Meetings by themselves don't have problems. It's meetings that are flawed.
This is like telling a drowning person that water is essential to life.
It's true, but it's neither relevant nor interesting to the situation they are in. Any white-collar worker in a modern corporate environment is drowning in bad meetings.
One useful thing to do is to simply not attend any meeting that does not have an agenda. Simply tell the organizer that you aren't sure if you should be on the attendees list, and you'd like to see an agenda to make sure that it is an appropriate use of your time, because you're very busy right now with project XYZ (fill in whatever the person calling the meeting cares most about, or something at least plausibly important.) You may just get told, "Too bad, there is no agenda, you have to come." In which case you need to start looking for work. But in surprisingly many cases an agenda will be forthcoming that you can then use as a lever to try to keep the meeting on track. Or maybe as an excuse not to go at all.
Like most dysfunctional corporate policies, bad meetings are due policies that are designed to satisfy the monkey-needs of managers rather than the economic needs of the company. But it is frequently possible to gently push your group toward some semblance of rationality and economic efficiency. Just don't ever get confrontational about it. Monkeys hate that.
Ideally companies should have policies that include:
1) All meetings will have an agenda
2) Anyone may leave a meeting if the organizer/chair does not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time
3) Anyone may intervene to bring the meeting back to the agenda if the chair is failing to do so
4) The number of meetings that go over time and the amount they go overtime by will be tracked, and will be posted on the internal website. Managers whose meetings are routinely over time will be subject to probation and possible dismissal if they do not improve.
Policies like these at least reduce the risk of meetings being the massive productivity sinks they routinely become.
The patterns shown in the article are not true penrose patterns, it exhibits two lines of reflection, horizontal and vertical and the pattern does not repeat indefinitely.
Even the fact of local five-fold symmetry is interesting, although I agree these are not true Penrose tiles, which typically use only two shapes (I count at least three or four in the picture) each of which have a reflection symmetry but no rotation symmetry.
The tiling shown in the picture with the article looks quite a lot like a Kepler Tiling, with its local five-fold symmetry and use of five hexagons to fill out the pattern. I have no idea where Kepler got the idea from--he lived in the 16th century, about a hundred years after the Arab tilings the article talks about.
In any case, the practical arts routinely outstripped scientific and mathematical understanding until very recently, and even now we do sometimes see science playing catch-up with empirical ability. It is doubtful that anyone at the time understood very much about any of these tilings in the way a modern mathematician would. But by the same token science and mathematics would have a lot less interesting stuff to work with if artisans didn't explore empirical possibilities for their own reasons.
Here's one that that really bugs me about online news articles: they rarely take advantage of the medium! Why the hell couldn't New Scientist provide a link to this paper?
Because science journalists and editors know nothing about the fields they report on, and frequently seem actively hostile to the facts in favour of some made-up, mythological story.
Some years ago a colleague at the university where I was a post-doc came into the lab and said, "Today the science section of the LA Times has five stories about stuff that I am either personally familiar with or have actually worked on. Four of them are all but unrecognizable. The fifth is full of things that are not true."
In my subsequent experience as a scientist I have found this to be pretty much par for the course for science journalism. I don't actually know if reporters are as ignorant as they appear, but by the time the edited work gets to the reading public it is almost always spun in such a way as to be misleading or simply wrong.
There seem to be some myths about science that are the bedrock of science reporting, and reporters or editors will distort or simply lie to ensure they reinforce those myths. Some of them are:
1) Science is mysterious and full of contradictions (see yesterdays "hot ice" story)
2) There is no point in anyone trying to understand science, it is beyond you (thus the lack of useful links in stories)
3) Scientists are either put on a pedestal or dragged through the mud. They are never treated as merely ordinary people doing a job or following a vocation.
4) The "story" is more important than the facts.
There are probably a lot more, but basically, science journalism will never be worth anything until it starts actually reporting on science rather than wasting time promulgating editorial myths.
There is no reasonable scenario which would ever put the IFE system in a position to affect the avionics
You are committing the logical fallacy of "Argumentum ad Stultum": argument from stupidity.
Arguments that commit this fallacy have the form:
It would be stupid to do X No one would ever do anything stupid ------------ Therefore no one would ever do X
The second premise is so obviously false it hardly needs mention.
So, simply because there is no reasonable scenario that would put the IFE system in a position of affecting the avionics does not mean there is no probable scenario in which this could occur. It requires good engineering, good management and yes, good luck, to ensure independence. Every engineer knows that we must try to eliminate luck from the process and must never, ever rely on it, but also that it will always be a factor.
One obvious way in which the IFE could affect the avionics is via coupled grounds. Grounding in aircraft is never simple, and maintaining fully independent power supplies has been a challenge for IFE and avionics engineers. IIRC the 777 was delayed for a while due to the need to do some redesign on the power systems to ensure independence was retained. In any system so complex there will always be an element of luck, despite the engineer's best efforts.
If you want to control carbon emissions, calculate the marginal externality cost and charge it to people. If they reduce -- great. If they don't -- you can fix their damage. Plus, it lets them pick whichever method is least inconvenient. The market would then incorporate externalities into prices.
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
Environmentalists who have a gram of economic knowledge know that capturing externalities by converting access to the commons into a market commodity is the most sustainable way of ensuring environmental efficiencies. Once the commons (in this case, the atmosphere) is no longer freely available for dumping, a well-designed market will automatically compute the costs and distribute them appropriately.
