Our energy needs are ever increasing as our population grows.
It depends on what "we" means - the energy use per capita in the developed world has been surprisingly level in the recent past (even if it is the highest in the world). The population continues to increase, and developing countries get more developed, sure, but once you reach a certain amount of development, it seems the per-person energy requirements start flattening. Of course, the population can't continue to grow without bound, but that's true for lots of reasons. And again, fortunately, developed countries tend to be approaching equilibrium (negative, even, in some parts of Europe).
And it's simply mathematically false that there isn't enough real estate for solar (wind is another matter - but it's power all comes from the sun, anyway). Lets do some order-of-magnitude calculations. The US has been at ~350 GJ/yr per capita for the last few decades. 350 GJ/yr corresponds to ~11 kWs of continuous power usage. The solar constant at the surface of the earth is ~1 kW per square meter. The Earth has a total cross-section of ~10 trillion square meters. So if we give everyone (world population ~ 10 billion) their own US-level standard of living entirely from (perfectly efficient) solar power, it only takes a thousandth of the earth's cross section (or about 1/4000 of it's surface area, if we build the patch on the equator). If we assume current solar efficiencies of ~10%, maybe that means we need 1/100th of the Earth's cross section.
That leaves 99% of the Earth's population free to live on. There's plenty of room for solar to be a permanent solution.
For all Al Gore's, the UN, and pro-globalists' hand-wringing over AGW (and I'm not here to get into THAT debate), the reality is that most people and therefore most businesses aren't particularly concerned about climate change
Lets be a bit more honest here: you don't have to be a "pro-globalist" to be worried about Climate Change. The science is the same regardless of the politics (even if political pre-conceptions make people want to ignore it). And I think it's not reasonable to say that if most people were concerned the businesses would be as well. They all have a vested interest in the status quo and hence will nearly always be behind the direction the people (or scientific results) are going. It's only in the ideal free market fantasy that this isn't true.
Climate change isn't something that will be fixed on a macro scale.
This is a pretty close-minded attitude, and this sort of thinking is most likely the main thing that may indeed prevent it from being fixed this way (or at all). Just because some greentech doesn't work, that doesn't mean none of it will. Hydroelectric power requires massive funds that are almost always public sector, and it's enormously successful (and profitable in many cases if you consider the net benefits). It's just conveniently ignored by those who decry "wasted" greentech money.
While the laws of physics are deterministic (at least at this scale), the laws of human behavior are not. Plenty of macro-scale activities have profound effects on our micro-scale behavior.
Many people are struggling to merely survive in this world - in fact, the vast majority of the global population is in that bind - and concern over how many hydrocarbons they're pumping into the environment is of zero to less-than-zero concern.
This is a very good point. But if Climate Change is real, the vast majority of the future global population's lives depend on us solving it. So we should be expending enormous resources to convince them that they should be concerned (or better yet, help lift them out of desperation).
The point is that claiming a quota system "always" leads to degradation of standards is a blanket statement that ignores the fact that some quota systems are designed to cancel out inefficiencies that already exist. The original Taco Cowboy point is based on an over-simplified view of reality (that the "default" lacks any sort of biases).
But I think it's incredibly obvious that there's a bias against women in any male-dominated field, just as there's a bias against men in female-dominated fields. No one can reasonably claim that society doesn't apply a lot of gender roles in every aspect of a person's life, so any task dominated by one gender will by nature be harder to get at for the other, because the context the minority group has as less applicable.
You know, women buy things too. And plenty of them put their money where their mouth is.
Try to avoid misogynistic language... Whether you think you're joking or not, this stuff really matters (probably a lot more than which computer you buy...).
Google and Facebook certainly get extra developer buy-on for open sourcing some things. Or perhaps more accurately, for adding to existing open source initiatives.
Also: github! I think they probably get an advantage from open sourcing some of their stuff (although it's not all open)... After all, they're the premier open source hosting site.
I don't think it's encrypted, but I think the methods of encoding the transmissions are incredibly arcane and the formats for the data are nothing even approaching standard (standards for such things didn't exist back then). Probably more important is that the only radio receivers in the entire world that are capable of detecting its signal are run by NASA...
The guy who is primarily responsible for the spread of claims of weather extremes [colorado.edu] has been caught in his lies.
