These mosquitoes aren't going to live longer. They just aren't going to kill people. Normally, that's counted as a good thing.
Several people here have posted wondering if these new bugs will cause unexpected problems. Anyone with a tithe of theoretical or empirical biological knowledge will know that the question is not "if" but "when". Odd though it may sound, unexpected consequences are a certainty--we don't know what they are, but we can be absolutely sure they will happen.
Any competent project manager is aware of this phenomena, and maintains some give in their schedule or budget to deal with it. Every project has a different set of surprises, but every project has some surprises, and a project manager would have to be a complete drooling idiot not to budget for them even though they have no clue what they will be. Projects that run chronically behind or over budget are typically run by morons who aren't capable of grasping that even though we don't know what surprises are in store, we can be as certain as anything that there will be surprises in store.
Can you name a single instance anywhere any time that any "benign" organism has been released into the environment and has not resulted in unexpected shifts in ecological equilibria that have had significant negative consequences, often for the humans the introduced organism was originally intended to help?
The problem with releasing an organism is that people think what they will get is exactly the existing ecosystem completely unchanged except for the envisioned beneficial effects of the organism. There is really no other word for this kind of thinking than "stupid." Introducing a new organism changes the ecological equilibrium in all kinds of unexpected ways due to the nonlinear feedbacks within any ecosystem.
Weirdly, the same people who claim to understand the problem of unintended consequences of interventionist action in economies are often the ones who are most arrogantly certain that they can predict the exact results of introducing GM organisms into ecologies.
However, unfortunately, the patent itself was granted on April 11, its patent number is 7,028,023.
Nuts. I was starting to write a rant about the stupidity of this patent when I noticed the number, and felt a great rush of relief when I realized the story just linked to a patent application. I foolishly thought that the USPTO wasn't really as stupid as the story made them look.
The claims in the granted patent read just like the application.
My main beef with the anti-GM crowd is that they single out genetic manipulation in the lab, and not other forms of genetic manipulation (like selective breeding).
Nearly all food plants and animals are the product of husbandry. This has nothing to do with GM as the term is commonly understood by everyone but the people who raise this pseudo-objection.
GM foods are different than foods produced by hybridization in that they generally have genes inserted into them from other species that could not be produced by hybridization. In the case at hand, there is a bacterial gene being spliced into a crop plant.
Different ways of producing effects that are similar in the abstract do not necessarily have identical results. You can cross town on foot, bicycle, bus, car or nuclear powered rocket. It would be disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that merely because all of these are "mechanisms to produce motion" and some of them had been used safely for many years that all new ways of doing so ought to be ruled safe and that people who objected to them were unfairly singling them out.
Yes. I've even seen pictures on the news at night of Monsanto agents holding guns to farmer's heads, preventing them from buying standard seeds without the terminator gene. Someone stop these bastards from forcing their seeds down people's throats!
Scenario.
1) Farmer A plants terminator seeds.
2) Farmer B plants non-terminator seeds in the next field over.
4) Nice sales person from company M shows up at Farmer B's door offering a low introductory price on terminator seeds.
5) Profit.
You can't claim this won't happen because it already has. Cross-pollination by RoundupReady crops has already been the basis for a legal case in Canada, where a farmer noticed that some patches in his field were pesticide resistant and deliberately saved and replanted those seeds. Monsanto sued and won.
The certain truth of GM foods is that the genes will get loose, and the terminator gene in particular is nothing more than a weapon of commercial bio-terrorism, a gun aimed at the head of innocent farmers whose fields happen to be adjacent to those who choose to use terminator seeds. To employ your silly analogy, how would you feel if any Windows machine on the same subnet progressively reduced the capability of all your Linux or Mac boxes? Would you be perfectly happy with your neighbours or the company down the street buying Windows?
Personally, I think it should be considered a serious crime to allow GM crops to cross-pollinate any other crop, and that both farmers who use them and companies that sell them should be liable for triple damages for any losses that occur, and unable to claim any recompense for benefits that accrue, to innocent farmers of adjacent fields.
Though it boggles my mind to think of the research he could be proposing...
There are two general approaches to proofs of this kind. One is to investigate the mathematical properties of the model you think describes the universe and show that a) it necessarily produces a universe rather like the one we see, and b) no other model can possibly do so under some fairly general assumptions.
This is a weak proof, as it will always depend on the assumptions--remember that Hawking's early work on the purported singularity in our past depended on the assumption of that the pressure in the universe was always strictly positive. Now that we know it is not only possible but fairly likely that the universe went through an inflationary era which had negative pressure in the relevant sense, we know that Hawking's proof that there is a singularity in our past no longer applies to the universe we actually live in.
On the other hand, if the model in question could be used to calculate the value of some of the constants of nature in the universe we find ourselves in, it would increase the plausibility of the model a good deal. This is a much stronger form of proof, although of course in science, as in life, all truth is contingent and new facts may overturn old beliefs.
