Your system fails because right is not on the side of he with the most financial leverage. An employer always has the upper hand over an employee because the employee has only one job and employer has many employees
It's even worse than that: the employer is typically a corporation, which is a pure product of the Nanny State. Corporations were created by the various Companies Acts in Great Britain and elsewhere in the middle years of the 1800's. The purpose of those acts was to priveledge one particular kind of social organization (corporations) by protecting the individuals who constituted them from certain types of harm, in particular by limiting their liability for their personal actions.
If some corporate employee screws me over, I can't in law go after them, I can only go after their employer, and only up to a certain point. People who work for corporations are doing nothing but hiding behind the skirts of the Nanny State.
"Loosely," of course, meaning "blatantly ignoring context and treating obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact."
And yet anyone who actually knows anything about ancient cosmogony knows that the belief in a flat earth with the heavens bowed above it across which the Sun, the Moon and the stars transited was incredibly common, and almost certainly believed by the ancient Israelites.
So it would be bizarre in the extreme to drop all this context and intepret Old Testament quotes as if they could possibly refer to a spherical Earth that moved about the Sun in an eliptical orbit under the law of universal gravitation. Although it is worth pointing out that Newton believed just that: since Moses was beloved of God, God must have revealed His deepest truths to him, and what deeper truth could their be than the law of universal gravitation?
Strangely, Moses didn't write it down, and even more strangely God didn't reveal a rather more mundane and practical universal truth: most disease is caused by tiny animals living in water and food that thrive in excrement, so you need to make sure your water is clean and you dispose of all animal and human feces far from water sources or you will risk great plagues. Wash your hands in clean water. Use lye soaps to scrub surfaces where food is prepared, and protect food from flies, which can carry such tiny animals on their feet from when they land on excrement.
Why didn't God mention any of that, exactly? It ain't rocket science, and it would have saved millions of His beloved children from horrible, needless and unhappy deaths.
I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**.
Clever, but neither argument works.
Paul's perversion of Christ's teaching took place within a couple of decades of his crucifixion, on the same timescale as the other cases you cite. While not quite on the scale of the eugenics movement or the A-Bomb, it was the foundation for all the murderous hatred and misogyny that followed.
Nor was the time of the Delphic Oracle all that wonderful, Greece being wracked by wars both foreign and domestic, and ending in the Alexandrian and then the Roman conquests. We get a relatively rosey picture because the history we have was written by rich, well-educated, Attic males.
Of course, admitting there's a problem is not the same as making a change that solves it (or makes it better), but at least they know there are problems and are trying to find solutions.
Presumably with the same awsome efficiency and effictiveness that the American federal government dealt with the problem of nuclear waste disposal, and are currently dealing the space program.
Government solutions are pretty effective for most problems world-wide, but the US federal government seems uniquely capable of making of mess of things.
We have lots of technology which, by refusing to export it, we have successfully prevented other countries from getting.
Really? I can't think of anything. Nuclear weapons can be had by anyone with sufficient expertise, which isn't hard to develop. Russia did it in just four years. The only reason Iran hasn't is that they get more out of the threat of developing nuclear weapons than actually having them.
I can't think of a single technology that has been kept out of the hands of others by America silly export regulations.
ITAR treats the M1A1 Abrams tank brake pads as controlled exports even though they are the same brake pads used in firetrucks.
So? There is virtually no technology that does not have both productive uses and deadweight-loss uses. If you only allow technology export that has no known deadweightloss uses all you will do is encourage the deadweightloss industry outside the US to find such uses. They are likely to call such things "Improvised Explosive Devices" and the like.
Do you really want Iran getting a hold of the blueprints for the shuttles solid rocket boosters?
Your "logic" makes no sense.
The SRBs are 35 year old tech NOW and one day they will be even more "by no means cutting edge", which you apparently have no problem publishing. Which is a good thing, because information wants to be free: one leak and the genie can never be put back in the bottle.
Everyone knows how to build nuclear weapons today. Anyone who is trying to restrict the spread of technology is pushing water uphill.
So you'd better be prepared to be safe in a world where everyone has every nasty kind of tech you can imagine. History suggests that conventional military thuggery is not the right way to go there.
About 20 years ago I developed what is still the fastest, most robust image registration algorithm there is. It was the first algorithm based on sampled pixels, and predated mutual-information and other similar techniques by about three years.
