Your quote from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants is from a letter to Hooke, who was extremely short, whom Newton was trying either to flatter for political reasons, or possibly subtly insult.
The second quote is a not-so-subtle put-down of Descarte, Leibniz and others whose conjectural claims Newton found pointless and stupid, and defence of his own approach of saying, "This is WHAT happens" rather than "This is WHY it happens."
Newton did NOT "collaborate" with anyone for the greater part of his career if you are going to give "collaborate" its ordinary meaning. If for some reason you want to stretch the meaning of the word "collaborate" all out of shape so that it applies to the use of ANY past result, then please be clear you are imposing on the word an entirely non-standard meaning.
According to your novel meaning of the word Newton also "collaborated" with the guy who invented the alphabet, because Newton's work was dependent upon that guy's work.
Science as always been cumulative. It has been increasingly collaborative over its three hundred year history. But it has not always been collaborative, and Newton was perhaps the least collaborative and most successful scientist who ever lived.
Even in the cases where he did arguably collaborate, as with Flamsteed at the Royal Observatory, he was remarkably fractious in the relationship, and while he was friends with Halley their relationship is mostly famous for Halley's encouragement for Newton to publish all of the work he had done in complete isolation over the past twenty years. That work was published under the title "Principia Mathematica", and owes much to Euclid, but was not a collaboration with anyone.
Attempts to get Newton to share credit with Leibniz for their independent inventions of calculus also quite famously lead to a long-running campaign by Newton against Leibniz.
None of this proves that science, especially today, is not mostly and increasingly collaborative. But Newton was a rare bird, and rarely engaged in anything resembling "collaboration" in the usual sense of the term.
Re:I see what they did there
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Evolving Rocks
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"Chemical evolution" is a perfectly ordinary and respectable term of art in astrophysics. It means the change in the chemical constituents of a star or other system due to nuclear processes producing new atomic species.
Words like "evolution" and "species" do not necessarily have purely biological meanings. What is bizarre, misleading and stupid about the article as described here is that for some reason it has been deemed necessary to contrast minerological evolution and biological evolution, two concepts so completely dissimilar that only someone as ignorant, hype-driven and brain-dead stupid as a science journalist would think it imaginable that anyone would confuse them.
It's only by somehow trying to relate the completely unrelated concepts of minerological evolution and biological evolution that any confusion arises. Obviously any responsible scientist discussing the effect of life on minerology would never use the term "evolution" for both of them, as it be clearly confusing to mix terms of art from two fields in this way. Ergo, if any scientist has so mixed the terms we can justly conclude that they are not responsible, and in fact are staggeringly incompetent or outstandingly dishonest when it comes to communicating about their field.
The threat to human life from people like KDawson posting sensationalist anti-LHC garbage to places like/. is real and documented. At least one person has actually, demonstrably died due to the precise behaviour that KDawson is exhibiting on this story.
The supposed threat from the LHC, on the other hand, is a fantasy made up and promoted by irresponsible, money-hungry media shills like KDawson to sell ads.
Yeah, but I bet you're still teaching Liebniz's Law (the identity of indiscernibles) as if it was true, whereas it is known to be false since the 1920's. Quantum statistics tells us that with as much certainty as we know anything.
I know of a couple of people who are working on formal logics that violate Liebniz's Law, but they are in the tiny minority. What the others think they are doing is not clear, because they are certainly not working on logics that have anything to do with the universe we actually live in, where it is trivial to have two entities that are indiscernible by any means whatsoever, but that are not the same entity.
Having worked with a number of philosophers over the years, including ones from first-rate schools, I have been repeatedly appalled by both their ignorance of and lack of interest in ordinary scientific truth.
They still, for example, think the whole "brain in a vat" thing is interesting, which is laughable to anyone keeping up with neuro-chemistry and neuro-physiology, which are telling us that we think with a lot more than the lump of neurons at the top of the spinal chord, and that our ability to act on the world is at least as important as our ability to observe it (somehow philosophers tend to leave out effectors in their brain-in-a-vat fantasies.)
If you press philosophers on these subjects it turns out that they don't mean a REAL brain in a REAL vat, but some kind of fictional, imaginary brain that fulfils whatever conditions they feel like making up to make their argument go. Again, not so interesting if you think philosophy ought to be about more than mental masturbation over imaginary worlds. The use of fantasy thought-experiments in this way by philosophers, which is totally different from the carefully-controlled thought experiments scientists use as the starting point for some arguments, is a real problem.
And I've yet to meet a philosopher who understands conditional probability. See the rather sad debate over the "envelope game" to appreciate the consequences of that.
Then there's that funny guy in philosophy of science who asks "suppose we were to find a substance that was identical to water in every respect but was not H2O, but rather XYZ?" This question is discussed seriously in the philosophy of science, or was ten or fifteen years ago, whereas to anyone who knows anything about how science actually works it is either incoherent or stupidly uninteresting.
If my experience is at odds with yours, well good! I'm glad to see things are improving--there were signs of betterment on the horizon when I was involved with identity theory and quantum ontologies a decade or two ago, but it was clear there was a long, long way to go.
