It's interesting that you put more faith in politicians to be able to make the right choices about cloning, than you do in the researchers on the front lines.
Sure there are so crazy people who want human clones NOW, but most researchers (including these) are opposed to reproductive cloning. Many however see therapuetic cloning to have a great deal of potential to benefit human medicine, and considerably less difficult ethical issues. For instance, the goal of the research announced today (were it to work perfectly) would be to create stem cells identical to the ones present in the first stage of development of the donor. In essence they are recreating something that already existed in the past because it can be of great use to the person alive right now. Unfortunately those cells were present so early in the individual's life that you could make a whole new human out of them, but only a very few people would want to give them that chance.
In the end it makes little difference, since it's doubtful that the world-wide community will ever pass enough laws to keep it from happening somewhere.
Well one might say that it's the same human life, since it's DNA is identical to your cells, and it's never offered the chance to develop into a fully independant life form (in this research). Regardless of which I have trouble buying the body farm argument in this case.
They intend to make stem cell lines, which is a far throw from making another human for harvesting. Stems cells can generate nerve or heart or bone tissue, but that's not the same as growing a person with a working brain, heart, or skeleton. A small collection of undifferentiated cells is a long distance from having full body floating in a tank.
I do remember this story. I also remember a Pentagon press briefing in November where Rumsfeld made a statement to the effect of: Upon further investigation, we have determined that these warehouses were correctly identified as legitimate military targets, despite being nominally controlled by the International Red Cross.
No elaboration was given as to what made them legitimate targets. Of course from previous reports we know that these were warehouses in a district with a number of other warehouses which were also bombed and not owned by the Red Cross. If the Taliban were moving things from their warehouses into Red Cross buildings, then they would certainly seem fair targets, though I have no evidence that such was happening.
For the record I did a search with several news agencies, and could find no record of the statement I'm citing. In fact I can find no record that the US admitted intentionally bombing the site (which I remember as well). Don't know what's going on, but interpret as you will.
Re:And what about...
on
Mapping Gravity
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You make some elementary mistakes, but I'm only going to deal with two of them.
First off relativity has nothing to do with variations in the earth gravitational field. This is entirely related to the fact that the mass density of the materials making up the earth are not uniformly distributed. Some rocks are denser than others, and moisture and magma move around. Relativistic mass scales as 1/Sqrt[1-v^2/c^2], where v is an objects velocity and c is is the speed of light. Thus for a 1% increase in mass you would have to identify objects moving at > 14% of c as measured by a stationary observer on the Earth's surface. Besides which this deals with inertial mass (F=ma), but gravitational fields (F=G*m1*m2/r^2) are more complicated in a relativistic framework.
Standing perfectly still in the 3 space dimensions and moving only through time. (I know that motion is relative, but imagine for a moment that your motion is relative to the universe itself and that you can guarentee that you're really not moving through space at all but only through time). Therefore, you're moving through time at the speed of light.
There is NO UNIVERSAL FRAME OF REFERENCE. When not accelerating everyone experiences time as moving at the same constant rate, and ALL are equally justified in saying they are moving solely in the time direction. One person observering another having a nonzero relatively velocity will interpret their motion as having decreased temporal component and appropriately increased spatial component(s). Sometimes it is useful for someone to interpret their own motion in terms of another person's perspective (such as saying the car is moving along the ground as opposed to saying the ground is moving under me), but this makes no difference to the objective or subjective experience.
I don't know what differences an asteroid impact would leave, but I do know there is at least one theory for a mass extinction asteroid event on the Indian subcontinent. According to theory though this was a biggie, and the asteroid impact punched through the crust of the earth and released large quantities of magma from the mantle to fill in the crater. The main evidence for the theory anyway, is the observation of massive granite deposits (which forms from cooled lava).
My memory is a bit fuzzy as to which time period and event they were trying to associate it to, but I think it was much before the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm tempted to say they wanted to connect it with the mass extinction immediately preceeding the age of dinosaurs, but I'm not sure now. Anyway, usually people claim a Yucatan impact site as being the most likely location for the event that may have killed the dinosaurs.
