for it.
Answer: It's not. This shutdown (if it happens) is OWNED by the Democrat party
Actually I think the current dysfunction at all levels of government in the United States is "owned" by partisan assholes who put the interests of the private organization they belong to before everything else.
I mean, it's a friggin tropical mosquito-borne disease with a two-week development latency in mosiquitos that his wife got less than nine days after he returned.
Isn't it amazing how a few little factual details can take a belief from the realm of "common sense" and teleport it straight to "imbecilic"?
paying a university 80% overhead to use their brand name. At the same time college has become incredibly expensive for students, too. I don't understand where it all goes.
I think you just answered your own question. University administrators.
I don't doubt this is particularly true in biology, since there are so many students pursuing that, but just wanted to say it's also true in geology which is my field.
This and the parent post leave me flabbergasted.
I worked for almost a decade in pure physics, and NEVER produced a positive result. I know people who have worked their ENTIRE CAREERS in pure physics and never produced a positive result. It was watching a talk by one of those guys--who had done basically the same experiment with more an more refinements for nearly thirty years, continually pushing up the limit on the lifetime of a decay we were almost certain happened but that no one had ever seen--that I decided to leave for greener pastures, because I wasn't finding null results all that gratifying.
I would go so far as to say that a field where certain results are not publishable is not a science. Science is the displine of publically testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. If you can't publish tests that don't generate novel results, you can't do science.
I used to wonder why some physics journals would publish theoretical papers that were obviously out to lunch, and eventually concluded that the purpose was to stop others from going down the same path: if one person made a particular mistake, getting it published and refuted would save everyone else from going through the same cycle. The same is true for null results.
If experimental scientists had the same grasp of their tools that "computational" scientists have, Universities would blow up a lot more often.
As someone with both an experimental and computational background in physics, and who now works closely with biologists and chemists, I cannot agree more. And in biology, at least, there is a very significant tendency to treat all experimental appartus the way too many computationalists treat computers, as black boxes that work magically and ideally, rather than as messy and finicky approximations to what one would ideally want.
Slashdot Mirror
160'000 are permanently disabled.
If they had symptoms that are actually caused by radiation exposure that would be a matter of concern. My only question is what has disabled 160,000 people? Since radiation exposure does not disable people, there must be something else going on.
Thanks for this information. It's good to know Chernobyl's radiation release had so little negative effect that people are bringing up completely unrelated health claims.
The NRC generally recognizes a zero-threshold proportional model for long-term risk from exposure.
Which is completely unsupported by any of the science of radiation exposure, either in terms of low-dose chronic exposure (people who live at high altitudes) or in terms of what we know about radiation effects at the microscopic level.
In particular, if the zero-threshold proportional model was correct, the quality factor would be unity for all types of radiation.
Do they not realize it makes them sound stupid?
Nope, because they are stupid, and trying to sell physics to stupid people, who for some unaccountable reason control pretty much all the money in the world.
While it's nice that they're at least putting some money in to it, it really isn't a whole lot. Especially when you consider it's 5 separate projects.
Over five years, so it's a little over 5 million per program per year. A relatively small lab can easily burn half a million a year, so this is funding for maybe ten small labs per program or a couple of larger ones.
What each program is getting on a yearly basis funds the imperial war machine for just about 5 minutes.
This is actually a useful number to remember: 600 billion a year comes out to about a million dollars a minute. So when you hear $130 million you should think, "Wow, two hours of military spending!"
Conservation and passive solar can replace more than 50% of the energy you--not ME--waste
Please don't tell me what you think I waste.
Those of us who have already invested in conservation, passive systems and (secondarily) renewables have been reaping the benefits for a long time, although I am not sure what this "air conditioning" stuff is that you're spending money on--must be some weirdly unnecessary tech that you--not ME--waste money on while I spend more time frolicking naked on the beach.
Simple changes to billing (pay-as-you go, for example) are known to result in significant (>10%) reductions in demand. Every kWhr we do not have to generate is a) free and b) has zero environmental impact and c) free.
But governments subsidize centralized power generation like crazy and do almost nothing that resembles sound public policy around conservation, passive systems and renewables.
