Uhm... Wrong. It was hugely profitable in a short term for the Spanish who commissioned it.
The spanish made their money by murdering and pillaging the local tribes. I was referring to money made by people being productive (since there are no local tribes to pillage on the moon!) but I should have made that clear. As for the "hospitable environment" argument look at the technology. The early colonies died out because given the technology they had North America was a hostile environment and settling there was beyond their knowledge. Yes the moon is a lot worse but our technology is a lot better.
If you send the neutrino on too weak a power it will face interferences from other neutrinos produced by natural radioactive decay and solar processes
First electron-volts measure energy. Power is energy per unit time i.e. joules per second. Energy is a property of each neutrino - a neutrino does not have a power. Power is a property of a beam of neutrinos and is the mean neutrino energy multiplied by the mean number of neutrinos emitted per second. Worse, your suggestion that neutrinos with millions of electron-volts of energy will be needed to avoid interference with radioactive decay could not be more wrong: radioactive decays emit neutrinos at MeV energies! MeV neutrinos will have very similar energies to those from natural radioactive decays!
But if you want to send your neutrino and to ensure people on the other side of the planet can receive it, you have to send it at least with a power of in the order of millions of electron-volts
Again you are confusing energy and power. There are two ways to detect neutrinos over background: beam intensity and energy. Accelerators generally produce neutrinos with GeV energies (billions of electron-volts). These have some background from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere but give more directional information when detected i.e. you can tell where they came from better than low energy neutrinos so you can greatly reduce any background. Alternatively, if you have enough beam power then you can modulate the beam intensity in the remote detector which will modulate the count rate - you just need to have enough neutrinos to dominate the background. Also you need to bury your detectors to avoid backgrounds from cosmic ray muons.
Are you suggesting that it was a profitable financial enterprise?
No, but neither was Christopher Columbus' first trip. It was what came after that was profitable. It took ~100 years for the first successful colonies and ~350 years after that to have the largest GDP in the world. The US landed on the moon 40 years ago so lets talk in ~400 years time about whether it was a profitable venture.
more salt holds heat better, unless you put it in a sheet or thread - but nobody involved is that dumb
Except that you have to put it in a "thread" (pipe) to pump it to the tower to be heated and back again for storage and you want to have it in a "sheet" (large surface area) to be able to efficiently extract heat from it to generate power. These plants are more complex than that.
While I agree that the ratio of heat loss vs. heat stored diminishes as the total volume increases (assuming a relatively compact storage facility) the total heat loss always increases. Hence there is some point where the total solar output from the plant will balance the heat loss and this will define the absolute maximum mass that the plant can handle (although all will operate will below this point). In addition it is not sufficient to just store the energy - you have to extract it as well so you cannot just have a spherical blob of molten salt - there has to be some heat exchanger in there with a large surface area. So the question really is how much of the earth has sufficiently infrequent cloudy periods that a plant can store enough heat energy to generate power over any cloudy period.
Concentrating solar facilities don't use diffuse light at all. In order to be able to use mirrors to reflect the light, it needs to be the direct-beam portion of the light.
That's exactly what I would expect and so a cloudy period will stop the plant from working if the period is longer than the period they have heat energy stored for.
Actually it varies based on the rate of heat flow from the salt. This is a function of the temperature, insulation and shape of the salt as well as the overall mass. However my question was more related as to whether the mirrors can collect enough light and infrared from a diffuse source to actually provide enough heating power to melt the salt and be useful.
Because these scientists are Special And they shouldn't be subject to economic downturns eh?
In the last year or so the British government spent more money bailing out the banks that it has spent on science in the last 1,000 years. Now just pause and think about that for a second. Think about the world 1,000 years ago and where we are today because that difference is due primarily to science. If governments can blow more than 1,000 years worth of their science budget to bail out the very people whose greed created the economic down turn then you might think that they could find the relatively meagre pittance required to continue a program which has transformed our society.
...of course this may be part of the problem: it was far easier for those in power to deal with us troublesome peasants in the dark ages!
Solar power towers can store energy efficiently in molten salt and achieve continuous output.
True but how well do they work on a cloudy day? Solar cells will still produce power - albeit less - on a cloudy day. It seems unlikely that this is the case for solar towers.
That is exactly the problem with our university system in the U.S. and evidently other countries as well.
