I am no PETA freak, but putting 200+ decibels is bound to do permanent damage.
The document linked on the Bahamas stranding says that source levels were 223 - 235 dB and levels were less than 180 dB at 300 m horizontally and 200 m vertically, so unless the dolphins were EXTREMELY close to the ships when the sonar was turned on the odds of even temporary deafness due to the use of sonar in the wild are quite low. Remember: a 40 dB difference in signal is a factor of 10,000 in amplitude of the pressure wave, so unless the dolphins were within a few meters of the source they would be very unlikely to get anything close to 200 dB.
This is a bit like dropping a 10 kg mass on a person and noticing it causes serious damage, and then arguing that you can say something about the effects of dropping 0.001 kg masses on people based on the 10 kg data.
That's not to say that it isn't plausible that dolphin sonar can be screwed up by powerful sonar, but this experiment just doesn't seem relevant to the question.
So, only 3% of chemicals in use by man have been tested for environmental and health safety.
And the number of natural substances that have been tested is also nearly nil, and they are far more likely to be biologically active as natural materials have no quality control in manufacture are the simplest cell contains hundreds of thousands of proteins, many of which are known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic, etc.
It's really incredibly we let anyone make anything out of natural materials at all.
[I'm trying to put the situation in perspective, not suggest that we don't need any chemical testing--we do, but maybe those 3% are the ones we have plausible reason to think might be dangerous?]
Yeah, but "low income" isn't an industry you can sue.
It's actually a race between which will come first: someone here saying "correlation is not causation" and a lawyer starting a class action suit against vinyl floor manufacturers and installers, as well as landlords who rent units with vinyl floors.
My point is that a huge double-standard is being applied, not by the people who dismissed Dyson because his work isn't peer-reviewed, but by the people (go read the thread!) who dismissed him with nothing more substantial than "he's not a cosmologist."
I'm not saying that there are no legitimate criticisms of Dyson's position. I'm saying that the people who criticized Dyson yesterday for "not being a climatologists" are hypocrites for not chiming in here attacking this guy for "not being a quantum physicist" (Hawking, by the way, is a cosmologist, and although Hawking radiation is a quantum phenomenon Hawking has never weighed in on the deep questions of quantum theory that Palmer is addressing here.)
We had a whole lot of people on here yesterday arguing that it was safe to ignore Freeman Dyson because he was a physicist offering an opinion on climatology. This makes a certain amount of sense, as it is well-known that the climate is not a physical system, so it would be very odd for a physicist to be able to say anything about it.
Today we have a climatologist offering an opinion on quantum theory, and I'm very curious that none of those objective, disinterested people who were so vociferous about the absolute separation of the two fields yesterday have bothered to reiterate their strongly-held opinion today.
What could it be that motivates these entirely honest, not-in-the-least-bit hypcritical individuals to roundly denounce a physicist for commenting on climate, but utter not a peep when a climatologist offers an opinion on physics?
This seems to me to be a mystery at least as big as those that underly quantum theory.
[My only real question right now is whether the troll or flamebait mods will be higher on this. But c'mon people: am I the only one to notice how hypocritical it is for folks to get up in arms about Dyson not being a climatologist, but being absolutely silent about a climatologist making such deep claims about physics?
If you are one of those people: you ought to be ashamed of yourself, and get some better arguments against people like Dyson, because your silence on this thread is going to come up every single time one of you makes the same lame rhetorical move in future. There's stuff to be said for and against AGW, but "he's not a climatologist" is a lame ad hominem that contributes only noise to the debate.]
But apparently the ones with mod points are not smart enough to realize that my perfectly factual account of why I'm interested in this research is neither flamebait nor a troll.
I actually asked myself, "Is this going to be mis-interpreted?" and then thought, "Well, it's exactly true, and in as neutral language as I can think of off-the-cuff" and went ahead and hit submit. While I appreciated that it could have caused a flamewar it wasn't my intent to do so, and it obviously hasn't (I agree the AC above is too heavy-handed in his parody, but that's another kettle of fish entirely.)
Personally, I don't see why people have such an issue with the existence of non-locality
It's because of how utterly central relativity is to our understanding of the universe. Manifest non-locality would be phenomenologically equivalent to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, or equivalently the law of causality. All the time-travel, grandfather-paradox stuff would become real problems for physics and nobody has the least idea of how to deal with them.
