Cheap electricity would go a long way to stabilize Africa.
The rule of law would go a long way to stablize Africa.
Unfortunately Africa is caught in a massive Prisoner's Dilemma: corruption is endemic, by most accounts, which means that there is very little upside to good government.
Figuring out how to deal with these situations is one of the big problems of the 21st century, particularly as places like the US become more corrupt.
India, on the other hand, seems to be becoming less corrupt, although god knows it has a lot of ground to make up. But it proves it is possible to move both ways along the continuum of corruption, and we need to be thinking about how to make that happen. Technolgy won't (necessarily) help, and wealth certainly won't.
effect does this discovery have on the current estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe?
The what?
The term "dark matter" on its own, unless you an scientist using it in a specific context, is not meaningful. When a layperson uses it as you have it is meaningless.
You have to specify which dark matter you mean. There is "missing matter" at all distance scales above some relatively modest threshold, but there are quite different constraints on what it might be depending on the scale you're observing.
When anti-scientific nutjobs on/. bitch out the purported arrogance of scientists who postulate "dark matter" they never mention which "dark matter" they are talking about, which does nothing but demonstrate their profound ignorance of the issue.
Galactic dark matter, which is what is relevant to this discovery, is potentially entirely baryonic. That means it could be made of the same stuff we are.
But the H/He ratio in the early universe, and other primoridal isotope ratios that we can estimate quite well based on numerous observations and very solid theory, puts a strong limit on the amount of baryonic matter the universe can contain.
Ergo, at larger scales there is evidence for non-baryonic dark matter, which is a quite different animal, and warrants more skepticism.
There is also "dark energy" on the largest scales, which acts as a cosmological constant and which personally I'm a good deal more skeptical about.
People who are dismissive of all dark matter hypotheses but who do not understand the different roles that different types of dark matter and dark energy play in different theories at different scales are simply enemies of scientific inquiry.
I haven't figured out all the blame is trying to focus on Wikileaks/Assange.
People like Palin believe in the epistemology of violence, just like the persecutors of Galileo did. They think that by threatening anyone who fails to see things their way with torture and death they can actually make the world that way.
It's a tricky problem to deal with, because their condition is stable against empirical disproof: you can show them how it fails any number of times, and their only response will be to proclaim that the people demonstrating the falisity of their beliefs ought to be tortured and killed.
If I woke up tomorrow and found out that deployment of this weapon allowed the precise termination of all combatants with no civilian casualties and the war was basically over, I'd be happy for being wrong.
Killing people (which for some reason I'm not clear on you've described as "termination", as if they were computer processes or something) is never precise, and it very rarely ends wars.
Killing everyone who is a combatant today will create a new batch of mothers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and fathers who are combatants tomorrow. It's trivially obvious that killing everyone who is a combatant today won't end anything, anywhere.
So trivially obvious, in fact, that I have to wonder why anyone thinks it's a good idea. War makes no sense: in any conflict between two parties it is always rational to settle the dispute peacefully. Both parties will always get more out of a peaceful settlement than not. Fewer people would have died on all sides in Europe in 1914-1918 or 1939-1945 if the issues that faced the nations involved had been settled without warfare. Both the victors and the vanquished would have been better off.
Military occupation and puppet governance is expensive, wasteful, inefficient and ineffective. Just ask the Russians how well it worked in Poland.
Warfare is not wrong because it is immoral, but because it is ineffective and inefficient. It the the very best solution to any problem, except compared to all the others. Only extremely stupid people advocate it, and only extremely stupid people waste their lives building weapons to destroy and kill when they could instead be building machines to build and create.
And how long (measured in months) until the Bad Guys(TM) have them too? Then what
Then we develop the New Better Computerized Anti-Previous-Weapon to "degrade" and "take out" those guys, becuase they'll NEVER get their hands on those!