The definition exists because people who are religious are not generally mentally ill. Just deluded.
Why make an exception for delusions that are a result of religion?
Is it because people with these delusions have managed to shape society to such a degree that until recent times the very act of denying their delusions would put you at risk of socially-sanctioned violence?
We still live in a world shaped by religious delusions, although the worst excesses of those delusional people have been moderated somewhat over the past few hundred years in the face of scientific disproof of vast swathes of what they formerly believed. It has become more difficult for the delusional majority to impose their delusions on the rest of us, thanks to Galileo et al.
But simply because this delusional group is large and powerful does not make them any less mentally ill, if mental illness is defined to include "able to function in the real world without persistent, evidence-free belief in logically inconsistent falsehoods."
I'm not sure mental illness should be defined that way, but you need at least to argue for an alternative definition if you want to exclude religious delusions as diagnostic of mental illness.
Think of it like a really big fire. To start a fire a lot of initial energy is needed. Once it is started, it will keep going as long as it has fuel. The bonds in all molecules contain energy. This process breaks those bonds and release the energy and the result of the process is salable, environmentally friendly materials.
Fire releases energy because the oxygen-carbon and oxygen-hydrogen bonds that are created are stronger than the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds in the unburned fuel. Breaking bonds consumes energy, it does not release it.
If this process breaks up molecules into atoms and the resulting atoms are then reacted with something (oxygen, say) then you could get some power out, maybe even net power, so long as the mean binding energy of the oxygen-whatever bonds being formed is higher than the whatever-whatever bonds being broken.
The metaphor of bonds "containing" energy is really misleading. Energy is released when bonds form, not when they are broken.
Think of any two atoms as a rocket (atom 1) in orbit about the Earth (atom 2). When the rocket returns to Earth (a bond forming) the gravitational potential energy of the rocket is released (as heat during re-entry.) To get the rocket into orbit, you need to expend energy (breaking the surly bonds of Earth, and all that.)
Thanks for the excellent link. That this "evolutionary" discovery is being published in Phys. Rev. Lett. is telling.
The articles linked in the/. story are textbook examples of bad science reporting. They jump from false claims about "what everyone knows" about evolution, to plausible claims about homeostasis in electron transport during ATP synthesis, to incoherent claims about this homeostatic process having something to do with "guiding" evolution.
The last jump in particular is weird, because the plausible bits sound like they are talking about a completely ordinary metabolic process with no relationship whatsoever to any process capable of inducing selected mutations in DNA, which is the only kind of process that a person not logically disabled would want to call "guiding evolution".
But I guess lies and/or incompetence get more press than truth. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether the failure is on the part of the reporters, the scientists, or both.
The article linked provides no evidence for a link between "some beaked-whale strandings and sonar use," and there are no citations supporting that claim in the article. It appears to be based on unquantified observations, which are the beginning of science but hardly the end.
In particular, it appears that no one has ever done a statistical analysis of strandings with and without nearby sonar activity. There is a great deal of statistical data available on whale strandings, particularly in Britain where detailed data have been kept since 1913 on every single beached cetacean that comes to the authorities attention.
As a matter of interest, whale strandings are mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny, whose work predates sonar by a considerable margin.
Given that it appears that no one has actually done the fairly simple analysis required to verify the existence of the purported "generally accepted link", you'll forgive this scientist for treating it as suspect. What is "generally accepted", even by scientists, is frequently false.
That ideas are tested by formal observation and experiment is the core principle of science. It needs to be applied in this case.
What is this "global mean temperature" that's being cited? How does one average an intensive thermodynamic quantity in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere? The only physically meaningful way to do this is to:
1) use the local humidity to determine the local heat content
2) average the heat contents across the globe
3) use an average humidity to convert back to an average temperature
Is this what is being done? There is a Wikipedia article on the instrumental temperature record, but no indication of what the actual averaging procedure is. The "instrumental humidity record" is notable by its absence in all these discussions, which makes me think that this is NOT what is being done, in which case the "global average temperature" is simply meaningless.
Curiously, the little-talked-about ocean temperature record and the undoubtedly real rise in ocean levels due to rising ocean temperatures appears to be far better evidence for anthropogenic global warming than all of the atmospheric modelling combined.
For some years I've been looking for a compelling argument, one way or another, on global warming, and the more deeply I've looked into the atmospheric physics the more appalled I've become that anyone wants to base strong policies on it. Oceans are actually much simpler systems than the atmosphere, so I guess that's where I'll look next.
GCMs have energy conservation added to them by hand.
At least all the ones I've looked at do.
To a computational physicist that means they are non-physical. They don't and can't make any serious claim to modelling climate.
Attempts to compare the results of GCMs to actual temperature readings have shown more anti-correlations than correlations, and that's without even correcting for the heat island effect, which makes the comparison worse.
The use of "average global temperature" is unphysical. Temperature is an intensive thermodynamic quantity. It cannot be averaged in an inhomogeneous substance like the atmosphere. Atmospheric heat content should be used, but isn't.