This doesn't mean that nonlocality is impossible, but it does mean it creates enormous practical problems for physics that no one knows how to approach, much less solve.
Palmer argues that quantum theory is incorrect in so far that the measurements it makes fall outside of the possible states of the universe and are therefore invalid.
Although that sentence doesn't actually make sense (quantum theory doesn't make measurements!) if I'm interpreting it correctly this is a legitimate out regarding the experimental violation of Bell's Inequalities.
The kinds of theory that Bell's Theorem rules out incorporate the assumption of "counter-factual definiteness", which is the belief that one can meaningfully talk about "the result we would have gotten if we had made a different (incompatible) measurement from the one we did make."
From my reading of it, the fractal theory is a way of motivating Bohr's insistence that "experiments that are not performed do not have results", because "experiments that are not performed" literally are not part of the universe in the fractal theory.
However, this doesn't actually say anything that Bohr and Heisenberg said in the thirties. Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" in particular is an extremely lucid account of these ideas, and while adding the fractal back-story may make the idea more palatable, the real question remains: is the fractal idea fertile? Will it give rise to new theoretical structures or suggest novel experiments that will solve some of our outstanding problems (like unification of gravity.)
Yeah, and the belief that "kids are basically little versions of adults" has been out of date since at least the '50's. The whole point of Piaget's stages, which are still held to be a broadly accurate characterization cognitive development, is that there is a wide range of apparently basic cognitive functions that kids in the early stages of development simply don't have.
Why anyone would still characterize the field as being full of stuff that treats kids as little versions of adults is beyond me. We've known that they aren't for more than half a century.
Objectively, however, the punisher is just conditioning him- or herself to hit the kid more.
Man I wish I had mod points for you! Can you point to any articles that back this claim up? I'd love to send them to some of my Bible Believing Christian acquaintances who think that hitting their kids is a good thing. It wouldn't convince them, because I know from experience that their certain aspects of their belief system is impervious to facts, but it might make them uncomfortable, and less critical of non-violent parenting.
It could also be that you're just talking to a fucking moron.
Yeah, there's a huge problem with the Turing Test, which is that you have to distinguish between a computer and a person drawn from the pool of humans intelligent and aware enough to have learned to speak and use a keyboard.
Unfortunately, as YouTube (and even/.) comments demonstrate, there is no lower limit to the intellectual capacity of a person who is still capable of speaking and using a keyboard.
Therefore, the Turing Test is not, properly speaking, about distinguishing between artificial and real intelligence because a significant portion of the human population will be below any finite threshold of "intelligence" as the term is ordinarily construed. Ergo, any bot that reaches even a minimal level of coherence will be indistinguishable from some humans.
The GPS analogy works here as we humans use a coordinate system (via GPS) to navigate on occasion.
The analogy fails because we call our co-ordinate systems "MAPS", not "GPS".
If they said, "Chimps have a mental map" no one would be complaining. But a GPS is not a map. It is a way of locating yourself on a map that has some very specific characteristics, the most important one being that it is GLOBAL, which the locale-specific mechanisms that the chimps are using are not.
Humans were using this kind of map-based navigation long before we started using GPS to make us independent of exactly the kind of locale-specific knowledge these chimps are using, so in fact what the chimps are doing is EXACTLY WHAT THE GPS WAS DESIGNED TO MAKE UNNECESSARY.
So yeah, I can totally see how someone would want to look at that and say, "Hey, these chimps are doing exactly what a GPS doesn't! Let's say they have a GPS in their head!"
By investigating the detailed empirical facts of the species in question, including genetic histories of specific species, relations between species sharing similar abilities, physiological and neurological studies of the guidance process in different species, hormonal studies of the seasonal triggers for migration in different species, and careful field observation of bird behaviour, including quantitative estimation of rates and kinds of navigational failure, in different species.
Every occurrence of terms "genetic" and "species" in the above is a point where the process of interpreting the data is informed by evolutionary theory. No other known theory can give the kind of detailed guidance and coherence that evolutionary theory gives, which is why no scientists working on problems like this have any use for alternative theories. If an alternative theory was able to provide the same kind of consistent, over-arching interpretive framework that evolution by variation and natural selection does, and had the same kind of compelling empirical and logical foundations that evolution by variation and natural selection does, scientists would be happy to use it.
Everything you read here, however sensible it may sound, is just noise. Case law matters. Statues matter. Public opinion, common sense, logic and reasonableness do not matter.
