These kind of problems require competence in both English and Maths which is why so few people get them right.
Mostly they require competency in psychology, so you can figure out how the twit posing the problem is deliberately trying to mislead you by using ambiguous English and claiming on the basis of their poor communication skills to be clever.
This problem hinges very greatly on how it is phrased and I think it's more a trick of English converting to statistics than it is a true puzzle.
100% correct. All "paradoxes" of this form are very carefully, almost ritually, stated because they are almost entirely linguistic tricks designed to mislead and confuse rather than educate and enlighten.
The very first thing anyone analyzing a problem of this type should do is restate it in several different ways, making as much implicit information explicit as possible. Such as:
I have two children. I'm going to tell you some things about one of my children. I have not chosen that child randomly. For example, I am always going to tell you about my male child. I have no idea what people do when they don't have male children. The very fact that I'm telling you this puzzle means I must have at least one male child, since this puzzle is always stated in terms of male children. The child I have non-randomly decided to tell you about was born on a particular day of the week. His name is Fred, by the way. Cute kid. The child I have non-randomly decided to tell you about is also male, but then again, we established that by the very fact of my telling you this.
Now that I've told you all those non-random things about one child, I want you to assume total randomness and make what I think is the "correct" inference about another child. You're almost certain to get it wrong, and then I'm going to laugh at you for not treating everything as totally random after I've fed you a bunch of carefully chosen, non-random information.
An honest mathematician would of course select a few dozen facts about thier children and then dice to get two of them about one of the children, and present the question in those terms. Then one could legitmately assume randomness in the analysis.
However, if someone went out and specifically selected a family with at least one boy, the probability of the other child being a girl is not 50% - the population in question has been artificially depleted of girls because the criteria excluded all two-girl families.
This is the crux of the problem: the choice of the population and the information provided to you by the twit who thinks this is an interesting way to spend time.
The cannonical form of this problem is, "If at least one of my children is a boy, what is the probability the other is a girl?" The answer is not necessarily 50%, depending on information that the person stating the problem has not provided and you have no way of knowing.
The usual answer that is claimed to be "correct" is 66%, since you have four cases: bb, bg, gb, gg, but the last case is excluded by the formulation of the question.
But suppose that the question was formulated by flipping a coin and picking from these cases randomly, and then posing the question in terms of boy or girl on that basis. One way of doing that would be to split the above list in half:
bb, bg | gb gg
and ask "At least one of my children is a boy..." in the first case and "At least one of my children is a girl..." in the second case.
Mathematicians will complain that this isn't "fair", and they would be right.
But then I have to ask: why is this problem always stated in terms of the child of known sex being a boy? Do mathematicians always and only have male children? In that case the probability of the other child being a girl would be zero!
Tattoos 50 years ago were about getting drunk while in the navy.
And don't forget: the reason why you did that back then was to prove what a Real Tough Man(TM) you were.
I'd love to see what those 70-year-old guys think now that half the teenage girls they see have more ink than they do. I knew a number of middle-aged guys thiry years ago who had got tattoos when they were twenty years younger, and they all felt kinda stupid about it then. By now they must feel unbelievably stupid, because they realize that what their younger selves considered a mark of manly toughness was no big deal, since virtually everyone has more than sufficient pain tolerance to get inked.
Tattooing as a practice has been around forever, usually as a means of expressing some aspect of social status, mostly among men. So while tattooing is certainly not a fad, the current "express your unique identity via a tattoo" certainly is, just as the "express how manly and tough you are" was.
Hopefully when this fad passes people will realize that tattooing is no big deal, one way or another. It can be useful for people struggling to express their identity, but it says mostly, "This person went through a time in their life when they were sufficiently uncertain of who they were that they felt the need to spend money and time and a trivial amount of pain on ensuring some aspect of who they thought they were at the moment would be emblazoned on their skin."
People who are secure in their identity don't need to do that. For some people who aren't secure in their identity it can genuinely help. For most, it's treating the symptom, not the cause, and that's rarely a good idea.
While Bilski lost, the Supreme Court did not throw out software or method patents.
If anything they suggested software and method patents have a place in "the Information Age", saying: "The machine-or-transformation test may well provide a sufficient basis for evaluating processes similar to those in the Industrial Age—for example, inventions grounded in a physical or other tangible form. But there are reasons to doubt whether the test should be the sole criterion for determining the patentability of inventions in the Information Age. As numerous amicus briefs argue, the machine-or-transformation test would create uncertainty as to the patentability of software, advanced diagnostic medicine techniques, and inventions based on linear programming, data compression, and the manipulation of digital signals."
