Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way.
This is why people who aren't delusional or dishonest want to site any American nuclear waste repositories in salt domes, which are geologically stable structures that have lasted quite happily over tens of millions of years without earthquakes or water intrusions (the latter is so obvious that even the neo-puritan anti-nukes aren't stupid enough to argue against it.)
In Canada we are planning to bury nuclear waste in granite dykes in the Canadian Shield, which have been stable for something like three hundred million years.
There are plenty of places that are suited to burying waste. The neo-puritans got together with politicians and chose one that satisfied all parties by appearing to do something about the waste disposal problem while ensuring that nothing was actually done.
The real question is: why are Americans incapable of governing themselves? You guys do so many things so brilliantly, yet you can't put together a decent government for anything. I'm not talking about the crazy partisan things Bush did or Obama might be doing--I'm talking about things like Yucca Mountain, which lasted over multiple administrations and changes in power in both houses of Congress. It's failure is a failure of the entire US governmental system, a monument to the apparent inability of Americans to actually use their government to make modestly intelligent plans and carry them through to approximately timely completion.
Other people manage to do this kind of thing through their governments all the time. What is is about Americans that they cannot?
I'm deliberately putting this at the feet of Americans, rather than 'the American government', because I think at some point you have to hold people in a democracy up to ridicule when they continually elect such complete bozos (and I mean that in a bi-partisan manner.)
The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
NO, the whole point of green is creating the Age of Sustainability, and anyone who wants less isn't green.
It's true that neo-puritans have glommed on to the environmental movement since the early '70's to the extent that they have dominated it until recently, but there are some actual green voices out there, clamouring to be heard amidst the neo-puritan lies.
The thing that should be stunningly obvious to everyone is: sacrifice is unsustainable. It requires more self-discipline than any large group of humans has ever managed, and in the absence of self-discipline it requires unsustainable (to say nothing of unethical) enforcement measures.
The neo-puritans are in particular trouble right now because green tech has reached industrial viability--wind farms, solar farms, biodiesel, etc. are all becoming viable industries, and in opposing them neo-puritans necessarily reveal that they don't love the environment, they hate industry. While genuine greens are out there making the world a better place, and making money on the way.
Unfortunately, badly managed companies go bankrupt.
Unless they are investment banks, insurance companies or auto companies with their hands so far up Washington's bipartisan butt that they can get the sock-puppets to rape the taxpayer for them.
This is the face of National Socialism, as created by Bush and continued by Obama: some companies in some industries are deemed to be too important to the Reich to fail, and markets are trampled for the sake of keeping them alive.
Meanwhile, companies that are just as badly run in other industries are allowed to die off. That provides a huge incentive to every company in the country to suck up to the government as closely as possible. It's a ticket to virtual immortality.
That being the case, I wish they choose their terminology, like the term "prove", bit more judiciously, lest us plebs gets misled.
I'm impressed with the work they've done, but based on my own priors I'd like to see the work replicated by a different team before I'm willing to consider claims of proof as being very plausible.
As it stands, this work means, "The same people did the same things with a different sample and got similar results." Well and good, but not nearly so convincing as "Different people did similar things with different samples and got similar results."
Personally, sign me up for this: RISUG [wikipedia.org]
From the linked article: "'Within an hour, the drugs produce an electrical charge that nullifies the electrical charge of the spermatozoa, preventing it from penetrating the ovum,' Dr. Guha said."
I have to say that while empirically this stuff may work, made-up bullshit like this from the inventor does not bode well for the veracity of his other claims. While he may be talking about membrane polarization or something, sperm are electrically neutral.
The article claims that it was formerly believed that the treatment killed sperm, which suggests it was developed without even the most basic empirical testing. It isn't hard to tell if sperm are alive or dead using a simple optical microscope immediately after ejaculation.
There's also no indication as to why anyone would use the substances incorporated into this stuff. What line of logic and research lead to this discovery, using a compound of heavily irradiated organic molecules injected into the vas defrens. Why would someone think that was a good idea in the first place?
Finally, there's the claim that it is persistent (up to ten years) and can at the same time be flushed out by irrigation with a sodium bicarbonate solution. This seems implausible, to say the least.
Finally, while there's a lot of talk in the article about Phase III trials, there is no mention at all of trials to actually demonstrate its long-term, or even short-term, efficacy, which is what Phase II trials are for (Phase I is toxicity and pharmokinetics and dyamics, Phase II is safety and efficacy.)
And really finally, there's the name "Sperm Under Guidance"? Under whose guidance are the sperm under, again?
but Luddites don't dominate the politics of, or otherwise rule, the USA.