I developed it for a medical application. When I realized how well it worked, I also realized it was perfectly suited to the terminal phase guidance system of a cruise missile. It ran fast enough on the commodity hardware of the time (33 Mhz 386) that it put it nicely in the price range of your average "credit card terrorist."
So far as I know, the organs of the security-industrial complex are still studiosly ignoring this reality: most technology can be adapted for to build weapons. IEDs and the like are proof of this. Never-the-less, no one suggests that cell phones and digital watches be banned, presumably because the kind of asshole that works in the security-industrial complex isn't about to give up their cell phone and digital watch, or even pay more for them.
I know what you're saying, but seems like a decent compromise. Besides the obvious "give ebooks away for free" what do you think would work better?
Almost anything that acknowledge this fact: bits can be copied an arbitrarily large number of times at almost arbitrarily small cost.
In the meantime, I have a GREAT idea: all these "horseless carriages" are really interfering with some technologically outmoded businesses, so why don't we put on an artificial requirement that every one of them should have a horse that runs along in front of it?
See, by just pretending that new technology has exactly the same limitations on it as old technology I'm sure we'll be able to save corporations from having to adapt or die! That's what capitalism is all about, isn't it? Using the power of the nanny state to protect some forms of social organization from ever having to face the real world?
[Note for the historically impaired: there was a brief period where automobiles in Britain had to be preceded by a person carrying in a red flag, effectively restricting them to speeds comparable to horse-drawn transport. That worked out about as well as you might expect, and the whole insane "lets pretend bits can't be copied la la la I'm not listening to you" gang will eventually go the same way, hopefully sooner rather than later.]
isn't any atom heavier than Fe technically supernova shrapnel?
Not if you consider "shrapnel" to mean "fragments that are small but not gaseous". The point here is that a nanoscale grain of chromium54 has been found, which suggests it cooled out of the supernova gas cloud and was driven into the meteroite during a collision, so it is a more-or-less pristine piece of supernova condensate that has not been processed further, the way the iron on Earth has, for example.
No, it's just a change in one of the thousands of indicators. However that's only for the people who actually care for the science of climate change.
One useful way of distinguishing people who care about the science from those who don't: people who don't care about the science reduce the entire debate to a single dimension of "better" or "worse". As soon as someone says that you know they aren't talking about and probably don't care about the science, which is multi-dimensional, non-linear, and does not remotely admit of such a single-valued figure of merit.
But the people who only care about the political power that the risks of climate change might give them are more than happy to immediately reduce the entire discussion to "worse" and "better", creating a nicely polarized debate that pits equally ignorant "warmists" against "denialists".
The guy who made that claim also makes a number of other absurd claims.
What is absurd about the CIA sending somenoe to kill a minister in the government of Portugal? I ask because you refer to "other absurd claims" as if you think this claim is absurd.
Also, even granted that the person making the claim is a nut, why do you think that makes the claim false?
If you see people with 1000+ friends, they don't have 1000+ friends to converse & be friends with, that's just 1000+ people they can broadcast to.
A guy I know slightly commented, "Calling the people you're connected to on Facebook or Twitter 'friends' is ridiculous. How many of them would help you move your couch?"
I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source.
Case in point: I compared the Wikipedia article with the Stanford article on the "Identity of Indiscernibles", a standard falsehood that is taught by philsophers everywhere as an almost axiomatic truth.
While the Standford article is still terrible, it is marginally better than the Wikipedia article. However, when I get a spare minute I will update the Wikipedia article to refer to the reference in the Stanford article that gets things at least vaguely correct, although it uses the bizarre and counter-intuitive formulation that the indiscernibles are not identical "in quantum mechanics", as if quantum mechanics did not describe reality. It also completely misses the deep and compelling proof that indiscernibles are not necessarily identical, which is the statistics of counting of identical particles. In any case, the Stanford article has pointed me toward a reasource to make the Wikipedia article better, and it is inevitable that Wikipedia will continue to improve in this way.
You're misdirecting your energies against ghosts and shadows instead of supporting what actually leads to progress: political activity, scientific research, charity and education.
I can see how you might read that into what I wrote, which is pretty much context free. As it happens, I am engaged in all the things you suggest, and spend far more time and energy on them than posting rants on/.
Nor, to be picky about it, did I suggest these problems were easy. I said they would be solved quickly. The two are very different.
The United States put a man on the Moon and returne him safely to Earth in less than a decade, which is in my view extremely quickly, but I hope no one would suggest it was easy!