I agree with what you say about university - at that level you should be allowed to focus on a single subject without distractions which, generally, is exactly what happens in the UK (or at least used to). However what I was talking about was at school. O' levels were exams taken at the age of 16 in secondary school. I think that it is entirely appropriate that education at this level should be a lot broader because you need to have a grounding in many subjects if for no other reason than to be able to decide which ones you like.
So I would argue that doing calculus and Shakespeare (and more besides) up to 16 is a good thing and the argument that things like simple calculus are too hard for someone going on to study for an English degree is just wrong. For years the British system used to require it and it worked extremely well. Now standards have fallen considerably - even when I was at school you could see that previous years' exam papers were noticeably more challenging than ours - and calculus us no longer required of all university candidates although they all still have to study Shakespeare!
Mathematics is the language used to describe how the world around you works.
I'd go further. It used to be that in the UK everyone going to university had to have a maths O'level which required _simple_ calculus. After all if I had to study Shakespeare before I could do a physics degree shouldn't those studying english study the basic maths developed by Newton to describe the same world that Shakespeare described with his plays?
Even if you swallow some balls, but not at once, you will need to go to the surgery.
Correct - you will need surgery but nobody has yet died. However if you look at the stats for accidental poisonings in the US you will see that there are 41,592 deaths every year. 91% of these are due to drugs which leaves 3,473 deaths every year due to non-drug related poisonings. It is not clear how many of these are due to kids swallowing household chemicals but you have to wonder why there is any need to ban something over 12 surgeries and zero deaths given the number of actual deaths from swallowing things.
Banning the sales of ammo would be unconstitutional, regardless of any statistic.
While that illustrates how broken the US constitution is what about bleach or any one of a number of other household products which are lethal if swallowed? If adults are going to let kids play with dangerous items those kids are at risk of serious injury or death. So, to be consistent, either you have to accept that or you have to ban from sale any product (that you legally can) that may harm someone if swallowed.
it could still be just a random once in a 100M yr event
The Earth's climate is known not to be stable on that sort of timescale, and in fact even on far shorter timescales (e.g. Ice Ages). Hence there is no practical way of knowing whether such an event is a one-off fluke or an indication of a change in the climate. The possibility is to hope the climate remains stable for the next 1,000+ years and then to see whether it occurs again...but the wait will be a long one! It's probably safe to say that once in a 100 MYr events are unlikely to occur twice in a millenium.
One of the reasons to believe they have found the Higgs boson and not some other particle is that the decay relative rates for each type of decay are pretty close to what the theory suggests.
Actually that is not really true because we do not have enough statistics to measure these rates with any accuracy. In fact the "most likely" value for diphoton rates for both ATLAS and CMS are quite a bit higher than the Standard Model predicts but the accuracy is sufficiently low that they are not yet inconsistent with the SM values. So really the rate measurements are currently far too inaccurate to have any idea whether this is a Higgs boson or not but things are improving rapidly as we gain statistics.
What is far more important at the moment are the decay channel observations. Since it decays into photons, W and Z bosons we know it must be either a spin-0 or spin-2 particle and it cannot be a fermion (spin-0.5). The Higgs should be spin-0 so this is consistent but not conclusive. Essentially it decays into the particles it should do and it _potentially_ has the correct spin. We can get a more accurate determination of the spin i.e. whether it is spin-0 or spin-2 by looking at the angle between the two leptons (electron or muon) produced in the WW decay channel - expect results from ATLAS and CMS on this soon.
However by the end of the year the rate measurements should be a lot more accurate and things will possibly start to get interesting if the current diphoton rates stay where they are but we end up with less uncertainty on the measurement.
Consider these issues...Lots of people have been killed over all of these.
Yes, but consider why they were killed over these issues. It was generally when an external body imposed their will over a local populace by legislation and/or military might. The Swiss system does not work like that - you change the law by persuading people that they are wrong through education. If you want a non-Swiss example look at slavery. It was abolished in the British Empire through the efforts of people like William Wilberforce who educated the public in the appalling conditions and nature of slavery which resulted in such a widespread condemnation of the practice that it was abolished. In the US only those in the north were convinced with those in the south, who were clearly benefiting from the work of slaves, needing far more convincing. However instead of proceeding more slowly with concerted education and persuasion the issue was forced resulting in a war.
Of course with something like slavery it is not clear which is the best way to go. Proceeding more slowly would have meant that many more slaves would die (and who's to say that even over time the south would have been persuaded?) but the fast route lead to war and the deaths of soldiers. So I certainly do not think that the slower, Swiss, method is the necessarily always better but it would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand as clearly worse.