From an outsider's perspective they have far more influence than is comfortable. While there is a major current in American culture that is against them, the majority of Americans have deeply anti-scientific religious beliefs, which contribute to your laws on sodomy in some states, your general refusal to legalize gay marriage, your puritanical and harmful drug laws, etc.
So, it is a statistical certainty (p 10e-11) that there are guilty people being held at Guantanamo Bay. Where does that get us?
Since the innocent people obviously deserve fair, public and speedy trials in the ordinary system of American jurisprudence one would hope that the certainty there are innocents in Guantanamo Bay would encourage anyone who doesn't hate America and the Constitution to agitate for an immediate transfer of all prisoners to the domestic judicial system so that the innocent can be separated from the guilty as rapidly as possible.
It is clearly impossible for the military, who were responsible for capturing the innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay, to preside over the trial process. That would be like the old Soviet system where the police determined guilt: grossly and completely un-American.
Given the existence of a perfectly adequate judicial system in the U.S. there is no reason to do anything other than allow the innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay access to it. Of course, that means giving the guilty people access to it as well, although the outcome of access for those two groups will not be the same...
Cowards who hate America might say that there's something wrong with doing this, but I really can't see what it is.
If you're interested in ancient technology, "The Medieval Machine" by Jean Gimpel is also very good, although the authors economic ideas are laughable.
I'll also second the AC above and highly recommend Newton's Opticks, which is an absolute tour-de-force on experimental method. Whenever I hear some idiot in a fuzzy subject complaining about how doing experiments is hard so they'd rather just make stuff up I am reminded of the Opticks, where for example Newton spends almost forty pages describing half a dozen different experiments to prove "positively and directly by experiment" the proposition, "light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibility." The Opticks is far more readable than even modernized versions of Principia, too.
Great ideas like these great discoveries are only notable if someone does something with it.
Right, this is why we are so dismissive of the Greeks of Periclean Athens, because they just talked about stuff and wrote books, and never actually DID anything with the logic and science they invented... except set the foundations for so much, Arab and European, that came after them.
The medieval Arab scholars who people are mentioning here were a very important step in the line of transmission between the great classical thinkers and the present day, and like all the other people who aided in that transmission they added their own not-inconsiderable body of discovery and speculation on top of the Greek foundations.
People can be bought - period. This makes systems of political checks and balances incompletely, because wealth is power, power corrupts, and economic power is most other forms of power spring from.
This is why I am absolutely in favor of redistribution of wealth.
So to avoid the corrupting effects of power you are in favour of giving some individuals vastly more power than they have now, to forcibly redistribute wealth?
Personally, I'm in favour of legal and tax frameworks whose policy goal is to produce flatter wealth distributions, and in favour of putting a tax-payer-funded floor under the poorest people, but wholesale redistribution necessarily involves some individuals (and it is ALWAYS individuals) having far too much power over other individuals for anyone to be safe.
You are correct that power corrupts. The power to redistribute wealth on a large scale corrupts absolutely.
Fascinating! Thanks for the link--the role of decoherence became clear to me in the '90's, and there's a whole little group pushing it as the solution to this problem as if it was new.
I never published on the topic because it rapidly became obvious to me that it in fact says nothing about the real problem. There's a subtle bait-and-switch going on. Decoherence doesn't actually address the problem: why is there a classical world at all? Why aren't we aware of the damned probability distributions, coherent or otherwise? And why does the charge of the electron only show up in one place, not spread (incoherently) all over the place?
Decoherence explains why we don't see interference patterns everywhere, but it says nothing about the ontology of the wavefunction, or of consciousness, which to me is the real issue. It takes for granted that conscious experience is classical, but that's the whole point. As Max Born said, "WHY must I treat the apparatus as classical? What will happen to me if I don't?!" THAT is the question, and decoherence does not address it at all.
It is still fascinating that Green came up with this back in the '50's. The journal he published in (Nuovo Cimento) is not first-rank, although still respectable. The real reason his work wasn't given the attention it perhaps deserves is more likely to be the internal politics of the academic community.
n other news, a purveyor of some media claims it's the best thing evar!!11!!
This is the actually the kind of advertising that I find the most useful, as it tells me what I absolutely want to avoid. Movie ads that hype the effects over the story tell me the film was made for some other audience, not me, which is great: I don't have to see the film to find out if it's any good. I know that by my standards it'll suck.
Likewise, all "low introductory rate" offers are sure signs that the service is overpriced, so I love ads like that. They tell me I can just walk away without any risk at all that I'll be missing out on a deal.
Food and athletic performance products that are advertised by professional sports figures are also no-brainers: I'm a competent amateur at several sports, and know that I don't burn the calories or have the technique where anything that could make a difference to a professional would be at all relevant to me.
I really don't think the advertising industry really gets enough credit for telling potential customers what we really need to know about the crappy, over-priced products they shill.
that resolved the paradox of the apparent wave/particle duality of electromagentic radiation.