This is for the same reason as you give: it spends less time being slowed on the way out because its speed was higher than when it was falling inward.
Nope. Think about it in terms of potentials and you'll see why this is not correct. The rocket's loss in gravitational potential energy coming out of the hole is exactly equal to the gain it got going in. It doesn't matter how fast it was moving at the start: the potential changes are determined solely by the source configuration because gravity is a velocity-independent force.
Remember: Newtonian energy change is equal to the integral of force over distance, not time.
The GP is correct in that mass discharged by a rocket deep in a gravity well has an added benefit. In terms of energetics you can think of this as being due to the gain in energy you get as the expended fuel falls into the well that you don't have to pay back when the spacecraft comes out of it.
But there it is also the case that the orbital velocity of the planet generally gives a larger effect, although of course it would be misleading and silly to claim that this is not due to the planet's gravity, because what else would be causing the interaction between the planet and the spacecraft? It is true that if the planet had no orbital velocity nothing very interesting would happen, but the same would be true if it had no gravity. Not that either condition is likely to pertain to real planets.
There is some possibility that dark matter could be non-luminous dust, but there are some limits placed on observations of the comsic microwave background, which would have had to travel over 13 billion light years through such dust without being significantly attenuated.
Galactic dark matter, which is required to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, can be completely explained by baryonic dark matter, which would be at least partially dust.
Extra-galactic dark matter cannot be primarily baryonic. The baryon density of the universe is known from big bang nucleo-synthesis and the primordial H/He ratio, and is too small to account for extra-galactic dark matter. Therefore extra-galactic dark matter has no relation at all to galactic dark matter, as it cannot be made of the same stuff as galactic dark matter.
So there are at least two completely different, totally unrelated dark matter problems. One can and probably is solved by baryons. The other requires exotic particles or possibly exotic physics.
you'd have to be blind to not realize that there are groups out there on BOTH sides that will do what they can, moral or not, to find proof saying they're right and the others are wrong
Proof is proof. It knows no morality. Threatening people with violence may produce agreement, but it can never produce proof.
Many environmentalists and businesspeople have what amounts to religious beliefs about the way the world is. All of these people are the enemies of proof, truth, and science. They all hate the idea that it is possible to prove something using an objective method, because what is proven might not sit well with their political or religious beliefs.
I personally would be extremely interested to find any report or study funded by Greenpeace or the Sierra Club that has ever found anything other than a) things are getting worse and b) humans are to blame. As a scientist I know that if an organization produces a string of purported studies that all reach conclusions that are consistent with that organizations political aims then what is being done is not science, but marketing. Real science does not ever always produce the results you expect going into a study, so either organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are suppressing the studies they do whose conclusions contradict their politics, or they are simply making up the results they want and publishing it under the false, dishonest and fraudulent pretence of objectivity.
I know it sounds trite, but it's the truth - at least in the US, the only ones who really need to fear the authorities are those with something that's punishable by the authorities.
Thanks for the excellent summary. It's a pity the/. editors didn't even read the submitter's summary, which says, "the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will."
Given this, one has to wonder what/. editors mean by "work" when they say "Subliminal messages might actually work". "Work" can't possibly mean "cause people to buy things", given the content of the summary, still less the article. Nor can it mean "cause people to know things", because the whole point of the article is about relative focus of attention on stimuli the observer is not aware of.
The headline in fact is completely unrelated to both the summary and the article. It's just a random catchy phrase that the/. editors picked out of a hat because after all, marketing is more important than truth on a site that bills itself as "news for nerds, stuff that matters." Everyone knows that nerds don't care about the truth. Right? I expect we will soon see articles with headlines like, "Hubble Space Telescope Reveals Naked Babes" over articles describing the latest results in solar neutrino research.
You should be afraid of our ICE, our police, our enforcement arms.
No innocent person should be afraid of law enforcement personnel. The purpose of the police is "to protect and to serve", and if they are doing that rather than "being enforcers for the criminals and thugs elected to high office" then no one needs to be afraid of them except the guilty.
I know it is something pointed to already by fluctuations in the Cosmic Background Radiation, but the though that local variations at the smallest scales determined the structure of galaxies is really something to think on.
The claim about the mass/combined-velocity[*] correlation being a reflection of big bang seeding of galaxies is really speculative. The fact that it applies to post-collisional galaxies suggests that the relationship is a product of galactic dynamics, not big bang cosmology. It's not impossible that the fingerprints of the big bang are still on these systems, but given the amount of entropy-creation that has been going on since then it is a little hard to believe that the observed correlation isn't due to the ongoing dynamics rather than the initial conditions.
[*] The combined velocity they are using is sqrt(0.5*v_rot**2 + sigma_gas**2), where v_rot is the mean rotation velocity of the stellar component and sigma_gas is the velocity dispersion of the gas component. This also suggests that the tightness of the correlation is due to galactic dynamics rather than initial conditions.
Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.