However, in this case it has a lot to do with the fact that certain elements - those who earned big money on pollution being allowed to happen - for many decades did everything they could to stop the government from taking appropriate action.
And yet it is worth remembering that these data also show that AIR QUALITY HAS IMPROVED in the past couple of decades in major American cities.
That's something that the "everything is always getting worse" crowd don't generally want us reminded of, because it makes it harder to pass more legislation that has nothing to do with protecting the environment but everything to do with power.
Unfortunately environmental arguments often come down to a fight between egregious profiteers who want to rape the Earth on the one hand and crypto-fascists on the other. The public would actually be more supportive of environmental protection legislation, and the environment would be better off, if there wasn't a deep-seated and quite deserved distrust of most "environmental" organizations, which are nothing more than authoritarian political organizations that have found they can use the environment as a motherhood issue.
Ever principled person is in favour of cleaner air. Not everyone agrees on how to make it cleaner (pollution taxes, cap-and-trade, technology mandates...) Politico-environmental organizations tend to try to frame the debate as "our way or no way" whereas the public would be better served by focusing the debate on different solutions. But that's less susceptible to stirring partisan sensibilities, as it is much harder to demonize your opponents, and so much less interesting to those who want to use "the environment" on one side and "the free market" on the other as tools of a partisan narrative.
just not so sure that it's 100% accurate( which is ideal, but not exactly realistic)
"100% accurate" is not the ideal because things that exist are better than things that are not, and no test that exists will ever be 100% accurate, so there will always be a better test: the one that actually exists!
It would be silly to have a test that was "better than ideal", so obviously the ideal test is the best one we can actually build, not the best one we can imagine. Our imagination is not the arbiter of quality. Reality is.
This story *sounds* interesting to me as it appeals to my sense of exploration and curiosity to learn new things but beyond that this stuff basically reads like sub-atomic particle physics to me
Here's my read on it: quarks are the constituents of a wide range of particles, from protons and neutrons to B-mesons etc. The fundamental interaction that holds these particles together is the "colour force" or "strong nuclear force", which arises due to the exchange of gluons between quarks in the same way that the electro-magnetic force arises because of the exchange of photons between charged particles.
Virtual particle exchange is made possible by the uncertainty principle, which for a massless particle like the photon produces forces with infinite range, but for gluons, which have mass, it results in a short-range force. As well as mass, gluons also have "colour charge", so they interact with each other as well as with quarks, resulting in the confinement property of the strong force: if you try to pull two bound quarks apart, the gluons holding them together self-interact in a way that makes the force stronger rather than weaker. If you pull really hard you get new quarks popping out of the vacuum, and jets of exotic particles. You never get a naked quark.
Computing the bound states of quarks is really, really hard because the force is so strong. The basic technique we use in quantum electro-dynamics is perturbation theory, where we get an approximate result and then apply a series of smaller and smaller corrections to it. Because of the self-interaction of the gluons, for quantum chromo-dynamics these corrections get larger and larger, and various other mathematical techniques have to used to get a well-behaved answer.
This means that while we can predict pretty well the excited states of atoms, we can't do that for quarks. I would bet the most likely form of this particle is some kind of multi-quark object (more than just a simple pair) whose existence depends on the details of the colour force. We are still learning what those details are, and this particle and others like it will be useful laboratories to reveal them.
So the significance of the discovery is that it provides us with a new way of studying quantum chromo-dynamic interactions. Not the world's biggest deal, but still very cool and useful.
My thoughts exactly. I have two teenage kids and while I'm making sure they both know how to code (Python and pygame FTW!) I'm discouraging them from going into anything that looks like "software development" as a career.
Software development skills are being commoditized very rapidly, both due to advances in technology and offshoring. Better frameworks, better libraries, and relatively simple and safe languages like Python and Java are allowing junior developers to do stuff that you'd only have trusted to a guru ten or fifteen years ago.
The number of well-paid development positions is going to decline in the next decade or two because the bulk of the job will be do-able by a less skilled person. In India. There will still be niches for people with really deep skill-sets, but they are going to be fewer and less lucrative as time goes on.
Darwinian evolution is a process in which successive generations differ cumulatively from preceding generations due to the differential reproductive success conferred on individuals by imperfectly heritable traits.
There is no possible way that the ontological commitments inherent in that statement can be reduced to "survivors survive", which says nothing about Darwinian evolution at all.