We didn't actually resolve the paradox, we just showed that we didn't have to resolve it to do useful calculations. The legacy of positivism and the Copenhagen Interpretation has been to simply sweep the whole question under the carpet.
Even modern approaches that attempt to explain the central question of quantum theory, which is "How does the classical world arise out of quantum phenomena?" don't actually answer it. They just make you feel better about it, distracting you from the fact that they have explained nothing. The whole Many Worlds approach is like this: it actually says nothing about why consciousness experiences only one of the many possible outcomes, despite its rather clever intellectual edifice.
To look at it another way, if all you knew about was the quantum universe of smoothly evolving probability densities, you would never guess at the existence of the classical universe at all. You would never suspect there was such a thing as "wavefunction collapse" (or any of its conceptual equivalents in different interpretations.) You would simply be aware (insofar as awareness might be possible in such a universe) that the various components of wavefunctions decohere smoothly over time due to interactions and entanglements with systems that have many degrees of freedom. You would not under any circumstances say, "Hey, all the components of that wavefunction just vanished except for this one!" Yet that is what WE say all the time, and no one has a clue as to why it happens.
My own take on this is that far from being some bizarre quantum phenomenon, consciousness is fundamentally classical in a way that physics is not. This is a Kantian view, that there are necessary conditions to consciousness that are more restrictive than the general conditions of existence.
So far, no empirical test of any interpretation of quantum mechanics (except experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities, which rule out any local causal interpretation) have been proposed. It may be that systems like this one will allow for novel tests, and in any case they are likely to put a finer point on the fundamental question even if they get us no closer to answering it.
If you don't respect international laws and rulings against you, don't expect others to respect the lopsided laws you're trying to force down the throats of more free-thinking countries.
Rogue states like the US need to be reigned in. The US government has consistently violated international norms for decades, particularly with regards to bizarre claims of extra-territoriality, which basically means Americans think that they can legally apply their wacko laws to everyone everywhere.
Unfortunately, although once a great trading republic, the United States is now a military empire, financed by debt and spiralling into oblivion. Americans will be hurt by their fall more than anyone else, but the rest of the world really needs to start paying attention and thinking about how to deal with a post-American planet.
One of the things we need to do is bring home to Americans as clearly as possible that we don't care about their parochial laws. Canada is in full compliance with all relevant international treaties on copyright, and any extraneous conditions that the Americans would like to impose on us are irrelevant. We are an independent nation, and don't react well to being told what we ought to do by our bankrupt southern neighbours.
For that matter, why is it running a general-purpose OS like Windows?
Ease of development, particularly UI support for rich user interaction and feedback.
Most medical systems I've worked on have two OS's: a relatively hard realtime system that's really close to the hardware, and a second system (Linux or Windows) that's close to the user. For some applications the general purpose OS is used as a soft realtime system and talks to all the hardware via USB or a framegrabber. Only very simple systems are pure embedded these days.
Given the complexity of computing that some of these machines do this makes perfect sense: an embedded, realtime OS is just not what you want to be dealing with when trying to develop richly representational software. Think imaging systems and computer-assisted surgery systems, which often have a lot of analysis and image processing built in, including heavy user interaction, in realtime, in the OR.
Intra-op ultrasound is routine in cardiac surgery (and yes, sometimes systems hang and have to be rebooted while the patient is on the table with their heart stopped...) Intra-op fluoroscopy is routine in some procedures as well, particularly in ortho.
The problem is that people have come to expect features that can't be easily delivered without a general purpose OS, and the issues that come with that are pretty much invisible to anyone who would be likely to scream about it, including the FDA. Users get used to periodic failures and work around them, just like desktop users do.
No, we just remember that KDawson and other irresponsible sensation-mongers are guilty of killing far more people and blighting far more lives than any of the supposed "dangers" they hysterically scream about.
I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has actually considered the times they lived in to be "certain"?
I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has failed to understand that some times have higher uncertainty than others?
Or that when an ordinary person uses the phrase "uncertain times" they generally mean something like "times sufficiently less certain than usual in the perception of a broad enough range of people to be sociologically interesting"?
The media attention is due to zeitgeist, not anything in particular about the bug. We live in uncertain times, and people are scared, but mostly they don't have anything to be scared OF.
The economy is burning, they're worried about losing their jobs themselves or that their spouse will, or that they won't be able to keep up with their mortgage or whatever. The economic meltdown is happening slowly, though, and it's hard for people to stay worried about it, so an acute threat that can absorb all of that relatively unfocused anxiety is more than welcome.