On the flip side, they didn't have universal suffrage for citizens over 18 until 1971.
Ah, but this is the danger of a true democracy: it gives you what the people want and if a majority are sexist or racist it results in laws which are likewise. However in many ways I think the Swiss system gets it right - they got proper equality for women once a majority of the voting population had been properly educated and brought up to realize that sexism is wrong. While this is slower that what happened elsewhere in the west it makes for a far happier, better functioning society. You have to solve bigotry by education and not by legislation which is the right way to do it. The result is that when they do update their laws they really do have the support of a majority of the population and so are really effective. Unlike the US where many people strongly disagree with some anti-discrimination laws resulting in a backlash where people push back against the law and either ignore it or act to the precise letter, and not intent, of it.
I know that you let the politicians make many of the decisions but I think that the ability to overrule those decisions means that they keep far more in line with what the people want and do not get sidelined by the special interest groups as much as they do in the US and, to some extent, the UK.
That sort of democracy can quickly turn into chaos and then anarchy.
You might think that yet Switzerland has a democratic system which is the closest I have seen to the "everyone votes on everything" idea and yet is an incredibly stable country. I think part of the reason for this is that people get to decide things at the local level which makes for strong communities since they have a sense of control. Certainly you don't seem to get the usual sense of powerlessness caused by the politicians listening to rich special interest groups and trampling all over society in their hurry to get that money.
The key to answering this is to look back 50-100 years. In 1912 the atom was a brand new discovery and quantum mechanics was still being figured out. At the time these were highly esoteric and abstract concepts. Applying that knowledge 50 years later was what made the transistor possible and hence gave rise to our modern IT infrastructure. But absolutely none of that was predictable when the discoveries were being made!
Particle detectors and physics of 50 years ago are now revolutionising medicine as doctor use them to see what is happening in the human body without cutting it open. So, while we cannot predict what use this discovery will be put to eventually, what we can say is that similar, equally abstract discoveries, in the past have helped to revolutionise our society. Our economy is built on using and applying basic science in ever more complex and wonderful ways. So if we want to keep this process running we had better keep fuelling it with new, fundamental science for it to learn and apply.
Particle physics data is not open because of the money, time and effort needed to analyse it. First data would never be released until first analysed by the collaboration - there is no way that you are going to get someone working on building and operating the detector without the reward of being among the first to analyse that data. We are physicists, not engineers.
Secondly analysing the data is a huge effort. You have to understand many varied and subtle detector effects related to how the detector was constructed. The not only requires a huge effort to pin the effects down but also a very detailed knowledge of the detector. It is highly unlikely that anyone who has not worked on the detector will be able to do this well or at least without considerable extra work.
Then there is the cost of storing and making available the petabytes of data an experiment like ATLAS generates each year. Who is going to pay for the network, disks, servers etc to make this all available not to mention the development of a simple event format and the processing needed to generate and fill it. Every pound/franc/dollar spent on this is one less to spend on the research itself.
Finally some experiments, like D0, have already made their data available after analysis which is the only time it is understood well enough to be converted to a simple format. The number of visitors to the website was in the single digits over a period of a year despite it being advertised to theorists.
Launching generally either involves either being hit with a bottle of champagne so hard that it breaks and then being slide down a ramp into the sea or being strapped to a rocket and blasted into orbit. So, speaking as a "higgs boson scientist" so, unless this party is being sponsored by SpaceX, I think I'll pass.
Suicidally? Being attracted to something known to shorten your lifespan doesn't mean you're suicidal.
It depends on the circumstances. In this case I would argue that it is suicidal because the parasite wants the mice to get eaten by the cat hence the intended outcome of the behaviour is for the mouse to kill itself (albeit at the parasite's urging). In the case of humans the tendency to overeat was a result of our stoneage heritage when food was scarce and so eating as much as possible when it was available was a survival trait. Now it might be harmful but because the original "intention" of the trait is to increase survival it is the opposite of suicidal. We just need to wait for evolution to catch up with our new era of abundant food.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm... Wrong. It was hugely profitable in a short term for the Spanish who commissioned it.
