Maybe so, if you ignore the fact that it's next door to the largest population center in North America.
TFS suggests the concerns are mostly about diseases of livestock, which other than Wall Street pigs sucking up their welfare dollars from the public trough, doesn't make up a large fraction of the population of New York.
That said, only an idiot would suggest that the dysfunctional American government is a partisan problem. It is, on the contrary, an AMERICAN problem. Dunno what it is about you guys that you can't put together a decent government program on anything. The rest of us don't have that hard a time with it.
By contrast, the type of data being discussed here is just a minutia of the full body of evidence.
The "minutia" are the foundation on which the broad, general, political conclusions of the IPCC and others are based, and if you know anything about science, you know that the process of synthesis of conclusions from the raw data is highly political and suspect. Therefore, the broad conclusions are to.
The only thing that can't lie is the data. Anyone who thinks that makes the data irrelevant "minutia" doesn't understand the scientific process, which is fundamentally based on open access to the data and the processes by which the data were accumulated. If you aren't focused on those, you aren't focused on the science, but the politics.
If an epidemiologist finds a cause of disease, are you going to discount it as valid science because you aren't allowed access to the patient records the data was collated from?
There is a huge and expensive system of data verification that has been developed to deal with this issue with regard to medical records, precisely because if either I or an agent I trust can't independently verify the data it isn't science.
So you're right: science is done with confidential data every day, but it is done in the context of a network of third-party verification based on trusted agents who DO have access to the data, and who are not the original researchers.
Also, anonymized patient records are often released in "as close to raw" form as possible. It would be easy to process aggregate temperature records in ways that moved a long way toward public release without violating any of the legal fine print.
Welcome to the real world of science, where we don't take kindly to people who claim, "My data proves X, but I can't let you or anyone you trust see it."
There's a real poisonous element working at the edges of the scientific community these days.
And there always has been. The remarkable thing is that science is robust against this element, over time.
Right back at the very beginning we had people like Newton, who was a shrewd political operator who pilloried his opponents played and fast and loose with their data.
This kind of thing has always gone on. Scientists are no better than businesspeople or politicians when it comes to lying and cheating.
The essence of science is not honesty or the virtue of individual scientists: it is open empiricism. That is, to be a scientist, to be counted as part of the scientific community, you must at the end of the day respect the data, and you must be open about what the data are, where they came from, and what you've done with them.
So people like Steve MacIntyre are not a danger to sciece.
There is no scientific consensus on when life begins, but most would agree that the thing is a living human whenever the egg is fertilized.
It appears we are now on a slippery slope that some of us have been predicting for a long time. From the article: "All you need are somebody's skin cells to create a human baby."
That isn't quite true yet, but it will be soon. The technique these guys are using injects reverted skin cells into an existing embryo, so you still need an embryo to start with. But that's just a temporary thing. At some point we will be able to revert skin cells to zygotes, and at that point all the crazy "life begins at conception therefore abortion is wrong" folks will go really nuts, because the completely nominal line between "ordinary somatic cell" and "living human being" will be entirely erased. Every cell in our bodies will clearly have the potential to become an independent, living human being, just like a zygote made the old fashion way.
Every human society has practised some form of defacto infanticide, and abortion is WAY better than any alternative, and pregnant women are FAR more qualified than anyone else--both on an information-theoretic basis and a moral basis--to decide what happens to their offspring and their body. Ergo, life begins at conception, and abortion is not wrong.
I may as well leverage this discussion, prompted by the trolling/. idiot editor who wrote the completely inaccurate summary of TFA, to comment on a curious fact.
It isn't that men have nipples that is the interesting question. The interesting question is: why do men NOT give milk?
This is interesting (to me, anyway) because lactation in men is a pretty common dysfunction, so we know there's no big physiological barrier to its occurrence.
It is also naively clear that babies born to men who lactated would have a higher rate of survival than babies born to men who didn't, given that virtually all human societies practise some kind of male-female social pair-bonding for the purposes of procreation, and having both pair-bonded parents able to feed a new baby would obviously increase infant survival in a world where women sometimes die in childbirth or are unable to lactate for other reasons.
So why hasn't this obvious evolutionary pressure resulted in lactating males in humans (or in almost any other mammal?)
The odd-on favourite to answer this question is: the rate of female infidelity is so high that males have a sufficiently low probability that the offspring born to their pair-bonded mate are genetically theirs that there is no significant evolutionary advantage in nursing them.
That is, the reasons males have nipples but don't lactate is that all women at all times everywhere have had a high enough propensity for procreative sex with other males that it has remained adaptive for males to limit their biological investment in their socially pair-bonded mate's offspring.
This explanation offends neo-Puritan mythology about female sexuality (although the old-style Puritans would have had no problem with it) but that doesn't make it any less plausible.
Energy on the planet doesn't just SIT there doing nothing.
Of all the highly concentrated nonsense in your post, this is the highest peak of wrong-headedness.