Likewise, India went from near-starvation under a command economy to a food exporter in less than 20 years, which is surely not an easy problem but again, a relatively quick solution, at least by my standards.
Nor do I see that I have suggested anywhere there is a virtuous "us" against a vile "them". My point was that all humans everywhere, Left and Right, are driven by desire for power, and if we recognize that fact and use it we have a realistic chance of solving in relatively short order what appear to be intractable problems.
They will still be hard problems, and the solutions will result in the wreckage of failed attempts being strewn across history, but compared to any other force in the world the desire of humans to seek and display power is pretty, well, powerful. I was responding to a comment that seemed to suggest these problems would always be with us, like the problems of municipal sanitation, or slavery, or any of a dozen other huge issues that have simply gone away for much (maybe even most) of the world in the past 200 years.
I don't understand the birth of this new flavor of relativism and anti-elitism. How the hell did EVERY lunatic opinion become worthy of debate,
Innumeracy.
That, and political savvy on the part of the American Right, who have taken become the dominant force in politics in the past twenty years by abandoning their traditional form of innumeracy and embracing that of the Left.
The argument goes like this, and dates back to pre-scientific days:
Innumerate A: "There is ONE right way."
Inumerate B: "Look, I can show that there are two wanys that both seem equally right."
Innumerate A: "Impossible! If that were true then ANY way would do! If there's more than ONE, ALL must be permitted! THERE IS NO TRUTH!"
Innumerate B: "That's right!"
That reality can constrain our thinking without determining it is too complex a concept for either the average Lefty or Righty to grasp, and both have recognized the benefits of Humpty Dumpty Epistemology to their cause (all that matters is "who shall be the master.")
So, if we could figure out a way to prove that terrorism, hunger, poverty, AIDS, or whatever injustice hurts the corporate bottom line, we'd see action being taken to clear it up in no time?
Close, but "hurting the bottom line" isn't enough because the Right is no more interested in money than the Left is interested in social justice. Both are interested in exactly one thing: power.
Capitalists get power from making money, but power--unlike profit--is a zero-sum game. This means that capitalists are willing to forego profits if that is necessary to prevent other people from gaining power.
That is, capitalists hate free-riders far more than they love money, so they are more than willing to lose customers to AIDS because curing AIDS for free would mean that someone else might also profit from those customers, and that would reduce the capitalist's feeling of power.
If wiping out hunger, poverty AIDS or terrorism would actually make someone money, then yes, it would be done very rapidly, the way slavery went out of style the moment it became more profitable to have consumer goods for sale to paid workers who could be controlled almost as well as slaves by debt.
Unfortunately, capitalists have learned that genuinely fixing problems is rarely the way to maximize their power. Far better to sell a more-or-less ineffective "solution" like the security-industrial complex's "War on Terror" or drug cocktails for AIDS or subsidized "food aid" for povery and hunger. Insert your corporation into one of those cash torrents and you will be in a position of power for decades to come.
Go read the Socratic dialogues. The best method of teaching hasn't changed in several thousand years.
What, you mean to talk to syncophantic followers who don't question your ridiculous claims?:-D
While I agree that the role of the teacher is or ought to be interactive and mentoring rather than "regarding course material much like a machine-gunner regards ammunition, to be fired off in the general direction of the enemy as rapidly as possible" I'm not at all convinced that Plato's dialogs are good examples of that, entertaining stories though they be.
The simple fact is that in the short duration of an in-class test you can't give the students substantive problems to work on.
Any experimental scientist, including people in the social sciences if they're any good, will agree with you. No experimentalist would ever design an experiment that resembled an exam, where students are put into an artificial environment and given one chance to demonstrate their knowledge on a given subject. Neither in-class quizzes nor final exams pass rudimentary tests of good experimental design.
In grad school I TA'd for a first year lab course and I recall the prof standing by a lab bench with a tape measure on the first day and telling the students, "If I ask you how wide this bench is, and you take a tape measure like this (actually performing the measurement) and measure it and write down the number and hand it in, I will fail you. You never measure anything just once, and you always need to understand the sources of error." As a one-line explication of good experimental technique I thought it was nice and clear.
Yet that is exactly what we do with students: we measure them once or twice, and pretend that those measurements are related to their knoweledge or performance or abilities. I've been on both sides of this process, and the only thing I hate more than taking exams is giving them, because they are simply lousy experimental technique personified.