The spanish made their money by murdering and pillaging the local tribes. I was referring to money made by people being productive (since there are no local tribes to pillage on the moon!) but I should have made that clear. As for the "hospitable environment" argument look at the technology. The early colonies died out because given the technology they had North America was a hostile environment and settling there was beyond their knowledge. Yes the moon is a lot worse but our technology is a lot better.
If you send the neutrino on too weak a power it will face interferences from other neutrinos produced by natural radioactive decay and solar processes
First electron-volts measure energy. Power is energy per unit time i.e. joules per second. Energy is a property of each neutrino - a neutrino does not have a power. Power is a property of a beam of neutrinos and is the mean neutrino energy multiplied by the mean number of neutrinos emitted per second. Worse, your suggestion that neutrinos with millions of electron-volts of energy will be needed to avoid interference with radioactive decay could not be more wrong: radioactive decays emit neutrinos at MeV energies! MeV neutrinos will have very similar energies to those from natural radioactive decays!
But if you want to send your neutrino and to ensure people on the other side of the planet can receive it, you have to send it at least with a power of in the order of millions of electron-volts
Again you are confusing energy and power. There are two ways to detect neutrinos over background: beam intensity and energy. Accelerators generally produce neutrinos with GeV energies (billions of electron-volts). These have some background from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere but give more directional information when detected i.e. you can tell where they came from better than low energy neutrinos so you can greatly reduce any background. Alternatively, if you have enough beam power then you can modulate the beam intensity in the remote detector which will modulate the count rate - you just need to have enough neutrinos to dominate the background. Also you need to bury your detectors to avoid backgrounds from cosmic ray muons.
Are you suggesting that it was a profitable financial enterprise?
No, but neither was Christopher Columbus' first trip. It was what came after that was profitable. It took ~100 years for the first successful colonies and ~350 years after that to have the largest GDP in the world. The US landed on the moon 40 years ago so lets talk in ~400 years time about whether it was a profitable venture.
more salt holds heat better, unless you put it in a sheet or thread - but nobody involved is that dumb
Except that you have to put it in a "thread" (pipe) to pump it to the tower to be heated and back again for storage and you want to have it in a "sheet" (large surface area) to be able to efficiently extract heat from it to generate power. These plants are more complex than that.
While I agree that the ratio of heat loss vs. heat stored diminishes as the total volume increases (assuming a relatively compact storage facility) the total heat loss always increases. Hence there is some point where the total solar output from the plant will balance the heat loss and this will define the absolute maximum mass that the plant can handle (although all will operate will below this point). In addition it is not sufficient to just store the energy - you have to extract it as well so you cannot just have a spherical blob of molten salt - there has to be some heat exchanger in there with a large surface area. So the question really is how much of the earth has sufficiently infrequent cloudy periods that a plant can store enough heat energy to generate power over any cloudy period.
Concentrating solar facilities don't use diffuse light at all. In order to be able to use mirrors to reflect the light, it needs to be the direct-beam portion of the light.
That's exactly what I would expect and so a cloudy period will stop the plant from working if the period is longer than the period they have heat energy stored for.
varies based on the size of the pool of salt.
Actually it varies based on the rate of heat flow from the salt. This is a function of the temperature, insulation and shape of the salt as well as the overall mass. However my question was more related as to whether the mirrors can collect enough light and infrared from a diffuse source to actually provide enough heating power to melt the salt and be useful.
Because these scientists are Special And they shouldn't be subject to economic downturns eh?
In the last year or so the British government spent more money bailing out the banks that it has spent on science in the last 1,000 years. Now just pause and think about that for a second. Think about the world 1,000 years ago and where we are today because that difference is due primarily to science. If governments can blow more than 1,000 years worth of their science budget to bail out the very people whose greed created the economic down turn then you might think that they could find the relatively meagre pittance required to continue a program which has transformed our society.
...of course this may be part of the problem: it was far easier for those in power to deal with us troublesome peasants in the dark ages!
Solar power towers can store energy efficiently in molten salt and achieve continuous output.
True but how well do they work on a cloudy day? Solar cells will still produce power - albeit less - on a cloudy day. It seems unlikely that this is the case for solar towers.
That is exactly the problem with our university system in the U.S. and evidently other countries as well.
I agree with what you say about university - at that level you should be allowed to focus on a single subject without distractions which, generally, is exactly what happens in the UK (or at least used to). However what I was talking about was at school. O' levels were exams taken at the age of 16 in secondary school. I think that it is entirely appropriate that education at this level should be a lot broader because you need to have a grounding in many subjects if for no other reason than to be able to decide which ones you like.