I didn't bother to read the article as the summary contains no information. Here is a logically equivalent summary:
"Young people who are overexposed to antibacterial soaps containing triclosan may NOT suffer more allergies, and exposure to higher levels of Bisphenol A among adults may NOT negatively influence the immune system, a new University of Michigan School of Public Health study suggests (abstract, full paper [PDF]). Triclosan is a chemical compound widely used in products such as antibacterial soaps, toothpaste, pens, diaper bags and medical devices. Bisphenol A is found in many plastics and, for example, as a protective lining in food cans. Both of these chemicals are in a class of environmental toxicants called endocrine-disrupting compounds, which are believed WITHOUT PROOF to negatively impact human health by mimicking or affecting hormones."
The only reason to choose the form of the summary used rather than the logically equivalent one I have presented is to scare people who are too stupid to realize that the summary is content-free. It says exactly the same thing as its logical negatation: nothing.
COUNTLESS they say. countless as in, a few hundred, tops. compared to 66.000+ (official no, unofficial probably higher) dead in iraq, unknown number dead in afghanistan, unknown number lost in the hands of cia, nsa and ice. (even inside usa - http://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles [thenation.com] )
Sure, but you have to realize that the lives of the patricians are worth more than the lives of the plebs, and the lives of the plebs are worth more than the lives of the subjet peoples.
Dead foreigners don't count because they aren't "real people", and detained Americans don't count because they aren't "Real Americans".
The notion that every single human being is free and equal in rights and dignity is too complex for the average person to grasp, and while it was defended vigorously for a while amongst academics neither the post-structuralist Left nor the post-traditionalist Right have any interest in it. Tribalism is the order of the day, as it always has been except for very brief interludes of quasi-legal peace and prosperity, which tribalists find intolerable because it is impossible to control peaceful, prosperous people through xenophobia and other forms of easily induced fear.
All the more reason to press harder to end the conflict sooner, less civilians will be harmed that way.
Someone sane might suggest that it was all the more reason to not get into conflicts in the first place, and to walk away when you realize you're in a war that was predicated on lies, like the illegal American invasion of Iraq.
Just how fast can they switch from "Obama invading your rights" to "Obama making you vulnerable to terrorists" without causing cognitive dissonance in their audience.
Three point six seconds. Apparently the "now" is about that long, so any two thoughts separated by more than that have to be brought together by a deliberate or habitual process or rational inquiry.
Lazarus Long: "Armed society is a polite society".
A non-factual belief from a fictional character. For example: Canada is much less heavily armed than the United States, but Canadian society is widely held to be much more polite than American society. In my experience, as a Canadian who has lived and worked in the US, this is a fair characterization.
A truly erroneous hard-right outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Imperialists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our social democracies on them. The primary driver of imperialism is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of American hegemony. Radical imperialists view the non-American controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their empire on all non-Americans. Other justifications for imperialism are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Imperialism.
and yes it would be humane (no need to kill anybody).
By this standard waterboarding and Glenn Beck are "humane" because they don't actually kill anyone. Torturing people is "humane" unless you torture them to death. Rape is "humane" because nobody dies.
Seems like a pretty weird notion of "humane".
Here's an alternative suggestion, which unfortunately wouldn't let arrogant assholes dictate how many children people have: raise the standard of living for everyone by encouraging urbanization and free trade, and massively promote education for women. The world's population will fall: this is not a controversial claim. Prosperity and educated women produces dramatic reductions in fecundity.
THAT is a "humane" solution: giving people greater autonomy, not imposing someone else's choices on their bodies.
but that doesn't make approaching the problem intractable.
Of course it doesn't make the problem intractable.
But simply because the problem is tractable doesn't mean we don't have to solve it, and I stand by my original statement: the dosimetry done on these devices is not appropriate to the dose distribution they produce, and as such people producing hand-waving assurances as to their safety are just making stuff up.
Make the appropriate measurements, run the appropriate Monte Carlos, and then talk about safety.
The standard dosimetric techniques by which these scanners have been tested are not appropriate to the kind of dose distribution they produce.
With regard to flying and skin cancer: if there is an increased incidence of skin cancer due to flying it will likely be due to heavy charged particles from cosmic rays that interact with the metal in the plane. Such heavy charged particles will have a wide range of energies and the whole lower end of the spectrum will stop in people's skins.
You can find scientists that warn lots of stuff. There are many more scientists that are telling those first scientists to shut up.