We saw this in the late '70's and early '80's as well. One particularly remarkable case was that herpes was at one time considered a huge public health issue... until AIDS came along. While herpes is nasty, the focus on it had far more to do with generalized anxiety about the state of the world and the sexual revolution as boomers started to settle down and have families than any objective threat level.
So after the swine flu mess passes over, expect to see other stories of this kind popping up every few months until global economic conditions start to improve, or until a real threat finally materializes (or is manufactured) to take people's minds off their mundane worries.
It's always possible that this flu will turn out to be a real threat, although in the case of the 1918 flu there was a significantly increased death rate up to three years before: the rate of death from influenza in England and Wales was over 10,000 in 1915, and less than 6000 in the several years before.
The war may have had an effect on this, of course, providing many susceptible human hosts to allow the virus lots of opportunities to mutate into the hellishly virulent strain of 1918. So the odds are that this isn't going to be nearly so bad, but until it's past we won't know, and that could take up to a year, given that the 1918 virus was mild in the spring and unprecedentedly deadly in the fall.
And they pointed out that lots of frog species seemed to survive pretty easily even though they are very sensitive to acid rain, forest fires and other such things that would have happened if the K-T impact was the primary explanation of extinction.
We know from relatively solid physical evidence what the size and composition of the KT impact object was. We know its effects were world-wide, and we know those effects would have caused acid rain, forest fires, etc.
What we do not know is how the world-wide frog population would have responded to such an event. We don't even know why the frog population is in decline worldwide today.
To hold up the survival of frogs, whose biology is complex and whose interaction with and response to extreme environments is very poorly understood, as a counter-argument against the preponderance of relatively simple physical evidence of world-wide effects from a large impact event is an extremely weak rhetorical move, which looks to me more like misdirection than actual argument.
Basic facts about war, foreign policy and economics will always be with us.
I'm not sure what these "basic facts" you mention are. They can't include "there will always be wars" because there have not always been. They can't include "nations will always have competing interests" because the very idea of a nation is a recent one. They can't include anything about corporate interests or the financial system because again, those are recent and flexible institutions, and while it is true that a system of full employment in a fractional reserve banking system is a recipe for war, that is a special case, not a "basic fact."
People will always be stupid and behave irrationally is pretty basic, but while all wars are always stupid and irrational--by economic definition, if you know any economics--that does not mean that all irrationality will end in war.
The US lost its trade dominance in the '70's, long before the original FTA with Canada (later expanded into NAFTA).
GATT was around from 1948 to 1994 (before being replaced by the WTO). The period from 1948 to the late 60's was a boom period for the US, in part driven by world trade.
So by trivial empirical examination the current US mess has nothing much to do with free trade.
The real problem is that your dollar is the reserve currency and has been for thirty years, which keeps its value far higher than your industrial production and exports would on their own. That makes American manufacturers disadvantaged in world markets, and foreign good very cheap to American consumers.
In response to that reality the more-or-less explicit policy of every American administration since the '70's has been to borrow and consume rather than save and produce. Your strong imperial dollar has let you do that, until very recently. Now, unfortunately, the house of cards is collapsing, trapping you and everyone else in the rubble. This is not anyone's fault... it's just the logic of empire working itself out as it always does.
Over the last couple of years, Sen. Specter has behaved in a manner that is against the core of the party, voting in favor of dozens of high-priced spending bills, in favor of the bailouts, etc
It's weird that Republicans still describe the policies of George W. Bush as "against the core of the party." Give it up, guys: we know you are the OTHER party of big government, big spending, big deficits.
There's a reason why almost nobody gets elected as one.
Because the parties have the system rigged so that it is nearly impossible?
Also, I'm amused that you think that parties have principles, unless you think "grow the government and the deficit faster than the other party" is a principle, as that seems to be the only thing that either party is consistently focused on.
Parties do not add a layer of protection. They are private organizations that have successfully colonized the body politic, which won't be healthy until the partisan encrustation is scraped off.
In Canada, unlike most socialized systems, there are actually very significant restrictions on private provision of care. There isn't any actual prohibition, but the single-payer system has ensured that until recently private care has been unavailable to most Canadians. The ultra-rich and politically well-connected do have access to private care, in the United States. Strangely, these hypocritical bastards are amongst the most ardent proponents of the current system... for other people.
Recent court decisions have eroded the principle of "equal care for all" somewhat, and if the U.S. would get its act together and wipe out its predatory health insurance industry it would be more politically viable to open up the Canadian market. Canadians are rightly worried that our cheaper and better-performing system would be raped by US companies if we ever relaxed the equal-care principle.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way.
This is why people who aren't delusional or dishonest want to site any American nuclear waste repositories in salt domes, which are geologically stable structures that have lasted quite happily over tens of millions of years without earthquakes or water intrusions (the latter is so obvious that even the neo-puritan anti-nukes aren't stupid enough to argue against it.)