"Matter" in ordinary parlance has various important properties: solidity, resistance to motion (otherwise known as mass) and so on.
Anti-matter has every single one of these properties, so it is not particularly helpful to say it is "the opposite of matter" because it is not.
Anti-matter is simply matter that consists of anti-particles, as correctly indicated by the article you link. Anti-particles are just like ordinary particles except that they have the opposite charge, parity or magnetic moment (in the case of neutrons). This minor change results in a fairly large cross-section for mutual annihilation when an anti-particle scatters off of its corresponding particle.
I mean, even being in grad school gets you a decent stipend and a fee waiver - and a post-doc usually pays enough (in fact, when I was at a certain national labs, physics post-docs were earning 75-100k).
In summary, the only people that want a sales tax are those that don't understand it's implications and those that could pay less taxes by shifting the tax burden more on the lower & middle classes.
Yeah, this is why the Canadian economy is such a basket case. We've had a (visible) national sales tax on good and services for nearly twenty years. All the arguments you've trotted out were used to show that it would end the world up here. The world seems to be spinning along just fine, thanks, especially as the capturing of tax revenues from the service sector has contributed to our regular government surplus over the past decade.
Are you really going to argue that in the United States your economy is so feeble that you can't managed to pay for the government you've got, even without socialized medicine, an effective national police force, and all the other goodies we have up here? Because that is what you argument against a consumption tax comes down to: the claim that the American economy is so much weaker than the Canadian economy that while ours can sustain a consumption tax just fine, and run a revenue surplus on that basis, yours can't.
And what about individual humans? Some are sheeple and some actually think for themselves - what about sentience in that case?
This is exactly my point: we have dealt with these issues for millennia with regard to humans. Some humans are clearly (there's that word again) marginally sapient due to organic disorders. We have a huge body of law, tradition and ethics for dealing with such people. All of that applies directly to marginally sapient robots. You are welcome to pretend that huge body of knowledge and experience doesn't exist, but you'll spend an awful lot of time re-inventing the wheel if you do.
Behavioural tests for sapience may have to be specialized to deal with non-human intelligences, but that is independent of the ethical dimension of the problem. And even there, the same principle applies: is this a being capable of choosing its own ends, and pursuing them in a way that does not risk undue harm to itself or others? This is a general principle that is used every single day to guide thousands of difficult ethical and legal decisions all over the world. It is used by pragmatic people--doctors and nurses and lawyers and judges--in the real world without any undue difficulty, and it applies as much to non-human intelligences as humans.
No new ethical problems are raised by (perhaps marginally) sapient beings that are created by novel means. Replacing the word "human" with "robot" in millennia-old ethical conundra creates no new issues. They are the same old issues that we have been dealing with, more-or-less adequately, for thousands upon thousands of years.
If you want to tackle those problems, by all means do so. The treatment of the mentally disabled and the mentally disturbed is a hard ethical terrain to travel, and could always use another intrepid explorer. But it has been travelled many, many times before, and the lessons learned from it will always be applicable to beings of questionable sapience, be they made of metal or flesh and blood.
Anyway, best article linked from/. in ages. Great, thought provoking read.
It's an excellent article, but the summary makes no sense, which at least encouraged me to read the article to figure out what the hell they were talking about. For example, from the summary:
The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera.
1) What is "unsettling" about this? Anyone? No prior deeply held beliefs have been overturned. No profound conceptual schemes have been shaken to their very foundations. Parasites are known to be highly specialized. This fact has been published repeatedly for decades, always with great emphasis on how apparently hard it is to believe. After a couple of decades of being routinely reminded that individual species of ticks and fleas and lice are hyper-specialized, do you think we might ask that people stop presenting this fact as something astonishingly new?
2) The statement is contradicted by the article. What the article says is that head lice and pubic lice in humans are so different morphologically that "early taxonimists" assigned them to different genera. The article implies but does not say explicitly that this early assignment was not in fact justified.
In any case, this is an absolutely fascinating, albeit tentative and partial, reconstruction of the hominid evolutionary tree from parasite DNA, and I'm sure that as more data from different parasites becomes available we will be in for some real surprises. Internal parasites that are less likely to be passed between species should provide a record that is clearer than the lice record, where despite the relative paucity of inter-species transfers the record has clearly been muddied several times.
If one day we build robots that can think for themselves then any ethical questions that arise regarding their treatment can be answered almost trivially by reference to the same ethical issue regarding the treatment of humans.
Treating humans as mere means is unethical. Treating sapient robots the same way would be equally unethical. This includes creating genetically modified humans intended to fulfill the needs of their creators rather than their own freely chosen ends.
Simply replace the word "robot" with the word "child" in all of your silly examples and the ethics of the matter becomes clear. If you don't like this, you need to give an account of why some sapient beings are deserving of ethical consideration and not others. Good luck with that.