There isn't just "one guy" who says this. There have been hundreds of papers showing links between weather extremes and global warming. To be fair, weather extremes aren't always bad either... if the "extreme" is that a major rainstorm passes over Texas right now, that's better. The problem is that (as was stated above), we've built most of our society around assuming the climate that existed before global warming. If this changes drastically, a lot of people are going to die before we settle back into whatever the new normal is climate-wise. It's not that global warming is bad per se, just that it's bad if it occurs too quickly for humanity and the ecosystem to respond.
Oh, and then there's the fact that increased CO2 is turning the oceans acidic. That gets much less news, but is potentially much more destructive from a world-wide perspective. And there's no possible way you can say that isn't associated with CO2 levels in the atmosphere. And all you have to be able to do to know that's anthropogenic is how to count.
(I *am* a physicist) Actually, the original paper *did* measure time with GPS - more to the point, they use GPS to establish a common frame between the two locations. Look at Figure 5 of the OPERA paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1).
Having said that, as other replies have noted, this kind of correction is well-understood, so while it isn't explicitly laid out as far as I can tell, it's unlikely the OPERA group screwed this up. What may well be true, though, is that there may be systemic offsets either in the GPS timing system, the implementation at Gran Sasso (they actually have a big waveguide that they run from the Earth's surface all the way to the GPS reveivers they have by their detector deep underground), or any of the myriad corrections that were needed to determine the time-of-flight baseline (although as far as I can tell they worked very hard to get this measurement right...).
It's also rather suggestive that the author of this paper has no particle physics (or even physics) credentials. So he/she probably doesn't know the OPERA collaboration's processes very well (admittedly, these details should be in the paper, but the tradition of the community is to not do that sort of detail in announcement papers like this...)
Keep in mind they did just have a huge management overhaul. That doesn't guarantee that they fixed the problems, but it certainly means they are aware of and are trying to fix the management issues.
The team analysed the isotopes of the elements lead and neodymium to place the age of a sample of a FAN at 4.36 billion years. This figure is significantly younger than earlier estimates of the Moon’s age that range to nearly as old as the age of the solar system itself at 4.567 billion years.
So when they say 200 million years younger, that means 4.3 byr instead of 4.5 byr. I'm sure this is interesting to those in the field, but I don't think that counts as "much younger".
That's not true at all. Nearly every field in the physical and natural sciences now depends heavily on modeling. Now, it is true that some of those models are easier to calibrate with data than others... And climate science is indeed one of the hardest ones to test because there are so many feedbacks that you can't really test some of the parameters independent of the others. But that doesn't make it "wrong" or "biased", just hard.
This is exactly the attitude I encounter very often when I talk to other physicists and astrophysicists (I'm the latter). But I think this actually is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. While it's true that many of the codes we write will never be re-examined by anyone, a few of them will. But many scientists write totally inscrutable code, so no one bothers trying to re-use code in that way, because it's easier to just start over from scratch. Thus, no wonder everyone thinks no one is going to look at their code - if they wrote more readable code, perhaps someone would!
That being said, I certainly have had to take code from someone and build upon it or make it work properly for a slightly different instrument or something like that, and I can definitely say that I'm biased, because those experiences are invariably the most frustrating work I find myself doing! Part of it is that a lot of scientists seem to say "if I add comments everywhere, that's all that's needed to make it easy/readable," but they then don't follow indentation rules, or consider their code structure before they implement, or consider possible extensions of their code when they are writing it. So it wouldn't take that much more work, but some scientists just don't realize that in fact it probably is worth the effort for the sake of future work.
No, this is a very strong distinction in *some* fields. For example, in observational astrophysics, most scientists spend much of their actual working time writing code... but they clearly think of themselves as "scientists" and not at all as programmers, with the mindset the article notes. Occasionally people get hired to be "software support" that are clearly supposed to be engineers/programmers, and they think in very different ways.
The end result is that despite programming as much as, if not more than, the "programmers", many of these scientists don't follow any of the rules about software readability and reuse that programmers have learned the hard way over decades. You can immediately look at code and tell who was trained to program by/as a scientist and who actually learned as a programmer: the algorithms often work just as well, but the former are impossible to understand and build on, while the latter are much more readable.