In Canada we are planning to bury nuclear waste in granite dykes in the Canadian Shield, which have been stable for something like three hundred million years.
There are plenty of places that are suited to burying waste. The neo-puritans got together with politicians and chose one that satisfied all parties by appearing to do something about the waste disposal problem while ensuring that nothing was actually done.
The real question is: why are Americans incapable of governing themselves? You guys do so many things so brilliantly, yet you can't put together a decent government for anything. I'm not talking about the crazy partisan things Bush did or Obama might be doing--I'm talking about things like Yucca Mountain, which lasted over multiple administrations and changes in power in both houses of Congress. It's failure is a failure of the entire US governmental system, a monument to the apparent inability of Americans to actually use their government to make modestly intelligent plans and carry them through to approximately timely completion.
Other people manage to do this kind of thing through their governments all the time. What is is about Americans that they cannot?
I'm deliberately putting this at the feet of Americans, rather than 'the American government', because I think at some point you have to hold people in a democracy up to ridicule when they continually elect such complete bozos (and I mean that in a bi-partisan manner.)
The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
NO, the whole point of green is creating the Age of Sustainability, and anyone who wants less isn't green.
It's true that neo-puritans have glommed on to the environmental movement since the early '70's to the extent that they have dominated it until recently, but there are some actual green voices out there, clamouring to be heard amidst the neo-puritan lies.
The thing that should be stunningly obvious to everyone is: sacrifice is unsustainable. It requires more self-discipline than any large group of humans has ever managed, and in the absence of self-discipline it requires unsustainable (to say nothing of unethical) enforcement measures.
The neo-puritans are in particular trouble right now because green tech has reached industrial viability--wind farms, solar farms, biodiesel, etc. are all becoming viable industries, and in opposing them neo-puritans necessarily reveal that they don't love the environment, they hate industry. While genuine greens are out there making the world a better place, and making money on the way.
Unfortunately, badly managed companies go bankrupt.
Unless they are investment banks, insurance companies or auto companies with their hands so far up Washington's bipartisan butt that they can get the sock-puppets to rape the taxpayer for them.
This is the face of National Socialism, as created by Bush and continued by Obama: some companies in some industries are deemed to be too important to the Reich to fail, and markets are trampled for the sake of keeping them alive.
Meanwhile, companies that are just as badly run in other industries are allowed to die off. That provides a huge incentive to every company in the country to suck up to the government as closely as possible. It's a ticket to virtual immortality.
3DRealms should have claimed it was vital for national security that DNF be released. It probably wouldn't have worked, but who would have thought that anyone would have even considered bailing out newspapers, even theoretically?
That being the case, I wish they choose their terminology, like the term "prove", bit more judiciously, lest us plebs gets misled.
I'm impressed with the work they've done, but based on my own priors I'd like to see the work replicated by a different team before I'm willing to consider claims of proof as being very plausible.
As it stands, this work means, "The same people did the same things with a different sample and got similar results." Well and good, but not nearly so convincing as "Different people did similar things with different samples and got similar results."
Personally, sign me up for this: RISUG [wikipedia.org]
From the linked article: "'Within an hour, the drugs produce an electrical charge that nullifies the electrical charge of the spermatozoa, preventing it from penetrating the ovum,' Dr. Guha said."
I have to say that while empirically this stuff may work, made-up bullshit like this from the inventor does not bode well for the veracity of his other claims. While he may be talking about membrane polarization or something, sperm are electrically neutral.
The article claims that it was formerly believed that the treatment killed sperm, which suggests it was developed without even the most basic empirical testing. It isn't hard to tell if sperm are alive or dead using a simple optical microscope immediately after ejaculation.
There's also no indication as to why anyone would use the substances incorporated into this stuff. What line of logic and research lead to this discovery, using a compound of heavily irradiated organic molecules injected into the vas defrens. Why would someone think that was a good idea in the first place?
Finally, there's the claim that it is persistent (up to ten years) and can at the same time be flushed out by irrigation with a sodium bicarbonate solution. This seems implausible, to say the least.
Finally, while there's a lot of talk in the article about Phase III trials, there is no mention at all of trials to actually demonstrate its long-term, or even short-term, efficacy, which is what Phase II trials are for (Phase I is toxicity and pharmokinetics and dyamics, Phase II is safety and efficacy.)
And really finally, there's the name "Sperm Under Guidance"? Under whose guidance are the sperm under, again?
but Luddites don't dominate the politics of, or otherwise rule, the USA.
From an outsider's perspective they have far more influence than is comfortable. While there is a major current in American culture that is against them, the majority of Americans have deeply anti-scientific religious beliefs, which contribute to your laws on sodomy in some states, your general refusal to legalize gay marriage, your puritanical and harmful drug laws, etc.