Every environmentalist worthy of the name knows this: if you restrict access to the commons via a market then environmental efficiencies become economic efficiencies, and you do not have to waste enormous resources trying to maintain unsustainable economic regulation.
This worked extremely well in limiting sulphur dioxide emissions in North America in the late 90's, to the extent that everyone was astonished at how quickly "cap and trade" reduced acid rain. There is no reason to believe that something similar can't work for carbon emissions. The only issue is that like any market it must be free of political interference. When that happens we get disasters like the East Coast fishery in Canada, which has been mismanaged due to political manipulation of catch limits to the point where major commercial stocks have collapsed.
Treating access to the atmospheric commons as a limited, ever-shrinking, tradable commodity is something that absolutely everyone whose political agenda does not trump reason and responsibility ought to be in favour of.
If you can learn to be good at something, why do you think that cannot include social interaction?
No amount of practice can make a deaf person hear.
That's the whole point: a deaf person does not know what it is to hear. No matter how intelligent they are they cannot compensate for their inability to hear without substantial guidance from a hearing counsellor.
It is equally unlikely that anyone with a clinical presentation of Aspergers would be able to successfully emulate "natural" behaviour without effective counselling. Otherwise they have no way of judging which behaviours are natural and appropriate to a situation and which are not. People with Aspergers don't primarily lack skills, they lack the awareness required to learn the skills that other people pick up naturally in the course of their development. Working with a counsellor--or an understanding and supportive parent, or whoever--can help a person with Apsergers use surrogate measures for the kinds of awareness they lack. But the lack of awareness prevents them from doing so themselves.
People with sub-clinical presentations, who lean in the direction of Aspergers but who are not diagnosable, may be able to do themselves some good with self-help. But the GP is not talking about those people, and it is very important to understand that simply because someone who leans in that direction can help themselves a little does not by any means imply that such advice will be of value to the majority of people diagnosed with the condition.
He would have read the DSM and been absolutely clueless that he exhibited. He can say "I don't fit in," but he doesn't know he doesn't fit in.
I think this is probably accurate, and I think your summary is an extremely good summary of a difficult topic. I do not have Aspergers, but lean toward that end of the spectrum, and one of my children--who I've been watching recapitulate my own childhood development for the past fifteen years--was threatened with an Autism diagnosis at one point in his childhood. I say "threatened" because I was convinced his presentation was sub-clinical and that diagnosis was not justified and would have resulted in inappropriate and potentially harmful intervention. Subsequent development has proven this to be the case.
On the basis of this experience and reflecting on my own situation, I'm convinced that anyone with sufficient self-awareness to diagnose themselves with Aspergers does not have it.
But that's a very human-centric view of how culture works. You conceive of conquest as a natural activity of an advanced culture, but not even all advanced HUMAN cultures did that - only very few of out of the tens of thousands of human cultures ever did (ours included).
All species at all times are engaged in a process of maximizing their ability to utilize their environment. Evolution cannot ever produce a species that does anything else, even when the inevitable end of such "successful" expansion is extinction by smothering in the its own waste products.
Humans are remarkable in that we have any ability to moderate our behaviour at all. But even so those human groups who have been the most immoderate in their behaviour--the most bellicose, the most expansionist, and aided by the highest technology--have been the most successful. We only moderate our behaviour (very slightly) after the major damage has been done, and this has been true of all human cultures in all times.
So sure it may be hubris, but I see no reason to believe that the same processes of both biological and social evolution will not take place on other worlds. Very little goes into that conclusion other than a belief that the laws of probability will continue to hold.
... and also not all fusion reactions create neutrons.
This is not quite correct, especially in the context of fusion in the solid state.
It is true that considered in complete isolation from everything else, the reaction d + d -> 4He is neutron free. But considered in complete isolation from everything else a great many things are true. For example, it is true that considered in complete isolation from everything else, you can drive your car the wrong way down a one-way street and not suffer any collisions. But I doubt that would stand up in court as a justification for claiming that driving your car the wrong way down a one-way street is perfectly safe.
In the case of fusion, for d + d -> 4He to occur, d + d -> 3He + n must also occur. And when d + d -> 4He occurs, the alpha particle carries off about 23 MeV, if memory serves. This is quite far above the neutron binding energy of most nuclei, which means that nuclear collisions as the alpha particle slows down can knock neutrons free. And such collisions produce a lot of gamma rays, too.
Believers in cold fusion are required to make up phenomena that might suppress these and other neutron and gamma production processes. Unfortunately, those phenomena always contradict what we know about solid state and nuclear physics. And by "know" I don't mean just "what we have a good theoretical understanding of" but also "what we are empirically certain of."
Finally, I'd like to point out a trivial falsehood in your post:
Well, 40 years ago "high temperature" super conduction was physically impossible. If a scientist had claimed super conduction does exist on high temperatures as well, his colleagues had declared him mad.
On the contrary, when a scientist actually did claim that super conduction exists at high temperatures his colleagues first reproduced the results and then gave him a Nobel Prize. That's what scientists do when people find the unexpected--try to reproduce the results, and if they do, reward the discoverer. No matter how astonishing and unexpected the results are. It is only when people make improbable claims with insufficient evidence that the question of their sanity is raised.
Of course, low temperature fusion is already old hat anyway (Farnsworth Fusor.)