Just to take a single example: what is the quantum efficiency of photosynthesis reactions?
Energy goes to waste all over the place--it would, amongst other things, be impossible to see if it did not! Nature is unbelievably wasteful. The very fact of the existence of oil and coal reserves is testament to this: those beds were all huge amounts of available energy at the time the dead plant matter was deposited. It did indeed "just sit there" on the surface for thousands of years as it accumulated before being buried.
Energy is "just sitting there" accumulating in peat bogs as I write this, freely available for some magic unicorns or something to come along and use it. I don't see any, do you?
Finally, your bizarre claim that any change to ocean temperature whatsoever is "enough to disrupt the ecosystem" will stand as a monument to the dangers of innumeracy for generations to come.
If this is occurring in a natural estuary, there should be minimal environmental impact.
No, no: you have to understand that making up ersatz objections is a mark of sophistication and intelligence amongst the ignorant and uneducated.
So while your point is valid, it won't sway anyone committed to demonstrating their brilliance by making up objections.
I think the best answer to your comment is to point out that the energy this device extracts from the mixing process would otherwise be released into the environment, and therefore these devices would result in MASSIVE IRREVERSIBLE COOLING OF THE ESTUARINE ENVIRONMENT! That will kill fish, birds, wildlife!
That objection makes perfect sense so long as you are completely innumerate, and therefore don't realize that the energy release we are talking about is equivalent to not more than 0.4 C, even at the 1.6 kJ per litre of fresh water that is speculatively suggested as a maximum output for this device.
There's also issues like whether or not a given fresh water supply might have better uses.
This cracks me up. You're probably too young to remember the "nattering nabobs of negativism", but this is a perfect example.
You mention two objections to this technology:
1) We can't do this 'cause it might kill to many fish or whatever
2) We can't do this because we should shunt that precious fresh water off to some other use (which will also, incidentally, necessarily have far more impact than this technology, which results in mixed salt/fresh water just the way the original river would have!)
So you have two objections, but your first objection can be levelled FAR MORE DIRECTLY against your second objection than against the original proposal. You're objecting to yourself, and not even aware of it. You may even consider yourself particularly clever because cynicism and negativism pass for intelligence in these degenerate days.
I actually did that before reading your post, and no, I'm not new here.
TFA has this gem: "The team is experimenting with different ways to package lithium ion batteries to be able to function after two weeks of exposure to air that is nearly as cold as liquid nitrogen."
Yeah, the air on the Moon sure is cold! I know it's just a thoughtless colloquialism the author has used, but it made me chuckle.
The only thing your cynically correct summary of this thread missed was a comment that re-visiting the Apollo landing sites would be a good thing if it allowed us to evaluate the effect on materials of long-term exposure to lunar conditions. Unfortunately, this program seems more about sight-seeing than collecting or analyzing samples. There's no mention of instrumentation other than the stereo HD cameras.
What's worrisome is that these same scientists who can't seem to build this thing without some fatal flaw are the same scientists telling us there's nothing to worry about when they create a black hole.
No, what's worrisome is that the murderous idiocy of self-serving show-offs is so persistent.
How many people do you have to kill before you'll stop promulgating this stuff?
An emotionally unstable teenage girl in India killed herself because she was so terrified that the world was going to end when the LHC turned on. I assume you're extremely pleased with that outcome, as it is the only concrete effect that the efforts of people like you to propagate this vicious nonsense has had.
After an authoritative-sounding bunch of complete nonsense you say: but not being familiar with quantum physics...
Well, given you know you aren't familiar with it, why are you telling us what kind of experiments are going on in it?
It is possible, perhaps, that not being familiar with the subject matter you completely misunderstood the PR hype from Fermilab, which certainly does not produce collisions with energies that are anywhere close to what is happening in the atmosphere every day?
Either that, or every competent physicist who has rightfully dismissed the murderous idiocy of the "LHC's gonna make a black hole" crowd is wrong.
I am familiar with quantum physics, and with human psychology, and I know which of those possibilities seems more plausible to me.
Oh, and as it happens, cosmic ray showers do contain a significant fraction of anti-matter, so your whole speculation about that is completely irrelevant, based on nothing but your admitted ignorance of the subject matter.
Finally, I don't know anything about horse racing, but I think the Kentucky Derby is a threat to humanity. See, horses don't run that fast around ovals in nature, so we really can't possibly predict what will happen. And horses have been getting faster and faster due to scientific training methods, so each year new records are set, and there's a risk that when the average speed exceeds 33 1/3 mph there will be a quantum correlation that will cause an equine bose condensate that will result in all the horses in the world suddenly taking on the same velocity, resulting in the destruction of the Earth.
Even though I don't know anything about horse racing I think you should take this threat seriously because it is a) scary and b) stupid, and that's apparently the kind of thing you take seriously.
If you have a screen that works 90% of the time, and you detain 300 people, 270 will be terrorists.