Your an idiot. Your household budget doesn't work like the governments and shouldn't. We don't have money to spend on stupid things, but we can print our own money and people are still lining up to lend us money.
This, I'm afraid, is nothing more than the warm assurance of a person falling from the sky that everything is going great so far.
People are still lining up to lend you money, true. But at some point, no matter what Keynes says, they are going to expect to get paid back in constant dollars, or interest rates are going to go through the roof. In the long run, your children will pay your debts.
When it says information passed between the two points is information, does it mean it changes energy states?
No.
The "thing" that is "teleported" is the quantum state, which is completely different to "teleporting" matter or energy. The state of the "receiver" has exactly the same particle quantum numbers (numbers of photons, electrons, etc) immeiately after the "teleportation" as it does immediately before. As such, "teleporting" a quantum state is completely different from "teleporting" a particle, although for some reason ignorant people keep on claiming otherwise.
The reason why I have used scare quotes around "thing" and "teleport" in the above is that it is misleading and wrong to use unadorned ordinary language when trying to speak about quantum reality, which is not bound by the same rules of non-contradiction and causality that the world of experience are bound by. A quantum state is not a "thing" in the usual sense at all, which is why it can be "teleported" when the nominally classical particles that carry the state cannot.
This is /. so I'll try a car analogy, although classical analogies are always tricky with these things. Suppose you have a red car, and a "car colour teleportation device", and I have a blue car, and you trigger your device, which "teleports" the colour of your car to mine (possibliy destroying your car, or its colour, in the process.) So now, whereas before I had a car, I now have a car that is the same colour as yours (was). Then suppose a really ignorant person came along and said, "Wow, a device for teleporting cars! Let me write an article for PopSci on that!" You'd have pretty much the situation we have.
As odd as it sounds, there's not actually any difference between teleporting "only" the quantum state of the photons and teleporting the photons themselves -- provide the state you're teleporting is the entire state of the photon.
This is an oft-repeated falsehood, promulagated by the vast hordes of ignorant people who swarm around quantum weirdness like moths on a flame.
If you could "teleport" a photon the photon number at the reciever changes. This is a profound ontological, existential difference from the case where the photon state is "teleported." As it is possible to "teleport" the state of massive particles, perhaps thinking about it in those terms will clear up the mistake for you: if I could "teleport" an electron to the Moon, the electron quantum number, charge, mass and spin of the Moon would be completely different from the case when I "teleport" the state of an electron. Since the two cases are trivially physically distinguishable it is simply false to claim they are the same.
I really don't know why so many people keep repeating this falsehood.
But a very simple explanation is that the device always shoots 1 up, 1 down. Sure you don't know if it's up or down until you measure it, but that doesn't make it spooky at all.
The experimental violation of Bell's Inequalities is inconsistent with this "very simple explanation". That is the whole point of such experiments: they prove that the system is in a (locally) indeterminate state. Anyone who argues otherwise is ignoring the facts of reality, and conclusions rigorously inferred from them.
As for "mate competition" - way off there. Wars are no longer fought in order to "git the'r women an' food".
That whooshing sound you hear is my point passing far over your head. The fact that for some reason you have mentioned "food" in the context of mate competition proves it. War has nothing to do with food, and never has. It's just that really stupid people confabulate impausible bullshit like that to make war sound sensible, when it isn't, ever.
The "rational" motivation for Germany's attacks on its neighbours that started WWII was the need for land and peasantry to feed the German people. This was the NAZI dream: German imperial rule over Eastern Europe to produce food for Greater Germany.
Now suppose for a moment that there really was a looming food shortage in Germany. Here are two possible responses:
1) take a vast quantity of productive labour and other resources out of the economy and put them into killing people and destroying things so that you can repopulate and rebuild in the unlkely event you "win", and after having repopulated and rebuilt in the areas where you have expended enormous otherwise productive labour and resources to kill and destroy, force the people now living there to grow food for you while you continue to expend otherwise productive labour and resources on failing to control the subject population.
2) Invest in agricultural research and free trade to improve your own agricultural yields and import any shortfall from your more agriculturally gifted trading partners.