From the article you link:
Unlike most controlled fusion systems, which slowly heat a magnetically confined plasma, the fusor injects "high temperature" ions directly into a reaction chamber, thereby avoiding a considerable amount of complexity.
The Farnsworth Fusor is a high-temperature fusion device, just like sonofusion systems are high temperature fusion devices (if they really do produce fusion.)
Do not confuse "table top" with "cold". The only reason conventional hot fusion systems are big is because the plasma losses scale as the surface area while the energy production scales as the volume, so the ratio of losses to energy goes down linearly with the size of the system. If one could produce a non-equilibrium device that had relatively smaller losses or larger energy production one could have a table-top fusion generator. Unfortunately, there is a quite general theoretical proof as to why such non-equilibrium devices cannot ever produce net power.
Everything we know about space-craft-building intelligence suggests that luck plays a large role in its evolution, unlike other complex adaptations like wings and eyes, which have evolved multiple times. This is demonstrated both by the fact that Earth has only one species capable of building spacecraft, and the fact that there aren't any other spacecraft-building species in the galaxy old enough to have left a clear sign in the sky.
Your definition of cold fusion is fusion happing at relatively low temperatures I take it?
Cold fusion is fusion that takes place when the fusing nuclei are at temperatures significantly below those required to overcome the Coulomb barrier. It has nothing to do with the temperature of the laboratory that the experiment takes place in, or the temperature of the majority of the mass of the apparatus. For example, we do not call tokomak's "cold fusion" because despite the fact that they sometimes use superconducting magnets and therefore are not just "cold" but positively cryogenic, the nuclei that do the fusing are HOT.
Any other use of the term "cold fusion" is terribly mis-leading for two reasons. One is that it invokes a completely arbitrary and unphysical division between various kinds of hot fusion, calling some kinds of hot fusion "cold" because someone happens to feel that it is important that some part of the apparatus that is not undergoing a fusion reaction is cold. The second reason is that it fails to distinguish between pressure-driven fusion of the kind claimed by Pons and Fleishman, and temperature-driven fusion which has actually been observed.
People who use "cold fusion" when they mean "sonofusion" are either honestly ignorant of the differences between hot fusion and cold fusion, or are being wilfully dishonest.
Despite the fact that neither Pons and Fleishman nor anyone else has ever been able to provide convincing evidence that pressure-driven fusion occurs between room-temperature nuclei, it is still the case that if anyone could figure out how to exert sufficient pressure, then the atoms would fuse, regardless of the amount of kinetic energy (that is, even at low temperatures.)
So there is a real distinction in the physics of "hot" and "cold" fusion, and in terms of that unambiguous and physically interesting distinction, sonofusion, if it happens at all, is almost certainly hot. Although if the centre of the bubbles really is as hot as they seem, it is a mystery as to why we don't see any neutron production in water, but only in more complex organic molecules--the phenomenon remains mysterious and there is still a lot of work to be done to reveal its secrets.
I can't accept the thinking that a sufficiently advanced race would feel it was neccessary to go out and conquer the galaxy, which pretty much blows this theory out of the water.
Let's see how that argument works at home:
"I can't accept the thinking that a sufficiently advanced country would feel it was necessary to invade other nations on the basis of unverified intelligence that included trivially false claims about the possible uses of aluminium tubes and equally false claims about attempts to acquire yellowcake in Niger."
Nope, not so good.
I don't know precisely what your idea of "advanced" entails, but human history shows that that the most "advanced" culture is the one that goes out and tramples all over the world. The Greeks did it. The Romans did it. The Arabs did it. The Spanish did it. The English did it. It is what every "advanced" culture does: expand to the limits of possibility, which allows them to maximize their share of the Earth's resources. It is not clear why a spacefaring culture should be any different.
Webb's 50th solution is the one that he believes is the most likely. Unfortunately for extraterrestrial enthusiasts, the solution is depressingly pessimistic: "...the only resolution of the Fermi paradox that makes sense to me--is that we are alone." Webb's preferred solution is highly controversial, but it satisfies Ockham's razor; out of all the Fermi paradox explanations, it is the simplest one. On the other hand, the solution is only as good as the evidence it is based on. New evidence could lead to a different solution to the paradox.
Fermi's Paradox isn't really a paradox, it's a question: "Where are they?" One possible answer is, "They don't exist." It seems probable that as we explore the galaxy we will find life everywhere, and intelligence nowhere.
The evidence for this is very strong. For one, there is the fact that we see no evidence for them at all. For two, life on Earth shows us that the kind of intelligence that builds spacecraft is extremely unlikely to evolve.
Evolution routinely produces some complicated solutions to common problems over and over again. The eye has (probably) evolved many, many times. Wings have certainly done so, as have fins. Everything we know about natural history on Earth tells us that evolution by variation and natural selection will produce the same solution to the same problem with very high reliability. This is even true of things like extra vertebra in the necks of some Central American lizard: there are a couple of species that have this feature, and previously they were thought to have a recent common ancestor. Gene sequencing shows this is not the case--it is merely a result of common evolutionary pressures on similar forms having similar results.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, seems to be something of an evolutionary fluke. Our ancestors were a marginal species of mediocre tool users for hundreds of thousands of years before we suddenly started on our current course about fifty thousand years ago, with the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. If intelligence was even just ten times harder to evolve than eyes and wings, it would have occurred more than once in the entire history of the Earth.