It is this equivocation on "works" that is at the heart of the problem. People always want to know the "accuracy" of tests, but false positives and false negatives are completely unrelated types of error, and "accuracy" is generally defined by statisticians based on the target population, not the post-selected population.
You've assumed that a test that "works" 90% of the time will have a 0% false negative rate and a 1% false positive rate, resulting in a 90% "accuracy" in the population identified as terrorists. This is completely different from a 10% false positive rate, which is how "works 90% of the time" is apt to be interpreted by a statistician, and indeed how the phrase is typically meant when screening tests are discussed.
For two-class tests the Matthews Coefficient is the best single figure-of-merit, but it is hard for people untutored in math to understand, and it does not properly address the ambiguity in "works" either.
Yet you failed to learn from that post that making insulting jokes about how anyone wearing a turban in the US can be beaten senseless "because they're a Muslim terrorist" is unacceptable in public
Unacceptable to whom? And why?
As I read the joke, it is making fun of ignorant American rednecks. While I guess some people might find painting such people with such a broad brush insulting or offensive, I don't see it, myself.
Apparently you a) have a different interpretation of the joke and b) feel that your interpretation justifies declaring the joke "unacceptable in public." I don't get your logic, and I certainly don't appreciate your arbitrary and unjustified declaration regarding what is or is not acceptable behaviour "in public".
This is particularly true since/. has a significant world-wide readership--if you clowns can't control your bigots that's your problem, not justification for declaring, in typically American imperialist fashion, what is and is not acceptable here in this international, albeit US-dominated, forum.
Ok, the problem with this comment is that it is now a) exactly what I feel and b) -1 flamebait. Oh well.
No matter how small the radiation level is, it's like microwaving the bats.
That would be "like" as in "totally unlike", right?
There's microwave radiation coming at us all the time from all kinds of sources, natural and artificial. So, being wilfully innumerate, you would say, "No matter how small the radiation level is, it's like we're being microwaved all the time!"
The energy levels matter far more than the abstract category you assign. "Being microwaved" does not in itself cause harm. "Being microwaved at sufficiently high energy levels to cause harm," does. The first concept includes the second, but the second concept does not include the first.
Even though "A is a B" and "A causes C", it does not follow that "B causes C."
Nope. This is exactly the point I was trying to make: extremely short wavelengths explain why we don't observe interference phenomena. But they don't explain why we don't observe the cat as being in a superposition of ALIVE and DEAD.
That is, they don't explain why the world of experience differs from the quantum world, and this is the central question.
GIVEN that the only way we can detect the quantum world is via interference phenomena, then the really short wavelength of macroscopic objects explains why we don't detect interference phenomena.
But WHY is interference the only way we can detect quantum phenomena? Why don't we just perceive the damned wavefunction? I think there is an essentially anthropic answer to this, in the form of an anthropic metaphysics: we experience a limited aspect of reality because the very fact of having such experience requires such a limitation. Kant would approve.
Man, I sure screwed up that last sentence, which should read:
"...when the natural expectation would be that after a measurement had taken place we would be aware of the measurement apparatus as being in an incoherent superposition of orthogonal states."
That's what superposition means, just less fancy:)
Nope, and this is a good straight line for my futile quest to explain something about quantum weirdness, because it is precisely the difference between "maybe" and "superposition" that makes life interesting for a quantum mechanic.
"Maybe" is a classical concept. If we see a cat get into a box, and then there is a sudden yowling and howling from the box, and you ask me, "Is the cat ok?" and I reply, "Maybe" we are talking about a classical situation, in which the cat "really is" either OK or !OK. There are two possible states and classically they are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, regardless of anything else we do to the system. We don't have to look at the cat or measure the cat, we know that it can only be "OK" or "!OK" (for some sufficiently crisp definition of "OK").
"Superposition" is a quantum concept. If a photon interacts with a double slit apparatus and you ask me, "Did it go through the left slit?" and I say, "Maybe" I've said something incoherent unless I quickly stick an apparatus for measuring which slit it went through into the photon's path, because until a measurement is made that distinguishes a photon that passed through the left slit from one that passed through the right, the photon is in a superposition of both states, which are still jointly exhaustive but no longer mutually exclusive, and there is no "fact of the matter" about which slit the photon "really" went through until we ask it with an appropriate apparatus.
The big question to me, which no one from Copenhagen to Consistent Histories or Decoherence answers, is why the classical world--that is, the world of human experience--arises from the quantum world at all. Which is to say, no one has ever answered Max Born's question, "WHY must I treat the measuring apparatus as classical? What will happen to me if I don't!?"
The standard interpretations all take for granted that there is a classical world in which superposition is unobservable, but this papers over the enormous ontological gap between the classical and quantum worlds. The classical world obeys Aristotelian limits on contradiction and causality and locality: a thing cannot both be and not be the same thing at the same time and in the same respect. The quantum world does not obey these limits: the photon can both be and not be a photon that has passed through the left slit, but the wavefunction pulls off some nonlocal legerdemain to clean up after itself when we try to catch it out.