So, it is a statistical certainty (p 10e-11) that there are guilty people being held at Guantanamo Bay. Where does that get us?
Since the innocent people obviously deserve fair, public and speedy trials in the ordinary system of American jurisprudence one would hope that the certainty there are innocents in Guantanamo Bay would encourage anyone who doesn't hate America and the Constitution to agitate for an immediate transfer of all prisoners to the domestic judicial system so that the innocent can be separated from the guilty as rapidly as possible.
It is clearly impossible for the military, who were responsible for capturing the innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay, to preside over the trial process. That would be like the old Soviet system where the police determined guilt: grossly and completely un-American.
Given the existence of a perfectly adequate judicial system in the U.S. there is no reason to do anything other than allow the innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay access to it. Of course, that means giving the guilty people access to it as well, although the outcome of access for those two groups will not be the same...
Cowards who hate America might say that there's something wrong with doing this, but I really can't see what it is.
Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague De Camp
If you're interested in ancient technology, "The Medieval Machine" by Jean Gimpel is also very good, although the authors economic ideas are laughable.
I'll also second the AC above and highly recommend Newton's Opticks, which is an absolute tour-de-force on experimental method. Whenever I hear some idiot in a fuzzy subject complaining about how doing experiments is hard so they'd rather just make stuff up I am reminded of the Opticks, where for example Newton spends almost forty pages describing half a dozen different experiments to prove "positively and directly by experiment" the proposition, "light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibility." The Opticks is far more readable than even modernized versions of Principia, too.
Besides, you look at the Middle East now, and there's an active fight against science.
So it's just like the United States, eh?
Great ideas like these great discoveries are only notable if someone does something with it.
Right, this is why we are so dismissive of the Greeks of Periclean Athens, because they just talked about stuff and wrote books, and never actually DID anything with the logic and science they invented... except set the foundations for so much, Arab and European, that came after them.
The medieval Arab scholars who people are mentioning here were a very important step in the line of transmission between the great classical thinkers and the present day, and like all the other people who aided in that transmission they added their own not-inconsiderable body of discovery and speculation on top of the Greek foundations.
Elsevier, a s/respectable/despicable/ publisher of scientific journals,
Fixed that for you.
By their acts you will know them.
People can be bought - period. This makes systems of political checks and balances incompletely, because wealth is power, power corrupts, and economic power is most other forms of power spring from.
This is why I am absolutely in favor of redistribution of wealth.
So to avoid the corrupting effects of power you are in favour of giving some individuals vastly more power than they have now, to forcibly redistribute wealth?
Personally, I'm in favour of legal and tax frameworks whose policy goal is to produce flatter wealth distributions, and in favour of putting a tax-payer-funded floor under the poorest people, but wholesale redistribution necessarily involves some individuals (and it is ALWAYS individuals) having far too much power over other individuals for anyone to be safe.
You are correct that power corrupts. The power to redistribute wealth on a large scale corrupts absolutely.
Fascinating! Thanks for the link--the role of decoherence became clear to me in the '90's, and there's a whole little group pushing it as the solution to this problem as if it was new.
I never published on the topic because it rapidly became obvious to me that it in fact says nothing about the real problem. There's a subtle bait-and-switch going on. Decoherence doesn't actually address the problem: why is there a classical world at all? Why aren't we aware of the damned probability distributions, coherent or otherwise? And why does the charge of the electron only show up in one place, not spread (incoherently) all over the place?
Decoherence explains why we don't see interference patterns everywhere, but it says nothing about the ontology of the wavefunction, or of consciousness, which to me is the real issue. It takes for granted that conscious experience is classical, but that's the whole point. As Max Born said, "WHY must I treat the apparatus as classical? What will happen to me if I don't?!" THAT is the question, and decoherence does not address it at all.
It is still fascinating that Green came up with this back in the '50's. The journal he published in (Nuovo Cimento) is not first-rank, although still respectable. The real reason his work wasn't given the attention it perhaps deserves is more likely to be the internal politics of the academic community.
n other news, a purveyor of some media claims it's the best thing evar!!11!!
This is the actually the kind of advertising that I find the most useful, as it tells me what I absolutely want to avoid. Movie ads that hype the effects over the story tell me the film was made for some other audience, not me, which is great: I don't have to see the film to find out if it's any good. I know that by my standards it'll suck.
Likewise, all "low introductory rate" offers are sure signs that the service is overpriced, so I love ads like that. They tell me I can just walk away without any risk at all that I'll be missing out on a deal.
Food and athletic performance products that are advertised by professional sports figures are also no-brainers: I'm a competent amateur at several sports, and know that I don't burn the calories or have the technique where anything that could make a difference to a professional would be at all relevant to me.