For an explanation of what is at issue, have a look at my take from the point of view of a radiation transport physicist. I've worked in various areas of medical physics, as well as detector design for particle physics, and I am confident in saying that the dosimetry done on these devices is almost entirely inappropriate for the dose distributions they produce.
This does not mean the devices are unsafe, but it does mean no one actually knows what the skin dose is, and the manufacturers and regulators are not rushing out to make the appropriate measurements.
And if anyone is telling anyone else to "shut up" they aren't engaging in science, but anti-science.
I've only read the headline, but it left me wondering: "What on Earth are these things made of?"
It's too bad the headline doesn't provide any information at all about the composition of these displays. For some reason the/. editors have opted for some non-geeky marketing-speak that completely ignores the facts and instead goes for... well, something, I guess. I don't know what.
I guess they think people here are dumb enough to go read a summary with a deliberately misleading headline, and then go and read a story with a deliberately misleading summary. What they've done instead is drive anyone intellegent to google "new Nokia display technology" and find some actual information.
And every time, I always think "define 'observe'", because that word is incredibly fluffy, vague as well as being immensely irritating.
This is the central question. Having studied QM more than a little, and spent a great deal of time on questions of interpretation, I see the fundamental question as not "why is QM so weird?" but "why does the classical world manifest at all?"
No one has any idea why this is so, and no one is even asking the question, so far as I know.
could an alternative explanation be that our theory of gravity is wrong?
Sure.
An alternative explanation could also be that elves are holding the galaxy together. Seriously. There are an infinite number of alternative explanations. It's just that some of them are far more plausible than others.
General relativity is a beautiful theory that has been tested over a ridiculous range of field strengths and range, from orbiting black holes to galaxy clusters to GPS corrections here on Earth.
The only anomaly we've found so far are at large distance scales, where everything from Newtonian gravity (galactic dyanamics) to GR (gravitational lensing) fails to account for what we observe based on the matter distribution we can see or reasonably infer by other means.
There are two obvious solutions to this: our description of gravity is wrong, or there is more matter than we expect.
If our description of gravity is wrong it is wrong in precisely the right way required to emulate the effect of having more matter than we expect. This would be a curious coincidence, although not utterly impossible.
Science is the discipline of publically testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. We have the idea that GR is a good theory. We have the idea that dark matter explains large-scale deviations from it. We are testing this idea by subjecting it to more and more precise observations. If GR is not a good theory then that process will eventually yeild a result that cannot be explained by any self-consistent distribution of matter.
So far, that hasn't happened.
On the other hand, science can and does prove positive statements all the time, contra the bizarre claims of non-scientists like Karl Popper.
For example, science proves the existence of entities by positive detection of them. We proved the existence of neutrinos this way. You prove the existence of your socks this way. And we would like to prove the existence of dark matter this way: by detecting it in the lab rather than observing it in the sky. Depending on the characteristics of dark matter particles this may or may not be possible, and so long as we have not done this there will always be a tiny bit of doubt regarding its reality, and the suggestion that maybe the astronomical observations are better described by some modification to gravity.
I can't find anything on the magnetic properties of siderites, but magnetite (Fe3O4) is highly ferrimagenetic and can easily be found with a metal detector.
The last photo linked in the summary looks like magnetite to me--it tends to be black, as opposed to siderite's more typical lighter colours.
But limestone chunks are probably not going to be meteors...;-)
I'm fascinated by how many people have suggested this is ordinary limestone or similar. I don't have a huge amount of experience with metal detectors, but having built one myself with my kids for fun and living on limestone I can say for sure that they don't detect ordinary sedimentary rock.
They do however detect magnetite, which is fairly reactive, quite well, and the last photo in the summary looks like it might be that. I wonder if there's a magnetic anomaly in the area--in my area there is a 25 degree variation in the compass across a few kilometers, and you can pick magnetite up on the beach if you know what you're looking for, even without a metal detector. Because it's reactive it weathers away fairly quickly, so it isn't that common to find it just lying about.
I agree the formation looks like a sinkhole, but the rocks he's found with a metal detector are very likely not simple sedimentary deposits.