As usual, the opponents of evolution first have to completely misrepresent it before mounting arguments against their own misrepresentations. I love the smell of burning straw people in the morning...
Ok. The internals the GP mentions are plausibly independent of the overall body plan, which is adapted to a life on rocky ocean bottoms eating molluscs. So long as those basic features of the world stay the same you would expect the overall body plan to stay the same, and since oceans are pretty stable environments (and allow free migration to other places when the local environment changes) it is plausible that the basic body plan could stay the same for tens of millions of years.
Internally, though, the population will be subject to diseases and parasites, and running a constant biomolecular race to keep ahead of them.
I'm a fairly deep believer in God and it always puzzled me why someone would have a problem with evolution.
You have to distinguish between religion as an individual belief in GOD and religion as a socially organized set of beliefs that that is built primarily around SCRIPTURE.
We use the same term, "religious" to describe believers who think that in general terms there is something going on behind the scenes of reality that might reasonably be labelled "God", AND to describe people who think they know in detail what God wants, especially visa vis the sacrificing of virgins, the stoning of infidels, etc.
The former people generally have no problem with evolution. The latter people do, because their belief is primarily focused on scripture, which generally has a creation story that can't be made consistent with evolution (and in the Christian case can't even be made consistent with itself!)
Sometimes you are an ass because other people are incompetent and interfere.
Sorry, no. You can be bluntly, objectively critical of a co-worker, subordinate or manager without being an ass. I've done it a lot, and it is far more effective than letting your emotions get the better of you, which is something best constrained to/.
The trick is to stay as objective as possible. "I was not able to get this done because X did not deliver Y by date Z. This has been a persistent problem, and I'd like to discuss with X how we can ensure it happens less often in future, or my schedule estimates will in future reflect these delays, which have now become routine. Here are the data on the promised and actual delivery dates from X in the past six months."
You'll be amazed at how effective that kind of fact-based response can be.
If you're being an ass, you are not getting the job done. Basic civility is part of any reasonable job description. Generally an implicit one, which people with no social skills are unfortunately too crippled to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I am no PETA freak, but putting 200+ decibels is bound to do permanent damage.
The document linked on the Bahamas stranding says that source levels were 223 - 235 dB and levels were less than 180 dB at 300 m horizontally and 200 m vertically, so unless the dolphins were EXTREMELY close to the ships when the sonar was turned on the odds of even temporary deafness due to the use of sonar in the wild are quite low. Remember: a 40 dB difference in signal is a factor of 10,000 in amplitude of the pressure wave, so unless the dolphins were within a few meters of the source they would be very unlikely to get anything close to 200 dB.
This is a bit like dropping a 10 kg mass on a person and noticing it causes serious damage, and then arguing that you can say something about the effects of dropping 0.001 kg masses on people based on the 10 kg data.
That's not to say that it isn't plausible that dolphin sonar can be screwed up by powerful sonar, but this experiment just doesn't seem relevant to the question.
So, only 3% of chemicals in use by man have been tested for environmental and health safety.
And the number of natural substances that have been tested is also nearly nil, and they are far more likely to be biologically active as natural materials have no quality control in manufacture are the simplest cell contains hundreds of thousands of proteins, many of which are known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic, etc.
It's really incredibly we let anyone make anything out of natural materials at all.
[I'm trying to put the situation in perspective, not suggest that we don't need any chemical testing--we do, but maybe those 3% are the ones we have plausible reason to think might be dangerous?]
Low income.
Yeah, but "low income" isn't an industry you can sue.
It's actually a race between which will come first: someone here saying "correlation is not causation" and a lawyer starting a class action suit against vinyl floor manufacturers and installers, as well as landlords who rent units with vinyl floors.
My point is that a huge double-standard is being applied, not by the people who dismissed Dyson because his work isn't peer-reviewed, but by the people (go read the thread!) who dismissed him with nothing more substantial than "he's not a cosmologist."
I'm not saying that there are no legitimate criticisms of Dyson's position. I'm saying that the people who criticized Dyson yesterday for "not being a climatologists" are hypocrites for not chiming in here attacking this guy for "not being a quantum physicist" (Hawking, by the way, is a cosmologist, and although Hawking radiation is a quantum phenomenon Hawking has never weighed in on the deep questions of quantum theory that Palmer is addressing here.)