So wait, we have two theories that describe different realms and no data for the intersection of the two realms, but people are trying to come up with a theory for the intersection?
We have two theories that describe different realms (although not the realms mentioned in the summary) and we have a known isomorphism between the mathatical description of one of them in stringy terms and the behaviour of the other. This paper extends that isomorphism into a currently intractable area.
So it's more like saying you know that people who can drive Fords can also drive Toyotas, but Toyota has just come out with a new model that none of the Toyota drivers can handle, so why not give it to a Ford driver and see how they do?
It's bound to be an interesting experiment even if it ends with a heap of smoking metal.
String theory is a vast sprawling body of mathematics that has found application far afield of its original domain of high-energy physics and grand unification, particularly in solid state physics where various "string like" phenomena can be found. This work is applying the mathematics of string theory that were developed for classifying black holes to classifying types of four-particle entanglements. That's an extremely curious correspondence, even if it just turns out to be a coincidence.
The problem is that there are disingenous twits who point to string theory's successes far from anything to do with grand-unified string theory, which is what most people mean when they hear "string theory" and claim that "string theory" is makes testable predictions, which is false. No grand-unified string theory has ever made a testable prediction, but this paper is describing something that is quite a lot closer to that than anything we've see so far.
People complain at string without proposing anything better.
Not so. There are a variety of more-or-less heuristic alternatives to string theory, they just don't have supporters that are quite so grandiose and arrogant as string theorists.
The problem with string theory is that it is uniquely hard to build models of low-energy systems using any of its variants, which is funny because it has been applied in pure form to various solid-state systems. But due to extremely high string tension (or equivalent parameter) that is necessary in the "theory of everything" string theory it has to be reduced to some low-energy approximation to describe the world we see, and no one knows how to do that, certainly not uniquely.
This paper is describing an incredibly interesting application of string-like mathematics to a quantum entanglement problem, but unfortunately it still falls within the domain of the famous XKCD on the topic, where when asked what the consequences of his idea that the world is made of tiny vibrating strings the guy replies, "I dunno." It is simply weird that the isomorphism exploited in this paper exists, but whether that means something deep or something trival is still up for grabs.
Regardless, it is simply not the case that every GUT would have the same problems as string theory, for which the grand unification scale is absurdly high. There are non-string theories floating around out there that will be knocked off by the LHC, for example, because they depend on much lighter "X" particles.
Lisa Randall's book "Warped Passages" gives a nice introduction to some of these theories that would even be accessible to a non-physicist like yourself.
And you an excellent example of how not to solve it.
No statement about the environment should begin with any word other than "I", as in "I own a car but only drive once a week or so", "I bought a smaller house downtown so I can walk to work and do almost all my shopping on foot--I stay fit as an added bonus!" and "My smaller house costs a lot less to heat. Basically I save a lot of money by living a more sustainable, urban lifestyle, which gives me more time for my kids."
The problem with the approach that you're taking is that it is clearly driven by your own desire to tell other people what to do. Lead by example, not by hectoring.
And if this post irritates you and makes you want to produce an antagonistic response that just proves my point.
[All the above "I" statements are true, by the way.]
Well the upper atmosphere is stripped off at a faster pace than here on earth so you will never be able to get a continuous water cycle going on the planet because you will loose so much to space every year. And the other HUGE reason is that with no magnetosphere you are getting hit with a lot more radiation and while thats great for a tan it's just plain awful on the reproductive organs and life in general.
This is such a great example of non-quantitative, innumerate thinking.
As another poster has pointed out, actual scientific study by systematic observation and controlled experiment suggests that the rate of loss of Martian atmosphere is very low.
More importantly, while lots of people have said, "Solar wind on noes!" no one has said, "The radiation flux at the Martian surface assuming attentuation by an atmosphere equivalent to 50% of Earth's would be XYZ." That's the number that matters. I don't care two pins for Mars' lack of magnetosphere, and telling me it doesn't have one tells me nothing about whether unmodified human life is viable there or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Your system fails because right is not on the side of he with the most financial leverage. An employer always has the upper hand over an employee because the employee has only one job and employer has many employees
It's even worse than that: the employer is typically a corporation, which is a pure product of the Nanny State. Corporations were created by the various Companies Acts in Great Britain and elsewhere in the middle years of the 1800's. The purpose of those acts was to priveledge one particular kind of social organization (corporations) by protecting the individuals who constituted them from certain types of harm, in particular by limiting their liability for their personal actions.