Until someone comes up with a compelling account as to why human-style (i.e. machine-building, empire-building, world-colonizing) intelligence should be anything other than incredibly rare, there really isn't any other reasonable answer to Fermi's Question.
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that the solution will be to create a sixth way of installing software, which will also not be widely accepted throughout the popular distributions?
Because you're familiar with the history of printer management on Linux?
Can you measure fear, respect, love, duty, honor, trust, or contentment? Have you ever known any of them?
You are equivocating "knowable" and "measurable". It is possible to know something without measurement. Nothing I said suggested otherwise.
As to the dictionary definition of "supernatural" and your aliens-planted-life example, they are both irrelevant and the second depends on another equivocation.
Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, and it in a world where the majority of people are mistaken about the possibility of "supernatural" explanations it is no surprise that a dictionary would reflect this fact.
With regards to aliens planting life on Earth, if you believe this would constitute a "supernatural explanation" in the same sense that "God did it" is a "supernatural explanation" for the origin of species, then you are also committed to starlings in North America being a "supernatural phenomena" for which there is a "supernatural explanation."
There are starlings in North America because some idiot let a breeding pair loose in New York in the 1800's. No one who speaks English natively would say this is a "supernatural explanation" of the presence of starlings here. You are equivocating on the meanings of "unnatural" and "supernatural".
Equivocation is not argument, nor is the introduction of irrelevancies and poetic sentiments.
I submit to you that it's my belief that people with an a priori commitment to philosophical naturalism hang on to evolution fundamentally because they don't want to believe that there's a supernatural explanation.
"Supernatural explanation" is an oxymoron.
For X to explain Y, knowing X must increase the plausibility of Y. See Jayne's "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning" if you don't understand this, but as someone concerned with the problem of explanation I'm assuming you are already familiar with the major works in the field.
For X to increase the plausibility of Y, X must be better known than Y. By definition the "supernatural" is unknowable. It cannot be seen, communicated with, or otherwise nailed down and studied in the lab. If it could it would be "merely natural."
So to claim that you "explain" something by invoking something that is by definition unknowable (because everything knowable is natural) is to talk nonsense.
If a thing is knowable it is natural. If a thing is not knowable, it is not an explanation.
Ergo, there are no supernatural explanations. The term is without meaning.
How do we know that it's the waves that are causing the hum, and not the other way around? Perhaps the planet is still ringing from meteor impacts, and the hum is just the resonant frequency.
I found it humorous that such a fundamental error got past both the original authors proof-reading and the peer-review process.
It's less humorous when it happens to you. It's never happened to me, but a colleague was once in quite a state when an article was published that he was lead author on and figures 2 and 3 were identical. Both were the original figure 2. It had happened in the original MS--somehow the same graph was included twice. The caption was right, the discussion in the text was right, but the actual graph in figure 3 was just a dupe of figure 2.
It got past him, his co-authors, the editor at the journal (who is supposed to check for important trivia like that) and both reviewers. Oops.
For the love of RB Woodward's wine-guzzling ghost, I am sick of stories about compound X and how it is the next big thing and how it kills cancer cells stone dead in a Petri dish.
Furthermore, most cancers in mice can be cured with the biochemical equivalent of a dirty look.
Humans are exceptionally long-lived for mammals. The average mammal lives about a billion of its own heartbeats. Humans live two billion. this massively delayed senescence is due in part to effective tumour-supressor genes. From an evolutionary perspective, this may have to do with grandparents/elders being the primary inter-generational transmitters of culture, knowledge and tradition.
The upshot is that cancers that can survive in humans have already bypassed internal defences that would drop-kick most mouse cancers out of the stadium. So we see lots and lots of compounds that cure cancer in mice but have almost no effect in humans, even though they are non-toxic.
Using mouse models is still reasonable for preliminary testing and understanding of pathways, but the popular press treating mouse results as more than mildly interesting is not generally justified.
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Wow, he's gotta be a wacko when even the other Objectivists are disowning him.
So, like, if the NAZI's think I'm crazy you're saying that's a BAD thing?
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The title of the list was "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy" (MDOP) and so far as I know there is no complete archive available anywhere, which is too bad.
Parts some of the discussions are available, possibly in somewhat edited form. In particular, under the "Epistemology" topic you will find some essays on Peikoff's "Objectivism" (OPAR) and Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" (IOE), and under "Philosophy of Science" there are some essay's on Binswanger's "Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts" (BBTC). Most of these essays are from MDOP discussions, although I beleive at least one of them was commissioned to complete the set.
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Jimbo Wales is not politically neutral. He ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years.
It was hardly "the" Ayn Rand mailing list--in fact it was small and hated by most of the "objectivist" community, to the extent that IIRC members were banned from some other fora. In contrast to those closed-minded groups, Jimmy's MDOP list was the only forum available at the time where Rand's work was discussed intelligently by people who knew something about philosophy. It spawned a number of fruitful discussions and collaborations, some of which resulted in new and interesting work, and all of which any true-blue objectivist nutter would hate.
So if by "ran the Ayn Rand mailing list" you mean Jimmy ran a productive and collegial list for the discussion of a famously contentious topic, then yes, he did indeed do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Meetings by themselves don't have problems. It's meetings that are flawed.
This is like telling a drowning person that water is essential to life.
It's true, but it's neither relevant nor interesting to the situation they are in. Any white-collar worker in a modern corporate environment is drowning in bad meetings.