We had a whole lot of people on here yesterday arguing that it was safe to ignore Freeman Dyson because he was a physicist offering an opinion on climatology. This makes a certain amount of sense, as it is well-known that the climate is not a physical system, so it would be very odd for a physicist to be able to say anything about it.
Today we have a climatologist offering an opinion on quantum theory, and I'm very curious that none of those objective, disinterested people who were so vociferous about the absolute separation of the two fields yesterday have bothered to reiterate their strongly-held opinion today.
What could it be that motivates these entirely honest, not-in-the-least-bit hypcritical individuals to roundly denounce a physicist for commenting on climate, but utter not a peep when a climatologist offers an opinion on physics?
This seems to me to be a mystery at least as big as those that underly quantum theory.
[My only real question right now is whether the troll or flamebait mods will be higher on this. But c'mon people: am I the only one to notice how hypocritical it is for folks to get up in arms about Dyson not being a climatologist, but being absolutely silent about a climatologist making such deep claims about physics?
If you are one of those people: you ought to be ashamed of yourself, and get some better arguments against people like Dyson, because your silence on this thread is going to come up every single time one of you makes the same lame rhetorical move in future. There's stuff to be said for and against AGW, but "he's not a climatologist" is a lame ad hominem that contributes only noise to the debate.]
people here are too smart for that.
But apparently the ones with mod points are not smart enough to realize that my perfectly factual account of why I'm interested in this research is neither flamebait nor a troll.
I actually asked myself, "Is this going to be mis-interpreted?" and then thought, "Well, it's exactly true, and in as neutral language as I can think of off-the-cuff" and went ahead and hit submit. While I appreciated that it could have caused a flamewar it wasn't my intent to do so, and it obviously hasn't (I agree the AC above is too heavy-handed in his parody, but that's another kettle of fish entirely.)
Personally, I don't see why people have such an issue with the existence of non-locality
It's because of how utterly central relativity is to our understanding of the universe. Manifest non-locality would be phenomenologically equivalent to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, or equivalently the law of causality. All the time-travel, grandfather-paradox stuff would become real problems for physics and nobody has the least idea of how to deal with them.
This doesn't mean that nonlocality is impossible, but it does mean it creates enormous practical problems for physics that no one knows how to approach, much less solve.
Palmer argues that quantum theory is incorrect in so far that the measurements it makes fall outside of the possible states of the universe and are therefore invalid.
Although that sentence doesn't actually make sense (quantum theory doesn't make measurements!) if I'm interpreting it correctly this is a legitimate out regarding the experimental violation of Bell's Inequalities.
The kinds of theory that Bell's Theorem rules out incorporate the assumption of "counter-factual definiteness", which is the belief that one can meaningfully talk about "the result we would have gotten if we had made a different (incompatible) measurement from the one we did make."
From my reading of it, the fractal theory is a way of motivating Bohr's insistence that "experiments that are not performed do not have results", because "experiments that are not performed" literally are not part of the universe in the fractal theory.
However, this doesn't actually say anything that Bohr and Heisenberg said in the thirties. Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" in particular is an extremely lucid account of these ideas, and while adding the fractal back-story may make the idea more palatable, the real question remains: is the fractal idea fertile? Will it give rise to new theoretical structures or suggest novel experiments that will solve some of our outstanding problems (like unification of gravity.)
Excellent! Many thanks.
That was about 9 years ago!
Yeah, and the belief that "kids are basically little versions of adults" has been out of date since at least the '50's. The whole point of Piaget's stages, which are still held to be a broadly accurate characterization cognitive development, is that there is a wide range of apparently basic cognitive functions that kids in the early stages of development simply don't have.
Why anyone would still characterize the field as being full of stuff that treats kids as little versions of adults is beyond me. We've known that they aren't for more than half a century.
Objectively, however, the punisher is just conditioning him- or herself to hit the kid more.
Man I wish I had mod points for you! Can you point to any articles that back this claim up? I'd love to send them to some of my Bible Believing Christian acquaintances who think that hitting their kids is a good thing. It wouldn't convince them, because I know from experience that their certain aspects of their belief system is impervious to facts, but it might make them uncomfortable, and less critical of non-violent parenting.
It could also be that you're just talking to a fucking moron.
Yeah, there's a huge problem with the Turing Test, which is that you have to distinguish between a computer and a person drawn from the pool of humans intelligent and aware enough to have learned to speak and use a keyboard.