So, anyone who takes GCMs seriously needs to answer these questions:
1) Why do you believe unphysical models are a sound basis for strong public policy measures?
2) Why do you believe disconfirmed models are a sound basis for strong public policy measures?
3) Why do you believe that an unphysical global average temperature is even worth talking about (that is, why aren't you talking about global atmospheric heat content?)
I believe dumping gigatonnes of garbage into the atmosphere is a bad idea, and that our policies should be drifting in the direction of reducing that. But I also believe that people who are making strong claims about the future of global climate based on GCM results are badly mistaken about the strength of their conclusions, and as a scientist I care far more about what is TRUE than what will motivate people to change.
It is wrong to mislead people in order to get them to change.
Some of it is new, but none of it is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for, I dunno, the past decade.
It's been clear since the mid-90's when we learned that there were only 44k "coding" genes but at least ten times that many proteins that more was going on than simple templating.
Things like methylation of double-stranded DNA have been known to be important in oncogenesis for at least ten years. miRNAs have been considered important for five years or more. Other conserved non-coding regions have been known for almost as long or longer.
This story is going to be like that "green" story that reports breathlessly every year or so that some company has instituted green policies because they save money! Just like Interface did fifteen years ago, and hundreds of others have done since.
The interesting thing is that these persistently "new" stories give us a measure of how slowly what can fairly be called "general knowledge" changes. Based on evidence from the "green" story we can expect to be hearing the AMAZING NEWS that there's more to genes than template coding until at least 2020.
Following the details as we learn them is fascinating. Being told that an uncontroversial fact we've known for a decade or more is "news" is very, very irritating.
This isn't like leukemia, where we want to kill all the abnormal cells. The patient's existing marrow is perfectly healthy, and its presence or absence will have no effect on the ability of the donor cells to colonized the liver or where-ever it is that they typically wind up.
So the patient shouldn't need any radiation at all. Their unmodified marrow will still produce T cells that are susceptible to the virus, but that's no big deal because the T cells from the modified marrow will be able to handle it.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems at least possible that one could do this with a "marrow plant" rather than a "marrow transplant".
Let's see if we can start a "competitor's thread" for people who do this stuff.:-)
My company, Predictive Patterns Software (http://www.predictivepatterns.com) does development and data analysis, specializing in the difficult transition from "a program that works in the lab with expert users" to "an installable, documented application that works in the real world with naive users".
Much of this is based on open source frameworks, and we are dedicated to writing cross-platform code whenever possible, mostly using wxWidgets as the application framework.
There are more than enough passages in the Koran to justify the killing of non-Mulsims as the following two show:... 4:89 They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them....3...2...1
Just counting down 'til some moron claims the Koran is gibberish, and therefore can't be translated.
This argument is pulled out by some coward every time anyone quotes anything from the Koran.
I don't know why so many people think the Koran is gibberish, but apparently they do. If it isn't gibberish, it can be translated. If it can't be translated, it's gibberish. Choose one.
Even worse than the little losers who claim the Koran is gibberish are the ones who claim that your translation is wrong, but who fail to come up with any alternative translation that differs substantively from the one given in any respect.
Unless you are Chinese I doubt you know enough to judge what is happening in there.
Sure, because coming from a country that routinely censors what people living there can know is the only way to have a truly informed opinion on any matter.
If you are forced to pay it, I'm guessing you would end up using it (since you are already paying).
Public policy should not be based on what you GUESS.
Somewhere around one percent of the American population suffer from severe or complete hearing loss. Numbers vary from 0.9 to 2.2 percent, depending on the specific definition of "severe" that is used.
Do you GUESS that they will use p2p music downloads?
What do you GUESS they will use them for?
This is the most egregiously stupid idea that any bunch of greedy bastards has come up with in an age. Not only do they propose to rip off people who don't download music, they propose to rip off people who can't even hear it.
Models from nature are rarely the best way to go. Heavier than air flight only got off the ground when people stopped looking to birds and bats for inspiration. Wheeled vehicles have no resemblance to horses. Interestingly, we are still trying to understand the nuanced details of the flight of birds based on the aerodynamics we learned building highly un-bird-like flying machines.
So while there's nothing wrong in looking at our radically imperfect understanding of the brain, which is in no better state than pre-flight understanding of bird aerodynamics, it is optimistic to expect that it will provide much guidance in building programmes for multi-core processors, or for building those processors themselves. Neural networks, the most famously brain-like system architecture, are famously hard to "programme" (train) and essentially impossible to debug (interpret).
The article suggests that heterogeneous multi-core architectures may be best represented to the programmer as a set of heterogeneous APIs, much as graphics-specific APIs are now. While this is vaguely consistent with the idea that "different parts of the brain do different things", I don't think the brain analogy brings anything useful to the table, and past experience should make us very wary of trying to draw any deeper inferences from it. Aeroplanes do look vaguely like birds, but that doesn't mean we should dispense with vertical stabilisers...