I'm not sure what you mean by "do the right thing"... but if you mean "obey orders" then I'm pretty sure you'll find that as fear is reduced so is obedience.
But you have to think this through at all levels: if fear is sufficiently muted there would be no war and therefore no soldiers. Wars are a product of the way humans use violence to induce fear in others and reduce fear in themselves.
It isn't clear what kind of society humans would be capable of sustaining without fear. We would be more mobile, more independent, less obedient to authority, more likely to be kind to each other, and more likely to get hurt in a variety of ways.
If you reduce fear enough you would not wind up with human beings who are exactly like everyone else but fearless. You would wind up with a species that was not recognizably human.
Fear is good. Fear is healthy. Fear keeps you alive.
Which fear is that?
Your post, and the others here praising fear, are excellent examples of innumeracy: you treat the world as it existed in real binary categorical terms "fearful" and "fearless".
The real world is a bit more floating point than that.
I suffer from a deficit of physical fear, yet I am still manifestly alive.
I routinely judge things based on rational probabilities. I once walked out into a fairly busy highway to remove some debris that had forced me to swerve. I could see from basic kinematics I had plenty of time to get out there, get the thing (a large piece of somebody's bumper, as it turned out) and get back without significant risk. So I did so. The person I was with was beside herself with fear on my behalf.
Incidents like this eventually convinced me that I was physiologically defficient in this regard, and made me more aware of the importance of rational risk-estimation in my life. But I am now nearing my second half-century, and still not dead.
The interesting question to me is: would most people be better off with LESS fear in their lives, or MORE?
Today, I'd argue strongly for less, across the board, so that fear was just one of many mild emotional impulses that people could take into account when choosing actions, rather than an apparently unanswerable motivation to do all manner of stupid things.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheap electricity would go a long way to stabilize Africa.
The rule of law would go a long way to stablize Africa.
Unfortunately Africa is caught in a massive Prisoner's Dilemma: corruption is endemic, by most accounts, which means that there is very little upside to good government.
Figuring out how to deal with these situations is one of the big problems of the 21st century, particularly as places like the US become more corrupt.
India, on the other hand, seems to be becoming less corrupt, although god knows it has a lot of ground to make up. But it proves it is possible to move both ways along the continuum of corruption, and we need to be thinking about how to make that happen. Technolgy won't (necessarily) help, and wealth certainly won't.
Poetry might.
effect does this discovery have on the current estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe?
The what?
The term "dark matter" on its own, unless you an scientist using it in a specific context, is not meaningful. When a layperson uses it as you have it is meaningless.
You have to specify which dark matter you mean. There is "missing matter" at all distance scales above some relatively modest threshold, but there are quite different constraints on what it might be depending on the scale you're observing.
When anti-scientific nutjobs on /. bitch out the purported arrogance of scientists who postulate "dark matter" they never mention which "dark matter" they are talking about, which does nothing but demonstrate their profound ignorance of the issue.
Galactic dark matter, which is what is relevant to this discovery, is potentially entirely baryonic. That means it could be made of the same stuff we are.
But the H/He ratio in the early universe, and other primoridal isotope ratios that we can estimate quite well based on numerous observations and very solid theory, puts a strong limit on the amount of baryonic matter the universe can contain.
Ergo, at larger scales there is evidence for non-baryonic dark matter, which is a quite different animal, and warrants more skepticism.
There is also "dark energy" on the largest scales, which acts as a cosmological constant and which personally I'm a good deal more skeptical about.
People who are dismissive of all dark matter hypotheses but who do not understand the different roles that different types of dark matter and dark energy play in different theories at different scales are simply enemies of scientific inquiry.
--
Poetry and pictures, inspired by the Doctor
I haven't figured out all the blame is trying to focus on Wikileaks/Assange.
People like Palin believe in the epistemology of violence, just like the persecutors of Galileo did. They think that by threatening anyone who fails to see things their way with torture and death they can actually make the world that way.
It's a tricky problem to deal with, because their condition is stable against empirical disproof: you can show them how it fails any number of times, and their only response will be to proclaim that the people demonstrating the falisity of their beliefs ought to be tortured and killed.