What they say in the last sentence is actually false: it would not "create uncertainty" but rather almost certainly rule out patentability. This is the court giving a wink and a nudge to the new slavery: ownership of ways of organizing human beings.
Patents in their up-until-recently form were intended as protection for ways of organizaing brute matter, not living things and not in particular not human beings. Patenting business processes and ways of thinking (which in the Age of Functional Programming is transparently all that software is: mathematical functions that can be represented in their entirety as thoughts) is nothing but a "form of tyranny over the human mind."
Business process patents and patents on ways of thinking restrict humans in ways that if they were implemented by any other means would be considered obviously acts of tyranny.
The good thing about the decision is that it suggests the scope of such tyrannical patents is likely to be viewed as narrow, and the minority concurring decision has much stronger language on the meaning of "process" that leaves the door open to sanity and liberty carrying the day in the end.
Except, that would require a Bayesian statistical analysis and a prior.
Which has almost certainly been done, this being a large experiment and Bayesian analysis being a popular passtime amongst experimental physicists for the past fifteen or twenty years.
The thing to remember is that the systematic effects in an experiment like this one are extremely tricky to deal with. The detector is made of matter, not equal parts matter and anti-matter. Muon (anti-)neutrinos interact with electrons (not positrons) in the detector to generate (anti-)muons, with muons and anti-muons distinguished by the way their tracks get bent by the magnetic field in the detector.
There are any number of small effects that might produce the observed assymetry, which is only at the 2-sigma level. From a Bayesian perspective, the possibility of mis-calibration has a vastly higher prior probability than CPT being violated, which means that we need a much better than 2-sigma result to be genuinely convincing.
Ever since I realized (via Goedel) that there aren't even any complete and consistent theories for logic, I sort of figured that there would never be a complete and consistent theory for physics.
It's not clear why you impute to reality a conclusion about thinking about reality in a particularly limited way. Incompleteness is a feature of a deliberately limited way of thinking about reality, which many people mistakenly believe is a limit on reality itself, even now that we know reality does not respect the limitations of logic (nonlocal quantum correlations can be viewed as violations of the law of noncontradiction, which appears in some form as underlying all logical descriptions of reality.)
This is the problem that physicists have with mathematicians (and experimental physicists have with theorists): you impute a kind of authority to your descriptions that reality does not care about. And so neither to we:-)
You've repeated this bizarre analogy multiple times in this thread, along with variously weird straw people. Many posters have pointed out that anonymous voting is completely different, for a stunningly obvious reason: voter identity is independently verified.
For all we know the 120,000 names are fictional characters, people from out of state, ineligible minors, or simply non-existent. No one who wants a petition taken seriously would ever want the names of the signers to remain anonyomous, because it completely destroys the credibility of the petition.
Now that that this huge difference between anonymous petition signing and anonymous voting has been pointed out to you directly, how do you respond to it?
Except for the part where there is an independent verification body that certifies election results, and where voting elects people the positions of power while petition signing is part of the nominally open and public process of political debate.
So yeah, other that that, the secret ballot is a great analogy for this petition. But including that, the secret ballot is such a terrible analogy for this petition that it's incredible anyone would bring it up if they have any clue whatsoever as to how secret ballots actually work, and how much effort is made to verify that people in secret ballot situations don't vote twice, and their identity matches who they say they are, and they are actually legally allowed to vote.
For all we know the names on this petition are "Donald Duck" repeated 100,000 times, or the names of closet gays (also known as Bible Believing Christians) and their minor children.
Publishing the names serves the good and useful purpose of validating that the signers are who they say they are, and that they are adults living in the State of Washington, as opposed to shills from out of state, minors, or fictional characters. Anyone who wants their voice to be taken seriously in public debate--which is what this petition is part of--would be strongly in favour of having their name known.
It may be a lot of pixels, but I have no idea what kind of particle they are detecting. Is it neutrinos, like the "telescope" reported yesterday, or cosmic ray muons, or something else entirely? All I know is that the system is imaging and can be focussed, and it uses CCD detection elements, which hardly narrows the field down at all.
Since apparently "telescope" no longer means "optical telescope" I'm at a loss to understand what this one is looking at without more information than what is provided in the summary.