The same technique can be used to resolve the so-called ethical issues surrounding cloning: replace the world "clone" with the word "child" in any ridiculous example anyone comes up with, and the ethics of the matter will become almost instantaneously clear. Or it will be obviously resolved into a well-worn dispute about the treatment of children that we have all managed to live with for millennia.
There are no new ethical problems raised by the creation of sapient beings--organic or inorganic--by unconventional means.
The fact of the matter is, there is no Hollywood in Canada, and if America stopped selling movies in Canada tomorrow there would be (like most countries) no national equivalent to take its place and thereby employ all the Canadians benefiting from what I just listed.
As others have pointed out, we have lots of production talent, and in fact one of the things that has kept us from building indigenous cinema on that basis has been the continual flood of cheap, strongly-marketed American films.
If the American film industry were to blacklist Canada it would be the best possible thing that could happen to the Canadian industry, which has all the production talent it needs, but is lacking a strong domestic market due to competition from American films.
So please, let's hope these useless interfering arrogant blowhards decide that the U.S. industry should simply stop releasing films in Canada. It would open the door to local film production in a way that nothing else would.
In any case, the odds of us bending to the will of a foreign power are frankly not all that good. Despite Harper's reputation as a pushover on foreign relations, the record shows the Conservatives have a mixed record of pragmatism (softwood lumber) and idealism (human rights in China.) A couple of weeks ago I had two documents arrive at my door decrying human rights abuses in China: one from Amnesty International, and one a front-page story in the Globe on Conservative trade policy.
The political picture is always richer and stranger than the mindless partisans (and really, what other kind of partisan is there?) would have you think.
In our experiment, a smooth light pulse of about 3-microsecond duration propagates through a specially prepared cesium atomic chamber of 6-cm length. It takes 0.2 nanosecond for a light pulse to traverse a 6-cm length in vacuum. In our experiment, we measured that the light pulse traversing through the specially-prepared atomic cell emerges 62 nanosecond sooner than if it propagate through the same thickness in vacuum.
Note the relative scales of these effects:
1) Pulse width = 3000 ns
2) Pulse propagation time at c = 0.2 ns
3) Pulse advance time = 62 ns (i.e. 2% of pulse width)
So the result depends critically on the pulse shape being absolutely identical through the transmission process, because what is being measured is the mean or peak position after transmission to infer the group velocity. Tiny changes in pulse shape could easily produce significant errors in this measurement, which is likely why the results are disputed.
This is not to say that the result is not correct, but merely to point out that this is a very tricky experiment whose interpretation depends on what you believe about the distortion of the pulse shape after transmission through a highly non-linear medium.
But it is in any case misleading to claim that the pulse "leaves the medium before it enters it" because the transmission time at c is so much shorter than the pulse width. It would be more accurate to say "the 3000 ns wide pulse leaving the medium peaks 62 ns before the peak of the 3000 ns wide pulse enters the medium." Another way of putting this might be: the first 48% of the pulse contains enough information to infer the peak position, and this experimental setup is designed such that interference effects actually perform the inference for us.
That developer better hope the court he'll face accepts EULAs as valid and he never travels into a country where they aren't.
I don't see how this would ever be prosecuted.
How would you prove that the deletion was malicious? He has carefully said the software will delete "something." Without knowing what, it is hard to prove anything. Stuff goes wrong with user's computers all the time. At one company I worked for we had a user blame a hard drive crash on our software. So a file gets deleted: prove it had anything to do with his software.
The complaint would start with, "I tried to run an illegal copy of this software..." That'll be creditable.
What if the software simply deletes itself? That would be the easiest and safest thing to do. Annoying to the would-be copyright violator, safe for the author.
Satellites using the Georgia Tech engine to blast off can carry more payload thanks to the mass freed up by the smaller amount of fuel needed for the trip into orbit.
It's impossible to tell for sure from the lies and confusion in the article, but it seems like it may be optimized for station-keeping while at the same time being useful for the final orbital insertion or orbital transfer burn.
But what would a "science journalist" be doing without writing an article that was full of ridiculous contradictions, like a "rocket with gears." I really have to wonder if they teach this in journalism school. "Today class we are going to learn how to write science articles. The first rule is that you must always describe scientific and technological advances as the union of two unrelated or better yet contradictory elements. If it is possible to extract burnable gaseous hydrocarbon fuel from ice, don't put 'Scientists have found a way to extract methane from buried ice deposits', say 'Hot ice burns!' It's completely false, but remember, you're a science journalist: you have neither brains nor integrity. And when you write about rockets, always make analogies with cars. It will mislead and confuse people, which is what science journalism is all about."
Slashdot Mirror
These mosquitoes aren't going to live longer. They just aren't going to kill people. Normally, that's counted as a good thing.
Several people here have posted wondering if these new bugs will cause unexpected problems. Anyone with a tithe of theoretical or empirical biological knowledge will know that the question is not "if" but "when". Odd though it may sound, unexpected consequences are a certainty--we don't know what they are, but we can be absolutely sure they will happen.