One could equally well argue that neurons in the brain are fairly homogeneous, and each core could be considered a neuron. We know that different parts of the brain are remarkably adaptable. Stroke patients often regain function due to other parts of the brain taking over from the bits that were destroyed. So on this analogy, homogeneous processors that could be adapted to multiple tasks is the way to go.
Demonstrating fairly conclusively that the brain analogy is pretty much useless, as it can be manipulated to appear to support whichever side of the debate you've already decided is the right one.
It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being.
Then you will also grant that it's entirely possible that our universe was created by a mediocre being. Or any one of an infinite number of possible alternative mediocre beings. Or any one of an infinite number of possible supreme beings, each one distinguished from all the others by the arbitrary standard used to define "supreme." Or perhaps a committee of beings, some supreme, some not so supreme.
Now, why you would believe any of this is possible is something of a mystery, particularly with regard to your use of the word "being", which is normally understood to mean "a thing that exists in an entirely ordinary sense within our universe." Obviously, this use of the term "being" can't possible apply to whatever it is that created the universe, so you must be using "being" in a completely non-standard and totally misleading way.
Whatever completely novel meaning you want to give the word "being", the concept of "possibility" only applies to things that exist in the aforesaid entirely ordinary sense, and as your supreme "being" manifestly cannot exist in that sense, there is no possibility that it exists at all, that being the only sense of existence there is.
Because the universe is everything that exists, the belief that beings outside the universe exist is not even self-consistent.
Rand never identified herself as a "Conservative" and routinely excoriated the Conservative establishment in the U.S. In the very Wikipedia article you link to, Jimmy says he is guided by the principles of "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights..." Hardly "Conservative" principles, which are all about security, surveillance and greater police powers.
You are wrong about the quality of Rand's fiction, as well.
As well as being factually wrong on these counts, your comment is logically fallacious:
Some Conservatives are corrupt. Jimmy Wales is a Conservative. Therefore, Jimmy Wales is corrupt.
Can you say undistributed middle? Likewise your remarks regarding Florida.
It is fairly amusing seeing someone deploy such sleazy innuendo while accusing Jimmy of being sleazy. The meat of the story is: pyscho ex g/f is spreading dirt, aided and abetted by former employee whose accusations are not backed up by any of the people who have their hands on all the facts. It's a pretty thin basis for trying to smear a guy who in my few personal dealings with him has always been decent and reasonable, and who did an excellent job of running MDOP, where I was an active critic of "Objectivist" philosophy for several years.
Understanding the mechanisms of apoptosis is fundamental to understanding cancer. Cancer cells are typically "immortal". They do not undergo programmed cell death. This research, which demonstrates the role of these three proteins in protecting against apoptosis won't apply directly to cancer treatment, but will shed light on the gene networks responsible for regulating apoptosis, which will increase the odds of us learning how to turn it back on for cancer cells.
This is part of the ordinary business of good science, and definitely worth reporting on as a step in the direction of understanding one of the most fundamental biochemical mechanisms there is.
If you're looking for "breakthroughs" you shouldn't be looking at science. Breakthroughs exist almost (almost!) exclusively in the province of myth. They are far too rare to be worth looking for, particularly as they are only ever recognized as such a generation after the fact.
Point is that what a great programer is depends on the environment they are going to be working in.
This can be turned around a little bit: you can attract great programmers by having a great programming environment. Process-driven without being stifling, design-focussed without being impractical. All code to be documented with explanatory comments and short design docs, and summary dismissal of people who prove unable to do so. Critical code to be well-reviewed against a clear and cogent coding standard. Emphasis on reuse and refactoring. Few, generally small, focussed meetings with agendas (a meeting without an agenda is a meeting without a purpose). Offices with doors that close. Daily builds. Stuff like that.
These things aren't rocket science, but in my experience only the great programmers really get them. They understand how much more there is than just writing code. Average programmers can live with them, and may reveal their hidden greatness. Bad programmers will shun a process-driven shop, as they'll see it as wasting too much time on irrelevant stuff.
The specifics of the process matter less than having one. There are a variety of ways of reliably producing maintainable, robust code on a relatively predictable timeline. Part of any good process is respecting developer's estimates and taking the time/features/resources trinity seriously. "Rapid Development" and other books covered this stuff ten years ago.
This is the key point that the idiot with the +5 mods above is missing.
This shutdown has nothing to do with neutron poisoning, and everything to do with load loss, the same as any conventional power plant. Negative reactivity from 135Xe typically doesn't prevent restart for an hour or so, and as the news is reporting the reactors are running again they must have had then back on line fairly quickly.
And yes, I am a nuclear physicist, and my undergraduate education as an engineer included reactor design.
Slashdot Mirror
Err... no.
Your quote from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants is from a letter to Hooke, who was extremely short, whom Newton was trying either to flatter for political reasons, or possibly subtly insult.
The second quote is a not-so-subtle put-down of Descarte, Leibniz and others whose conjectural claims Newton found pointless and stupid, and defence of his own approach of saying, "This is WHAT happens" rather than "This is WHY it happens."