The large volume is not needed to suppress background, but to beat the very small cross section; in order to detect neutrinos you need them to interact with your detector, and the only way to achieve that is to make it as big as possible.
Yes, and then again no. I have designed and built (reactor) neutrino detectors that have a volume of less than a cubic metre (and some very impressive background-suppression tricks) and have detected reactor neutrinos (~10 m from the core).
Background is not simply separable from rate. In particular, background tends to ramp up as energy goes down, so even though there are many more low-energy neutrinos in most interesting cases we typically are cut off at a few MeV because of backgrounds. The Moon offers a number of ultra-low background possibilities that may permit relatively low volume detectors to achieve interesting levels of performance.
So while yeah, these huge detectors with cubic kilometers of active volume aren't to be sneezed at, lower volume detectors in ultra-low-background environments aren't necessarily going to have useable detection rates that scale linearly with the volume.
the modern stock market has no fundamental reason to exist.
IPOs and secondary offerings are a major means of raising capital for companies. With no secondary market the primary market wouldn't exist. Therefore the secondary market's fundamental reason for existence is to make the primary market possible.
Since your first claim is nonsense that belies a total ignorance of the market I didn't bother to read the rest of your comment. Thanks for playing.
Why? It captures information from a flux of particles (not photons, but neutrinos in this case) emitted by astrophysical objects.
Because when speaking to a broad audience it behooves scientists to avoid terminology that they know will be confusing and misleading to laypeople. Anything else is an abrogation of their responsibility to communicate science clearly and unambiguously to the public.
Besides, no one in these fields ever calls anything like this an (unqualified) telescope. So the purpose of doing so for a general audience seems to me to be solely to mislead and confuse, and I'm not at all clear why anyone would want to do that.
Curiously, the link you provide to Auger describes it as a "cosmic ray observatory", almost as if the people who created the site were scientists, aware of their responsibility to communicate clearly.
Would there, however, be any benefit to having such a project set up under lunar regolith/base rock if we could ever get back to the moon?
Yes.
The reason why: there are virtually no high-energy muons in lunar cosmic rays, and high-energy muons, one way or another, are the major cosmic-ray background in these experiments.
The reason why there are virtually no high-energy muons in lunar cosmic rays is due to their primary mechanism of production: on Earth, cosmic-ray protons smack into atoms at the top of the atmosphere, producing high energy pions, which decay into muons etc... and because of the low density of the atmosphere, the decay time is much less than the stopping time, so the muons have most of the orignal energy of the primary cosmic ray available to them.
On the Moon, which notably lacks an atmosphere, the primay cosmic rays smack into the lunar regolith and therefore the pions are created in a very dense medium, and lose most or all of their energy before decaying. The muons thus created are relatively low energy and stop within a few meters--as opposed to terrestrial cosmic ray muons which are still seen in experiments like the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, 2 kilometres underground.
As such, a relatively small, relatively shallow detector on the Moon could produce comparable performance to the best terrestrial detectors, at only a few orders of magnitude higher cost.
It may be worth mentioning that no one working in the field ever calls a neutrino detector a "telescope", as in English that word when used without qualification virtually always means "optical telescope", so the usage in this article is misleading and confusing, to the point where if were done deliberately I would consider the person doing it to be either stupid or dishonest. I guess maybe the person who wrote the article or provided the information for it has English as a second language.
And a 5.5 here can be felt for hundreds of kilometers away
Yeah, it was weird. I've lived in LA and been in 3.5 (barely noticeable) to 6.0 quakes (cracked walls, a few light fixtures down, one death from falling bricks). I'm a couple of hundred kilometers south of Ottawa and felt this one distinctly, so the dispersion was definitely less than what I'm used to. If I was in LA I'd think it was maybe 4.0 and local, not 5.5 and 150 km away.
There are many more older folks now, as a percentage of the population. Overpopulation also has not become as large a problem as anyone thought.
There are a lot of ways of handling this. For one, the developing world has a vastly more youthful population than the developed world--that's one reason for all the political instability there. For two, oil is getting short if you believe in roboust extrapolation, which I personally find at least plausible.
So if I were writing the screenplay (no one has asked me, unaccountably, but still...) I'd make it a Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Hindu dominated world where a revolution lead by a Mahdi-like figure from the Middle East overthrew post-Enlightenment Western culture by combining with fundamentalist Christians in the US and fundamentalist Hindus in India and fundamentalist Jews in Isreal and the US to usher in a distorted version of the thousand years of peace from the Revelation of John: hedonistic, youth-oriented, but utterly tyranical.