So with a recommended hard disk size of 1.5 Gigs, Windows XP requires twice as much information as your average human being. Really puts a perspective on MS bloat.
I can one up you. I saw an ad, in my campus paper, by an infertile couple offering $25K for an egg donor with certain very specific physical and intellectual qualities.
Well if you worry about selecting for IQ, what about selecting for socioeconomic success? That's what most people do (or would if they could). Everything else being equal career and financial success are of considerable importance when humans chose mates. I don't know how big a genetic correlation there is, but the process is certainly self-perpetuating more often than not. After all successful parents can give their kids numerous advantages in addition to the genes they passed on, and only rarely do people marry far outside the socioeconomic class in which they were born.
In short we already have a breeding program for human success (at least to the extent that money and power = success). We might make such a thing more rigidly defined by identifying "desirable" genes, but that doesn't seem overly likely. A critic might mention that smart people breed less, but honestly does it matter? The class structure seems no less stable just because there are fewer people on the top than the bottom. Besides all the people at the bottom have the dream of working their way up (though in reality only a few ever manage it.)
PS I'm not saying that the current state of affairs is a good thing, but this does seem to be the way of the world.
Fortunately, the US government seems to be pushing for a secular Afghanistan, but do not be satisfied just because the Taliban are going into guerilla mode.
The US is pushing an ethnically diverse Afghanistan sure, but I would be truely surprised if it became a secular country. Except for some Sikhs, nearly everyone will declare that they are Muslim, just not the Taliban interpretation of Islam. I wouldn't hold my breath for seperation of church and state in that environment. But, plenty of countries have nationally supported religions and we are even relatively friendly with some Islamic states.
I would agree, except that Katz says he knows this person from before the Taliban. That makes it very unlikely anyone duped Katz. Of course I could believe that Katz and/or Junis are exagerrating a wee bit. Sensationalism on Slashdot? Never.
The only other alternative would be that Katz is outright making it up, but much as I've disagreed with him before, I don't think he would stoop that low.
How did it get to be that way? Bit by bit -- incremental removal of information that offends some minority, is "dangerous," etc. Posessing and/or distributing proscribed information meant that you were an enemy of the state.
Can it actually work this way? Since the invention of the printing press, I can't recall a single instance in which society allowed itself to be censored into ignorance by the existing govenrment. There have been numerous cases where a revolution has led to information censoring and revisionist history. New leaders and new power structures may seek to control the flow and dissemination of information, but they tend to do so in broad and blunt strokes.
I tend to doubt that the genie of information can ever be substantially eroded by anything short of revolution. This seems to be true to an especially high degree in America where citizens often believe in their right to free information to a higher degree than anywhere else on earth.
... we are promoting security through obscurity, which has been proved time and time again not to work.
"Security through obscurity" is not bad. It's only bad when it's your only line of defense. As an extreme example, I would be really upset if my credit card information was published online, but I could still cancel the card and have various insurance against abuses. Similarly, we shouldn't hand terrorists information to use against us, but we also shouldn't remain under any delusion that pulling documents is all the security we need.
IMHO, during the debate over destroying/not publishing government data you need to ask several questions before restricting information:
Would a terrorist really want or need this information?
Does not publishing this information make the terrorist's job substantially more difficult? In particular, how easily might he do his own research or find the same info in other sources?
Will beneficial programs (including security) be able to continue with little disruption after this information is removed?
Will people continue to improve security and minimize weaknesses in the absence of these publications?
Unless the answer to all these question is yes, I'd say there is no justification for removing the documents in question. It is particularly important that physical security be continued even in the absence of detailed public accountability. The department of defense certainly maintains efforts to promote their security without ever publishing lists of weaknesses, but less well-funded and less paranoid agencies may not even notice vulnerabilities in the absence of external review.
There will always be government (and for that matter, corporate) secrets, and they have a valid place in a security scheme, but just not the only line of defense. I can believe that there are some things that might be too compromising, but I hope that the US government continues to record what was destroyed and why, and that a copy be stored somewhere to await a more peaceful time.