Newton did NOT "collaborate" with anyone for the greater part of his career if you are going to give "collaborate" its ordinary meaning. If for some reason you want to stretch the meaning of the word "collaborate" all out of shape so that it applies to the use of ANY past result, then please be clear you are imposing on the word an entirely non-standard meaning.
According to your novel meaning of the word Newton also "collaborated" with the guy who invented the alphabet, because Newton's work was dependent upon that guy's work.
Science as always been cumulative. It has been increasingly collaborative over its three hundred year history. But it has not always been collaborative, and Newton was perhaps the least collaborative and most successful scientist who ever lived.
Even in the cases where he did arguably collaborate, as with Flamsteed at the Royal Observatory, he was remarkably fractious in the relationship, and while he was friends with Halley their relationship is mostly famous for Halley's encouragement for Newton to publish all of the work he had done in complete isolation over the past twenty years. That work was published under the title "Principia Mathematica", and owes much to Euclid, but was not a collaboration with anyone.
Attempts to get Newton to share credit with Leibniz for their independent inventions of calculus also quite famously lead to a long-running campaign by Newton against Leibniz.
None of this proves that science, especially today, is not mostly and increasingly collaborative. But Newton was a rare bird, and rarely engaged in anything resembling "collaboration" in the usual sense of the term.
"Chemical evolution" is a perfectly ordinary and respectable term of art in astrophysics. It means the change in the chemical constituents of a star or other system due to nuclear processes producing new atomic species.
Words like "evolution" and "species" do not necessarily have purely biological meanings. What is bizarre, misleading and stupid about the article as described here is that for some reason it has been deemed necessary to contrast minerological evolution and biological evolution, two concepts so completely dissimilar that only someone as ignorant, hype-driven and brain-dead stupid as a science journalist would think it imaginable that anyone would confuse them.
It's only by somehow trying to relate the completely unrelated concepts of minerological evolution and biological evolution that any confusion arises. Obviously any responsible scientist discussing the effect of life on minerology would never use the term "evolution" for both of them, as it be clearly confusing to mix terms of art from two fields in this way. Ergo, if any scientist has so mixed the terms we can justly conclude that they are not responsible, and in fact are staggeringly incompetent or outstandingly dishonest when it comes to communicating about their field.
"The media portrayal of the LHC experiments has been branded as irresponsible and sensationalist by psychologists - especially since the death of a 16-year-old Indian girl, who killed herself after being distressed by the coverage on an Indian news channel."
The threat to human life from people like KDawson posting sensationalist anti-LHC garbage to places like /. is real and documented. At least one person has actually, demonstrably died due to the precise behaviour that KDawson is exhibiting on this story.
The supposed threat from the LHC, on the other hand, is a fantasy made up and promoted by irresponsible, money-hungry media shills like KDawson to sell ads.
The LHC is safe. People like KDawson kill.
Yeah, but I bet you're still teaching Liebniz's Law (the identity of indiscernibles) as if it was true, whereas it is known to be false since the 1920's. Quantum statistics tells us that with as much certainty as we know anything.
I know of a couple of people who are working on formal logics that violate Liebniz's Law, but they are in the tiny minority. What the others think they are doing is not clear, because they are certainly not working on logics that have anything to do with the universe we actually live in, where it is trivial to have two entities that are indiscernible by any means whatsoever, but that are not the same entity.
Having worked with a number of philosophers over the years, including ones from first-rate schools, I have been repeatedly appalled by both their ignorance of and lack of interest in ordinary scientific truth.
They still, for example, think the whole "brain in a vat" thing is interesting, which is laughable to anyone keeping up with neuro-chemistry and neuro-physiology, which are telling us that we think with a lot more than the lump of neurons at the top of the spinal chord, and that our ability to act on the world is at least as important as our ability to observe it (somehow philosophers tend to leave out effectors in their brain-in-a-vat fantasies.)
If you press philosophers on these subjects it turns out that they don't mean a REAL brain in a REAL vat, but some kind of fictional, imaginary brain that fulfils whatever conditions they feel like making up to make their argument go. Again, not so interesting if you think philosophy ought to be about more than mental masturbation over imaginary worlds. The use of fantasy thought-experiments in this way by philosophers, which is totally different from the carefully-controlled thought experiments scientists use as the starting point for some arguments, is a real problem.
And I've yet to meet a philosopher who understands conditional probability. See the rather sad debate over the "envelope game" to appreciate the consequences of that.
Then there's that funny guy in philosophy of science who asks "suppose we were to find a substance that was identical to water in every respect but was not H2O, but rather XYZ?" This question is discussed seriously in the philosophy of science, or was ten or fifteen years ago, whereas to anyone who knows anything about how science actually works it is either incoherent or stupidly uninteresting.
If my experience is at odds with yours, well good! I'm glad to see things are improving--there were signs of betterment on the horizon when I was involved with identity theory and quantum ontologies a decade or two ago, but it was clear there was a long, long way to go.
The definition exists because people who are religious are not generally mentally ill. Just deluded.
Why make an exception for delusions that are a result of religion?
Is it because people with these delusions have managed to shape society to such a degree that until recent times the very act of denying their delusions would put you at risk of socially-sanctioned violence?