Still one can dream it might be otherwise.
If I woke up tomorrow and found out that deployment of this weapon allowed the precise termination of all combatants with no civilian casualties and the war was basically over, I'd be happy for being wrong.
Killing people (which for some reason I'm not clear on you've described as "termination", as if they were computer processes or something) is never precise, and it very rarely ends wars.
Killing everyone who is a combatant today will create a new batch of mothers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and fathers who are combatants tomorrow. It's trivially obvious that killing everyone who is a combatant today won't end anything, anywhere.
So trivially obvious, in fact, that I have to wonder why anyone thinks it's a good idea. War makes no sense: in any conflict between two parties it is always rational to settle the dispute peacefully. Both parties will always get more out of a peaceful settlement than not. Fewer people would have died on all sides in Europe in 1914-1918 or 1939-1945 if the issues that faced the nations involved had been settled without warfare. Both the victors and the vanquished would have been better off.
Military occupation and puppet governance is expensive, wasteful, inefficient and ineffective. Just ask the Russians how well it worked in Poland.
Warfare is not wrong because it is immoral, but because it is ineffective and inefficient. It the the very best solution to any problem, except compared to all the others. Only extremely stupid people advocate it, and only extremely stupid people waste their lives building weapons to destroy and kill when they could instead be building machines to build and create.
It is good for making fun of, though.
And how long (measured in months) until the Bad Guys(TM) have them too? Then what
Then we develop the New Better Computerized Anti-Previous-Weapon to "degrade" and "take out" those guys, becuase they'll NEVER get their hands on those!
I didn't bother to read the article as the summary contains no information. Here is a logically equivalent summary:
The only reason to choose the form of the summary used rather than the logically equivalent one I have presented is to scare people who are too stupid to realize that the summary is content-free. It says exactly the same thing as its logical negatation: nothing.
COUNTLESS they say. countless as in, a few hundred, tops. compared to 66.000+ (official no, unofficial probably higher) dead in iraq, unknown number dead in afghanistan, unknown number lost in the hands of cia, nsa and ice. (even inside usa - http://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles [thenation.com] )
Sure, but you have to realize that the lives of the patricians are worth more than the lives of the plebs, and the lives of the plebs are worth more than the lives of the subjet peoples.
Dead foreigners don't count because they aren't "real people", and detained Americans don't count because they aren't "Real Americans".
The notion that every single human being is free and equal in rights and dignity is too complex for the average person to grasp, and while it was defended vigorously for a while amongst academics neither the post-structuralist Left nor the post-traditionalist Right have any interest in it. Tribalism is the order of the day, as it always has been except for very brief interludes of quasi-legal peace and prosperity, which tribalists find intolerable because it is impossible to control peaceful, prosperous people through xenophobia and other forms of easily induced fear.
Personally, I believe that peace and prosperity are possible, but there is no doubt they have to be defended--mostly by ridicule--against tribalists of all kinds.
Whatever happened to K.I.S.S?
No money in it.
All the more reason to press harder to end the conflict sooner, less civilians will be harmed that way.
Someone sane might suggest that it was all the more reason to not get into conflicts in the first place, and to walk away when you realize you're in a war that was predicated on lies, like the illegal American invasion of Iraq.
Many of the demotivator [despair.com] posters [despair.com] fit the bill here.
How about this one, inspired by one of my poems, which was itself inspired by Joss Whedon's "Firefly".
Just how fast can they switch from "Obama invading your rights" to "Obama making you vulnerable to terrorists" without causing cognitive dissonance in their audience.
Three point six seconds. Apparently the "now" is about that long, so any two thoughts separated by more than that have to be brought together by a deliberate or habitual process or rational inquiry.
Which is unfortunate, as it means they can't even tell when we are making fun of them.
Lazarus Long: "Armed society is a polite society".
A non-factual belief from a fictional character. For example: Canada is much less heavily armed than the United States, but Canadian society is widely held to be much more polite than American society. In my experience, as a Canadian who has lived and worked in the US, this is a fair characterization.