"Large" here simply means large compared to the Planck scale. They're still typically small compared to, say, the universe's size. One of the main motivations for the models (often called ADD in the literature, after the authors of the first paper) is that string theories compatible with the ADD model typically are observable at roughly LHC energy scales. So this result does indeed disfavor the ADD varieties of string theorey, but they were thought up initially precisely because LHC-like colliders could test them. So the original post is correct in that lots of varieties of string theory are ruled out by this result, but there's a lot more left over.
How can we be sure that the black holes were not created? String theory posits that there exist physical dimensions outside of our 4 dimensional universe, in fact that these are part and parcel of our universe. However, given our tools are all limited to 4 dimensions, it makes sense that there could be phenomena that is unobservable in our universe yet occurring in those other unexperienceable dimensions.
The second part of this is not correct. No variety of string theory says there are physical dimensions "outside of" the 4d universe. Instead, the additional dimensions are written down the same way as the traditional 4, but are variously either "wrapped up" or have very small scales, and hence appear to not exist. The classic example is of an ant walking on a table - if you are the ant, and the table has lots of crap on it, you immediately notice the third dimension because it's roughly the same size as the table itself, so it's obvious that you're going up and down along with side-to-side. On the other hand, a very flat table might lead the ant to think there are only 2 dimensions. Similarly, in string theory, the extra dimensions aren't somehow "seperate from" the regular universe - they just have different scales or geometry that make them difficult to detect (not impossible - just very difficult sometimes).
Better yet, send astronauts - NASA did an internal survey of the astronaut corps a few years back on exactly this topic, and they found plenty of current astronauts (mostly those without family) that would volunteer for a one-way trip.
I guess no one knows such things, but I wonder what would prevent it from clumping up like normal baryonic matter. Maybe it's too diffuse to form dark matter nebulae, but those are only held together by gravity too, right? Or would fast-moving particles just fly apart before gravity could act? Or maybe we just can't see the clumps. Or maybe it's a happy medium—loosely bound to the galaxy but nothing more...
Actually, the explanation for this one is pretty simple: it's because the dark matter is dark. The reason why baryonic matter collapses into a (relatively) tiny disk in the center of a much larger dark matter halo is that baryonic matter emits light... and light carries off energy. So baryonic matter quickly loses all the energy it can while still conserving angular momentum, and the result is a disk-like structure (spiral galaxies). Once it collapses into a disk, the density becomes high enough that it can further clump into nebulae and stars and such. Dark matter, on the other hand, is much lower density and hence isn't able to collapse efficiently (i.e. its Jean's Length is much longer, if you want to think in terms of some simple math).
First of all, the fact that it isn't running right now should prove to you that there is a limited amount. I work in a physics department at a research university, and I can tell you the prices for Helium (esp. Helium-3) have absolutely skyrocketed (just like the helium does, as some later posts point out!) - if it were reasonably economical it would have restarted again by now. The problem is that it's a trace byproduct of other refining processes, and most of the easily accessible oil on the US southwest (where the Helium is most abundant) has become much more expensive.
Just like oil, the problem isn't that there will actually be none left - just that it'll suddenly become much more expensive and some crucial applications will become economically infeasible, to the detriment of all.
Even a very good looking girl can behave in such a shitty manner that you'd no longer consider banging her. It might be getting to that point here. Apple may be getting too skanky to fuck.
While I agree with this post right before this comment, I think it's important to point that this is the kind of throw-away statement that tends to drive women away from technical areas (esp. computer-related fields). It's one thing to have a random troll toss out some silly sexist crap... most people can just ignore that. But it's quite another for it to come from someone who says something that otherwise is very reasonable.
"Another impact structure in Siberia was created by an asteroid 100 km in size"
That would've caused an extinction as bad if not worse than the end-K event (the one that killed the dinosaurs) - I think they mean the *crater* is 100 km in size - presumably they're referring to Popigai crater, which is dated to the Eocene, but the *crater* is 100 km, not the asteroid. 100 km is a *big* asteroid.
You have a point, but probably more important is that in the case of observing the slit, the wave function collapses twice - once at the slit and once at the final screen, and that's what jumbles up the phases and destroys the interference pattern. So its really both.