War has nothing to do with control of resources other than (supposed) mating opportunities. No species anywhere ever fights to the death over anything other than mating opportunities. In some species--including humans and and some varieties of deer and elk--control of resources is directly linked to mating opportunities, but those are the only cases where two individuals of the same species will ever fight to the death.
There is simply no reason to assume that it is any different amongst humans, given that war is always an economic loss: all parties are 100% certain to end up less well off than they would be had they resolved their differences without war. Mate competition is the only motivation that matters.
It is also a primary motivator in politics.
So unsurprisingly, I find quoting the dead German I was deliberately riffing of in my statement, "War is a continuation of mate competition by other means" enitrely unconvincing. Clauswitz knew nothing about evolution or economics, and as such he was incapable of appreciating that war makes absolutely no sense (nor do politics, in most cases, as the insane commentatry on Paul Ryan's statist, anti-libertarian health care proposals demonstrates.)
But to use it efficiently, you have to forget everything that Windows and Ubuntu has tried to teach you for the last decade
Right, so it is bad UI design, violating the principle of least astonishment in the most fundamental way. Design exists in context, and in the context of the world of real humans want to, I don't know, not have to forget everything they've learned about human/computer interaction in the past decade, the GIMP design is not so good.
Really, I have never seen anyone state so clearly why the GIMP UI design is wrong.
American economic growth over the last 20 years has been entirely driven by American companies getting costs down through outsourcing.
That claim makes no sense, as follows: large companies have never been the major drivers of employment growth, but large companies are overwhelmingly the ones that have offshored everything. So you are claiming that the segement of the American economy that is least important to overall wellbeing of workers is the one whose activities have driven economic growth. So either your measure of economic growth is unrelated to the wellbeing of workers, in which case it is a very bad metric to use as an arbiter of public policy, or there's something fishy about your claim that offshoring has been a big important deal for Amerian economic growth.
That was pretty much one of my barometers for choosing a wife. "You either get a house or an expensive ring. Which do you choose?"
Oh c'mon! Nothing says "I love you" more than an overpriced rock dug out the ground by African slave labour and sold to you via a cartel of obscenely wealthy oligarchs!
I actually do think the whole "three months salary" thing is a great invention, though. Any woman who wants a ring worth that much is one to run, not walk, away from, so it's a great litmus test of a life partner.
So with that kind of logic in place there is no way to defeat piracy.
Excatly. Right. "There is no way to defeat piracy". End of story.
Big Media are flailing around like mad trying to make water not wet and bytes incapable of being copied. None of their solutions will work. Ergo, their business model is doomed. The ability to get rich creating mass-produced art was an artefact of a narrow technological window, between Chaucer's invention of the printing press and Al Gore's creation of the Internet.
It only meant really big money in the past 150 years, and it is now over, done, dead, buried. It is an ex-business model.
Also, compared to some other "adventures", [wikipedia.org] the whole thing would be rather cheap
The challenge for space travel is to get buy-in from the broader population, and to do that it has to have the same visceral, senseless emotional response that warfare has. War is mate competition carried out by other means, and as such engages our deepest emotional responses.
While exploration is daring and dangerous, the vast majority of people can't participate in it in an active way. We sent 12 people to the Moon, compared to hundreds of thousands rotated through Iraq.
So from my point of view the problem with exploring other worlds is that we aren't doing enough of it to engage a large enough segment of the population. If some country were to commit to militarizing the Moon, say, we'd see a vast increase in resources flung at space travel, and at this point I'm not sure that wouldn't be a bad thing. Even done by an organization as stupid and inefficient as any standing army, it would be cheaper and vastly less destructive than even a fairly tiny war.
Voila, a nuclear rocket with no radioactive exhaust.
False. Quartz is also transparent to neutrons, which will be copiuously produced by the fission reaction going on. I haven't looked at the link, and don't need to. If this thing is fission powered, there are neutrons. If there are neutrons the exhaust is going to be radioactive, unless the gas is pure helium-4, in which case the whole gas vortex UV thing is irrelevant. You can run 4He through a pebble bed reactor and have it come out non-radioactive (more or less.)