Francium is highly chemically reactive. I would guess that if the whole complex is taken inside the cell as opposed to hanging outside (something I'm unclear about) then it will chemically bond with something inside the cell, rather than leaving and wandering around.
If it's comfortable then you have other people and lots more flora and fauna around. Desolate and uncomfortable sort of go hand in hand. Plains may be flat, but lots of stuff still lives there. For instance look at the savannah in Africa. If you want isolation and emptiness, then you really have to choose somewhere that most earth-born life doesn't want to be.
I know Dr. Park from classes at UMD and a few lectures he gave outside of class. I've never read the book, but I'm certain he tried out a good deal of the material on us.
For perspective Bob Park also believes that the space shuttle program has been a major delay to scientific research in space. He would much prefer a space program focused on unmanned (ie. robotic) exploration. I've never heard him speak about the ISS, but I'd bet he doesn't like that too much either. I'm sure he has a point that robotic exploration could be doing a lot more, but his opposition to manned space flight never sat well with me, personally.
Well hopefully that offers some insight on Bob Park versus the Mars Society. Of course I suspect some of the criticisms are still valid. Thoughts of going to Mars does seem to attract lots of people with a nearly fanatical mindset.
I done extensive personal shipping with UPS because of relocating to different parts of the US these last few years. As far as computer equipment, I've had a hard drive not work after shipping (though no other noticable to that system) and a case that acquired a significant dent (easily repaired with a hammer). Plastic containers and few other incidentals have been damaged over the years, but nothing as bad as what happened to him.
My biggest complaint with UPS is that they seem to change their packing requirements every 3 months. More than once I've prepared things for shipping using recommended guidelines from a previous visit and found them no longer acceptable. After writing their corporate office to complain that requirements were inconsistant and not well publicized, they were actually quite friendly about it. Of course, I wasn't complaining about damages at the time.
Fine. You show them a better way to be able to detect SINGLE photon events, roughly measure their wavelength and do it with sub-nanosecond resolution and I'm sure they will be very interested.
Yes they will detect it. What you lose by reducing sensors is resolution as to direction and energy.
It's actually rather unlike that they'll miss nuetrino events because of such a change. I've had the oppurtunity to look at individual event plots and raw data, and the Cerenkov light from a single event actually registers in a considerable fraction of the tank. IIRC, typically 5-30% of detectors see each event.
They use the timing of when each detector becomes active to reconstruct the path and speed of the particle generating the light. So fewer PMT tubes means less accuracy in determining the direction and energy of the nuetrino that produced the event. I would guess that it's not the case that half as many tubes means half the accuracy. If I were to make an estimate I'd say you're probably increasing the error on individual measurements by around 30-60% (as opposed to 100%, if it were doubled). This is most important on electron nuetrino events which were somewhat hard to accurately determine to begin with, compared to their muonic cousins.
With only half the amount of sensors - wont these sensors each have more pressure placed on them?
No. Hydrodynamics doesn't work that way.
Wasnt a collapse because of water pressure what caused the initial sensor implosion chain reaction?
Well the machine worked successfully for several years at the same amount of pressure, so this shouldn't be the initial cause of the accident. However it is entirely likely that the pressure facillitated the disasterous chain reaction once some faulty equipment or human error got it started.
This is an exotic size of tube and most of the replacements will have to be manufactured (which takes time), so this is probably the best solution we can expect in the near term.
Calling the place the story is about is a dead giveaway.
Not only is it entirely atypical behavior for slashdot, one has to wonder why it is that chrisd didn't trust the New York Times? Did he think SuperK would give him more details than were already in the story?
I don't know about physically damaging the detectors, but I do know that the machine is extermely sensitive to ionization with regards to it's being able to function properly.
The photocollectors measure Cerenkov radiation given off by high energy electrons and muons travelling through or being created in the tank. The mountain blocks the majority of external particles, so most are created when nuetrinos interact with Hydrogen nuclei. You don't get a lot of Cerenkov light from an event, and ionized impurities dissipate the light, so in order to work effectively, the water needs to be very pure.