That's just one idea off the top of my head. There are plenty of others.
It's done a fairly realistic manner, from the ship they are in to their interactions to their responsibilities.
You have a very strange idea of "fairly realistic" if you think that bunch of emotionally unstable mentally retarded wingnuts behaved in a way that remotely resembled a realistic crew for the most important rescue mission in history.
Can you imagine the crew selection process? "I know, let's select a bunch of losers who have rich and complex psychological problems and will come to pieces and start improvising at the first moment anything goes wrong instead of following the mission plan or executing one of the many, many contingency plans they've been drilled on for the past five years while the ship has been under contstruction!"
And no fair saying they couldn't make an interesting film if the crew weren't a bunch of obvious screw-ups who would have washed out of the first phase of the crew selection process. All that's saying is the writer sucks as an artist, or the basic premise is unsuitable to cinematic story telling.
Have you ever dealt with teenagers or early 20's kids? They are by definition that exact statement..
Actually I have. That's exactly why I would put some rudimentary psychological screening in place before sending a ship-load of people off to save the planet.
I'm not saying average people don't sometimes act like idiots: I'm saying it's stupidly implausible that the crew of a ship sent to save the whole planet, on a probable suicide mission, would act that way.
I don't care about the unrealistic science: I care about characters who are unrealistic to the point of making the film self-contradictory. Someone in another comment likened them to a bunch of whiny college kids on a badly organized camping trip. That's a fare evaluation, and in no possible world would any civilization capable of sending people on such a rescue mission would send those people as crew.
If you're making a "space disaster" movie you've gotta ask "what would Neil Armstrong do?" If you can't get a good story out of that, you'd better rethink your premise.
Why can't the solar physicists get an unrealistic movie that makes them seem cool, too?
Because despite the stunning visual aesthetic in parts of the film it didn't make solar physicists seem cool--it made them seem like complete gits you wouldn't put in charge of a beer-run, much less the most important mission in human history.
Implausible premise, implausible technology, and completely ridiculous story peopled by totally unrealistics characters. The most important rescue mission in history is crewed entirely by psychologically unstable children who routinely make trivially imbecilic decisions for no readily apparent reason.
I guess as a reflection on how vacuous and self-involved modern Western culture it has some artistic merit, but not very much.
To be great art there has to be at least a thread of internal logic that makes for a self-consistent story. Sunshine didn't have that: a culture so completely degenerate as to crew a ship on such an important mission with such a bunch of losers would never have been able to build the ship in the first place.
Just as a matter of interest, how much sympathy do you feel for the good samaritans who were going to the aid of the wounded when the Americas shot and killed them?
But, do you agree with editing exculpatory footage out of videos and then treating the video as the whole story?
Except that you have no evidence of that other than the Pentagon's say-so, and they aren't known for their honesty and forthrightness. Furthermore, the footage you're talking about is not the least exculpatory: it purportedly shows the same gun crew that asked permission to shoot and kill the good samaritans who were aiding the wounded victims of their previous attack, and then shot and killed the good samaritans who were aiding the wounded victims of their previous attack, did not kill another group of completely innocent people previous to shooting and killing the good samaritans who were aiding the wounded victims of their previous attack.
Only in the mind of someone deluded or evil would not killing innocent people prior to killing innocent good samaritans who are aiding the victims of your previous attack count as "exculpatory."
As to the rest: yeah, we'll stop killing them when they stop killing us; and they'll stop killing us when we stop killing them. Sounds like the security-industrial complex is going to be a major profit center for America for decades to come, building all that deadweightloss gear so young American men and women can go off to kill and be killed. Not a bad gig: getting taxpayers to fund the wanton destruction--body and soul--of their own children, all in the name of bigger profits for Lockheed, Haliburton and Blackwaster(Xe).
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These kind of problems require competence in both English and Maths which is why so few people get them right.
Mostly they require competency in psychology, so you can figure out how the twit posing the problem is deliberately trying to mislead you by using ambiguous English and claiming on the basis of their poor communication skills to be clever.
Math and logic problems don't follow normal implied rules of common English.
When they are presented to a general audience they ought. Otherwise, as the GP said, they are dishonest.