One useful thing to do is to simply not attend any meeting that does not have an agenda. Simply tell the organizer that you aren't sure if you should be on the attendees list, and you'd like to see an agenda to make sure that it is an appropriate use of your time, because you're very busy right now with project XYZ (fill in whatever the person calling the meeting cares most about, or something at least plausibly important.) You may just get told, "Too bad, there is no agenda, you have to come." In which case you need to start looking for work. But in surprisingly many cases an agenda will be forthcoming that you can then use as a lever to try to keep the meeting on track. Or maybe as an excuse not to go at all.
Like most dysfunctional corporate policies, bad meetings are due policies that are designed to satisfy the monkey-needs of managers rather than the economic needs of the company. But it is frequently possible to gently push your group toward some semblance of rationality and economic efficiency. Just don't ever get confrontational about it. Monkeys hate that.
Ideally companies should have policies that include:
1) All meetings will have an agenda
2) Anyone may leave a meeting if the organizer/chair does not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time
3) Anyone may intervene to bring the meeting back to the agenda if the chair is failing to do so
4) The number of meetings that go over time and the amount they go overtime by will be tracked, and will be posted on the internal website. Managers whose meetings are routinely over time will be subject to probation and possible dismissal if they do not improve.
Policies like these at least reduce the risk of meetings being the massive productivity sinks they routinely become.
The patterns shown in the article are not true penrose patterns, it exhibits two lines of reflection, horizontal and vertical and the pattern does not repeat indefinitely.
Even the fact of local five-fold symmetry is interesting, although I agree these are not true Penrose tiles, which typically use only two shapes (I count at least three or four in the picture) each of which have a reflection symmetry but no rotation symmetry.
The tiling shown in the picture with the article looks quite a lot like a Kepler Tiling, with its local five-fold symmetry and use of five hexagons to fill out the pattern. I have no idea where Kepler got the idea from--he lived in the 16th century, about a hundred years after the Arab tilings the article talks about.
In any case, the practical arts routinely outstripped scientific and mathematical understanding until very recently, and even now we do sometimes see science playing catch-up with empirical ability. It is doubtful that anyone at the time understood very much about any of these tilings in the way a modern mathematician would. But by the same token science and mathematics would have a lot less interesting stuff to work with if artisans didn't explore empirical possibilities for their own reasons.
Here's one that that really bugs me about online news articles: they rarely take advantage of the medium! Why the hell couldn't New Scientist provide a link to this paper?
Because science journalists and editors know nothing about the fields they report on, and frequently seem actively hostile to the facts in favour of some made-up, mythological story.
Some years ago a colleague at the university where I was a post-doc came into the lab and said, "Today the science section of the LA Times has five stories about stuff that I am either personally familiar with or have actually worked on. Four of them are all but unrecognizable. The fifth is full of things that are not true."
In my subsequent experience as a scientist I have found this to be pretty much par for the course for science journalism. I don't actually know if reporters are as ignorant as they appear, but by the time the edited work gets to the reading public it is almost always spun in such a way as to be misleading or simply wrong.
There seem to be some myths about science that are the bedrock of science reporting, and reporters or editors will distort or simply lie to ensure they reinforce those myths. Some of them are:
1) Science is mysterious and full of contradictions (see yesterdays "hot ice" story)
2) There is no point in anyone trying to understand science, it is beyond you (thus the lack of useful links in stories)
3) Scientists are either put on a pedestal or dragged through the mud. They are never treated as merely ordinary people doing a job or following a vocation.
4) The "story" is more important than the facts.
There are probably a lot more, but basically, science journalism will never be worth anything until it starts actually reporting on science rather than wasting time promulgating editorial myths.
Sigh.
/. whose author or editor does not feel it necessary to include outright falsehoods.
It would be nice to see a science article linked on
Clathrates have been known about for a long time. Extracting them economically is an interesting interim move to extend the natural gas supply. Here's a nice summary of the potential and problems with this fossil-fuel energy source, in which the authors somehow manage to convey information and not wilfully and deliberately mislead their readers.
There is no reasonable scenario which would ever put the IFE system in a position to affect the avionics
You are committing the logical fallacy of "Argumentum ad Stultum": argument from stupidity.
Arguments that commit this fallacy have the form:
It would be stupid to do X
No one would ever do anything stupid
------------
Therefore no one would ever do X
The second premise is so obviously false it hardly needs mention.
So, simply because there is no reasonable scenario that would put the IFE system in a position of affecting the avionics does not mean there is no probable scenario in which this could occur. It requires good engineering, good management and yes, good luck, to ensure independence. Every engineer knows that we must try to eliminate luck from the process and must never, ever rely on it, but also that it will always be a factor.
One obvious way in which the IFE could affect the avionics is via coupled grounds. Grounding in aircraft is never simple, and maintaining fully independent power supplies has been a challenge for IFE and avionics engineers. IIRC the 777 was delayed for a while due to the need to do some redesign on the power systems to ensure independence was retained. In any system so complex there will always be an element of luck, despite the engineer's best efforts.
Not much chance getting away with calling a Glenn Gould recording your own.
You can if you use the Glenn Gould De-Vocalizer 2000! I mean, listen to the difference in this after-and-before recording!
If you want to control carbon emissions, calculate the marginal externality cost and charge it to people. If they reduce -- great. If they don't -- you can fix their damage. Plus, it lets them pick whichever method is least inconvenient. The market would then incorporate externalities into prices.