I've never heard that detectors can be physically damaged by impure water, but I've never heard that they can't either. At the very least you already need pure water to gather data effectively regardless of any actual damage to equipment that impurities might cause.
I can understand wanting different angles of flight, but why do you have to tilt the whole aparatus? It would seem that being able to tilt the whole wind tunnel would be a rather difficult (ie expensive) engineering constraint.
Is there a good reason you couldn't work out some sort of flexible tubing or other solution so that part of the tunnel could be bent appropriately without moving the whole thing? Would the effect on the air flow be so disruptive that you couldn't correct for it?
Disclaimer: I used to study gravity, not particle physics.
I remember reading about one that had to filter out (among other things) the noise caused by the motion of the moon orbiting the earth in order to extract the signal.
I'm wondering if perhaps you haven't gotten confused and are thinking about LIGO (Large Interferometry Gravitational Observatory). I would be rather surprised if particle experiments could pick up the motion of the moon. Among other things the moon doesn't move significantly over the span of each event, and particle detectors and what not are usually concerned with EM effects largely neglect gravitational effects.
On the other hand I do know that LIGO has to contend with a laundry list of crazy sources of interference, including cars on the nearest road, lunar motion, continental drift, and tumbleweeds bumping into the research buildings. That is what you get when you want to measure average displacement of a macroscopic object to within a fraction of an atomic nucleus.
High Energy Particle Physics is something of a special ball of wax because of the huge teams involved. For instance this paper has 44 names attached. If even half of those have seriously critiqued the paper then I'd be pretty confident there is nothing wrong the results.
Of course I don't want to encourage "publishing to the press" as it's called, and in any case there will have to be more experiments to follow up this result.
Blind people might want to use ATMs too. Suppose a blind person needs to get some cash, he or she can get someone else to read the screen instructions, but can punch in the PIN directly, without having to give it out to anyone else. Of course being certain the other person isn't watching your fingers might be a trick, but in theory a blind person should be able to conduct his transaction without revealing his PIN to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Our home phone is xxx-xxx-9113, so that doesn't work either.
It's interesting that you put more faith in politicians to be able to make the right choices about cloning, than you do in the researchers on the front lines.
Sure there are so crazy people who want human clones NOW, but most researchers (including these) are opposed to reproductive cloning. Many however see therapuetic cloning to have a great deal of potential to benefit human medicine, and considerably less difficult ethical issues. For instance, the goal of the research announced today (were it to work perfectly) would be to create stem cells identical to the ones present in the first stage of development of the donor. In essence they are recreating something that already existed in the past because it can be of great use to the person alive right now. Unfortunately those cells were present so early in the individual's life that you could make a whole new human out of them, but only a very few people would want to give them that chance.
In the end it makes little difference, since it's doubtful that the world-wide community will ever pass enough laws to keep it from happening somewhere.
Well one might say that it's the same human life, since it's DNA is identical to your cells, and it's never offered the chance to develop into a fully independant life form (in this research). Regardless of which I have trouble buying the body farm argument in this case.
They intend to make stem cell lines, which is a far throw from making another human for harvesting. Stems cells can generate nerve or heart or bone tissue, but that's not the same as growing a person with a working brain, heart, or skeleton. A small collection of undifferentiated cells is a long distance from having full body floating in a tank.
I do remember this story. I also remember a Pentagon press briefing in November where Rumsfeld made a statement to the effect of: Upon further investigation, we have determined that these warehouses were correctly identified as legitimate military targets, despite being nominally controlled by the International Red Cross.
No elaboration was given as to what made them legitimate targets. Of course from previous reports we know that these were warehouses in a district with a number of other warehouses which were also bombed and not owned by the Red Cross. If the Taliban were moving things from their warehouses into Red Cross buildings, then they would certainly seem fair targets, though I have no evidence that such was happening.
For the record I did a search with several news agencies, and could find no record of the statement I'm citing. In fact I can find no record that the US admitted intentionally bombing the site (which I remember as well). Don't know what's going on, but interpret as you will.