We still live in a world shaped by religious delusions, although the worst excesses of those delusional people have been moderated somewhat over the past few hundred years in the face of scientific disproof of vast swathes of what they formerly believed. It has become more difficult for the delusional majority to impose their delusions on the rest of us, thanks to Galileo et al.
But simply because this delusional group is large and powerful does not make them any less mentally ill, if mental illness is defined to include "able to function in the real world without persistent, evidence-free belief in logically inconsistent falsehoods."
I'm not sure mental illness should be defined that way, but you need at least to argue for an alternative definition if you want to exclude religious delusions as diagnostic of mental illness.
Think of it like a really big fire. To start a fire a lot of initial energy is needed. Once it is started, it will keep going as long as it has fuel. The bonds in all molecules contain energy. This process breaks those bonds and release the energy and the result of the process is salable, environmentally friendly materials.
Fire releases energy because the oxygen-carbon and oxygen-hydrogen bonds that are created are stronger than the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds in the unburned fuel. Breaking bonds consumes energy, it does not release it.
If this process breaks up molecules into atoms and the resulting atoms are then reacted with something (oxygen, say) then you could get some power out, maybe even net power, so long as the mean binding energy of the oxygen-whatever bonds being formed is higher than the whatever-whatever bonds being broken.
The metaphor of bonds "containing" energy is really misleading. Energy is released when bonds form, not when they are broken.
Think of any two atoms as a rocket (atom 1) in orbit about the Earth (atom 2). When the rocket returns to Earth (a bond forming) the gravitational potential energy of the rocket is released (as heat during re-entry.) To get the rocket into orbit, you need to expend energy (breaking the surly bonds of Earth, and all that.)
Thanks for the excellent link. That this "evolutionary" discovery is being published in Phys. Rev. Lett. is telling.
The articles linked in the /. story are textbook examples of bad science reporting. They jump from false claims about "what everyone knows" about evolution, to plausible claims about homeostasis in electron transport during ATP synthesis, to incoherent claims about this homeostatic process having something to do with "guiding" evolution.
The last jump in particular is weird, because the plausible bits sound like they are talking about a completely ordinary metabolic process with no relationship whatsoever to any process capable of inducing selected mutations in DNA, which is the only kind of process that a person not logically disabled would want to call "guiding evolution".
But I guess lies and/or incompetence get more press than truth. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether the failure is on the part of the reporters, the scientists, or both.
Could you please point to a paper that does a statistical analysis of whale beachings with and without sonar activity nearby?
The article linked provides no evidence for a link between "some beaked-whale strandings and sonar use," and there are no citations supporting that claim in the article. It appears to be based on unquantified observations, which are the beginning of science but hardly the end.
In particular, it appears that no one has ever done a statistical analysis of strandings with and without nearby sonar activity. There is a great deal of statistical data available on whale strandings, particularly in Britain where detailed data have been kept since 1913 on every single beached cetacean that comes to the authorities attention.
As a matter of interest, whale strandings are mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny, whose work predates sonar by a considerable margin.
Given that it appears that no one has actually done the fairly simple analysis required to verify the existence of the purported "generally accepted link", you'll forgive this scientist for treating it as suspect. What is "generally accepted", even by scientists, is frequently false.
That ideas are tested by formal observation and experiment is the core principle of science. It needs to be applied in this case.
The other countries, which have sent spacecraft to Moon, are the United States, former Soviet Union, Japan and China
So what you're saying is that nations that send a spacecraft to the Moon have a 20% chance of ceasing to exist within a couple of decades?
Joking aside, this is wonderful news for India and the world.
What is this "global mean temperature" that's being cited? How does one average an intensive thermodynamic quantity in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere? The only physically meaningful way to do this is to:
1) use the local humidity to determine the local heat content
2) average the heat contents across the globe
3) use an average humidity to convert back to an average temperature
Is this what is being done? There is a Wikipedia article on the instrumental temperature record, but no indication of what the actual averaging procedure is. The "instrumental humidity record" is notable by its absence in all these discussions, which makes me think that this is NOT what is being done, in which case the "global average temperature" is simply meaningless.
Curiously, the little-talked-about ocean temperature record and the undoubtedly real rise in ocean levels due to rising ocean temperatures appears to be far better evidence for anthropogenic global warming than all of the atmospheric modelling combined.
For some years I've been looking for a compelling argument, one way or another, on global warming, and the more deeply I've looked into the atmospheric physics the more appalled I've become that anyone wants to base strong policies on it. Oceans are actually much simpler systems than the atmosphere, so I guess that's where I'll look next.
GCMs have energy conservation added to them by hand.
At least all the ones I've looked at do.
To a computational physicist that means they are non-physical. They don't and can't make any serious claim to modelling climate.
Attempts to compare the results of GCMs to actual temperature readings have shown more anti-correlations than correlations, and that's without even correcting for the heat island effect, which makes the comparison worse.