Environmentalists: isn't that solution a LOT better than setting up millions of pages of regulations for how big a house you can have, how fuel-efficient your car can be, who needs to get a prescription for a light bulb, etc?
Environmentalists who have a gram of economic knowledge know that capturing externalities by converting access to the commons into a market commodity is the most sustainable way of ensuring environmental efficiencies. Once the commons (in this case, the atmosphere) is no longer freely available for dumping, a well-designed market will automatically compute the costs and distribute them appropriately.
Every environmentalist worthy of the name knows this: if you restrict access to the commons via a market then environmental efficiencies become economic efficiencies, and you do not have to waste enormous resources trying to maintain unsustainable economic regulation.
This worked extremely well in limiting sulphur dioxide emissions in North America in the late 90's, to the extent that everyone was astonished at how quickly "cap and trade" reduced acid rain. There is no reason to believe that something similar can't work for carbon emissions. The only issue is that like any market it must be free of political interference. When that happens we get disasters like the East Coast fishery in Canada, which has been mismanaged due to political manipulation of catch limits to the point where major commercial stocks have collapsed.
Treating access to the atmospheric commons as a limited, ever-shrinking, tradable commodity is something that absolutely everyone whose political agenda does not trump reason and responsibility ought to be in favour of.
If you can learn to be good at something, why do you think that cannot include social interaction?
No amount of practice can make a deaf person hear.
That's the whole point: a deaf person does not know what it is to hear. No matter how intelligent they are they cannot compensate for their inability to hear without substantial guidance from a hearing counsellor.
It is equally unlikely that anyone with a clinical presentation of Aspergers would be able to successfully emulate "natural" behaviour without effective counselling. Otherwise they have no way of judging which behaviours are natural and appropriate to a situation and which are not. People with Aspergers don't primarily lack skills, they lack the awareness required to learn the skills that other people pick up naturally in the course of their development. Working with a counsellor--or an understanding and supportive parent, or whoever--can help a person with Apsergers use surrogate measures for the kinds of awareness they lack. But the lack of awareness prevents them from doing so themselves.
People with sub-clinical presentations, who lean in the direction of Aspergers but who are not diagnosable, may be able to do themselves some good with self-help. But the GP is not talking about those people, and it is very important to understand that simply because someone who leans in that direction can help themselves a little does not by any means imply that such advice will be of value to the majority of people diagnosed with the condition.
He would have read the DSM and been absolutely clueless that he exhibited. He can say "I don't fit in," but he doesn't know he doesn't fit in.
I think this is probably accurate, and I think your summary is an extremely good summary of a difficult topic. I do not have Aspergers, but lean toward that end of the spectrum, and one of my children--who I've been watching recapitulate my own childhood development for the past fifteen years--was threatened with an Autism diagnosis at one point in his childhood. I say "threatened" because I was convinced his presentation was sub-clinical and that diagnosis was not justified and would have resulted in inappropriate and potentially harmful intervention. Subsequent development has proven this to be the case.
On the basis of this experience and reflecting on my own situation, I'm convinced that anyone with sufficient self-awareness to diagnose themselves with Aspergers does not have it.
But that's a very human-centric view of how culture works. You conceive of conquest as a natural activity of an advanced culture, but not even all advanced HUMAN cultures did that - only very few of out of the tens of thousands of human cultures ever did (ours included).
All species at all times are engaged in a process of maximizing their ability to utilize their environment. Evolution cannot ever produce a species that does anything else, even when the inevitable end of such "successful" expansion is extinction by smothering in the its own waste products.
Humans are remarkable in that we have any ability to moderate our behaviour at all. But even so those human groups who have been the most immoderate in their behaviour--the most bellicose, the most expansionist, and aided by the highest technology--have been the most successful. We only moderate our behaviour (very slightly) after the major damage has been done, and this has been true of all human cultures in all times.
So sure it may be hubris, but I see no reason to believe that the same processes of both biological and social evolution will not take place on other worlds. Very little goes into that conclusion other than a belief that the laws of probability will continue to hold.
This is not quite correct, especially in the context of fusion in the solid state.
It is true that considered in complete isolation from everything else, the reaction d + d -> 4He is neutron free. But considered in complete isolation from everything else a great many things are true. For example, it is true that considered in complete isolation from everything else, you can drive your car the wrong way down a one-way street and not suffer any collisions. But I doubt that would stand up in court as a justification for claiming that driving your car the wrong way down a one-way street is perfectly safe.
In the case of fusion, for d + d -> 4He to occur, d + d -> 3He + n must also occur. And when d + d -> 4He occurs, the alpha particle carries off about 23 MeV, if memory serves. This is quite far above the neutron binding energy of most nuclei, which means that nuclear collisions as the alpha particle slows down can knock neutrons free. And such collisions produce a lot of gamma rays, too.
Believers in cold fusion are required to make up phenomena that might suppress these and other neutron and gamma production processes. Unfortunately, those phenomena always contradict what we know about solid state and nuclear physics. And by "know" I don't mean just "what we have a good theoretical understanding of" but also "what we are empirically certain of."
Finally, I'd like to point out a trivial falsehood in your post:
Well, 40 years ago "high temperature" super conduction was physically impossible. If a scientist had claimed super conduction does exist on high temperatures as well, his colleagues had declared him mad.