I'm not clear what you mean by an "absolute" event, though - remember that they're interacting all the time to some extent - wavefunctions extend over all space, they're just highly attenuated outside the wave packet (at least in the case of electrons - photons are more extended).
Actually, most of the cosmologists I know see Dark Energy as a wonderful thing - we already know there's something fundamentally wrong with the Standard Model and General Relativity (seeing as how they can't work together), and Dark Energy is about the only thing out there that may provide a direction as to how to solve this problem. (except maybe Dark Matter, and it's looking right now like it'll turn out to be some sort of fairly normal particle who's existence won't require any major changes in our understanding of the universe)
You misunderstand - that's certainly true if this were about us measuring light from stars of planets, but that's not what this is about. The form of Dark Energy this article is talking about is generally modeled as a quantized scalar field. But one of the things that lets Dark Energy act the way it does is that its essentially uniform on all scales, so it can be thought of as sort of a universal wave function (this isn't strictly true, but to a first approximation, its probably the easiest way to think about it). It actually turns out that the math behind a scalar field is substantially easier than the math for photons (which are EM radiation, which is a quantized vector field), and if you treat dark energy that way, it's sort of like treating the whole universe as a a single particle with a unified wave function that we're collapsing when we measure cosmological values.
This may be physically true, but the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics does not require it. This is why this Dark Energy test is an interesting point to make. Most astrophysicists will probably agree that it sounds rather ridiculous, but the point is that the way Dark Energy is theoretically modeled by some people (e.g. a quantized scalar field, probably in a false vacuum), the result is as the article describes.
That is to say, you need not postulate anything about how a photon interacts with a detector to still get the strange result in the double-slit experiment. Just say that the measurement collapses the wave function (e.g. fixes it to a definite eigenstate), and you get the results observed. So it isn't all in the details about the interaction - there's something going on that applies rather well in general to all quantum mechanical interactions.
To sum up, "observation changest things" is not a "mystification," but rather a way to generalize what's going on and develop a theoretical framework (which, incidentally, is quantitatively by far the best verified theory science has ever created).
Slashdot Mirror
Our energy needs are ever increasing as our population grows.
It depends on what "we" means - the energy use per capita in the developed world has been surprisingly level in the recent past (even if it is the highest in the world). The population continues to increase, and developing countries get more developed, sure, but once you reach a certain amount of development, it seems the per-person energy requirements start flattening. Of course, the population can't continue to grow without bound, but that's true for lots of reasons. And again, fortunately, developed countries tend to be approaching equilibrium (negative, even, in some parts of Europe).
And it's simply mathematically false that there isn't enough real estate for solar (wind is another matter - but it's power all comes from the sun, anyway). Lets do some order-of-magnitude calculations. The US has been at ~350 GJ/yr per capita for the last few decades. 350 GJ/yr corresponds to ~11 kWs of continuous power usage. The solar constant at the surface of the earth is ~1 kW per square meter. The Earth has a total cross-section of ~10 trillion square meters. So if we give everyone (world population ~ 10 billion) their own US-level standard of living entirely from (perfectly efficient) solar power, it only takes a thousandth of the earth's cross section (or about 1/4000 of it's surface area, if we build the patch on the equator). If we assume current solar efficiencies of ~10%, maybe that means we need 1/100th of the Earth's cross section.
That leaves 99% of the Earth's population free to live on. There's plenty of room for solar to be a permanent solution.
For all Al Gore's, the UN, and pro-globalists' hand-wringing over AGW (and I'm not here to get into THAT debate), the reality is that most people and therefore most businesses aren't particularly concerned about climate change
Lets be a bit more honest here: you don't have to be a "pro-globalist" to be worried about Climate Change. The science is the same regardless of the politics (even if political pre-conceptions make people want to ignore it). And I think it's not reasonable to say that if most people were concerned the businesses would be as well. They all have a vested interest in the status quo and hence will nearly always be behind the direction the people (or scientific results) are going. It's only in the ideal free market fantasy that this isn't true.
Climate change isn't something that will be fixed on a macro scale.
This is a pretty close-minded attitude, and this sort of thinking is most likely the main thing that may indeed prevent it from being fixed this way (or at all). Just because some greentech doesn't work, that doesn't mean none of it will. Hydroelectric power requires massive funds that are almost always public sector, and it's enormously successful (and profitable in many cases if you consider the net benefits). It's just conveniently ignored by those who decry "wasted" greentech money.