When they are not presented to a general audience, they ought to be presented in symbolic logic to remove all ambiguities.
This problem hinges very greatly on how it is phrased and I think it's more a trick of English converting to statistics than it is a true puzzle.
100% correct. All "paradoxes" of this form are very carefully, almost ritually, stated because they are almost entirely linguistic tricks designed to mislead and confuse rather than educate and enlighten.
The very first thing anyone analyzing a problem of this type should do is restate it in several different ways, making as much implicit information explicit as possible. Such as:
I have two children.
I'm going to tell you some things about one of my children.
I have not chosen that child randomly. For example, I am always going to tell you about my male child. I have no idea what people do when they don't have male children. The very fact that I'm telling you this puzzle means I must have at least one male child, since this puzzle is always stated in terms of male children.
The child I have non-randomly decided to tell you about was born on a particular day of the week.
His name is Fred, by the way. Cute kid.
The child I have non-randomly decided to tell you about is also male, but then again, we established that by the very fact of my telling you this.
Now that I've told you all those non-random things about one child, I want you to assume total randomness and make what I think is the "correct" inference about another child. You're almost certain to get it wrong, and then I'm going to laugh at you for not treating everything as totally random after I've fed you a bunch of carefully chosen, non-random information.
An honest mathematician would of course select a few dozen facts about thier children and then dice to get two of them about one of the children, and present the question in those terms. Then one could legitmately assume randomness in the analysis.
However, if someone went out and specifically selected a family with at least one boy, the probability of the other child being a girl is not 50% - the population in question has been artificially depleted of girls because the criteria excluded all two-girl families.
This is the crux of the problem: the choice of the population and the information provided to you by the twit who thinks this is an interesting way to spend time.
The cannonical form of this problem is, "If at least one of my children is a boy, what is the probability the other is a girl?" The answer is not necessarily 50%, depending on information that the person stating the problem has not provided and you have no way of knowing.
The usual answer that is claimed to be "correct" is 66%, since you have four cases: bb, bg, gb, gg, but the last case is excluded by the formulation of the question.
But suppose that the question was formulated by flipping a coin and picking from these cases randomly, and then posing the question in terms of boy or girl on that basis. One way of doing that would be to split the above list in half:
bb, bg | gb gg
and ask "At least one of my children is a boy..." in the first case and "At least one of my children is a girl..." in the second case.
Mathematicians will complain that this isn't "fair", and they would be right.
But then I have to ask: why is this problem always stated in terms of the child of known sex being a boy? Do mathematicians always and only have male children? In that case the probability of the other child being a girl would be zero!
Tattoos 50 years ago were about getting drunk while in the navy.
And don't forget: the reason why you did that back then was to prove what a Real Tough Man(TM) you were.
I'd love to see what those 70-year-old guys think now that half the teenage girls they see have more ink than they do. I knew a number of middle-aged guys thiry years ago who had got tattoos when they were twenty years younger, and they all felt kinda stupid about it then. By now they must feel unbelievably stupid, because they realize that what their younger selves considered a mark of manly toughness was no big deal, since virtually everyone has more than sufficient pain tolerance to get inked.
Tattooing as a practice has been around forever, usually as a means of expressing some aspect of social status, mostly among men. So while tattooing is certainly not a fad, the current "express your unique identity via a tattoo" certainly is, just as the "express how manly and tough you are" was.
Hopefully when this fad passes people will realize that tattooing is no big deal, one way or another. It can be useful for people struggling to express their identity, but it says mostly, "This person went through a time in their life when they were sufficiently uncertain of who they were that they felt the need to spend money and time and a trivial amount of pain on ensuring some aspect of who they thought they were at the moment would be emblazoned on their skin."
People who are secure in their identity don't need to do that. For some people who aren't secure in their identity it can genuinely help. For most, it's treating the symptom, not the cause, and that's rarely a good idea.
While Bilski lost, the Supreme Court did not throw out software or method patents.
If anything they suggested software and method patents have a place in "the Information Age", saying: "The machine-or-transformation test may well provide a sufficient basis for evaluating processes similar to those in the Industrial Age—for example, inventions grounded in a physical or other tangible form. But there are reasons to doubt whether the test should be the sole criterion for determining the patentability of inventions in the Information Age. As numerous amicus briefs argue, the machine-or-transformation test would create uncertainty as to the patentability of software, advanced diagnostic medicine techniques, and inventions based on linear programming, data compression, and the manipulation of digital signals."