Various interpretations make arguments about HOW this cleanup happens, but no one says anything about why the classical world exists at all: why we are unaware of all the "extra" components of wavefunctions floating around loose after a measurement has been made. Decoherence comes closest to an answer by simply declaring that interference phenomena are the only means by which we can be aware of these other components, but it still says nothing about why we are privileged to observe the effects of one component and not all the others, when the natural expectation would be that we would be that after a measurement had taken place we would be aware of the measurement apparatus as being in an incoherent superposition of orthogonal states.
The same is true for Passwindow. I bet that with 5-10 instances of ciphertext and the knowledge that the cleartext is a numeric code, you could work out the key.
So what? Getting 5 - 10 instances of the ciphertext is a barrier to entry that PassWindow provides. Is it uncrackable? Of course not. But then again, what is?
If you lock the door of your house or your car, you should take PassWindow seriously, because clearly you believe that "trivially breakable security is better than none." If you didn't, you'd leave your house and car unlocked.
Hurricanes are not known to be affected in number or severity due to climate change, so it isn't clear why you bring them up, but with regard to droughts you are correct: there current frequency is quite different from the past. It's a lot lower.
The Earth in the 19th - 20th century enjoyed an unusual period of climatic stability, and we are now reverting to more typical conditions. The probability of going 150 years without a major drought in central North America is pretty small, and one reason we may not have had one yet (the 30's dustbowl was minor in comparison to things seen in the past) is global warming, which canonically will produce a "warmer, wetter world."
At least, that's what the pundits were predicting before drought and hurricanes were seen to garner more press than tropical diseases and floods.
Why should others not be able to judge for themselves (taking into account your own comment)?
We can, but now those of us reading at +3 or so don't have to wade through the made up stuff before seeing the rebuttal. Now we get to see the high-modded rebuttal, and if we think the story being rebutted sounds interesting, we are perfectly free to go look at it.
So it isn't clear why you are talking about "others not be[ing] able to judge for themselves". What exactly do you think is making us UNABLE to read and judge the story for ourselves, given that down-modding does not in any way prevent us from reading the story, which we are all aware of now because of the high-modded rebuttal?
This MAY lead to speciation if other genetic changes occur in one or both bird populations.
Yeah, this is an article about the specific mechanism that is driving speciation in this particular case. It is connecting the dots between a minor genetic variation, and a behavioural variation that is sufficient to decrease the mating probability between groups.
This research is either quite clever or a little circuitous, I can't decide which. They are using the territorial defence behaviour of the males of each variety as an "instrument" to detect the probability of inter-breeding between varieties.
The problem for creationists and their ilk is given a rather sharp point by observations of this kind: granted the undoubted fact of micro-evolution, which has been observed in detail in the wild for decades, how can you possibly prevent speciation and macro-evolution from happening?
The main problem is there is no universal definition of "species" and thus no universally accepted criteria for what constitutes speciation.
This is not a problem. You're confusing two unrelated issues:
1) There is no arbitrarily fine line that can be drawn using perfectly objective criteria to distinguish class A from class B
2) Class A and class B cluster around widely separated collections of characteristics.
As I said, these have nothing to do with each other. You can have a case where the first criterion is fulfilled but the second is not, and the you can have case where the second criterion is fulfilled and the first is not (this is the far more common case in reality.)
All conceptual boundaries are purely human-imposed on the ontological substrate of experience. We deal with this every single day with no difficulty whatsoever. The last time you went swimming, did it concern you that there is no arbitrarily fine dividing line between 100% water and 100% dry land? Of course not, and every other concept is like this. When the lack of clear division becomes a problem, we create a new concept for the boundary region (in the case of water/land the concept is "beach" or "inter-tidal zone" or "littoral".) In the case of inter-species mixtures the boundary concept is "hybrid".
So "speciation" and the division between species is in this regard exactly like every other concept ever used by anyone anywhere.
If they put themselves as "average" then they'll probably also put themselves as an inaccurate weight.
People find it very hard to lie about specifics and stay consistent.
It's easy to lie when you say you "love sports and working out" but harder to answer "what sports to you play regularly (at least once a month)?" and "When did you last play sport X?" and "What was the score the last time you played sport X?" and (for team sports) "what position did you play in your most recent game?"
No system is going to catch every liar, but it should be possible to look at the pattern of answers and generate some estimate of how consistent they are.
I'd also like to see some kind of anonymous user rating system, so that if you go out with someone you can rate them as to the accuracy of their profile. There are various non-parametric and ROC-like analyses that can be used to factor out rater biases from this kind of system, given a sufficiently large number of ratings (five or ten is generally enough.)
But again, this assumes that the audience being served is the non-delusional and sincere, which in my experience is maybe 10% of the total online dating population.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe so, if you ignore the fact that it's next door to the largest population center in North America.