Any competent project manager is aware of this phenomena, and maintains some give in their schedule or budget to deal with it. Every project has a different set of surprises, but every project has some surprises, and a project manager would have to be a complete drooling idiot not to budget for them even though they have no clue what they will be. Projects that run chronically behind or over budget are typically run by morons who aren't capable of grasping that even though we don't know what surprises are in store, we can be as certain as anything that there will be surprises in store.
Can you name a single instance anywhere any time that any "benign" organism has been released into the environment and has not resulted in unexpected shifts in ecological equilibria that have had significant negative consequences, often for the humans the introduced organism was originally intended to help?
The problem with releasing an organism is that people think what they will get is exactly the existing ecosystem completely unchanged except for the envisioned beneficial effects of the organism. There is really no other word for this kind of thinking than "stupid." Introducing a new organism changes the ecological equilibrium in all kinds of unexpected ways due to the nonlinear feedbacks within any ecosystem.
Weirdly, the same people who claim to understand the problem of unintended consequences of interventionist action in economies are often the ones who are most arrogantly certain that they can predict the exact results of introducing GM organisms into ecologies.
However, unfortunately, the patent itself was granted on April 11, its patent number is 7,028,023.
Nuts. I was starting to write a rant about the stupidity of this patent when I noticed the number, and felt a great rush of relief when I realized the story just linked to a patent application. I foolishly thought that the USPTO wasn't really as stupid as the story made them look.
The claims in the granted patent read just like the application.
There is no US patent #10260471. It looks like a patent application number.
Check out the result of a search at the USPTO on that number.
Currently we are in the low seven millions in US patent numbers.
For all of that, this is the stupidest patent application I have ever seen.
My main beef with the anti-GM crowd is that they single out genetic manipulation in the lab, and not other forms of genetic manipulation (like selective breeding).
Nearly all food plants and animals are the product of husbandry. This has nothing to do with GM as the term is commonly understood by everyone but the people who raise this pseudo-objection.
GM foods are different than foods produced by hybridization in that they generally have genes inserted into them from other species that could not be produced by hybridization. In the case at hand, there is a bacterial gene being spliced into a crop plant.
Different ways of producing effects that are similar in the abstract do not necessarily have identical results. You can cross town on foot, bicycle, bus, car or nuclear powered rocket. It would be disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that merely because all of these are "mechanisms to produce motion" and some of them had been used safely for many years that all new ways of doing so ought to be ruled safe and that people who objected to them were unfairly singling them out.
How do sterile seeds cross-pollinate with non-sterile seeds?
The sterile terminator plants still produce pollen, but seeds fertilized with that pollen will not develop.
Clever, huh?
Yes. I've even seen pictures on the news at night of Monsanto agents holding guns to farmer's heads, preventing them from buying standard seeds without the terminator gene. Someone stop these bastards from forcing their seeds down people's throats!
Scenario.
1) Farmer A plants terminator seeds.
2) Farmer B plants non-terminator seeds in the next field over.
3) Farmer A's terminator crops cross-pollinate with Farmer B's crops, reducing Farmer B's yield.
4) Nice sales person from company M shows up at Farmer B's door offering a low introductory price on terminator seeds.
5) Profit.
You can't claim this won't happen because it already has. Cross-pollination by RoundupReady crops has already been the basis for a legal case in Canada, where a farmer noticed that some patches in his field were pesticide resistant and deliberately saved and replanted those seeds. Monsanto sued and won.
The certain truth of GM foods is that the genes will get loose, and the terminator gene in particular is nothing more than a weapon of commercial bio-terrorism, a gun aimed at the head of innocent farmers whose fields happen to be adjacent to those who choose to use terminator seeds. To employ your silly analogy, how would you feel if any Windows machine on the same subnet progressively reduced the capability of all your Linux or Mac boxes? Would you be perfectly happy with your neighbours or the company down the street buying Windows?
Personally, I think it should be considered a serious crime to allow GM crops to cross-pollinate any other crop, and that both farmers who use them and companies that sell them should be liable for triple damages for any losses that occur, and unable to claim any recompense for benefits that accrue, to innocent farmers of adjacent fields.
Though it boggles my mind to think of the research he could be proposing...
There are two general approaches to proofs of this kind. One is to investigate the mathematical properties of the model you think describes the universe and show that a) it necessarily produces a universe rather like the one we see, and b) no other model can possibly do so under some fairly general assumptions.
This is a weak proof, as it will always depend on the assumptions--remember that Hawking's early work on the purported singularity in our past depended on the assumption of that the pressure in the universe was always strictly positive. Now that we know it is not only possible but fairly likely that the universe went through an inflationary era which had negative pressure in the relevant sense, we know that Hawking's proof that there is a singularity in our past no longer applies to the universe we actually live in.
On the other hand, if the model in question could be used to calculate the value of some of the constants of nature in the universe we find ourselves in, it would increase the plausibility of the model a good deal. This is a much stronger form of proof, although of course in science, as in life, all truth is contingent and new facts may overturn old beliefs.