I really don't think the advertising industry really gets enough credit for telling potential customers what we really need to know about the crappy, over-priced products they shill.
that resolved the paradox of the apparent wave/particle duality of electromagentic radiation.
We didn't actually resolve the paradox, we just showed that we didn't have to resolve it to do useful calculations. The legacy of positivism and the Copenhagen Interpretation has been to simply sweep the whole question under the carpet.
Even modern approaches that attempt to explain the central question of quantum theory, which is "How does the classical world arise out of quantum phenomena?" don't actually answer it. They just make you feel better about it, distracting you from the fact that they have explained nothing. The whole Many Worlds approach is like this: it actually says nothing about why consciousness experiences only one of the many possible outcomes, despite its rather clever intellectual edifice.
To look at it another way, if all you knew about was the quantum universe of smoothly evolving probability densities, you would never guess at the existence of the classical universe at all. You would never suspect there was such a thing as "wavefunction collapse" (or any of its conceptual equivalents in different interpretations.) You would simply be aware (insofar as awareness might be possible in such a universe) that the various components of wavefunctions decohere smoothly over time due to interactions and entanglements with systems that have many degrees of freedom. You would not under any circumstances say, "Hey, all the components of that wavefunction just vanished except for this one!" Yet that is what WE say all the time, and no one has a clue as to why it happens.
My own take on this is that far from being some bizarre quantum phenomenon, consciousness is fundamentally classical in a way that physics is not. This is a Kantian view, that there are necessary conditions to consciousness that are more restrictive than the general conditions of existence.
So far, no empirical test of any interpretation of quantum mechanics (except experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities, which rule out any local causal interpretation) have been proposed. It may be that systems like this one will allow for novel tests, and in any case they are likely to put a finer point on the fundamental question even if they get us no closer to answering it.
If you don't respect international laws and rulings against you, don't expect others to respect the lopsided laws you're trying to force down the throats of more free-thinking countries.
Rogue states like the US need to be reigned in. The US government has consistently violated international norms for decades, particularly with regards to bizarre claims of extra-territoriality, which basically means Americans think that they can legally apply their wacko laws to everyone everywhere.
Unfortunately, although once a great trading republic, the United States is now a military empire, financed by debt and spiralling into oblivion. Americans will be hurt by their fall more than anyone else, but the rest of the world really needs to start paying attention and thinking about how to deal with a post-American planet.
One of the things we need to do is bring home to Americans as clearly as possible that we don't care about their parochial laws. Canada is in full compliance with all relevant international treaties on copyright, and any extraneous conditions that the Americans would like to impose on us are irrelevant. We are an independent nation, and don't react well to being told what we ought to do by our bankrupt southern neighbours.
For that matter, why is it running a general-purpose OS like Windows?
Ease of development, particularly UI support for rich user interaction and feedback.
Most medical systems I've worked on have two OS's: a relatively hard realtime system that's really close to the hardware, and a second system (Linux or Windows) that's close to the user. For some applications the general purpose OS is used as a soft realtime system and talks to all the hardware via USB or a framegrabber. Only very simple systems are pure embedded these days.
Given the complexity of computing that some of these machines do this makes perfect sense: an embedded, realtime OS is just not what you want to be dealing with when trying to develop richly representational software. Think imaging systems and computer-assisted surgery systems, which often have a lot of analysis and image processing built in, including heavy user interaction, in realtime, in the OR.
Intra-op ultrasound is routine in cardiac surgery (and yes, sometimes systems hang and have to be rebooted while the patient is on the table with their heart stopped...) Intra-op fluoroscopy is routine in some procedures as well, particularly in ortho.
The problem is that people have come to expect features that can't be easily delivered without a general purpose OS, and the issues that come with that are pretty much invisible to anyone who would be likely to scream about it, including the FDA. Users get used to periodic failures and work around them, just like desktop users do.
Looks like everyone has already forgot...
No, we just remember that KDawson and other irresponsible sensation-mongers are guilty of killing far more people and blighting far more lives than any of the supposed "dangers" they hysterically scream about.
I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has actually considered the times they lived in to be "certain"?
I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has failed to understand that some times have higher uncertainty than others?
Or that when an ordinary person uses the phrase "uncertain times" they generally mean something like "times sufficiently less certain than usual in the perception of a broad enough range of people to be sociologically interesting"?
it certainly is getting a lot of media attention
The media attention is due to zeitgeist, not anything in particular about the bug. We live in uncertain times, and people are scared, but mostly they don't have anything to be scared OF.
The economy is burning, they're worried about losing their jobs themselves or that their spouse will, or that they won't be able to keep up with their mortgage or whatever. The economic meltdown is happening slowly, though, and it's hard for people to stay worried about it, so an acute threat that can absorb all of that relatively unfocused anxiety is more than welcome.