You make some elementary mistakes, but I'm only going to deal with two of them.
First off relativity has nothing to do with variations in the earth gravitational field. This is entirely related to the fact that the mass density of the materials making up the earth are not uniformly distributed. Some rocks are denser than others, and moisture and magma move around. Relativistic mass scales as 1/Sqrt[1-v^2/c^2], where v is an objects velocity and c is is the speed of light. Thus for a 1% increase in mass you would have to identify objects moving at > 14% of c as measured by a stationary observer on the Earth's surface. Besides which this deals with inertial mass (F=ma), but gravitational fields (F=G*m1*m2/r^2) are more complicated in a relativistic framework.
Standing perfectly still in the 3 space dimensions and moving only through time. (I know that motion is relative, but imagine for a moment that your motion is relative to the universe itself and that you can guarentee that you're really not moving through space at all but only through time). Therefore, you're moving through time at the speed of light.
There is NO UNIVERSAL FRAME OF REFERENCE. When not accelerating everyone experiences time as moving at the same constant rate, and ALL are equally justified in saying they are moving solely in the time direction. One person observering another having a nonzero relatively velocity will interpret their motion as having decreased temporal component and appropriately increased spatial component(s). Sometimes it is useful for someone to interpret their own motion in terms of another person's perspective (such as saying the car is moving along the ground as opposed to saying the ground is moving under me), but this makes no difference to the objective or subjective experience.
I don't know what differences an asteroid impact would leave, but I do know there is at least one theory for a mass extinction asteroid event on the Indian subcontinent. According to theory though this was a biggie, and the asteroid impact punched through the crust of the earth and released large quantities of magma from the mantle to fill in the crater. The main evidence for the theory anyway, is the observation of massive granite deposits (which forms from cooled lava).
My memory is a bit fuzzy as to which time period and event they were trying to associate it to, but I think it was much before the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm tempted to say they wanted to connect it with the mass extinction immediately preceeding the age of dinosaurs, but I'm not sure now. Anyway, usually people claim a Yucatan impact site as being the most likely location for the event that may have killed the dinosaurs.
So with a recommended hard disk size of 1.5 Gigs, Windows XP requires twice as much information as your average human being. Really puts a perspective on MS bloat.
I can one up you. I saw an ad, in my campus paper, by an infertile couple offering $25K for an egg donor with certain very specific physical and intellectual qualities.
Well if you worry about selecting for IQ, what about selecting for socioeconomic success? That's what most people do (or would if they could). Everything else being equal career and financial success are of considerable importance when humans chose mates. I don't know how big a genetic correlation there is, but the process is certainly self-perpetuating more often than not. After all successful parents can give their kids numerous advantages in addition to the genes they passed on, and only rarely do people marry far outside the socioeconomic class in which they were born.
In short we already have a breeding program for human success (at least to the extent that money and power = success). We might make such a thing more rigidly defined by identifying "desirable" genes, but that doesn't seem overly likely. A critic might mention that smart people breed less, but honestly does it matter? The class structure seems no less stable just because there are fewer people on the top than the bottom. Besides all the people at the bottom have the dream of working their way up (though in reality only a few ever manage it.)
PS I'm not saying that the current state of affairs is a good thing, but this does seem to be the way of the world.
Fortunately, the US government seems to be pushing for a secular Afghanistan, but do not be satisfied just because the Taliban are going into guerilla mode.
The US is pushing an ethnically diverse Afghanistan sure, but I would be truely surprised if it became a secular country. Except for some Sikhs, nearly everyone will declare that they are Muslim, just not the Taliban interpretation of Islam. I wouldn't hold my breath for seperation of church and state in that environment. But, plenty of countries have nationally supported religions and we are even relatively friendly with some Islamic states.
I would agree, except that Katz says he knows this person from before the Taliban. That makes it very unlikely anyone duped Katz. Of course I could believe that Katz and/or Junis are exagerrating a wee bit. Sensationalism on Slashdot? Never.
The only other alternative would be that Katz is outright making it up, but much as I've disagreed with him before, I don't think he would stoop that low.