On the contrary, when a scientist actually did claim that super conduction exists at high temperatures his colleagues first reproduced the results and then gave him a Nobel Prize. That's what scientists do when people find the unexpected--try to reproduce the results, and if they do, reward the discoverer. No matter how astonishing and unexpected the results are. It is only when people make improbable claims with insufficient evidence that the question of their sanity is raised.
From the article you link:The Farnsworth Fusor is a high-temperature fusion device, just like sonofusion systems are high temperature fusion devices (if they really do produce fusion.)
Do not confuse "table top" with "cold". The only reason conventional hot fusion systems are big is because the plasma losses scale as the surface area while the energy production scales as the volume, so the ratio of losses to energy goes down linearly with the size of the system. If one could produce a non-equilibrium device that had relatively smaller losses or larger energy production one could have a table-top fusion generator. Unfortunately, there is a quite general theoretical proof as to why such non-equilibrium devices cannot ever produce net power.
we got lucky with our opposable thumbs ....
Exactly my point: we got lucky.
Everything we know about space-craft-building intelligence suggests that luck plays a large role in its evolution, unlike other complex adaptations like wings and eyes, which have evolved multiple times. This is demonstrated both by the fact that Earth has only one species capable of building spacecraft, and the fact that there aren't any other spacecraft-building species in the galaxy old enough to have left a clear sign in the sky.
Your definition of cold fusion is fusion happing at relatively low temperatures I take it?
Cold fusion is fusion that takes place when the fusing nuclei are at temperatures significantly below those required to overcome the Coulomb barrier. It has nothing to do with the temperature of the laboratory that the experiment takes place in, or the temperature of the majority of the mass of the apparatus. For example, we do not call tokomak's "cold fusion" because despite the fact that they sometimes use superconducting magnets and therefore are not just "cold" but positively cryogenic, the nuclei that do the fusing are HOT.
Any other use of the term "cold fusion" is terribly mis-leading for two reasons. One is that it invokes a completely arbitrary and unphysical division between various kinds of hot fusion, calling some kinds of hot fusion "cold" because someone happens to feel that it is important that some part of the apparatus that is not undergoing a fusion reaction is cold. The second reason is that it fails to distinguish between pressure-driven fusion of the kind claimed by Pons and Fleishman, and temperature-driven fusion which has actually been observed.
People who use "cold fusion" when they mean "sonofusion" are either honestly ignorant of the differences between hot fusion and cold fusion, or are being wilfully dishonest.
Despite the fact that neither Pons and Fleishman nor anyone else has ever been able to provide convincing evidence that pressure-driven fusion occurs between room-temperature nuclei, it is still the case that if anyone could figure out how to exert sufficient pressure, then the atoms would fuse, regardless of the amount of kinetic energy (that is, even at low temperatures.)
So there is a real distinction in the physics of "hot" and "cold" fusion, and in terms of that unambiguous and physically interesting distinction, sonofusion, if it happens at all, is almost certainly hot. Although if the centre of the bubbles really is as hot as they seem, it is a mystery as to why we don't see any neutron production in water, but only in more complex organic molecules--the phenomenon remains mysterious and there is still a lot of work to be done to reveal its secrets.
I can't accept the thinking that a sufficiently advanced race would feel it was neccessary to go out and conquer the galaxy, which pretty much blows this theory out of the water.
Let's see how that argument works at home:
"I can't accept the thinking that a sufficiently advanced country would feel it was necessary to invade other nations on the basis of unverified intelligence that included trivially false claims about the possible uses of aluminium tubes and equally false claims about attempts to acquire yellowcake in Niger."
Nope, not so good.
I don't know precisely what your idea of "advanced" entails, but human history shows that that the most "advanced" culture is the one that goes out and tramples all over the world. The Greeks did it. The Romans did it. The Arabs did it. The Spanish did it. The English did it. It is what every "advanced" culture does: expand to the limits of possibility, which allows them to maximize their share of the Earth's resources. It is not clear why a spacefaring culture should be any different.
Webb's 50th solution is the one that he believes is the most likely. Unfortunately for extraterrestrial enthusiasts, the solution is depressingly pessimistic: "...the only resolution of the Fermi paradox that makes sense to me--is that we are alone." Webb's preferred solution is highly controversial, but it satisfies Ockham's razor; out of all the Fermi paradox explanations, it is the simplest one. On the other hand, the solution is only as good as the evidence it is based on. New evidence could lead to a different solution to the paradox.
Fermi's Paradox isn't really a paradox, it's a question: "Where are they?" One possible answer is, "They don't exist." It seems probable that as we explore the galaxy we will find life everywhere, and intelligence nowhere.
The evidence for this is very strong. For one, there is the fact that we see no evidence for them at all. For two, life on Earth shows us that the kind of intelligence that builds spacecraft is extremely unlikely to evolve.
Evolution routinely produces some complicated solutions to common problems over and over again. The eye has (probably) evolved many, many times. Wings have certainly done so, as have fins. Everything we know about natural history on Earth tells us that evolution by variation and natural selection will produce the same solution to the same problem with very high reliability. This is even true of things like extra vertebra in the necks of some Central American lizard: there are a couple of species that have this feature, and previously they were thought to have a recent common ancestor. Gene sequencing shows this is not the case--it is merely a result of common evolutionary pressures on similar forms having similar results.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, seems to be something of an evolutionary fluke. Our ancestors were a marginal species of mediocre tool users for hundreds of thousands of years before we suddenly started on our current course about fifty thousand years ago, with the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. If intelligence was even just ten times harder to evolve than eyes and wings, it would have occurred more than once in the entire history of the Earth.