This is for the same reason as you give: it spends less time being slowed on the way out because its speed was higher than when it was falling inward.
Nope. Think about it in terms of potentials and you'll see why this is not correct. The rocket's loss in gravitational potential energy coming out of the hole is exactly equal to the gain it got going in. It doesn't matter how fast it was moving at the start: the potential changes are determined solely by the source configuration because gravity is a velocity-independent force.
Remember: Newtonian energy change is equal to the integral of force over distance, not time.
The GP is correct in that mass discharged by a rocket deep in a gravity well has an added benefit. In terms of energetics you can think of this as being due to the gain in energy you get as the expended fuel falls into the well that you don't have to pay back when the spacecraft comes out of it.
But there it is also the case that the orbital velocity of the planet generally gives a larger effect, although of course it would be misleading and silly to claim that this is not due to the planet's gravity, because what else would be causing the interaction between the planet and the spacecraft? It is true that if the planet had no orbital velocity nothing very interesting would happen, but the same would be true if it had no gravity. Not that either condition is likely to pertain to real planets.
There is some possibility that dark matter could be non-luminous dust, but there are some limits placed on observations of the comsic microwave background, which would have had to travel over 13 billion light years through such dust without being significantly attenuated.
Galactic dark matter, which is required to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, can be completely explained by baryonic dark matter, which would be at least partially dust.
Extra-galactic dark matter cannot be primarily baryonic. The baryon density of the universe is known from big bang nucleo-synthesis and the primordial H/He ratio, and is too small to account for extra-galactic dark matter. Therefore extra-galactic dark matter has no relation at all to galactic dark matter, as it cannot be made of the same stuff as galactic dark matter.
So there are at least two completely different, totally unrelated dark matter problems. One can and probably is solved by baryons. The other requires exotic particles or possibly exotic physics.
you'd have to be blind to not realize that there are groups out there on BOTH sides that will do what they can, moral or not, to find proof saying they're right and the others are wrong
Proof is proof. It knows no morality. Threatening people with violence may produce agreement, but it can never produce proof.
Many environmentalists and businesspeople have what amounts to religious beliefs about the way the world is. All of these people are the enemies of proof, truth, and science. They all hate the idea that it is possible to prove something using an objective method, because what is proven might not sit well with their political or religious beliefs.
I personally would be extremely interested to find any report or study funded by Greenpeace or the Sierra Club that has ever found anything other than a) things are getting worse and b) humans are to blame. As a scientist I know that if an organization produces a string of purported studies that all reach conclusions that are consistent with that organizations political aims then what is being done is not science, but marketing. Real science does not ever always produce the results you expect going into a study, so either organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are suppressing the studies they do whose conclusions contradict their politics, or they are simply making up the results they want and publishing it under the false, dishonest and fraudulent pretence of objectivity.
I know it sounds trite, but it's the truth - at least in the US, the only ones who really need to fear the authorities are those with something that's punishable by the authorities.
This is unfortunately false.
Thanks for the excellent summary. It's a pity the /. editors didn't even read the submitter's summary, which says, "the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will."
/. editors mean by "work" when they say "Subliminal messages might actually work". "Work" can't possibly mean "cause people to buy things", given the content of the summary, still less the article. Nor can it mean "cause people to know things", because the whole point of the article is about relative focus of attention on stimuli the observer is not aware of.
/. editors picked out of a hat because after all, marketing is more important than truth on a site that bills itself as "news for nerds, stuff that matters." Everyone knows that nerds don't care about the truth. Right? I expect we will soon see articles with headlines like, "Hubble Space Telescope Reveals Naked Babes" over articles describing the latest results in solar neutrino research.
Given this, one has to wonder what
The headline in fact is completely unrelated to both the summary and the article. It's just a random catchy phrase that the
You should be afraid of our ICE, our police, our enforcement arms.
No innocent person should be afraid of law enforcement personnel. The purpose of the police is "to protect and to serve", and if they are doing that rather than "being enforcers for the criminals and thugs elected to high office" then no one needs to be afraid of them except the guilty.
I know it is something pointed to already by fluctuations in the Cosmic Background Radiation, but the though that local variations at the smallest scales determined the structure of galaxies is really something to think on.
The claim about the mass/combined-velocity[*] correlation being a reflection of big bang seeding of galaxies is really speculative. The fact that it applies to post-collisional galaxies suggests that the relationship is a product of galactic dynamics, not big bang cosmology. It's not impossible that the fingerprints of the big bang are still on these systems, but given the amount of entropy-creation that has been going on since then it is a little hard to believe that the observed correlation isn't due to the ongoing dynamics rather than the initial conditions.
[*] The combined velocity they are using is sqrt(0.5*v_rot**2 + sigma_gas**2), where v_rot is the mean rotation velocity of the stellar component and sigma_gas is the velocity dispersion of the gas component. This also suggests that the tightness of the correlation is due to galactic dynamics rather than initial conditions.
Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.
"Matter" in ordinary parlance has various important properties: solidity, resistance to motion (otherwise known as mass) and so on.
Anti-matter has every single one of these properties, so it is not particularly helpful to say it is "the opposite of matter" because it is not.
Anti-matter is simply matter that consists of anti-particles, as correctly indicated by the article you link. Anti-particles are just like ordinary particles except that they have the opposite charge, parity or magnetic moment (in the case of neutrons). This minor change results in a fairly large cross-section for mutual annihilation when an anti-particle scatters off of its corresponding particle.
I mean, even being in grad school gets you a decent stipend and a fee waiver - and a post-doc usually pays enough (in fact, when I was at a certain national labs, physics post-docs were earning 75-100k).
I was going to suggest this was an exaggeration, but a quick check suggests you aren't too far off the mark. My goodness.
In summary, the only people that want a sales tax are those that don't understand it's implications and those that could pay less taxes by shifting the tax burden more on the lower & middle classes.
Yeah, this is why the Canadian economy is such a basket case. We've had a (visible) national sales tax on good and services for nearly twenty years. All the arguments you've trotted out were used to show that it would end the world up here. The world seems to be spinning along just fine, thanks, especially as the capturing of tax revenues from the service sector has contributed to our regular government surplus over the past decade.
Are you really going to argue that in the United States your economy is so feeble that you can't managed to pay for the government you've got, even without socialized medicine, an effective national police force, and all the other goodies we have up here? Because that is what you argument against a consumption tax comes down to: the claim that the American economy is so much weaker than the Canadian economy that while ours can sustain a consumption tax just fine, and run a revenue surplus on that basis, yours can't.
And what about individual humans? Some are sheeple and some actually think for themselves - what about sentience in that case?
This is exactly my point: we have dealt with these issues for millennia with regard to humans. Some humans are clearly (there's that word again) marginally sapient due to organic disorders. We have a huge body of law, tradition and ethics for dealing with such people. All of that applies directly to marginally sapient robots. You are welcome to pretend that huge body of knowledge and experience doesn't exist, but you'll spend an awful lot of time re-inventing the wheel if you do.
Behavioural tests for sapience may have to be specialized to deal with non-human intelligences, but that is independent of the ethical dimension of the problem. And even there, the same principle applies: is this a being capable of choosing its own ends, and pursuing them in a way that does not risk undue harm to itself or others? This is a general principle that is used every single day to guide thousands of difficult ethical and legal decisions all over the world. It is used by pragmatic people--doctors and nurses and lawyers and judges--in the real world without any undue difficulty, and it applies as much to non-human intelligences as humans.
No new ethical problems are raised by (perhaps marginally) sapient beings that are created by novel means. Replacing the word "human" with "robot" in millennia-old ethical conundra creates no new issues. They are the same old issues that we have been dealing with, more-or-less adequately, for thousands upon thousands of years.
If you want to tackle those problems, by all means do so. The treatment of the mentally disabled and the mentally disturbed is a hard ethical terrain to travel, and could always use another intrepid explorer. But it has been travelled many, many times before, and the lessons learned from it will always be applicable to beings of questionable sapience, be they made of metal or flesh and blood.
Anyway, best article linked from /. in ages. Great, thought provoking read.
It's an excellent article, but the summary makes no sense, which at least encouraged me to read the article to figure out what the hell they were talking about. For example, from the summary:
The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera.
1) What is "unsettling" about this? Anyone? No prior deeply held beliefs have been overturned. No profound conceptual schemes have been shaken to their very foundations. Parasites are known to be highly specialized. This fact has been published repeatedly for decades, always with great emphasis on how apparently hard it is to believe. After a couple of decades of being routinely reminded that individual species of ticks and fleas and lice are hyper-specialized, do you think we might ask that people stop presenting this fact as something astonishingly new?
2) The statement is contradicted by the article. What the article says is that head lice and pubic lice in humans are so different morphologically that "early taxonimists" assigned them to different genera. The article implies but does not say explicitly that this early assignment was not in fact justified.
In any case, this is an absolutely fascinating, albeit tentative and partial, reconstruction of the hominid evolutionary tree from parasite DNA, and I'm sure that as more data from different parasites becomes available we will be in for some real surprises. Internal parasites that are less likely to be passed between species should provide a record that is clearer than the lice record, where despite the relative paucity of inter-species transfers the record has clearly been muddied several times.
If one day we build robots that can think for themselves then any ethical questions that arise regarding their treatment can be answered almost trivially by reference to the same ethical issue regarding the treatment of humans.
Treating humans as mere means is unethical. Treating sapient robots the same way would be equally unethical. This includes creating genetically modified humans intended to fulfill the needs of their creators rather than their own freely chosen ends.