TFS suggests the concerns are mostly about diseases of livestock, which other than Wall Street pigs sucking up their welfare dollars from the public trough, doesn't make up a large fraction of the population of New York.
That said, only an idiot would suggest that the dysfunctional American government is a partisan problem. It is, on the contrary, an AMERICAN problem. Dunno what it is about you guys that you can't put together a decent government program on anything. The rest of us don't have that hard a time with it.
By contrast, the type of data being discussed here is just a minutia of the full body of evidence.
The "minutia" are the foundation on which the broad, general, political conclusions of the IPCC and others are based, and if you know anything about science, you know that the process of synthesis of conclusions from the raw data is highly political and suspect. Therefore, the broad conclusions are to.
The only thing that can't lie is the data. Anyone who thinks that makes the data irrelevant "minutia" doesn't understand the scientific process, which is fundamentally based on open access to the data and the processes by which the data were accumulated. If you aren't focused on those, you aren't focused on the science, but the politics.
If an epidemiologist finds a cause of disease, are you going to discount it as valid science because you aren't allowed access to the patient records the data was collated from?
There is a huge and expensive system of data verification that has been developed to deal with this issue with regard to medical records, precisely because if either I or an agent I trust can't independently verify the data it isn't science.
So you're right: science is done with confidential data every day, but it is done in the context of a network of third-party verification based on trusted agents who DO have access to the data, and who are not the original researchers.
Also, anonymized patient records are often released in "as close to raw" form as possible. It would be easy to process aggregate temperature records in ways that moved a long way toward public release without violating any of the legal fine print.
Welcome to the real world of science, where we don't take kindly to people who claim, "My data proves X, but I can't let you or anyone you trust see it."
There's a real poisonous element working at the edges of the scientific community these days.
And there always has been. The remarkable thing is that science is robust against this element, over time.
Right back at the very beginning we had people like Newton, who was a shrewd political operator who pilloried his opponents played and fast and loose with their data.
This kind of thing has always gone on. Scientists are no better than businesspeople or politicians when it comes to lying and cheating.
The essence of science is not honesty or the virtue of individual scientists: it is open empiricism. That is, to be a scientist, to be counted as part of the scientific community, you must at the end of the day respect the data, and you must be open about what the data are, where they came from, and what you've done with them.
So people like Steve MacIntyre are not a danger to sciece.
People like you are.
There is no scientific consensus on when life begins, but most would agree that the thing is a living human whenever the egg is fertilized.
It appears we are now on a slippery slope that some of us have been predicting for a long time. From the article: "All you need are somebody's skin cells to create a human baby."
That isn't quite true yet, but it will be soon. The technique these guys are using injects reverted skin cells into an existing embryo, so you still need an embryo to start with. But that's just a temporary thing. At some point we will be able to revert skin cells to zygotes, and at that point all the crazy "life begins at conception therefore abortion is wrong" folks will go really nuts, because the completely nominal line between "ordinary somatic cell" and "living human being" will be entirely erased. Every cell in our bodies will clearly have the potential to become an independent, living human being, just like a zygote made the old fashion way.
Every human society has practised some form of defacto infanticide, and abortion is WAY better than any alternative, and pregnant women are FAR more qualified than anyone else--both on an information-theoretic basis and a moral basis--to decide what happens to their offspring and their body. Ergo, life begins at conception, and abortion is not wrong.
...why do men still have nipples.
I may as well leverage this discussion, prompted by the trolling /. idiot editor who wrote the completely inaccurate summary of TFA, to comment on a curious fact.
It isn't that men have nipples that is the interesting question. The interesting question is: why do men NOT give milk?
This is interesting (to me, anyway) because lactation in men is a pretty common dysfunction, so we know there's no big physiological barrier to its occurrence.
It is also naively clear that babies born to men who lactated would have a higher rate of survival than babies born to men who didn't, given that virtually all human societies practise some kind of male-female social pair-bonding for the purposes of procreation, and having both pair-bonded parents able to feed a new baby would obviously increase infant survival in a world where women sometimes die in childbirth or are unable to lactate for other reasons.
So why hasn't this obvious evolutionary pressure resulted in lactating males in humans (or in almost any other mammal?)
The odd-on favourite to answer this question is: the rate of female infidelity is so high that males have a sufficiently low probability that the offspring born to their pair-bonded mate are genetically theirs that there is no significant evolutionary advantage in nursing them.
That is, the reasons males have nipples but don't lactate is that all women at all times everywhere have had a high enough propensity for procreative sex with other males that it has remained adaptive for males to limit their biological investment in their socially pair-bonded mate's offspring.
This explanation offends neo-Puritan mythology about female sexuality (although the old-style Puritans would have had no problem with it) but that doesn't make it any less plausible.
Energy on the planet doesn't just SIT there doing nothing.
Of all the highly concentrated nonsense in your post, this is the highest peak of wrong-headedness.
Just to take a single example: what is the quantum efficiency of photosynthesis reactions?