If some corporate employee screws me over, I can't in law go after them, I can only go after their employer, and only up to a certain point. People who work for corporations are doing nothing but hiding behind the skirts of the Nanny State.
"Loosely," of course, meaning "blatantly ignoring context and treating obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact."
And yet anyone who actually knows anything about ancient cosmogony knows that the belief in a flat earth with the heavens bowed above it across which the Sun, the Moon and the stars transited was incredibly common, and almost certainly believed by the ancient Israelites.
So it would be bizarre in the extreme to drop all this context and intepret Old Testament quotes as if they could possibly refer to a spherical Earth that moved about the Sun in an eliptical orbit under the law of universal gravitation. Although it is worth pointing out that Newton believed just that: since Moses was beloved of God, God must have revealed His deepest truths to him, and what deeper truth could their be than the law of universal gravitation?
Strangely, Moses didn't write it down, and even more strangely God didn't reveal a rather more mundane and practical universal truth: most disease is caused by tiny animals living in water and food that thrive in excrement, so you need to make sure your water is clean and you dispose of all animal and human feces far from water sources or you will risk great plagues. Wash your hands in clean water. Use lye soaps to scrub surfaces where food is prepared, and protect food from flies, which can carry such tiny animals on their feet from when they land on excrement.
Why didn't God mention any of that, exactly? It ain't rocket science, and it would have saved millions of His beloved children from horrible, needless and unhappy deaths.
I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**.
Clever, but neither argument works.
Paul's perversion of Christ's teaching took place within a couple of decades of his crucifixion, on the same timescale as the other cases you cite. While not quite on the scale of the eugenics movement or the A-Bomb, it was the foundation for all the murderous hatred and misogyny that followed.
Nor was the time of the Delphic Oracle all that wonderful, Greece being wracked by wars both foreign and domestic, and ending in the Alexandrian and then the Roman conquests. We get a relatively rosey picture because the history we have was written by rich, well-educated, Attic males.
science, which is based on the faith (for it is faith) that underlying all things is a universal set of rules which can be expressed using math,
There's your problem! You don't have a clue what science is.
Science is the discipline of publically testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment.
It has nothing to do with math. Where is the math in "the Earth's crust consists of plates that move about driven by currents in the mantle"?
Nor does it have anything to do with "faith", which is the discipline of believing certain things without putting them to any kind of test.
Of course, admitting there's a problem is not the same as making a change that solves it (or makes it better), but at least they know there are problems and are trying to find solutions.
Presumably with the same awsome efficiency and effictiveness that the American federal government dealt with the problem of nuclear waste disposal, and are currently dealing the space program.
Government solutions are pretty effective for most problems world-wide, but the US federal government seems uniquely capable of making of mess of things.
We have lots of technology which, by refusing to export it, we have successfully prevented other countries from getting.
Really? I can't think of anything. Nuclear weapons can be had by anyone with sufficient expertise, which isn't hard to develop. Russia did it in just four years. The only reason Iran hasn't is that they get more out of the threat of developing nuclear weapons than actually having them.
I can't think of a single technology that has been kept out of the hands of others by America silly export regulations.
ITAR treats the M1A1 Abrams tank brake pads as controlled exports even though they are the same brake pads used in firetrucks.
So? There is virtually no technology that does not have both productive uses and deadweight-loss uses. If you only allow technology export that has no known deadweightloss uses all you will do is encourage the deadweightloss industry outside the US to find such uses. They are likely to call such things "Improvised Explosive Devices" and the like.
Do you really want Iran getting a hold of the blueprints for the shuttles solid rocket boosters?
Your "logic" makes no sense.
The SRBs are 35 year old tech NOW and one day they will be even more "by no means cutting edge", which you apparently have no problem publishing. Which is a good thing, because information wants to be free: one leak and the genie can never be put back in the bottle.
Everyone knows how to build nuclear weapons today. Anyone who is trying to restrict the spread of technology is pushing water uphill.
So you'd better be prepared to be safe in a world where everyone has every nasty kind of tech you can imagine. History suggests that conventional military thuggery is not the right way to go there.
mean aside from weapons technology that is?
What exactly is "weapons technology"?
About 20 years ago I developed what is still the fastest, most robust image registration algorithm there is. It was the first algorithm based on sampled pixels, and predated mutual-information and other similar techniques by about three years.