Simply replace the word "robot" with the word "child" in all of your silly examples and the ethics of the matter becomes clear. If you don't like this, you need to give an account of why some sapient beings are deserving of ethical consideration and not others. Good luck with that.
The same technique can be used to resolve the so-called ethical issues surrounding cloning: replace the world "clone" with the word "child" in any ridiculous example anyone comes up with, and the ethics of the matter will become almost instantaneously clear. Or it will be obviously resolved into a well-worn dispute about the treatment of children that we have all managed to live with for millennia.
There are no new ethical problems raised by the creation of sapient beings--organic or inorganic--by unconventional means.
Because one thing's quite blatantly clear, robots are by their very definition slaves.
False. Robots are machines.
You may as well say, "toasters are by their very definition slaves."
The fact of the matter is, there is no Hollywood in Canada, and if America stopped selling movies in Canada tomorrow there would be (like most countries) no national equivalent to take its place and thereby employ all the Canadians benefiting from what I just listed.
As others have pointed out, we have lots of production talent, and in fact one of the things that has kept us from building indigenous cinema on that basis has been the continual flood of cheap, strongly-marketed American films.
If the American film industry were to blacklist Canada it would be the best possible thing that could happen to the Canadian industry, which has all the production talent it needs, but is lacking a strong domestic market due to competition from American films.
So please, let's hope these useless interfering arrogant blowhards decide that the U.S. industry should simply stop releasing films in Canada. It would open the door to local film production in a way that nothing else would.
In any case, the odds of us bending to the will of a foreign power are frankly not all that good. Despite Harper's reputation as a pushover on foreign relations, the record shows the Conservatives have a mixed record of pragmatism (softwood lumber) and idealism (human rights in China.) A couple of weeks ago I had two documents arrive at my door decrying human rights abuses in China: one from Amnesty International, and one a front-page story in the Globe on Conservative trade policy.
The political picture is always richer and stranger than the mindless partisans (and really, what other kind of partisan is there?) would have you think.
In our experiment, a smooth light pulse of about 3-microsecond duration propagates through a specially prepared cesium atomic chamber of 6-cm length. It takes 0.2 nanosecond for a light pulse to traverse a 6-cm length in vacuum. In our experiment, we measured that the light pulse traversing through the specially-prepared atomic cell emerges 62 nanosecond sooner than if it propagate through the same thickness in vacuum.
Note the relative scales of these effects:
1) Pulse width = 3000 ns
2) Pulse propagation time at c = 0.2 ns
3) Pulse advance time = 62 ns (i.e. 2% of pulse width)
So the result depends critically on the pulse shape being absolutely identical through the transmission process, because what is being measured is the mean or peak position after transmission to infer the group velocity. Tiny changes in pulse shape could easily produce significant errors in this measurement, which is likely why the results are disputed.
This is not to say that the result is not correct, but merely to point out that this is a very tricky experiment whose interpretation depends on what you believe about the distortion of the pulse shape after transmission through a highly non-linear medium.
But it is in any case misleading to claim that the pulse "leaves the medium before it enters it" because the transmission time at c is so much shorter than the pulse width. It would be more accurate to say "the 3000 ns wide pulse leaving the medium peaks 62 ns before the peak of the 3000 ns wide pulse enters the medium." Another way of putting this might be: the first 48% of the pulse contains enough information to infer the peak position, and this experimental setup is designed such that interference effects actually perform the inference for us.
That developer better hope the court he'll face accepts EULAs as valid and he never travels into a country where they aren't.
I don't see how this would ever be prosecuted.
How would you prove that the deletion was malicious? He has carefully said the software will delete "something." Without knowing what, it is hard to prove anything. Stuff goes wrong with user's computers all the time. At one company I worked for we had a user blame a hard drive crash on our software. So a file gets deleted: prove it had anything to do with his software.
The complaint would start with, "I tried to run an illegal copy of this software..." That'll be creditable.
What if the software simply deletes itself? That would be the easiest and safest thing to do. Annoying to the would-be copyright violator, safe for the author.
Satellites using the Georgia Tech engine to blast off can carry more payload thanks to the mass freed up by the smaller amount of fuel needed for the trip into orbit.
It's impossible to tell for sure from the lies and confusion in the article, but it seems like it may be optimized for station-keeping while at the same time being useful for the final orbital insertion or orbital transfer burn.
But what would a "science journalist" be doing without writing an article that was full of ridiculous contradictions, like a "rocket with gears." I really have to wonder if they teach this in journalism school. "Today class we are going to learn how to write science articles. The first rule is that you must always describe scientific and technological advances as the union of two unrelated or better yet contradictory elements. If it is possible to extract burnable gaseous hydrocarbon fuel from ice, don't put 'Scientists have found a way to extract methane from buried ice deposits', say 'Hot ice burns!' It's completely false, but remember, you're a science journalist: you have neither brains nor integrity. And when you write about rockets, always make analogies with cars. It will mislead and confuse people, which is what science journalism is all about."