Energy goes to waste all over the place--it would, amongst other things, be impossible to see if it did not! Nature is unbelievably wasteful. The very fact of the existence of oil and coal reserves is testament to this: those beds were all huge amounts of available energy at the time the dead plant matter was deposited. It did indeed "just sit there" on the surface for thousands of years as it accumulated before being buried.
Energy is "just sitting there" accumulating in peat bogs as I write this, freely available for some magic unicorns or something to come along and use it. I don't see any, do you?
Finally, your bizarre claim that any change to ocean temperature whatsoever is "enough to disrupt the ecosystem" will stand as a monument to the dangers of innumeracy for generations to come.
If this is occurring in a natural estuary, there should be minimal environmental impact.
No, no: you have to understand that making up ersatz objections is a mark of sophistication and intelligence amongst the ignorant and uneducated.
So while your point is valid, it won't sway anyone committed to demonstrating their brilliance by making up objections.
I think the best answer to your comment is to point out that the energy this device extracts from the mixing process would otherwise be released into the environment, and therefore these devices would result in MASSIVE IRREVERSIBLE COOLING OF THE ESTUARINE ENVIRONMENT! That will kill fish, birds, wildlife!
That objection makes perfect sense so long as you are completely innumerate, and therefore don't realize that the energy release we are talking about is equivalent to not more than 0.4 C, even at the 1.6 kJ per litre of fresh water that is speculatively suggested as a maximum output for this device.
There's also issues like whether or not a given fresh water supply might have better uses.
This cracks me up. You're probably too young to remember the "nattering nabobs of negativism", but this is a perfect example.
You mention two objections to this technology:
1) We can't do this 'cause it might kill to many fish or whatever
2) We can't do this because we should shunt that precious fresh water off to some other use (which will also, incidentally, necessarily have far more impact than this technology, which results in mixed salt/fresh water just the way the original river would have!)
So you have two objections, but your first objection can be levelled FAR MORE DIRECTLY against your second objection than against the original proposal. You're objecting to yourself, and not even aware of it. You may even consider yourself particularly clever because cynicism and negativism pass for intelligence in these degenerate days.
Now, go defy expectations and RTFA instead.
I actually did that before reading your post, and no, I'm not new here.
TFA has this gem: "The team is experimenting with different ways to package lithium ion batteries to be able to function after two weeks of exposure to air that is nearly as cold as liquid nitrogen."
Yeah, the air on the Moon sure is cold! I know it's just a thoughtless colloquialism the author has used, but it made me chuckle.
The only thing your cynically correct summary of this thread missed was a comment that re-visiting the Apollo landing sites would be a good thing if it allowed us to evaluate the effect on materials of long-term exposure to lunar conditions. Unfortunately, this program seems more about sight-seeing than collecting or analyzing samples. There's no mention of instrumentation other than the stereo HD cameras.
What's worrisome is that these same scientists who can't seem to build this thing without some fatal flaw are the same scientists telling us there's nothing to worry about when they create a black hole.
No, what's worrisome is that the murderous idiocy of self-serving show-offs is so persistent.
How many people do you have to kill before you'll stop promulgating this stuff?
An emotionally unstable teenage girl in India killed herself because she was so terrified that the world was going to end when the LHC turned on. I assume you're extremely pleased with that outcome, as it is the only concrete effect that the efforts of people like you to propagate this vicious nonsense has had.
Proud of yourself?
After an authoritative-sounding bunch of complete nonsense you say: but not being familiar with quantum physics...
Well, given you know you aren't familiar with it, why are you telling us what kind of experiments are going on in it?
It is possible, perhaps, that not being familiar with the subject matter you completely misunderstood the PR hype from Fermilab, which certainly does not produce collisions with energies that are anywhere close to what is happening in the atmosphere every day?
Either that, or every competent physicist who has rightfully dismissed the murderous idiocy of the "LHC's gonna make a black hole" crowd is wrong.
I am familiar with quantum physics, and with human psychology, and I know which of those possibilities seems more plausible to me.
Oh, and as it happens, cosmic ray showers do contain a significant fraction of anti-matter, so your whole speculation about that is completely irrelevant, based on nothing but your admitted ignorance of the subject matter.
Finally, I don't know anything about horse racing, but I think the Kentucky Derby is a threat to humanity. See, horses don't run that fast around ovals in nature, so we really can't possibly predict what will happen. And horses have been getting faster and faster due to scientific training methods, so each year new records are set, and there's a risk that when the average speed exceeds 33 1/3 mph there will be a quantum correlation that will cause an equine bose condensate that will result in all the horses in the world suddenly taking on the same velocity, resulting in the destruction of the Earth.
Even though I don't know anything about horse racing I think you should take this threat seriously because it is a) scary and b) stupid, and that's apparently the kind of thing you take seriously.
The same idea works any time you want to illustrate the effects of low-incidence events on a large population.
XKCD can be used to illustrate this too
Mouse-over: "You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback."