Until someone comes up with a compelling account as to why human-style (i.e. machine-building, empire-building, world-colonizing) intelligence should be anything other than incredibly rare, there really isn't any other reasonable answer to Fermi's Question.
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that the solution will be to create a sixth way of installing software, which will also not be widely accepted throughout the popular distributions?
Because you're familiar with the history of printer management on Linux?
Can you measure fear, respect, love, duty, honor, trust, or contentment? Have you ever known any of them?
You are equivocating "knowable" and "measurable". It is possible to know something without measurement. Nothing I said suggested otherwise.
As to the dictionary definition of "supernatural" and your aliens-planted-life example, they are both irrelevant and the second depends on another equivocation.
Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, and it in a world where the majority of people are mistaken about the possibility of "supernatural" explanations it is no surprise that a dictionary would reflect this fact.
With regards to aliens planting life on Earth, if you believe this would constitute a "supernatural explanation" in the same sense that "God did it" is a "supernatural explanation" for the origin of species, then you are also committed to starlings in North America being a "supernatural phenomena" for which there is a "supernatural explanation."
There are starlings in North America because some idiot let a breeding pair loose in New York in the 1800's. No one who speaks English natively would say this is a "supernatural explanation" of the presence of starlings here. You are equivocating on the meanings of "unnatural" and "supernatural".
Equivocation is not argument, nor is the introduction of irrelevancies and poetic sentiments.
I submit to you that it's my belief that people with an a priori commitment to philosophical naturalism hang on to evolution fundamentally because they don't want to believe that there's a supernatural explanation.
"Supernatural explanation" is an oxymoron.
For X to explain Y, knowing X must increase the plausibility of Y. See Jayne's "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning" if you don't understand this, but as someone concerned with the problem of explanation I'm assuming you are already familiar with the major works in the field.
For X to increase the plausibility of Y, X must be better known than Y. By definition the "supernatural" is unknowable. It cannot be seen, communicated with, or otherwise nailed down and studied in the lab. If it could it would be "merely natural."
So to claim that you "explain" something by invoking something that is by definition unknowable (because everything knowable is natural) is to talk nonsense.
If a thing is knowable it is natural. If a thing is not knowable, it is not an explanation.
Ergo, there are no supernatural explanations. The term is without meaning.
How do we know that it's the waves that are causing the hum, and not the other way around? Perhaps the planet is still ringing from meteor impacts, and the hum is just the resonant frequency.
Damping.
Note to mods: you misspelled "funny".
I found it humorous that such a fundamental error got past both the original authors proof-reading and the peer-review process.
It's less humorous when it happens to you. It's never happened to me, but a colleague was once in quite a state when an article was published that he was lead author on and figures 2 and 3 were identical. Both were the original figure 2. It had happened in the original MS--somehow the same graph was included twice. The caption was right, the discussion in the text was right, but the actual graph in figure 3 was just a dupe of figure 2.
It got past him, his co-authors, the editor at the journal (who is supposed to check for important trivia like that) and both reviewers. Oops.
For the love of RB Woodward's wine-guzzling ghost, I am sick of stories about compound X and how it is the next big thing and how it kills cancer cells stone dead in a Petri dish.
Furthermore, most cancers in mice can be cured with the biochemical equivalent of a dirty look.
Humans are exceptionally long-lived for mammals. The average mammal lives about a billion of its own heartbeats. Humans live two billion. this massively delayed senescence is due in part to effective tumour-supressor genes. From an evolutionary perspective, this may have to do with grandparents/elders being the primary inter-generational transmitters of culture, knowledge and tradition.
The upshot is that cancers that can survive in humans have already bypassed internal defences that would drop-kick most mouse cancers out of the stadium. So we see lots and lots of compounds that cure cancer in mice but have almost no effect in humans, even though they are non-toxic.
Using mouse models is still reasonable for preliminary testing and understanding of pathways, but the popular press treating mouse results as more than mildly interesting is not generally justified.
Wow, he's gotta be a wacko when even the other Objectivists are disowning him.
So, like, if the NAZI's think I'm crazy you're saying that's a BAD thing?
The title of the list was "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy" (MDOP) and so far as I know there is no complete archive available anywhere, which is too bad.
Parts some of the discussions are available, possibly in somewhat edited form. In particular, under the "Epistemology" topic you will find some essays on Peikoff's "Objectivism" (OPAR) and Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" (IOE), and under "Philosophy of Science" there are some essay's on Binswanger's "Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts" (BBTC). Most of these essays are from MDOP discussions, although I beleive at least one of them was commissioned to complete the set.
Jimbo Wales is not politically neutral. He ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years.
It was hardly "the" Ayn Rand mailing list--in fact it was small and hated by most of the "objectivist" community, to the extent that IIRC members were banned from some other fora. In contrast to those closed-minded groups, Jimmy's MDOP list was the only forum available at the time where Rand's work was discussed intelligently by people who knew something about philosophy. It spawned a number of fruitful discussions and collaborations, some of which resulted in new and interesting work, and all of which any true-blue objectivist nutter would hate.
So if by "ran the Ayn Rand mailing list" you mean Jimmy ran a productive and collegial list for the discussion of a famously contentious topic, then yes, he did indeed do that.