While the laws of physics are deterministic (at least at this scale), the laws of human behavior are not. Plenty of macro-scale activities have profound effects on our micro-scale behavior.
Many people are struggling to merely survive in this world - in fact, the vast majority of the global population is in that bind - and concern over how many hydrocarbons they're pumping into the environment is of zero to less-than-zero concern.
This is a very good point. But if Climate Change is real, the vast majority of the future global population's lives depend on us solving it. So we should be expending enormous resources to convince them that they should be concerned (or better yet, help lift them out of desperation).
The point is that claiming a quota system "always" leads to degradation of standards is a blanket statement that ignores the fact that some quota systems are designed to cancel out inefficiencies that already exist. The original Taco Cowboy point is based on an over-simplified view of reality (that the "default" lacks any sort of biases).
But I think it's incredibly obvious that there's a bias against women in any male-dominated field, just as there's a bias against men in female-dominated fields. No one can reasonably claim that society doesn't apply a lot of gender roles in every aspect of a person's life, so any task dominated by one gender will by nature be harder to get at for the other, because the context the minority group has as less applicable.
(that's called being a man).
You know, women buy things too. And plenty of them put their money where their mouth is.
Try to avoid misogynistic language... Whether you think you're joking or not, this stuff really matters (probably a lot more than which computer you buy...).
Google and Facebook certainly get extra developer buy-on for open sourcing some things. Or perhaps more accurately, for adding to existing open source initiatives.
Also: github! I think they probably get an advantage from open sourcing some of their stuff (although it's not all open)... After all, they're the premier open source hosting site.
Frankly, if you have to ask this question you aren't really serious about succeeding.
I was with you right up until this bit. The arrogant presumption just drips off these words.
I don't think it's encrypted, but I think the methods of encoding the transmissions are incredibly arcane and the formats for the data are nothing even approaching standard (standards for such things didn't exist back then). Probably more important is that the only radio receivers in the entire world that are capable of detecting its signal are run by NASA...
The guy who is primarily responsible for the spread of claims of weather extremes [colorado.edu] has been caught in his lies.
There isn't just "one guy" who says this. There have been hundreds of papers showing links between weather extremes and global warming. To be fair, weather extremes aren't always bad either... if the "extreme" is that a major rainstorm passes over Texas right now, that's better. The problem is that (as was stated above), we've built most of our society around assuming the climate that existed before global warming. If this changes drastically, a lot of people are going to die before we settle back into whatever the new normal is climate-wise. It's not that global warming is bad per se, just that it's bad if it occurs too quickly for humanity and the ecosystem to respond.
Oh, and then there's the fact that increased CO2 is turning the oceans acidic. That gets much less news, but is potentially much more destructive from a world-wide perspective. And there's no possible way you can say that isn't associated with CO2 levels in the atmosphere. And all you have to be able to do to know that's anthropogenic is how to count.
(I *am* a physicist) Actually, the original paper *did* measure time with GPS - more to the point, they use GPS to establish a common frame between the two locations. Look at Figure 5 of the OPERA paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1).
Having said that, as other replies have noted, this kind of correction is well-understood, so while it isn't explicitly laid out as far as I can tell, it's unlikely the OPERA group screwed this up. What may well be true, though, is that there may be systemic offsets either in the GPS timing system, the implementation at Gran Sasso (they actually have a big waveguide that they run from the Earth's surface all the way to the GPS reveivers they have by their detector deep underground), or any of the myriad corrections that were needed to determine the time-of-flight baseline (although as far as I can tell they worked very hard to get this measurement right...).
It's also rather suggestive that the author of this paper has no particle physics (or even physics) credentials. So he/she probably doesn't know the OPERA collaboration's processes very well (admittedly, these details should be in the paper, but the tradition of the community is to not do that sort of detail in announcement papers like this...)
Keep in mind they did just have a huge management overhaul. That doesn't guarantee that they fixed the problems, but it certainly means they are aware of and are trying to fix the management issues.