How did it get to be that way? Bit by bit -- incremental removal of information that offends some minority, is "dangerous," etc. Posessing and/or distributing proscribed information meant that you were an enemy of the state.
Can it actually work this way? Since the invention of the printing press, I can't recall a single instance in which society allowed itself to be censored into ignorance by the existing govenrment. There have been numerous cases where a revolution has led to information censoring and revisionist history. New leaders and new power structures may seek to control the flow and dissemination of information, but they tend to do so in broad and blunt strokes.
I tend to doubt that the genie of information can ever be substantially eroded by anything short of revolution. This seems to be true to an especially high degree in America where citizens often believe in their right to free information to a higher degree than anywhere else on earth.
"Security through obscurity" is not bad. It's only bad when it's your only line of defense. As an extreme example, I would be really upset if my credit card information was published online, but I could still cancel the card and have various insurance against abuses. Similarly, we shouldn't hand terrorists information to use against us, but we also shouldn't remain under any delusion that pulling documents is all the security we need.
IMHO, during the debate over destroying/not publishing government data you need to ask several questions before restricting information:
- Would a terrorist really want or need this information?
- Does not publishing this information make the terrorist's job substantially more difficult? In particular, how easily might he do his own research or find the same info in other sources?
- Will beneficial programs (including security) be able to continue with little disruption after this information is removed?
- Will people continue to improve security and minimize weaknesses in the absence of these publications?
Unless the answer to all these question is yes, I'd say there is no justification for removing the documents in question. It is particularly important that physical security be continued even in the absence of detailed public accountability. The department of defense certainly maintains efforts to promote their security without ever publishing lists of weaknesses, but less well-funded and less paranoid agencies may not even notice vulnerabilities in the absence of external review.There will always be government (and for that matter, corporate) secrets, and they have a valid place in a security scheme, but just not the only line of defense. I can believe that there are some things that might be too compromising, but I hope that the US government continues to record what was destroyed and why, and that a copy be stored somewhere to await a more peaceful time.
Francium is highly chemically reactive. I would guess that if the whole complex is taken inside the cell as opposed to hanging outside (something I'm unclear about) then it will chemically bond with something inside the cell, rather than leaving and wandering around.
If it's comfortable then you have other people and lots more flora and fauna around. Desolate and uncomfortable sort of go hand in hand. Plains may be flat, but lots of stuff still lives there. For instance look at the savannah in Africa. If you want isolation and emptiness, then you really have to choose somewhere that most earth-born life doesn't want to be.
I know Dr. Park from classes at UMD and a few lectures he gave outside of class. I've never read the book, but I'm certain he tried out a good deal of the material on us.
For perspective Bob Park also believes that the space shuttle program has been a major delay to scientific research in space. He would much prefer a space program focused on unmanned (ie. robotic) exploration. I've never heard him speak about the ISS, but I'd bet he doesn't like that too much either. I'm sure he has a point that robotic exploration could be doing a lot more, but his opposition to manned space flight never sat well with me, personally.
Well hopefully that offers some insight on Bob Park versus the Mars Society. Of course I suspect some of the criticisms are still valid. Thoughts of going to Mars does seem to attract lots of people with a nearly fanatical mindset.
So how much do I get if I'm the last one left?
I done extensive personal shipping with UPS because of relocating to different parts of the US these last few years. As far as computer equipment, I've had a hard drive not work after shipping (though no other noticable to that system) and a case that acquired a significant dent (easily repaired with a hammer). Plastic containers and few other incidentals have been damaged over the years, but nothing as bad as what happened to him.
My biggest complaint with UPS is that they seem to change their packing requirements every 3 months. More than once I've prepared things for shipping using recommended guidelines from a previous visit and found them no longer acceptable. After writing their corporate office to complain that requirements were inconsistant and not well publicized, they were actually quite friendly about it. Of course, I wasn't complaining about damages at the time.
Fine. You show them a better way to be able to detect SINGLE photon events, roughly measure their wavelength and do it with sub-nanosecond resolution and I'm sure they will be very interested.