I developed it for a medical application. When I realized how well it worked, I also realized it was perfectly suited to the terminal phase guidance system of a cruise missile. It ran fast enough on the commodity hardware of the time (33 Mhz 386) that it put it nicely in the price range of your average "credit card terrorist."
So far as I know, the organs of the security-industrial complex are still studiosly ignoring this reality: most technology can be adapted for to build weapons. IEDs and the like are proof of this. Never-the-less, no one suggests that cell phones and digital watches be banned, presumably because the kind of asshole that works in the security-industrial complex isn't about to give up their cell phone and digital watch, or even pay more for them.
About the only firearm related thing specifically exempted from the scope of ITAR are shotguns made expressly for sporting purposes.
Why is it that this immediately reminded me that that is exactly what Dick Cheney uses to shoot people in the face?
I know what you're saying, but seems like a decent compromise. Besides the obvious "give ebooks away for free" what do you think would work better?
Almost anything that acknowledge this fact: bits can be copied an arbitrarily large number of times at almost arbitrarily small cost.
In the meantime, I have a GREAT idea: all these "horseless carriages" are really interfering with some technologically outmoded businesses, so why don't we put on an artificial requirement that every one of them should have a horse that runs along in front of it?
See, by just pretending that new technology has exactly the same limitations on it as old technology I'm sure we'll be able to save corporations from having to adapt or die! That's what capitalism is all about, isn't it? Using the power of the nanny state to protect some forms of social organization from ever having to face the real world?
[Note for the historically impaired: there was a brief period where automobiles in Britain had to be preceded by a person carrying in a red flag, effectively restricting them to speeds comparable to horse-drawn transport. That worked out about as well as you might expect, and the whole insane "lets pretend bits can't be copied la la la I'm not listening to you" gang will eventually go the same way, hopefully sooner rather than later.]
isn't any atom heavier than Fe technically supernova shrapnel?
Not if you consider "shrapnel" to mean "fragments that are small but not gaseous". The point here is that a nanoscale grain of chromium54 has been found, which suggests it cooled out of the supernova gas cloud and was driven into the meteroite during a collision, so it is a more-or-less pristine piece of supernova condensate that has not been processed further, the way the iron on Earth has, for example.
That's a fairly interesting find, I'd say.
No, it's just a change in one of the thousands of indicators. However that's only for the people who actually care for the science of climate change.
One useful way of distinguishing people who care about the science from those who don't: people who don't care about the science reduce the entire debate to a single dimension of "better" or "worse". As soon as someone says that you know they aren't talking about and probably don't care about the science, which is multi-dimensional, non-linear, and does not remotely admit of such a single-valued figure of merit.
But the people who only care about the political power that the risks of climate change might give them are more than happy to immediately reduce the entire discussion to "worse" and "better", creating a nicely polarized debate that pits equally ignorant "warmists" against "denialists".
The guy who made that claim also makes a number of other absurd claims.
What is absurd about the CIA sending somenoe to kill a minister in the government of Portugal? I ask because you refer to "other absurd claims" as if you think this claim is absurd.
Also, even granted that the person making the claim is a nut, why do you think that makes the claim false?
If you see people with 1000+ friends, they don't have 1000+ friends to converse & be friends with, that's just 1000+ people they can broadcast to.
A guy I know slightly commented, "Calling the people you're connected to on Facebook or Twitter 'friends' is ridiculous. How many of them would help you move your couch?"
I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source.
Case in point: I compared the Wikipedia article with the Stanford article on the "Identity of Indiscernibles", a standard falsehood that is taught by philsophers everywhere as an almost axiomatic truth.
While the Standford article is still terrible, it is marginally better than the Wikipedia article. However, when I get a spare minute I will update the Wikipedia article to refer to the reference in the Stanford article that gets things at least vaguely correct, although it uses the bizarre and counter-intuitive formulation that the indiscernibles are not identical "in quantum mechanics", as if quantum mechanics did not describe reality. It also completely misses the deep and compelling proof that indiscernibles are not necessarily identical, which is the statistics of counting of identical particles. In any case, the Stanford article has pointed me toward a reasource to make the Wikipedia article better, and it is inevitable that Wikipedia will continue to improve in this way.
You're misdirecting your energies against ghosts and shadows instead of supporting what actually leads to progress: political activity, scientific research, charity and education.