However that surrenders the initiative to the enemy. Something that from Mahan to Clausewitz to Sun Tzu has been taught to be a losing strategy.
Yeah, man, look at Solidarity in Poland, or Gandhi's movement in India! They left the enemy all kinds of initiative, and look how badly that ended for them.
Whereas the Palestinians and Israelis are both working every day to take the initiative, so the war will end in their favour any day now for sure! And the Tamils took the initiative in Sri Lanka, too, and the IRA in Ireland and the ETA in Spain. Clearly a totally successful strategy, all done with the approval of some dead theorists who barely knew the Earth was round, much less the role evolutionary pyschology plays in the entirely irrational act of war-making.
Hypothetical causes of the war are irrelevant... They could have quite literally been starved into submission had they only possessed a coastal defense.
Hypothetical outcomes are irrelevant to the point being made.
The Battle of Britain was fought almost exclusively by land-based forces
Unlike the Battle of the Atlantic, which was fought to keep Britain supplied during the Battle of Britain, and wasn't won until some years later.
I'm not defending deadweight loss military spending (which is what all military spending is). People who hate free markets, hate productivity and hate creativity are all doing more than enough of that. I'm just saying that once you accept the "logic" of war it is unfortunately possible to justify all kinds of crazy.
So my observation does not invalidate your point. Once you recognize war as an economically irrational activity that is nothing but mate competition carried out by other means you can step back from the emotionally-driven, undisciplined, unreflective thinking of the miliary and realize that anyone arguing from within the frame of "the war model" of human conflict resolution is so far off the real axis they need to be approached at right angles to all conventional thinking, or their dementia will suck you in.
Still, if it weren't for Jean Chretien more or less giving the finger to the U.S. after 9/11, Canadians at least would still be able to cross the border relatively hassle-free.
JTF2 was in Afghanistan before anyone but the CIA. How exactly is that "giving the finger to the US"? Or do you just like using abstract, metaphorical claims to hide the absence of factual content behind your position?
Chretien declined to get Canada involved in Iraq, showing more sense and guts than many other Western leaders. Given how close our ties are to the US it was a damned gutsy move, and most Canadians are deeply grateful for it.
Answer: It's not. This shutdown (if it happens) is OWNED by the Democrat party
Actually I think the current dysfunction at all levels of government in the United States is "owned" by partisan assholes who put the interests of the private organization they belong to before everything else.
I mean, it's a friggin tropical mosquito-borne disease with a two-week development latency in mosiquitos that his wife got less than nine days after he returned.
Isn't it amazing how a few little factual details can take a belief from the realm of "common sense" and teleport it straight to "imbecilic"?
paying a university 80% overhead to use their brand name. At the same time college has become incredibly expensive for students, too. I don't understand where it all goes.
I think you just answered your own question. University administrators.
I don't doubt this is particularly true in biology, since there are so many students pursuing that, but just wanted to say it's also true in geology which is my field.
This and the parent post leave me flabbergasted.
I worked for almost a decade in pure physics, and NEVER produced a positive result. I know people who have worked their ENTIRE CAREERS in pure physics and never produced a positive result. It was watching a talk by one of those guys--who had done basically the same experiment with more an more refinements for nearly thirty years, continually pushing up the limit on the lifetime of a decay we were almost certain happened but that no one had ever seen--that I decided to leave for greener pastures, because I wasn't finding null results all that gratifying.
I would go so far as to say that a field where certain results are not publishable is not a science. Science is the displine of publically testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. If you can't publish tests that don't generate novel results, you can't do science.
I used to wonder why some physics journals would publish theoretical papers that were obviously out to lunch, and eventually concluded that the purpose was to stop others from going down the same path: if one person made a particular mistake, getting it published and refuted would save everyone else from going through the same cycle. The same is true for null results.
If experimental scientists had the same grasp of their tools that "computational" scientists have, Universities would blow up a lot more often.
As someone with both an experimental and computational background in physics, and who now works closely with biologists and chemists, I cannot agree more. And in biology, at least, there is a very significant tendency to treat all experimental appartus the way too many computationalists treat computers, as black boxes that work magically and ideally, rather than as messy and finicky approximations to what one would ideally want.