Yes they will detect it. What you lose by reducing sensors is resolution as to direction and energy.
It's actually rather unlike that they'll miss nuetrino events because of such a change. I've had the oppurtunity to look at individual event plots and raw data, and the Cerenkov light from a single event actually registers in a considerable fraction of the tank. IIRC, typically 5-30% of detectors see each event.
They use the timing of when each detector becomes active to reconstruct the path and speed of the particle generating the light. So fewer PMT tubes means less accuracy in determining the direction and energy of the nuetrino that produced the event. I would guess that it's not the case that half as many tubes means half the accuracy. If I were to make an estimate I'd say you're probably increasing the error on individual measurements by around 30-60% (as opposed to 100%, if it were doubled). This is most important on electron nuetrino events which were somewhat hard to accurately determine to begin with, compared to their muonic cousins.
With only half the amount of sensors - wont these sensors each have more pressure placed on them?
No. Hydrodynamics doesn't work that way.
Wasnt a collapse because of water pressure what caused the initial sensor implosion chain reaction?
Well the machine worked successfully for several years at the same amount of pressure, so this shouldn't be the initial cause of the accident. However it is entirely likely that the pressure facillitated the disasterous chain reaction once some faulty equipment or human error got it started.
This is an exotic size of tube and most of the replacements will have to be manufactured (which takes time), so this is probably the best solution we can expect in the near term.
Calling the place the story is about is a dead giveaway.
Not only is it entirely atypical behavior for slashdot, one has to wonder why it is that chrisd didn't trust the New York Times? Did he think SuperK would give him more details than were already in the story?
I don't know about physically damaging the detectors, but I do know that the machine is extermely sensitive to ionization with regards to it's being able to function properly.
The photocollectors measure Cerenkov radiation given off by high energy electrons and muons travelling through or being created in the tank. The mountain blocks the majority of external particles, so most are created when nuetrinos interact with Hydrogen nuclei. You don't get a lot of Cerenkov light from an event, and ionized impurities dissipate the light, so in order to work effectively, the water needs to be very pure.
I've never heard that detectors can be physically damaged by impure water, but I've never heard that they can't either. At the very least you already need pure water to gather data effectively regardless of any actual damage to equipment that impurities might cause.
I can understand wanting different angles of flight, but why do you have to tilt the whole aparatus? It would seem that being able to tilt the whole wind tunnel would be a rather difficult (ie expensive) engineering constraint.
Is there a good reason you couldn't work out some sort of flexible tubing or other solution so that part of the tunnel could be bent appropriately without moving the whole thing? Would the effect on the air flow be so disruptive that you couldn't correct for it?
Disclaimer: I used to study gravity, not particle physics.
I remember reading about one that had to filter out (among other things) the noise caused by the motion of the moon orbiting the earth in order to extract the signal.
I'm wondering if perhaps you haven't gotten confused and are thinking about LIGO (Large Interferometry Gravitational Observatory). I would be rather surprised if particle experiments could pick up the motion of the moon. Among other things the moon doesn't move significantly over the span of each event, and particle detectors and what not are usually concerned with EM effects largely neglect gravitational effects.
On the other hand I do know that LIGO has to contend with a laundry list of crazy sources of interference, including cars on the nearest road, lunar motion, continental drift, and tumbleweeds bumping into the research buildings. That is what you get when you want to measure average displacement of a macroscopic object to within a fraction of an atomic nucleus.
High Energy Particle Physics is something of a special ball of wax because of the huge teams involved. For instance this paper has 44 names attached. If even half of those have seriously critiqued the paper then I'd be pretty confident there is nothing wrong the results.
Of course I don't want to encourage "publishing to the press" as it's called, and in any case there will have to be more experiments to follow up this result.
Blind people might want to use ATMs too. Suppose a blind person needs to get some cash, he or she can get someone else to read the screen instructions, but can punch in the PIN directly, without having to give it out to anyone else. Of course being certain the other person isn't watching your fingers might be a trick, but in theory a blind person should be able to conduct his transaction without revealing his PIN to anyone.