Unfortunately, as YouTube (and even /.) comments demonstrate, there is no lower limit to the intellectual capacity of a person who is still capable of speaking and using a keyboard.
Therefore, the Turing Test is not, properly speaking, about distinguishing between artificial and real intelligence because a significant portion of the human population will be below any finite threshold of "intelligence" as the term is ordinarily construed. Ergo, any bot that reaches even a minimal level of coherence will be indistinguishable from some humans.
The GPS analogy works here as we humans use a coordinate system (via GPS) to navigate on occasion.
The analogy fails because we call our co-ordinate systems "MAPS", not "GPS".
If they said, "Chimps have a mental map" no one would be complaining. But a GPS is not a map. It is a way of locating yourself on a map that has some very specific characteristics, the most important one being that it is GLOBAL, which the locale-specific mechanisms that the chimps are using are not.
Humans were using this kind of map-based navigation long before we started using GPS to make us independent of exactly the kind of locale-specific knowledge these chimps are using, so in fact what the chimps are doing is EXACTLY WHAT THE GPS WAS DESIGNED TO MAKE UNNECESSARY.
So yeah, I can totally see how someone would want to look at that and say, "Hey, these chimps are doing exactly what a GPS doesn't! Let's say they have a GPS in their head!"
How do evolutionists explain this?
By investigating the detailed empirical facts of the species in question, including genetic histories of specific species, relations between species sharing similar abilities, physiological and neurological studies of the guidance process in different species, hormonal studies of the seasonal triggers for migration in different species, and careful field observation of bird behaviour, including quantitative estimation of rates and kinds of navigational failure, in different species.
Every occurrence of terms "genetic" and "species" in the above is a point where the process of interpreting the data is informed by evolutionary theory. No other known theory can give the kind of detailed guidance and coherence that evolutionary theory gives, which is why no scientists working on problems like this have any use for alternative theories. If an alternative theory was able to provide the same kind of consistent, over-arching interpretive framework that evolution by variation and natural selection does, and had the same kind of compelling empirical and logical foundations that evolution by variation and natural selection does, scientists would be happy to use it.
...not a bunch of random strangers!
Everything you read here, however sensible it may sound, is just noise. Case law matters. Statues matter. Public opinion, common sense, logic and reasonableness do not matter.
However, in this case it has a lot to do with the fact that certain elements - those who earned big money on pollution being allowed to happen - for many decades did everything they could to stop the government from taking appropriate action.
And yet it is worth remembering that these data also show that AIR QUALITY HAS IMPROVED in the past couple of decades in major American cities.
That's something that the "everything is always getting worse" crowd don't generally want us reminded of, because it makes it harder to pass more legislation that has nothing to do with protecting the environment but everything to do with power.
Unfortunately environmental arguments often come down to a fight between egregious profiteers who want to rape the Earth on the one hand and crypto-fascists on the other. The public would actually be more supportive of environmental protection legislation, and the environment would be better off, if there wasn't a deep-seated and quite deserved distrust of most "environmental" organizations, which are nothing more than authoritarian political organizations that have found they can use the environment as a motherhood issue.
Ever principled person is in favour of cleaner air. Not everyone agrees on how to make it cleaner (pollution taxes, cap-and-trade, technology mandates...) Politico-environmental organizations tend to try to frame the debate as "our way or no way" whereas the public would be better served by focusing the debate on different solutions. But that's less susceptible to stirring partisan sensibilities, as it is much harder to demonize your opponents, and so much less interesting to those who want to use "the environment" on one side and "the free market" on the other as tools of a partisan narrative.
just not so sure that it's 100% accurate( which is ideal, but not exactly realistic)
"100% accurate" is not the ideal because things that exist are better than things that are not, and no test that exists will ever be 100% accurate, so there will always be a better test: the one that actually exists!
It would be silly to have a test that was "better than ideal", so obviously the ideal test is the best one we can actually build, not the best one we can imagine. Our imagination is not the arbiter of quality. Reality is.
This story *sounds* interesting to me as it appeals to my sense of exploration and curiosity to learn new things but beyond that this stuff basically reads like sub-atomic particle physics to me
Here's my read on it: quarks are the constituents of a wide range of particles, from protons and neutrons to B-mesons etc. The fundamental interaction that holds these particles together is the "colour force" or "strong nuclear force", which arises due to the exchange of gluons between quarks in the same way that the electro-magnetic force arises because of the exchange of photons between charged particles.