I can see how you might read that into what I wrote, which is pretty much context free. As it happens, I am engaged in all the things you suggest, and spend far more time and energy on them than posting rants on /.
Nor, to be picky about it, did I suggest these problems were easy. I said they would be solved quickly. The two are very different.
The United States put a man on the Moon and returne him safely to Earth in less than a decade, which is in my view extremely quickly, but I hope no one would suggest it was easy!
Likewise, India went from near-starvation under a command economy to a food exporter in less than 20 years, which is surely not an easy problem but again, a relatively quick solution, at least by my standards.
Nor do I see that I have suggested anywhere there is a virtuous "us" against a vile "them". My point was that all humans everywhere, Left and Right, are driven by desire for power, and if we recognize that fact and use it we have a realistic chance of solving in relatively short order what appear to be intractable problems.
They will still be hard problems, and the solutions will result in the wreckage of failed attempts being strewn across history, but compared to any other force in the world the desire of humans to seek and display power is pretty, well, powerful. I was responding to a comment that seemed to suggest these problems would always be with us, like the problems of municipal sanitation, or slavery, or any of a dozen other huge issues that have simply gone away for much (maybe even most) of the world in the past 200 years.
I don't understand the birth of this new flavor of relativism and anti-elitism. How the hell did EVERY lunatic opinion become worthy of debate,
Innumeracy.
That, and political savvy on the part of the American Right, who have taken become the dominant force in politics in the past twenty years by abandoning their traditional form of innumeracy and embracing that of the Left.
The argument goes like this, and dates back to pre-scientific days:
Innumerate A: "There is ONE right way."
Inumerate B: "Look, I can show that there are two wanys that both seem equally right."
Innumerate A: "Impossible! If that were true then ANY way would do! If there's more than ONE, ALL must be permitted! THERE IS NO TRUTH!"
Innumerate B: "That's right!"
That reality can constrain our thinking without determining it is too complex a concept for either the average Lefty or Righty to grasp, and both have recognized the benefits of Humpty Dumpty Epistemology to their cause (all that matters is "who shall be the master.")
So, if we could figure out a way to prove that terrorism, hunger, poverty, AIDS, or whatever injustice hurts the corporate bottom line, we'd see action being taken to clear it up in no time?
Close, but "hurting the bottom line" isn't enough because the Right is no more interested in money than the Left is interested in social justice. Both are interested in exactly one thing: power.
Capitalists get power from making money, but power--unlike profit--is a zero-sum game. This means that capitalists are willing to forego profits if that is necessary to prevent other people from gaining power.
That is, capitalists hate free-riders far more than they love money, so they are more than willing to lose customers to AIDS because curing AIDS for free would mean that someone else might also profit from those customers, and that would reduce the capitalist's feeling of power.
If wiping out hunger, poverty AIDS or terrorism would actually make someone money, then yes, it would be done very rapidly, the way slavery went out of style the moment it became more profitable to have consumer goods for sale to paid workers who could be controlled almost as well as slaves by debt.
Unfortunately, capitalists have learned that genuinely fixing problems is rarely the way to maximize their power. Far better to sell a more-or-less ineffective "solution" like the security-industrial complex's "War on Terror" or drug cocktails for AIDS or subsidized "food aid" for povery and hunger. Insert your corporation into one of those cash torrents and you will be in a position of power for decades to come.
Go read the Socratic dialogues. The best method of teaching hasn't changed in several thousand years.
What, you mean to talk to syncophantic followers who don't question your ridiculous claims? :-D
While I agree that the role of the teacher is or ought to be interactive and mentoring rather than "regarding course material much like a machine-gunner regards ammunition, to be fired off in the general direction of the enemy as rapidly as possible" I'm not at all convinced that Plato's dialogs are good examples of that, entertaining stories though they be.
The simple fact is that in the short duration of an in-class test you can't give the students substantive problems to work on.
Any experimental scientist, including people in the social sciences if they're any good, will agree with you. No experimentalist would ever design an experiment that resembled an exam, where students are put into an artificial environment and given one chance to demonstrate their knowledge on a given subject. Neither in-class quizzes nor final exams pass rudimentary tests of good experimental design.
In grad school I TA'd for a first year lab course and I recall the prof standing by a lab bench with a tape measure on the first day and telling the students, "If I ask you how wide this bench is, and you take a tape measure like this (actually performing the measurement) and measure it and write down the number and hand it in, I will fail you. You never measure anything just once, and you always need to understand the sources of error." As a one-line explication of good experimental technique I thought it was nice and clear.