If you have a screen that works 90% of the time, and you detain 300 people, 270 will be terrorists.
It is this equivocation on "works" that is at the heart of the problem. People always want to know the "accuracy" of tests, but false positives and false negatives are completely unrelated types of error, and "accuracy" is generally defined by statisticians based on the target population, not the post-selected population.
You've assumed that a test that "works" 90% of the time will have a 0% false negative rate and a 1% false positive rate, resulting in a 90% "accuracy" in the population identified as terrorists. This is completely different from a 10% false positive rate, which is how "works 90% of the time" is apt to be interpreted by a statistician, and indeed how the phrase is typically meant when screening tests are discussed.
For two-class tests the Matthews Coefficient is the best single figure-of-merit, but it is hard for people untutored in math to understand, and it does not properly address the ambiguity in "works" either.
Yet you failed to learn from that post that making insulting jokes about how anyone wearing a turban in the US can be beaten senseless "because they're a Muslim terrorist" is unacceptable in public
Unacceptable to whom? And why?
As I read the joke, it is making fun of ignorant American rednecks. While I guess some people might find painting such people with such a broad brush insulting or offensive, I don't see it, myself.
Apparently you a) have a different interpretation of the joke and b) feel that your interpretation justifies declaring the joke "unacceptable in public." I don't get your logic, and I certainly don't appreciate your arbitrary and unjustified declaration regarding what is or is not acceptable behaviour "in public".
This is particularly true since /. has a significant world-wide readership--if you clowns can't control your bigots that's your problem, not justification for declaring, in typically American imperialist fashion, what is and is not acceptable here in this international, albeit US-dominated, forum.
Ok, the problem with this comment is that it is now a) exactly what I feel and b) -1 flamebait. Oh well.
No matter how small the radiation level is, it's like microwaving the bats.
That would be "like" as in "totally unlike", right?
There's microwave radiation coming at us all the time from all kinds of sources, natural and artificial. So, being wilfully innumerate, you would say, "No matter how small the radiation level is, it's like we're being microwaved all the time!"
The energy levels matter far more than the abstract category you assign. "Being microwaved" does not in itself cause harm. "Being microwaved at sufficiently high energy levels to cause harm," does. The first concept includes the second, but the second concept does not include the first.
Even though "A is a B" and "A causes C", it does not follow that "B causes C."
Nope. This is exactly the point I was trying to make: extremely short wavelengths explain why we don't observe interference phenomena. But they don't explain why we don't observe the cat as being in a superposition of ALIVE and DEAD.
That is, they don't explain why the world of experience differs from the quantum world, and this is the central question.
GIVEN that the only way we can detect the quantum world is via interference phenomena, then the really short wavelength of macroscopic objects explains why we don't detect interference phenomena.
But WHY is interference the only way we can detect quantum phenomena? Why don't we just perceive the damned wavefunction? I think there is an essentially anthropic answer to this, in the form of an anthropic metaphysics: we experience a limited aspect of reality because the very fact of having such experience requires such a limitation. Kant would approve.
Man, I sure screwed up that last sentence, which should read:
"...when the natural expectation would be that after a measurement had taken place we would be aware of the measurement apparatus as being in an incoherent superposition of orthogonal states."
That's what superposition means, just less fancy :)
Nope, and this is a good straight line for my futile quest to explain something about quantum weirdness, because it is precisely the difference between "maybe" and "superposition" that makes life interesting for a quantum mechanic.
"Maybe" is a classical concept. If we see a cat get into a box, and then there is a sudden yowling and howling from the box, and you ask me, "Is the cat ok?" and I reply, "Maybe" we are talking about a classical situation, in which the cat "really is" either OK or !OK. There are two possible states and classically they are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, regardless of anything else we do to the system. We don't have to look at the cat or measure the cat, we know that it can only be "OK" or "!OK" (for some sufficiently crisp definition of "OK").
"Superposition" is a quantum concept. If a photon interacts with a double slit apparatus and you ask me, "Did it go through the left slit?" and I say, "Maybe" I've said something incoherent unless I quickly stick an apparatus for measuring which slit it went through into the photon's path, because until a measurement is made that distinguishes a photon that passed through the left slit from one that passed through the right, the photon is in a superposition of both states, which are still jointly exhaustive but no longer mutually exclusive, and there is no "fact of the matter" about which slit the photon "really" went through until we ask it with an appropriate apparatus.
The big question to me, which no one from Copenhagen to Consistent Histories or Decoherence answers, is why the classical world--that is, the world of human experience--arises from the quantum world at all. Which is to say, no one has ever answered Max Born's question, "WHY must I treat the measuring apparatus as classical? What will happen to me if I don't!?"
The standard interpretations all take for granted that there is a classical world in which superposition is unobservable, but this papers over the enormous ontological gap between the classical and quantum worlds. The classical world obeys Aristotelian limits on contradiction and causality and locality: a thing cannot both be and not be the same thing at the same time and in the same respect. The quantum world does not obey these limits: the photon can both be and not be a photon that has passed through the left slit, but the wavefunction pulls off some nonlocal legerdemain to clean up after itself when we try to catch it out.