From the article:
The team analysed the isotopes of the elements lead and neodymium to place the age of a sample of a FAN at 4.36 billion years. This figure is significantly younger than earlier estimates of the Moon’s age that range to nearly as old as the age of the solar system itself at 4.567 billion years.
So when they say 200 million years younger, that means 4.3 byr instead of 4.5 byr. I'm sure this is interesting to those in the field, but I don't think that counts as "much younger".
That's not true at all. Nearly every field in the physical and natural sciences now depends heavily on modeling. Now, it is true that some of those models are easier to calibrate with data than others... And climate science is indeed one of the hardest ones to test because there are so many feedbacks that you can't really test some of the parameters independent of the others. But that doesn't make it "wrong" or "biased", just hard.
This is exactly the attitude I encounter very often when I talk to other physicists and astrophysicists (I'm the latter). But I think this actually is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. While it's true that many of the codes we write will never be re-examined by anyone, a few of them will. But many scientists write totally inscrutable code, so no one bothers trying to re-use code in that way, because it's easier to just start over from scratch. Thus, no wonder everyone thinks no one is going to look at their code - if they wrote more readable code, perhaps someone would!
That being said, I certainly have had to take code from someone and build upon it or make it work properly for a slightly different instrument or something like that, and I can definitely say that I'm biased, because those experiences are invariably the most frustrating work I find myself doing! Part of it is that a lot of scientists seem to say "if I add comments everywhere, that's all that's needed to make it easy/readable," but they then don't follow indentation rules, or consider their code structure before they implement, or consider possible extensions of their code when they are writing it. So it wouldn't take that much more work, but some scientists just don't realize that in fact it probably is worth the effort for the sake of future work.
No, this is a very strong distinction in *some* fields. For example, in observational astrophysics, most scientists spend much of their actual working time writing code... but they clearly think of themselves as "scientists" and not at all as programmers, with the mindset the article notes. Occasionally people get hired to be "software support" that are clearly supposed to be engineers/programmers, and they think in very different ways.
The end result is that despite programming as much as, if not more than, the "programmers", many of these scientists don't follow any of the rules about software readability and reuse that programmers have learned the hard way over decades. You can immediately look at code and tell who was trained to program by/as a scientist and who actually learned as a programmer: the algorithms often work just as well, but the former are impossible to understand and build on, while the latter are much more readable.
"Large" here simply means large compared to the Planck scale. They're still typically small compared to, say, the universe's size. One of the main motivations for the models (often called ADD in the literature, after the authors of the first paper) is that string theories compatible with the ADD model typically are observable at roughly LHC energy scales. So this result does indeed disfavor the ADD varieties of string theorey, but they were thought up initially precisely because LHC-like colliders could test them. So the original post is correct in that lots of varieties of string theory are ruled out by this result, but there's a lot more left over.
How can we be sure that the black holes were not created? String theory posits that there exist physical dimensions outside of our 4 dimensional universe, in fact that these are part and parcel of our universe. However, given our tools are all limited to 4 dimensions, it makes sense that there could be phenomena that is unobservable in our universe yet occurring in those other unexperienceable dimensions.
The second part of this is not correct. No variety of string theory says there are physical dimensions "outside of" the 4d universe. Instead, the additional dimensions are written down the same way as the traditional 4, but are variously either "wrapped up" or have very small scales, and hence appear to not exist. The classic example is of an ant walking on a table - if you are the ant, and the table has lots of crap on it, you immediately notice the third dimension because it's roughly the same size as the table itself, so it's obvious that you're going up and down along with side-to-side. On the other hand, a very flat table might lead the ant to think there are only 2 dimensions. Similarly, in string theory, the extra dimensions aren't somehow "seperate from" the regular universe - they just have different scales or geometry that make them difficult to detect (not impossible - just very difficult sometimes).
Better yet, send astronauts - NASA did an internal survey of the astronaut corps a few years back on exactly this topic, and they found plenty of current astronauts (mostly those without family) that would volunteer for a one-way trip.
I guess no one knows such things, but I wonder what would prevent it from clumping up like normal baryonic matter. Maybe it's too diffuse to form dark matter nebulae, but those are only held together by gravity too, right? Or would fast-moving particles just fly apart before gravity could act? Or maybe we just can't see the clumps. Or maybe it's a happy medium—loosely bound to the galaxy but nothing more...