So I would argue that doing calculus and Shakespeare (and more besides) up to 16 is a good thing and the argument that things like simple calculus are too hard for someone going on to study for an English degree is just wrong. For years the British system used to require it and it worked extremely well. Now standards have fallen considerably - even when I was at school you could see that previous years' exam papers were noticeably more challenging than ours - and calculus us no longer required of all university candidates although they all still have to study Shakespeare!
Mathematics is the language used to describe how the world around you works.
I'd go further. It used to be that in the UK everyone going to university had to have a maths O'level which required _simple_ calculus. After all if I had to study Shakespeare before I could do a physics degree shouldn't those studying english study the basic maths developed by Newton to describe the same world that Shakespeare described with his plays?
Even if you swallow some balls, but not at once, you will need to go to the surgery.
Correct - you will need surgery but nobody has yet died. However if you look at the stats for accidental poisonings in the US you will see that there are 41,592 deaths every year. 91% of these are due to drugs which leaves 3,473 deaths every year due to non-drug related poisonings. It is not clear how many of these are due to kids swallowing household chemicals but you have to wonder why there is any need to ban something over 12 surgeries and zero deaths given the number of actual deaths from swallowing things.
Banning the sales of ammo would be unconstitutional, regardless of any statistic.
While that illustrates how broken the US constitution is what about bleach or any one of a number of other household products which are lethal if swallowed? If adults are going to let kids play with dangerous items those kids are at risk of serious injury or death. So, to be consistent, either you have to accept that or you have to ban from sale any product (that you legally can) that may harm someone if swallowed.
But I thought male Englishmen were so womanly that they have periods too.
No, you are thinking of the female Englishmen. ;-)
it could still be just a random once in a 100M yr event
The Earth's climate is known not to be stable on that sort of timescale, and in fact even on far shorter timescales (e.g. Ice Ages). Hence there is no practical way of knowing whether such an event is a one-off fluke or an indication of a change in the climate. The possibility is to hope the climate remains stable for the next 1,000+ years and then to see whether it occurs again...but the wait will be a long one! It's probably safe to say that once in a 100 MYr events are unlikely to occur twice in a millenium.
Using periods is simply properly using the English language.
Not quite, if you are properly using the English language (and not American) you can only use periods to identify female psychopaths.
Remember when the SyFy channel actually showed SciFi programming?
Yes - that was when it was called the SciFi channel. Now it's called SyFy and shows iffy programming...so they only got a couple of letters wrong.
One of the reasons to believe they have found the Higgs boson and not some other particle is that the decay relative rates for each type of decay are pretty close to what the theory suggests.
Actually that is not really true because we do not have enough statistics to measure these rates with any accuracy. In fact the "most likely" value for diphoton rates for both ATLAS and CMS are quite a bit higher than the Standard Model predicts but the accuracy is sufficiently low that they are not yet inconsistent with the SM values. So really the rate measurements are currently far too inaccurate to have any idea whether this is a Higgs boson or not but things are improving rapidly as we gain statistics.
What is far more important at the moment are the decay channel observations. Since it decays into photons, W and Z bosons we know it must be either a spin-0 or spin-2 particle and it cannot be a fermion (spin-0.5). The Higgs should be spin-0 so this is consistent but not conclusive. Essentially it decays into the particles it should do and it _potentially_ has the correct spin. We can get a more accurate determination of the spin i.e. whether it is spin-0 or spin-2 by looking at the angle between the two leptons (electron or muon) produced in the WW decay channel - expect results from ATLAS and CMS on this soon.
However by the end of the year the rate measurements should be a lot more accurate and things will possibly start to get interesting if the current diphoton rates stay where they are but we end up with less uncertainty on the measurement.
Consider these issues...Lots of people have been killed over all of these.
Yes, but consider why they were killed over these issues. It was generally when an external body imposed their will over a local populace by legislation and/or military might. The Swiss system does not work like that - you change the law by persuading people that they are wrong through education. If you want a non-Swiss example look at slavery. It was abolished in the British Empire through the efforts of people like William Wilberforce who educated the public in the appalling conditions and nature of slavery which resulted in such a widespread condemnation of the practice that it was abolished. In the US only those in the north were convinced with those in the south, who were clearly benefiting from the work of slaves, needing far more convincing. However instead of proceeding more slowly with concerted education and persuasion the issue was forced resulting in a war.