Various interpretations make arguments about HOW this cleanup happens, but no one says anything about why the classical world exists at all: why we are unaware of all the "extra" components of wavefunctions floating around loose after a measurement has been made. Decoherence comes closest to an answer by simply declaring that interference phenomena are the only means by which we can be aware of these other components, but it still says nothing about why we are privileged to observe the effects of one component and not all the others, when the natural expectation would be that we would be that after a measurement had taken place we would be aware of the measurement apparatus as being in an incoherent superposition of orthogonal states.
The same is true for Passwindow. I bet that with 5-10 instances of ciphertext and the knowledge that the cleartext is a numeric code, you could work out the key.
So what? Getting 5 - 10 instances of the ciphertext is a barrier to entry that PassWindow provides. Is it uncrackable? Of course not. But then again, what is?
If you lock the door of your house or your car, you should take PassWindow seriously, because clearly you believe that "trivially breakable security is better than none." If you didn't, you'd leave your house and car unlocked.
there's always been as many as now,
Hurricanes are not known to be affected in number or severity due to climate change, so it isn't clear why you bring them up, but with regard to droughts you are correct: there current frequency is quite different from the past. It's a lot lower.
The Earth in the 19th - 20th century enjoyed an unusual period of climatic stability, and we are now reverting to more typical conditions. The probability of going 150 years without a major drought in central North America is pretty small, and one reason we may not have had one yet (the 30's dustbowl was minor in comparison to things seen in the past) is global warming, which canonically will produce a "warmer, wetter world."
At least, that's what the pundits were predicting before drought and hurricanes were seen to garner more press than tropical diseases and floods.
Why should others not be able to judge for themselves (taking into account your own comment)?
We can, but now those of us reading at +3 or so don't have to wade through the made up stuff before seeing the rebuttal. Now we get to see the high-modded rebuttal, and if we think the story being rebutted sounds interesting, we are perfectly free to go look at it.
So it isn't clear why you are talking about "others not be[ing] able to judge for themselves". What exactly do you think is making us UNABLE to read and judge the story for ourselves, given that down-modding does not in any way prevent us from reading the story, which we are all aware of now because of the high-modded rebuttal?
This MAY lead to speciation if other genetic changes occur in one or both bird populations.
Yeah, this is an article about the specific mechanism that is driving speciation in this particular case. It is connecting the dots between a minor genetic variation, and a behavioural variation that is sufficient to decrease the mating probability between groups.
This research is either quite clever or a little circuitous, I can't decide which. They are using the territorial defence behaviour of the males of each variety as an "instrument" to detect the probability of inter-breeding between varieties.
The problem for creationists and their ilk is given a rather sharp point by observations of this kind: granted the undoubted fact of micro-evolution, which has been observed in detail in the wild for decades, how can you possibly prevent speciation and macro-evolution from happening?
The main problem is there is no universal definition of "species" and thus no universally accepted criteria for what constitutes speciation.
This is not a problem. You're confusing two unrelated issues:
1) There is no arbitrarily fine line that can be drawn using perfectly objective criteria to distinguish class A from class B
2) Class A and class B cluster around widely separated collections of characteristics.
As I said, these have nothing to do with each other. You can have a case where the first criterion is fulfilled but the second is not, and the you can have case where the second criterion is fulfilled and the first is not (this is the far more common case in reality.)
All conceptual boundaries are purely human-imposed on the ontological substrate of experience. We deal with this every single day with no difficulty whatsoever. The last time you went swimming, did it concern you that there is no arbitrarily fine dividing line between 100% water and 100% dry land? Of course not, and every other concept is like this. When the lack of clear division becomes a problem, we create a new concept for the boundary region (in the case of water/land the concept is "beach" or "inter-tidal zone" or "littoral".) In the case of inter-species mixtures the boundary concept is "hybrid".
So "speciation" and the division between species is in this regard exactly like every other concept ever used by anyone anywhere.
If they put themselves as "average" then they'll probably also put themselves as an inaccurate weight.
People find it very hard to lie about specifics and stay consistent.
It's easy to lie when you say you "love sports and working out" but harder to answer "what sports to you play regularly (at least once a month)?" and "When did you last play sport X?" and "What was the score the last time you played sport X?" and (for team sports) "what position did you play in your most recent game?"
No system is going to catch every liar, but it should be possible to look at the pattern of answers and generate some estimate of how consistent they are.
I'd also like to see some kind of anonymous user rating system, so that if you go out with someone you can rate them as to the accuracy of their profile. There are various non-parametric and ROC-like analyses that can be used to factor out rater biases from this kind of system, given a sufficiently large number of ratings (five or ten is generally enough.)
But again, this assumes that the audience being served is the non-delusional and sincere, which in my experience is maybe 10% of the total online dating population.