What they say in the last sentence is actually false: it would not "create uncertainty" but rather almost certainly rule out patentability. This is the court giving a wink and a nudge to the new slavery: ownership of ways of organizing human beings.
Patents in their up-until-recently form were intended as protection for ways of organizaing brute matter, not living things and not in particular not human beings. Patenting business processes and ways of thinking (which in the Age of Functional Programming is transparently all that software is: mathematical functions that can be represented in their entirety as thoughts) is nothing but a "form of tyranny over the human mind."
Business process patents and patents on ways of thinking restrict humans in ways that if they were implemented by any other means would be considered obviously acts of tyranny.
The good thing about the decision is that it suggests the scope of such tyrannical patents is likely to be viewed as narrow, and the minority concurring decision has much stronger language on the meaning of "process" that leaves the door open to sanity and liberty carrying the day in the end.
Except, that would require a Bayesian statistical analysis and a prior.
Which has almost certainly been done, this being a large experiment and Bayesian analysis being a popular passtime amongst experimental physicists for the past fifteen or twenty years.
The thing to remember is that the systematic effects in an experiment like this one are extremely tricky to deal with. The detector is made of matter, not equal parts matter and anti-matter. Muon (anti-)neutrinos interact with electrons (not positrons) in the detector to generate (anti-)muons, with muons and anti-muons distinguished by the way their tracks get bent by the magnetic field in the detector.
There are any number of small effects that might produce the observed assymetry, which is only at the 2-sigma level. From a Bayesian perspective, the possibility of mis-calibration has a vastly higher prior probability than CPT being violated, which means that we need a much better than 2-sigma result to be genuinely convincing.
Ever since I realized (via Goedel) that there aren't even any complete and consistent theories for logic, I sort of figured that there would never be a complete and consistent theory for physics.
It's not clear why you impute to reality a conclusion about thinking about reality in a particularly limited way. Incompleteness is a feature of a deliberately limited way of thinking about reality, which many people mistakenly believe is a limit on reality itself, even now that we know reality does not respect the limitations of logic (nonlocal quantum correlations can be viewed as violations of the law of noncontradiction, which appears in some form as underlying all logical descriptions of reality.)
This is the problem that physicists have with mathematicians (and experimental physicists have with theorists): you impute a kind of authority to your descriptions that reality does not care about. And so neither to we :-)
Do you feel the same way about anonymous voting?
You've repeated this bizarre analogy multiple times in this thread, along with variously weird straw people. Many posters have pointed out that anonymous voting is completely different, for a stunningly obvious reason: voter identity is independently verified.
For all we know the 120,000 names are fictional characters, people from out of state, ineligible minors, or simply non-existent. No one who wants a petition taken seriously would ever want the names of the signers to remain anonyomous, because it completely destroys the credibility of the petition.
Now that that this huge difference between anonymous petition signing and anonymous voting has been pointed out to you directly, how do you respond to it?
"...opponents of gay marriage who wanted to keep their identities secret" == spineless gay Bible Believing Christian Conservative republicans
FTFY :-D
Although I guess saying a "Bible Believing Christian Conservative" is a gay is kind of redundant.
It makes a good analogy for this petition.
Except for the part where there is an independent verification body that certifies election results, and where voting elects people the positions of power while petition signing is part of the nominally open and public process of political debate.
So yeah, other that that, the secret ballot is a great analogy for this petition. But including that, the secret ballot is such a terrible analogy for this petition that it's incredible anyone would bring it up if they have any clue whatsoever as to how secret ballots actually work, and how much effort is made to verify that people in secret ballot situations don't vote twice, and their identity matches who they say they are, and they are actually legally allowed to vote.
For all we know the names on this petition are "Donald Duck" repeated 100,000 times, or the names of closet gays (also known as Bible Believing Christians) and their minor children.
Publishing the names serves the good and useful purpose of validating that the signers are who they say they are, and that they are adults living in the State of Washington, as opposed to shills from out of state, minors, or fictional characters. Anyone who wants their voice to be taken seriously in public debate--which is what this petition is part of--would be strongly in favour of having their name known.
It may be a lot of pixels, but I have no idea what kind of particle they are detecting. Is it neutrinos, like the "telescope" reported yesterday, or cosmic ray muons, or something else entirely? All I know is that the system is imaging and can be focussed, and it uses CCD detection elements, which hardly narrows the field down at all.