Yet that is exactly what we do with students: we measure them once or twice, and pretend that those measurements are related to their knoweledge or performance or abilities. I've been on both sides of this process, and the only thing I hate more than taking exams is giving them, because they are simply lousy experimental technique personified.
So wait, we have two theories that describe different realms and no data for the intersection of the two realms, but people are trying to come up with a theory for the intersection?
We have two theories that describe different realms (although not the realms mentioned in the summary) and we have a known isomorphism between the mathatical description of one of them in stringy terms and the behaviour of the other. This paper extends that isomorphism into a currently intractable area.
So it's more like saying you know that people who can drive Fords can also drive Toyotas, but Toyota has just come out with a new model that none of the Toyota drivers can handle, so why not give it to a Ford driver and see how they do?
It's bound to be an interesting experiment even if it ends with a heap of smoking metal.
String theory is a vast sprawling body of mathematics that has found application far afield of its original domain of high-energy physics and grand unification, particularly in solid state physics where various "string like" phenomena can be found. This work is applying the mathematics of string theory that were developed for classifying black holes to classifying types of four-particle entanglements. That's an extremely curious correspondence, even if it just turns out to be a coincidence.
The problem is that there are disingenous twits who point to string theory's successes far from anything to do with grand-unified string theory, which is what most people mean when they hear "string theory" and claim that "string theory" is makes testable predictions, which is false. No grand-unified string theory has ever made a testable prediction, but this paper is describing something that is quite a lot closer to that than anything we've see so far.
People complain at string without proposing anything better.
Not so. There are a variety of more-or-less heuristic alternatives to string theory, they just don't have supporters that are quite so grandiose and arrogant as string theorists.
The problem with string theory is that it is uniquely hard to build models of low-energy systems using any of its variants, which is funny because it has been applied in pure form to various solid-state systems. But due to extremely high string tension (or equivalent parameter) that is necessary in the "theory of everything" string theory it has to be reduced to some low-energy approximation to describe the world we see, and no one knows how to do that, certainly not uniquely.
This paper is describing an incredibly interesting application of string-like mathematics to a quantum entanglement problem, but unfortunately it still falls within the domain of the famous XKCD on the topic, where when asked what the consequences of his idea that the world is made of tiny vibrating strings the guy replies, "I dunno." It is simply weird that the isomorphism exploited in this paper exists, but whether that means something deep or something trival is still up for grabs.
Regardless, it is simply not the case that every GUT would have the same problems as string theory, for which the grand unification scale is absurdly high. There are non-string theories floating around out there that will be knocked off by the LHC, for example, because they depend on much lighter "X" particles.
Lisa Randall's book "Warped Passages" gives a nice introduction to some of these theories that would even be accessible to a non-physicist like yourself.
you are part of the problem
And you an excellent example of how not to solve it.
No statement about the environment should begin with any word other than "I", as in "I own a car but only drive once a week or so", "I bought a smaller house downtown so I can walk to work and do almost all my shopping on foot--I stay fit as an added bonus!" and "My smaller house costs a lot less to heat. Basically I save a lot of money by living a more sustainable, urban lifestyle, which gives me more time for my kids."
The problem with the approach that you're taking is that it is clearly driven by your own desire to tell other people what to do. Lead by example, not by hectoring.
And if this post irritates you and makes you want to produce an antagonistic response that just proves my point.
[All the above "I" statements are true, by the way.]
Well the upper atmosphere is stripped off at a faster pace than here on earth so you will never be able to get a continuous water cycle going on the planet because you will loose so much to space every year. And the other HUGE reason is that with no magnetosphere you are getting hit with a lot more radiation and while thats great for a tan it's just plain awful on the reproductive organs and life in general.
This is such a great example of non-quantitative, innumerate thinking.
As another poster has pointed out, actual scientific study by systematic observation and controlled experiment suggests that the rate of loss of Martian atmosphere is very low.
More importantly, while lots of people have said, "Solar wind on noes!" no one has said, "The radiation flux at the Martian surface assuming attentuation by an atmosphere equivalent to 50% of Earth's would be XYZ." That's the number that matters. I don't care two pins for Mars' lack of magnetosphere, and telling me it doesn't have one tells me nothing about whether unmodified human life is viable there or not.