Virtual particle exchange is made possible by the uncertainty principle, which for a massless particle like the photon produces forces with infinite range, but for gluons, which have mass, it results in a short-range force. As well as mass, gluons also have "colour charge", so they interact with each other as well as with quarks, resulting in the confinement property of the strong force: if you try to pull two bound quarks apart, the gluons holding them together self-interact in a way that makes the force stronger rather than weaker. If you pull really hard you get new quarks popping out of the vacuum, and jets of exotic particles. You never get a naked quark.
Computing the bound states of quarks is really, really hard because the force is so strong. The basic technique we use in quantum electro-dynamics is perturbation theory, where we get an approximate result and then apply a series of smaller and smaller corrections to it. Because of the self-interaction of the gluons, for quantum chromo-dynamics these corrections get larger and larger, and various other mathematical techniques have to used to get a well-behaved answer.
This means that while we can predict pretty well the excited states of atoms, we can't do that for quarks. I would bet the most likely form of this particle is some kind of multi-quark object (more than just a simple pair) whose existence depends on the details of the colour force. We are still learning what those details are, and this particle and others like it will be useful laboratories to reveal them.
So the significance of the discovery is that it provides us with a new way of studying quantum chromo-dynamic interactions. Not the world's biggest deal, but still very cool and useful.
"You're going the wrong way!!!"
My thoughts exactly. I have two teenage kids and while I'm making sure they both know how to code (Python and pygame FTW!) I'm discouraging them from going into anything that looks like "software development" as a career.
Software development skills are being commoditized very rapidly, both due to advances in technology and offshoring. Better frameworks, better libraries, and relatively simple and safe languages like Python and Java are allowing junior developers to do stuff that you'd only have trusted to a guru ten or fifteen years ago.
The number of well-paid development positions is going to decline in the next decade or two because the bulk of the job will be do-able by a less skilled person. In India. There will still be niches for people with really deep skill-sets, but they are going to be fewer and less lucrative as time goes on.
It makes no predictions.
What does plate tectonics predict?
There, that's it.
Hardly.
Darwinian evolution is a process in which successive generations differ cumulatively from preceding generations due to the differential reproductive success conferred on individuals by imperfectly heritable traits.
There is no possible way that the ontological commitments inherent in that statement can be reduced to "survivors survive", which says nothing about Darwinian evolution at all.
As usual, the opponents of evolution first have to completely misrepresent it before mounting arguments against their own misrepresentations. I love the smell of burning straw people in the morning...
Someone correct me!
Ok. The internals the GP mentions are plausibly independent of the overall body plan, which is adapted to a life on rocky ocean bottoms eating molluscs. So long as those basic features of the world stay the same you would expect the overall body plan to stay the same, and since oceans are pretty stable environments (and allow free migration to other places when the local environment changes) it is plausible that the basic body plan could stay the same for tens of millions of years.
Internally, though, the population will be subject to diseases and parasites, and running a constant biomolecular race to keep ahead of them.
I'm a fairly deep believer in God and it always puzzled me why someone would have a problem with evolution.
You have to distinguish between religion as an individual belief in GOD and religion as a socially organized set of beliefs that that is built primarily around SCRIPTURE.
We use the same term, "religious" to describe believers who think that in general terms there is something going on behind the scenes of reality that might reasonably be labelled "God", AND to describe people who think they know in detail what God wants, especially visa vis the sacrificing of virgins, the stoning of infidels, etc.
The former people generally have no problem with evolution. The latter people do, because their belief is primarily focused on scripture, which generally has a creation story that can't be made consistent with evolution (and in the Christian case can't even be made consistent with itself!)
Sometimes you are an ass because other people are incompetent and interfere.
Sorry, no. You can be bluntly, objectively critical of a co-worker, subordinate or manager without being an ass. I've done it a lot, and it is far more effective than letting your emotions get the better of you, which is something best constrained to /.
The trick is to stay as objective as possible. "I was not able to get this done because X did not deliver Y by date Z. This has been a persistent problem, and I'd like to discuss with X how we can ensure it happens less often in future, or my schedule estimates will in future reflect these delays, which have now become routine. Here are the data on the promised and actual delivery dates from X in the past six months."
You'll be amazed at how effective that kind of fact-based response can be.
It isn't?
If you're being an ass, you are not getting the job done. Basic civility is part of any reasonable job description. Generally an implicit one, which people with no social skills are unfortunately too crippled to understand.