The use of "average global temperature" is unphysical. Temperature is an intensive thermodynamic quantity. It cannot be averaged in an inhomogeneous substance like the atmosphere. Atmospheric heat content should be used, but isn't.
So, anyone who takes GCMs seriously needs to answer these questions:
1) Why do you believe unphysical models are a sound basis for strong public policy measures?
2) Why do you believe disconfirmed models are a sound basis for strong public policy measures?
3) Why do you believe that an unphysical global average temperature is even worth talking about (that is, why aren't you talking about global atmospheric heat content?)
I believe dumping gigatonnes of garbage into the atmosphere is a bad idea, and that our policies should be drifting in the direction of reducing that. But I also believe that people who are making strong claims about the future of global climate based on GCM results are badly mistaken about the strength of their conclusions, and as a scientist I care far more about what is TRUE than what will motivate people to change.
It is wrong to mislead people in order to get them to change.
Some of it is new, but none of it is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for, I dunno, the past decade.
It's been clear since the mid-90's when we learned that there were only 44k "coding" genes but at least ten times that many proteins that more was going on than simple templating.
Things like methylation of double-stranded DNA have been known to be important in oncogenesis for at least ten years. miRNAs have been considered important for five years or more. Other conserved non-coding regions have been known for almost as long or longer.
This story is going to be like that "green" story that reports breathlessly every year or so that some company has instituted green policies because they save money! Just like Interface did fifteen years ago, and hundreds of others have done since.
The interesting thing is that these persistently "new" stories give us a measure of how slowly what can fairly be called "general knowledge" changes. Based on evidence from the "green" story we can expect to be hearing the AMAZING NEWS that there's more to genes than template coding until at least 2020.
Following the details as we learn them is fascinating. Being told that an uncontroversial fact we've known for a decade or more is "news" is very, very irritating.
Why bother wiping out the existing bone marrow?
This isn't like leukemia, where we want to kill all the abnormal cells. The patient's existing marrow is perfectly healthy, and its presence or absence will have no effect on the ability of the donor cells to colonized the liver or where-ever it is that they typically wind up.
So the patient shouldn't need any radiation at all. Their unmodified marrow will still produce T cells that are susceptible to the virus, but that's no big deal because the T cells from the modified marrow will be able to handle it.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems at least possible that one could do this with a "marrow plant" rather than a "marrow transplant".
Let's see if we can start a "competitor's thread" for people who do this stuff. :-)
My company, Predictive Patterns Software (http://www.predictivepatterns.com) does development and data analysis, specializing in the difficult transition from "a program that works in the lab with expert users" to "an installable, documented application that works in the real world with naive users".
Much of this is based on open source frameworks, and we are dedicated to writing cross-platform code whenever possible, mostly using wxWidgets as the application framework.
There are more than enough passages in the Koran to justify the killing of non-Mulsims as the following two show: ... ...3 ...2 ...1
4:89 They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them.
Just counting down 'til some moron claims the Koran is gibberish, and therefore can't be translated.
This argument is pulled out by some coward every time anyone quotes anything from the Koran.
I don't know why so many people think the Koran is gibberish, but apparently they do. If it isn't gibberish, it can be translated. If it can't be translated, it's gibberish. Choose one.
Even worse than the little losers who claim the Koran is gibberish are the ones who claim that your translation is wrong, but who fail to come up with any alternative translation that differs substantively from the one given in any respect.
Unless you are Chinese I doubt you know enough to judge what is happening in there.
Sure, because coming from a country that routinely censors what people living there can know is the only way to have a truly informed opinion on any matter.
If you are forced to pay it, I'm guessing you would end up using it (since you are already paying).
Public policy should not be based on what you GUESS.
Somewhere around one percent of the American population suffer from severe or complete hearing loss. Numbers vary from 0.9 to 2.2 percent, depending on the specific definition of "severe" that is used.
Do you GUESS that they will use p2p music downloads?
What do you GUESS they will use them for?
This is the most egregiously stupid idea that any bunch of greedy bastards has come up with in an age. Not only do they propose to rip off people who don't download music, they propose to rip off people who can't even hear it.
...there is sometimes an arsonist.
It's pretty clear that there's some kind of whispering campaign going on against Jimmy. Maybe started by his psycho ex-g/f, maybe by someone else.
But anyone who's had any contact with him will find these smears and innuendos less than credible.
Models from nature are rarely the best way to go. Heavier than air flight only got off the ground when people stopped looking to birds and bats for inspiration. Wheeled vehicles have no resemblance to horses. Interestingly, we are still trying to understand the nuanced details of the flight of birds based on the aerodynamics we learned building highly un-bird-like flying machines.
So while there's nothing wrong in looking at our radically imperfect understanding of the brain, which is in no better state than pre-flight understanding of bird aerodynamics, it is optimistic to expect that it will provide much guidance in building programmes for multi-core processors, or for building those processors themselves. Neural networks, the most famously brain-like system architecture, are famously hard to "programme" (train) and essentially impossible to debug (interpret).