Different ways of thinking, not different laws, are primary. The laws follow from the thinking, not the other way around. Here's one of my attempts to influence thought through humour and poetry, which seem to me much more potent weapons than guns.
A truly erroneous hard-right outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Imperialists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our social democracies on them. The primary driver of imperialism is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of American hegemony. Radical imperialists view the non-American controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their empire on all non-Americans. Other justifications for imperialism are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Imperialism.
Give peace a chance.
and yes it would be humane (no need to kill anybody).
By this standard waterboarding and Glenn Beck are "humane" because they don't actually kill anyone. Torturing people is "humane" unless you torture them to death. Rape is "humane" because nobody dies.
Seems like a pretty weird notion of "humane".
Here's an alternative suggestion, which unfortunately wouldn't let arrogant assholes dictate how many children people have: raise the standard of living for everyone by encouraging urbanization and free trade, and massively promote education for women. The world's population will fall: this is not a controversial claim. Prosperity and educated women produces dramatic reductions in fecundity.
THAT is a "humane" solution: giving people greater autonomy, not imposing someone else's choices on their bodies.
but that doesn't make approaching the problem intractable.
Of course it doesn't make the problem intractable.
But simply because the problem is tractable doesn't mean we don't have to solve it, and I stand by my original statement: the dosimetry done on these devices is not appropriate to the dose distribution they produce, and as such people producing hand-waving assurances as to their safety are just making stuff up.
Make the appropriate measurements, run the appropriate Monte Carlos, and then talk about safety.
It doesn't really make the health risk to crew any more substantial.
You're comparing apples to organgutans, and you have no basis for making dosimetric claims regarding x-ray backscatter devices, as there has never been any proper dosimetry done on them.
But these low-intensity x-ray machines in the airports are low enough energy that the radiation is mostly absorbed by the skin...
Pretty much. Here's a simple explanation of the problem from the point of view of radiation transport physics.
The standard dosimetric techniques by which these scanners have been tested are not appropriate to the kind of dose distribution they produce.
With regard to flying and skin cancer: if there is an increased incidence of skin cancer due to flying it will likely be due to heavy charged particles from cosmic rays that interact with the metal in the plane. Such heavy charged particles will have a wide range of energies and the whole lower end of the spectrum will stop in people's skins.
You can find scientists that warn lots of stuff. There are many more scientists that are telling those first scientists to shut up.
For an explanation of what is at issue, have a look at my take from the point of view of a radiation transport physicist. I've worked in various areas of medical physics, as well as detector design for particle physics, and I am confident in saying that the dosimetry done on these devices is almost entirely inappropriate for the dose distributions they produce.
This does not mean the devices are unsafe, but it does mean no one actually knows what the skin dose is, and the manufacturers and regulators are not rushing out to make the appropriate measurements.
And if anyone is telling anyone else to "shut up" they aren't engaging in science, but anti-science.
I've only read the headline, but it left me wondering: "What on Earth are these things made of?"
It's too bad the headline doesn't provide any information at all about the composition of these displays. For some reason the /. editors have opted for some non-geeky marketing-speak that completely ignores the facts and instead goes for... well, something, I guess. I don't know what.
I guess they think people here are dumb enough to go read a summary with a deliberately misleading headline, and then go and read a story with a deliberately misleading summary. What they've done instead is drive anyone intellegent to google "new Nokia display technology" and find some actual information.
And every time, I always think "define 'observe'", because that word is incredibly fluffy, vague as well as being immensely irritating.
This is the central question. Having studied QM more than a little, and spent a great deal of time on questions of interpretation, I see the fundamental question as not "why is QM so weird?" but "why does the classical world manifest at all?"
No one has any idea why this is so, and no one is even asking the question, so far as I know.
could an alternative explanation be that our theory of gravity is wrong?
Sure.
An alternative explanation could also be that elves are holding the galaxy together. Seriously. There are an infinite number of alternative explanations. It's just that some of them are far more plausible than others.
General relativity is a beautiful theory that has been tested over a ridiculous range of field strengths and range, from orbiting black holes to galaxy clusters to GPS corrections here on Earth.