Actually, the explanation for this one is pretty simple: it's because the dark matter is dark. The reason why baryonic matter collapses into a (relatively) tiny disk in the center of a much larger dark matter halo is that baryonic matter emits light... and light carries off energy. So baryonic matter quickly loses all the energy it can while still conserving angular momentum, and the result is a disk-like structure (spiral galaxies). Once it collapses into a disk, the density becomes high enough that it can further clump into nebulae and stars and such. Dark matter, on the other hand, is much lower density and hence isn't able to collapse efficiently (i.e. its Jean's Length is much longer, if you want to think in terms of some simple math).
First of all, the fact that it isn't running right now should prove to you that there is a limited amount. I work in a physics department at a research university, and I can tell you the prices for Helium (esp. Helium-3) have absolutely skyrocketed (just like the helium does, as some later posts point out!) - if it were reasonably economical it would have restarted again by now. The problem is that it's a trace byproduct of other refining processes, and most of the easily accessible oil on the US southwest (where the Helium is most abundant) has become much more expensive. Just like oil, the problem isn't that there will actually be none left - just that it'll suddenly become much more expensive and some crucial applications will become economically infeasible, to the detriment of all.
Even a very good looking girl can behave in such a shitty manner that you'd no longer consider banging her. It might be getting to that point here. Apple may be getting too skanky to fuck.
While I agree with this post right before this comment, I think it's important to point that this is the kind of throw-away statement that tends to drive women away from technical areas (esp. computer-related fields). It's one thing to have a random troll toss out some silly sexist crap... most people can just ignore that. But it's quite another for it to come from someone who says something that otherwise is very reasonable.
"Another impact structure in Siberia was created by an asteroid 100 km in size" That would've caused an extinction as bad if not worse than the end-K event (the one that killed the dinosaurs) - I think they mean the *crater* is 100 km in size - presumably they're referring to Popigai crater, which is dated to the Eocene, but the *crater* is 100 km, not the asteroid. 100 km is a *big* asteroid.
You have a point, but probably more important is that in the case of observing the slit, the wave function collapses twice - once at the slit and once at the final screen, and that's what jumbles up the phases and destroys the interference pattern. So its really both. I'm not clear what you mean by an "absolute" event, though - remember that they're interacting all the time to some extent - wavefunctions extend over all space, they're just highly attenuated outside the wave packet (at least in the case of electrons - photons are more extended).
Actually, most of the cosmologists I know see Dark Energy as a wonderful thing - we already know there's something fundamentally wrong with the Standard Model and General Relativity (seeing as how they can't work together), and Dark Energy is about the only thing out there that may provide a direction as to how to solve this problem. (except maybe Dark Matter, and it's looking right now like it'll turn out to be some sort of fairly normal particle who's existence won't require any major changes in our understanding of the universe)
You misunderstand - that's certainly true if this were about us measuring light from stars of planets, but that's not what this is about. The form of Dark Energy this article is talking about is generally modeled as a quantized scalar field. But one of the things that lets Dark Energy act the way it does is that its essentially uniform on all scales, so it can be thought of as sort of a universal wave function (this isn't strictly true, but to a first approximation, its probably the easiest way to think about it). It actually turns out that the math behind a scalar field is substantially easier than the math for photons (which are EM radiation, which is a quantized vector field), and if you treat dark energy that way, it's sort of like treating the whole universe as a a single particle with a unified wave function that we're collapsing when we measure cosmological values.
This may be physically true, but the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics does not require it. This is why this Dark Energy test is an interesting point to make. Most astrophysicists will probably agree that it sounds rather ridiculous, but the point is that the way Dark Energy is theoretically modeled by some people (e.g. a quantized scalar field, probably in a false vacuum), the result is as the article describes.
That is to say, you need not postulate anything about how a photon interacts with a detector to still get the strange result in the double-slit experiment. Just say that the measurement collapses the wave function (e.g. fixes it to a definite eigenstate), and you get the results observed. So it isn't all in the details about the interaction - there's something going on that applies rather well in general to all quantum mechanical interactions.
To sum up, "observation changest things" is not a "mystification," but rather a way to generalize what's going on and develop a theoretical framework (which, incidentally, is quantitatively by far the best verified theory science has ever created).