The article suggests that heterogeneous multi-core architectures may be best represented to the programmer as a set of heterogeneous APIs, much as graphics-specific APIs are now. While this is vaguely consistent with the idea that "different parts of the brain do different things", I don't think the brain analogy brings anything useful to the table, and past experience should make us very wary of trying to draw any deeper inferences from it. Aeroplanes do look vaguely like birds, but that doesn't mean we should dispense with vertical stabilisers...
One could equally well argue that neurons in the brain are fairly homogeneous, and each core could be considered a neuron. We know that different parts of the brain are remarkably adaptable. Stroke patients often regain function due to other parts of the brain taking over from the bits that were destroyed. So on this analogy, homogeneous processors that could be adapted to multiple tasks is the way to go.
Demonstrating fairly conclusively that the brain analogy is pretty much useless, as it can be manipulated to appear to support whichever side of the debate you've already decided is the right one.
It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being.
Then you will also grant that it's entirely possible that our universe was created by a mediocre being. Or any one of an infinite number of possible alternative mediocre beings. Or any one of an infinite number of possible supreme beings, each one distinguished from all the others by the arbitrary standard used to define "supreme." Or perhaps a committee of beings, some supreme, some not so supreme.
Now, why you would believe any of this is possible is something of a mystery, particularly with regard to your use of the word "being", which is normally understood to mean "a thing that exists in an entirely ordinary sense within our universe." Obviously, this use of the term "being" can't possible apply to whatever it is that created the universe, so you must be using "being" in a completely non-standard and totally misleading way.
Whatever completely novel meaning you want to give the word "being", the concept of "possibility" only applies to things that exist in the aforesaid entirely ordinary sense, and as your supreme "being" manifestly cannot exist in that sense, there is no possibility that it exists at all, that being the only sense of existence there is.
Because the universe is everything that exists, the belief that beings outside the universe exist is not even self-consistent.
Rand never identified herself as a "Conservative" and routinely excoriated the Conservative establishment in the U.S. In the very Wikipedia article you link to, Jimmy says he is guided by the principles of "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights..." Hardly "Conservative" principles, which are all about security, surveillance and greater police powers.
You are wrong about the quality of Rand's fiction, as well.
As well as being factually wrong on these counts, your comment is logically fallacious:
Some Conservatives are corrupt.
Jimmy Wales is a Conservative.
Therefore, Jimmy Wales is corrupt.
Can you say undistributed middle? Likewise your remarks regarding Florida.
It is fairly amusing seeing someone deploy such sleazy innuendo while accusing Jimmy of being sleazy. The meat of the story is: pyscho ex g/f is spreading dirt, aided and abetted by former employee whose accusations are not backed up by any of the people who have their hands on all the facts. It's a pretty thin basis for trying to smear a guy who in my few personal dealings with him has always been decent and reasonable, and who did an excellent job of running MDOP, where I was an active critic of "Objectivist" philosophy for several years.
No breakthrough here.
Understanding the mechanisms of apoptosis is fundamental to understanding cancer. Cancer cells are typically "immortal". They do not undergo programmed cell death. This research, which demonstrates the role of these three proteins in protecting against apoptosis won't apply directly to cancer treatment, but will shed light on the gene networks responsible for regulating apoptosis, which will increase the odds of us learning how to turn it back on for cancer cells.
This is part of the ordinary business of good science, and definitely worth reporting on as a step in the direction of understanding one of the most fundamental biochemical mechanisms there is.
If you're looking for "breakthroughs" you shouldn't be looking at science. Breakthroughs exist almost (almost!) exclusively in the province of myth. They are far too rare to be worth looking for, particularly as they are only ever recognized as such a generation after the fact.
Point is that what a great programer is depends on the environment they are going to be working in.
This can be turned around a little bit: you can attract great programmers by having a great programming environment. Process-driven without being stifling, design-focussed without being impractical. All code to be documented with explanatory comments and short design docs, and summary dismissal of people who prove unable to do so. Critical code to be well-reviewed against a clear and cogent coding standard. Emphasis on reuse and refactoring. Few, generally small, focussed meetings with agendas (a meeting without an agenda is a meeting without a purpose). Offices with doors that close. Daily builds. Stuff like that.
These things aren't rocket science, but in my experience only the great programmers really get them. They understand how much more there is than just writing code. Average programmers can live with them, and may reveal their hidden greatness. Bad programmers will shun a process-driven shop, as they'll see it as wasting too much time on irrelevant stuff.
The specifics of the process matter less than having one. There are a variety of ways of reliably producing maintainable, robust code on a relatively predictable timeline. Part of any good process is respecting developer's estimates and taking the time/features/resources trinity seriously. "Rapid Development" and other books covered this stuff ten years ago.
This is the same for coal and gas plants as well.
This is the key point that the idiot with the +5 mods above is missing.
This shutdown has nothing to do with neutron poisoning, and everything to do with load loss, the same as any conventional power plant. Negative reactivity from 135Xe typically doesn't prevent restart for an hour or so, and as the news is reporting the reactors are running again they must have had then back on line fairly quickly.
And yes, I am a nuclear physicist, and my undergraduate education as an engineer included reactor design.