The only anomaly we've found so far are at large distance scales, where everything from Newtonian gravity (galactic dyanamics) to GR (gravitational lensing) fails to account for what we observe based on the matter distribution we can see or reasonably infer by other means.
There are two obvious solutions to this: our description of gravity is wrong, or there is more matter than we expect.
If our description of gravity is wrong it is wrong in precisely the right way required to emulate the effect of having more matter than we expect. This would be a curious coincidence, although not utterly impossible.
Science is the discipline of publically testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. We have the idea that GR is a good theory. We have the idea that dark matter explains large-scale deviations from it. We are testing this idea by subjecting it to more and more precise observations. If GR is not a good theory then that process will eventually yeild a result that cannot be explained by any self-consistent distribution of matter.
So far, that hasn't happened.
On the other hand, science can and does prove positive statements all the time, contra the bizarre claims of non-scientists like Karl Popper.
For example, science proves the existence of entities by positive detection of them. We proved the existence of neutrinos this way. You prove the existence of your socks this way. And we would like to prove the existence of dark matter this way: by detecting it in the lab rather than observing it in the sky. Depending on the characteristics of dark matter particles this may or may not be possible, and so long as we have not done this there will always be a tiny bit of doubt regarding its reality, and the suggestion that maybe the astronomical observations are better described by some modification to gravity.
I can't find anything on the magnetic properties of siderites, but magnetite (Fe3O4) is highly ferrimagenetic and can easily be found with a metal detector.
The last photo linked in the summary looks like magnetite to me--it tends to be black, as opposed to siderite's more typical lighter colours.
But limestone chunks are probably not going to be meteors...;-)
I'm fascinated by how many people have suggested this is ordinary limestone or similar. I don't have a huge amount of experience with metal detectors, but having built one myself with my kids for fun and living on limestone I can say for sure that they don't detect ordinary sedimentary rock.
They do however detect magnetite, which is fairly reactive, quite well, and the last photo in the summary looks like it might be that. I wonder if there's a magnetic anomaly in the area--in my area there is a 25 degree variation in the compass across a few kilometers, and you can pick magnetite up on the beach if you know what you're looking for, even without a metal detector. Because it's reactive it weathers away fairly quickly, so it isn't that common to find it just lying about.
I agree the formation looks like a sinkhole, but the rocks he's found with a metal detector are very likely not simple sedimentary deposits.
I'm not sure what you mean by "do the right thing"... but if you mean "obey orders" then I'm pretty sure you'll find that as fear is reduced so is obedience.
But you have to think this through at all levels: if fear is sufficiently muted there would be no war and therefore no soldiers. Wars are a product of the way humans use violence to induce fear in others and reduce fear in themselves.
It isn't clear what kind of society humans would be capable of sustaining without fear. We would be more mobile, more independent, less obedient to authority, more likely to be kind to each other, and more likely to get hurt in a variety of ways.
If you reduce fear enough you would not wind up with human beings who are exactly like everyone else but fearless. You would wind up with a species that was not recognizably human.
Fear is good. Fear is healthy. Fear keeps you alive.
Which fear is that?
Your post, and the others here praising fear, are excellent examples of innumeracy: you treat the world as it existed in real binary categorical terms "fearful" and "fearless".
The real world is a bit more floating point than that.
I suffer from a deficit of physical fear, yet I am still manifestly alive.
I routinely judge things based on rational probabilities. I once walked out into a fairly busy highway to remove some debris that had forced me to swerve. I could see from basic kinematics I had plenty of time to get out there, get the thing (a large piece of somebody's bumper, as it turned out) and get back without significant risk. So I did so. The person I was with was beside herself with fear on my behalf.
Incidents like this eventually convinced me that I was physiologically defficient in this regard, and made me more aware of the importance of rational risk-estimation in my life. But I am now nearing my second half-century, and still not dead.
The interesting question to me is: would most people be better off with LESS fear in their lives, or MORE?
Today, I'd argue strongly for less, across the board, so that fear was just one of many mild emotional impulses that people could take into account when choosing actions, rather than an apparently unanswerable motivation to do all manner of stupid things.