Since apparently "telescope" no longer means "optical telescope" I'm at a loss to understand what this one is looking at without more information than what is provided in the summary.
The large volume is not needed to suppress background, but to beat the very small cross section; in order to detect neutrinos you need them to interact with your detector, and the only way to achieve that is to make it as big as possible.
Yes, and then again no. I have designed and built (reactor) neutrino detectors that have a volume of less than a cubic metre (and some very impressive background-suppression tricks) and have detected reactor neutrinos (~10 m from the core).
Background is not simply separable from rate. In particular, background tends to ramp up as energy goes down, so even though there are many more low-energy neutrinos in most interesting cases we typically are cut off at a few MeV because of backgrounds. The Moon offers a number of ultra-low background possibilities that may permit relatively low volume detectors to achieve interesting levels of performance.
So while yeah, these huge detectors with cubic kilometers of active volume aren't to be sneezed at, lower volume detectors in ultra-low-background environments aren't necessarily going to have useable detection rates that scale linearly with the volume.
the modern stock market has no fundamental reason to exist.
IPOs and secondary offerings are a major means of raising capital for companies. With no secondary market the primary market wouldn't exist. Therefore the secondary market's fundamental reason for existence is to make the primary market possible.
Since your first claim is nonsense that belies a total ignorance of the market I didn't bother to read the rest of your comment. Thanks for playing.
The HFT guys build a position, thereby taking on risk.
Show me five HFT guys who have gone broke in the past year.
The operational meaning of "take on risk" is "sometimes goes broke." If you can't show me the bankruptcies, your claim of risk is just false.
Why? It captures information from a flux of particles (not photons, but neutrinos in this case) emitted by astrophysical objects.
Because when speaking to a broad audience it behooves scientists to avoid terminology that they know will be confusing and misleading to laypeople. Anything else is an abrogation of their responsibility to communicate science clearly and unambiguously to the public.
Besides, no one in these fields ever calls anything like this an (unqualified) telescope. So the purpose of doing so for a general audience seems to me to be solely to mislead and confuse, and I'm not at all clear why anyone would want to do that.
Curiously, the link you provide to Auger describes it as a "cosmic ray observatory", almost as if the people who created the site were scientists, aware of their responsibility to communicate clearly.
Would there, however, be any benefit to having such a project set up under lunar regolith/base rock if we could ever get back to the moon?
Yes.
The reason why: there are virtually no high-energy muons in lunar cosmic rays, and high-energy muons, one way or another, are the major cosmic-ray background in these experiments.
The reason why there are virtually no high-energy muons in lunar cosmic rays is due to their primary mechanism of production: on Earth, cosmic-ray protons smack into atoms at the top of the atmosphere, producing high energy pions, which decay into muons etc... and because of the low density of the atmosphere, the decay time is much less than the stopping time, so the muons have most of the orignal energy of the primary cosmic ray available to them.
On the Moon, which notably lacks an atmosphere, the primay cosmic rays smack into the lunar regolith and therefore the pions are created in a very dense medium, and lose most or all of their energy before decaying. The muons thus created are relatively low energy and stop within a few meters--as opposed to terrestrial cosmic ray muons which are still seen in experiments like the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, 2 kilometres underground.
As such, a relatively small, relatively shallow detector on the Moon could produce comparable performance to the best terrestrial detectors, at only a few orders of magnitude higher cost.
It may be worth mentioning that no one working in the field ever calls a neutrino detector a "telescope", as in English that word when used without qualification virtually always means "optical telescope", so the usage in this article is misleading and confusing, to the point where if were done deliberately I would consider the person doing it to be either stupid or dishonest. I guess maybe the person who wrote the article or provided the information for it has English as a second language.
And a 5.5 here can be felt for hundreds of kilometers away
Yeah, it was weird. I've lived in LA and been in 3.5 (barely noticeable) to 6.0 quakes (cracked walls, a few light fixtures down, one death from falling bricks). I'm a couple of hundred kilometers south of Ottawa and felt this one distinctly, so the dispersion was definitely less than what I'm used to. If I was in LA I'd think it was maybe 4.0 and local, not 5.5 and 150 km away.
There are many more older folks now, as a percentage of the population. Overpopulation also has not become as large a problem as anyone thought.