We saw this in the late '70's and early '80's as well. One particularly remarkable case was that herpes was at one time considered a huge public health issue... until AIDS came along. While herpes is nasty, the focus on it had far more to do with generalized anxiety about the state of the world and the sexual revolution as boomers started to settle down and have families than any objective threat level.
So after the swine flu mess passes over, expect to see other stories of this kind popping up every few months until global economic conditions start to improve, or until a real threat finally materializes (or is manufactured) to take people's minds off their mundane worries.
It's always possible that this flu will turn out to be a real threat, although in the case of the 1918 flu there was a significantly increased death rate up to three years before: the rate of death from influenza in England and Wales was over 10,000 in 1915, and less than 6000 in the several years before.
The war may have had an effect on this, of course, providing many susceptible human hosts to allow the virus lots of opportunities to mutate into the hellishly virulent strain of 1918. So the odds are that this isn't going to be nearly so bad, but until it's past we won't know, and that could take up to a year, given that the 1918 virus was mild in the spring and unprecedentedly deadly in the fall.
And they pointed out that lots of frog species seemed to survive pretty easily even though they are very sensitive to acid rain, forest fires and other such things that would have happened if the K-T impact was the primary explanation of extinction.
We know from relatively solid physical evidence what the size and composition of the KT impact object was. We know its effects were world-wide, and we know those effects would have caused acid rain, forest fires, etc.
What we do not know is how the world-wide frog population would have responded to such an event. We don't even know why the frog population is in decline worldwide today.
To hold up the survival of frogs, whose biology is complex and whose interaction with and response to extreme environments is very poorly understood, as a counter-argument against the preponderance of relatively simple physical evidence of world-wide effects from a large impact event is an extremely weak rhetorical move, which looks to me more like misdirection than actual argument.
Basic facts about war, foreign policy and economics will always be with us.
I'm not sure what these "basic facts" you mention are. They can't include "there will always be wars" because there have not always been. They can't include "nations will always have competing interests" because the very idea of a nation is a recent one. They can't include anything about corporate interests or the financial system because again, those are recent and flexible institutions, and while it is true that a system of full employment in a fractional reserve banking system is a recipe for war, that is a special case, not a "basic fact."
People will always be stupid and behave irrationally is pretty basic, but while all wars are always stupid and irrational--by economic definition, if you know any economics--that does not mean that all irrationality will end in war.
And there is the problem: who really thinks this?
I do.
The US lost its trade dominance in the '70's, long before the original FTA with Canada (later expanded into NAFTA).
GATT was around from 1948 to 1994 (before being replaced by the WTO). The period from 1948 to the late 60's was a boom period for the US, in part driven by world trade.
So by trivial empirical examination the current US mess has nothing much to do with free trade.
The real problem is that your dollar is the reserve currency and has been for thirty years, which keeps its value far higher than your industrial production and exports would on their own. That makes American manufacturers disadvantaged in world markets, and foreign good very cheap to American consumers.
In response to that reality the more-or-less explicit policy of every American administration since the '70's has been to borrow and consume rather than save and produce. Your strong imperial dollar has let you do that, until very recently. Now, unfortunately, the house of cards is collapsing, trapping you and everyone else in the rubble. This is not anyone's fault... it's just the logic of empire working itself out as it always does.
Over the last couple of years, Sen. Specter has behaved in a manner that is against the core of the party, voting in favor of dozens of high-priced spending bills, in favor of the bailouts, etc
It's weird that Republicans still describe the policies of George W. Bush as "against the core of the party." Give it up, guys: we know you are the OTHER party of big government, big spending, big deficits.
There's a reason why almost nobody gets elected as one.
Because the parties have the system rigged so that it is nearly impossible?
Also, I'm amused that you think that parties have principles, unless you think "grow the government and the deficit faster than the other party" is a principle, as that seems to be the only thing that either party is consistently focused on.
Parties do not add a layer of protection. They are private organizations that have successfully colonized the body politic, which won't be healthy until the partisan encrustation is scraped off.
No one will stop you from doing so.
In Canada, unlike most socialized systems, there are actually very significant restrictions on private provision of care. There isn't any actual prohibition, but the single-payer system has ensured that until recently private care has been unavailable to most Canadians. The ultra-rich and politically well-connected do have access to private care, in the United States. Strangely, these hypocritical bastards are amongst the most ardent proponents of the current system... for other people.
Recent court decisions have eroded the principle of "equal care for all" somewhat, and if the U.S. would get its act together and wipe out its predatory health insurance industry it would be more politically viable to open up the Canadian market. Canadians are rightly worried that our cheaper and better-performing system would be raped by US companies if we ever relaxed the equal-care principle.