Of course with something like slavery it is not clear which is the best way to go. Proceeding more slowly would have meant that many more slaves would die (and who's to say that even over time the south would have been persuaded?) but the fast route lead to war and the deaths of soldiers. So I certainly do not think that the slower, Swiss, method is the necessarily always better but it would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand as clearly worse.
On the flip side, they didn't have universal suffrage for citizens over 18 until 1971.
Ah, but this is the danger of a true democracy: it gives you what the people want and if a majority are sexist or racist it results in laws which are likewise. However in many ways I think the Swiss system gets it right - they got proper equality for women once a majority of the voting population had been properly educated and brought up to realize that sexism is wrong. While this is slower that what happened elsewhere in the west it makes for a far happier, better functioning society. You have to solve bigotry by education and not by legislation which is the right way to do it. The result is that when they do update their laws they really do have the support of a majority of the population and so are really effective. Unlike the US where many people strongly disagree with some anti-discrimination laws resulting in a backlash where people push back against the law and either ignore it or act to the precise letter, and not intent, of it.
I know that you let the politicians make many of the decisions but I think that the ability to overrule those decisions means that they keep far more in line with what the people want and do not get sidelined by the special interest groups as much as they do in the US and, to some extent, the UK.
That sort of democracy can quickly turn into chaos and then anarchy.
You might think that yet Switzerland has a democratic system which is the closest I have seen to the "everyone votes on everything" idea and yet is an incredibly stable country. I think part of the reason for this is that people get to decide things at the local level which makes for strong communities since they have a sense of control. Certainly you don't seem to get the usual sense of powerlessness caused by the politicians listening to rich special interest groups and trampling all over society in their hurry to get that money.
The key to answering this is to look back 50-100 years. In 1912 the atom was a brand new discovery and quantum mechanics was still being figured out. At the time these were highly esoteric and abstract concepts. Applying that knowledge 50 years later was what made the transistor possible and hence gave rise to our modern IT infrastructure. But absolutely none of that was predictable when the discoveries were being made!
Particle detectors and physics of 50 years ago are now revolutionising medicine as doctor use them to see what is happening in the human body without cutting it open. So, while we cannot predict what use this discovery will be put to eventually, what we can say is that similar, equally abstract discoveries, in the past have helped to revolutionise our society. Our economy is built on using and applying basic science in ever more complex and wonderful ways. So if we want to keep this process running we had better keep fuelling it with new, fundamental science for it to learn and apply.
Particle physics data is not open because of the money, time and effort needed to analyse it. First data would never be released until first analysed by the collaboration - there is no way that you are going to get someone working on building and operating the detector without the reward of being among the first to analyse that data. We are physicists, not engineers.
Secondly analysing the data is a huge effort. You have to understand many varied and subtle detector effects related to how the detector was constructed. The not only requires a huge effort to pin the effects down but also a very detailed knowledge of the detector. It is highly unlikely that anyone who has not worked on the detector will be able to do this well or at least without considerable extra work.
Then there is the cost of storing and making available the petabytes of data an experiment like ATLAS generates each year. Who is going to pay for the network, disks, servers etc to make this all available not to mention the development of a simple event format and the processing needed to generate and fill it. Every pound/franc/dollar spent on this is one less to spend on the research itself.
Finally some experiments, like D0, have already made their data available after analysis which is the only time it is understood well enough to be converted to a simple format. The number of visitors to the website was in the single digits over a period of a year despite it being advertised to theorists.
Higgs Boson Scientists Launch Party
Launching generally either involves either being hit with a bottle of champagne so hard that it breaks and then being slide down a ramp into the sea or being strapped to a rocket and blasted into orbit. So, speaking as a "higgs boson scientist" so, unless this party is being sponsored by SpaceX, I think I'll pass.
Suicidally? Being attracted to something known to shorten your lifespan doesn't mean you're suicidal.
It depends on the circumstances. In this case I would argue that it is suicidal because the parasite wants the mice to get eaten by the cat hence the intended outcome of the behaviour is for the mouse to kill itself (albeit at the parasite's urging). In the case of humans the tendency to overeat was a result of our stoneage heritage when food was scarce and so eating as much as possible when it was available was a survival trait. Now it might be harmful but because the original "intention" of the trait is to increase survival it is the opposite of suicidal. We just need to wait for evolution to catch up with our new era of abundant food.