There are a lot of ways of handling this. For one, the developing world has a vastly more youthful population than the developed world--that's one reason for all the political instability there. For two, oil is getting short if you believe in roboust extrapolation, which I personally find at least plausible.
So if I were writing the screenplay (no one has asked me, unaccountably, but still...) I'd make it a Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Hindu dominated world where a revolution lead by a Mahdi-like figure from the Middle East overthrew post-Enlightenment Western culture by combining with fundamentalist Christians in the US and fundamentalist Hindus in India and fundamentalist Jews in Isreal and the US to usher in a distorted version of the thousand years of peace from the Revelation of John: hedonistic, youth-oriented, but utterly tyranical.
That's just one idea off the top of my head. There are plenty of others.
It's done a fairly realistic manner, from the ship they are in to their interactions to their responsibilities.
You have a very strange idea of "fairly realistic" if you think that bunch of emotionally unstable mentally retarded wingnuts behaved in a way that remotely resembled a realistic crew for the most important rescue mission in history.
Can you imagine the crew selection process? "I know, let's select a bunch of losers who have rich and complex psychological problems and will come to pieces and start improvising at the first moment anything goes wrong instead of following the mission plan or executing one of the many, many contingency plans they've been drilled on for the past five years while the ship has been under contstruction!"
And no fair saying they couldn't make an interesting film if the crew weren't a bunch of obvious screw-ups who would have washed out of the first phase of the crew selection process. All that's saying is the writer sucks as an artist, or the basic premise is unsuitable to cinematic story telling.
Have you ever dealt with teenagers or early 20's kids? They are by definition that exact statement..
Actually I have. That's exactly why I would put some rudimentary psychological screening in place before sending a ship-load of people off to save the planet.
I'm not saying average people don't sometimes act like idiots: I'm saying it's stupidly implausible that the crew of a ship sent to save the whole planet, on a probable suicide mission, would act that way.
I don't care about the unrealistic science: I care about characters who are unrealistic to the point of making the film self-contradictory. Someone in another comment likened them to a bunch of whiny college kids on a badly organized camping trip. That's a fare evaluation, and in no possible world would any civilization capable of sending people on such a rescue mission would send those people as crew.
If you're making a "space disaster" movie you've gotta ask "what would Neil Armstrong do?" If you can't get a good story out of that, you'd better rethink your premise.
Why can't the solar physicists get an unrealistic movie that makes them seem cool, too?
Because despite the stunning visual aesthetic in parts of the film it didn't make solar physicists seem cool--it made them seem like complete gits you wouldn't put in charge of a beer-run, much less the most important mission in human history.
which was a modern day masterpiece
Implausible premise, implausible technology, and completely ridiculous story peopled by totally unrealistics characters. The most important rescue mission in history is crewed entirely by psychologically unstable children who routinely make trivially imbecilic decisions for no readily apparent reason.
I guess as a reflection on how vacuous and self-involved modern Western culture it has some artistic merit, but not very much.
To be great art there has to be at least a thread of internal logic that makes for a self-consistent story. Sunshine didn't have that: a culture so completely degenerate as to crew a ship on such an important mission with such a bunch of losers would never have been able to build the ship in the first place.
I lost all sympathy for him
Just as a matter of interest, how much sympathy do you feel for the good samaritans who were going to the aid of the wounded when the Americas shot and killed them?
But, do you agree with editing exculpatory footage out of videos and then treating the video as the whole story?
Except that you have no evidence of that other than the Pentagon's say-so, and they aren't known for their honesty and forthrightness. Furthermore, the footage you're talking about is not the least exculpatory: it purportedly shows the same gun crew that asked permission to shoot and kill the good samaritans who were aiding the wounded victims of their previous attack, and then shot and killed the good samaritans who were aiding the wounded victims of their previous attack, did not kill another group of completely innocent people previous to shooting and killing the good samaritans who were aiding the wounded victims of their previous attack.
Only in the mind of someone deluded or evil would not killing innocent people prior to killing innocent good samaritans who are aiding the victims of your previous attack count as "exculpatory."
As to the rest: yeah, we'll stop killing them when they stop killing us; and they'll stop killing us when we stop killing them. Sounds like the security-industrial complex is going to be a major profit center for America for decades to come, building all that deadweightloss gear so young American men and women can go off to kill and be killed. Not a bad gig: getting taxpayers to fund the wanton destruction--body and soul--of their own children, all in the name of bigger profits for Lockheed, Haliburton and Blackwaster(Xe).