In addition to this: IMHO, a study that finds no increased accident rates when comparing drunk driving with normal driving has some serious design errors.
Sorry but that is highly unscientific! Just because the data do not agree with your preconceived correct answer is not a reason to disregard the data. It would be a reason to look closely at the data and the test setup to see whether there was a problem but, given that the alcohol limit was the legally maximum amount and that the conditions were controlled I see no reason to doubt the data.
The study showed that alcohol made things worse but, if the conditions were not sufficient to mean that the degradation in performance was sufficient to convert a near miss into an accident why should the accident rate have increased? After all if driving at the legal maximum did significantly increase the accident rate under normal conditions then clearly it would mean the limit is too high.
That was my understanding too - I'm a physicist not a mathematician though. However the article states that the Goldbach conjecture is:
every integer can be expressed as the sum of two primes
but this seems trivially easy to disprove. There is only one even prime, 2, so if I take an odd integer I have to construct it from the sum of an even and an odd number hence if N-2 is not a prime number Goldbach (as stated) cannot be correct. Now consider '11': since 9 is not a prime number and '2' is the only even prime this cannot hold true for all integers, only even integers which are constructed from the sum of two odd numbers.
So is the article wrong? Should Goldbach actually be limited to 'every even integer' or does the mistake lie somewhere else?
Let me know when the copy the almost virus and malware free feature offered by KDE/Linux - it's not quite the same as the free virus and malware feature they seem to have in the current versions of Windows.
Only if you take the original latin meaning of the word meaning "knowledge". Since you trust Wikipedia I'm surprised that you did not look up science itself, and I quote from the article:
In modern use, "science" more often refers to a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself. It is "often treated as synonymous with ‘natural and physical science’...
Clearly this is not economics or indeed any of the social sciences where social critique and symbolic interpretation are acceptable tools to use - something that is an anathema to what the vast majority of people would undersand when you say "science". Medicine is closer to but, in case you are unaware of what natural science is I quote again from the relevant Wikipedia article:
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using scientific methods.
Medicine applies science, so yes technically using the ancient definition of the word it is a "science" but using the definition of the word that most people (though clearly not you) use it is not science. As an example: if a doctor studies the effects of Magic Pill A on patients with a disease and finds that it cures them then he is a huge success medically because the aim of medicine is to cure people. Scientifically he would be far less of a success because he does not know why Magic Pill A cures people.
The scientist is interested in understanding how and why things behave the way they do. Some medics are indeed scientists because in order to develop the best way to cure people they want to understand how something works but in many cases the focus is on the result rather than the understanding which is not science in the modern, natural science, meaning of the word.
That you think your attempt at pedantry
Who is the pedant? The person using the modern, generally accepted interpretation of the word or someone insisting on the ancient dictionary definition? My apologies if I inadvertently caused the modern world to intrude on you but I had not realized that Slashdot posts were available in ancient Greece....still perhaps you have managed to learn something!
It it increases by the same factor of 7.57 over three years then in under 21 years you will all have renounced your US citizenship. Of course that is exceeding unlikely to happen but this is why you need to be concerned about large factor increases even when the numbers are small because they can grow very fast - although I don't see any reason to suspect that such a huge growth factor will be maintained.
You forgot to mention that it is yet another piece of published work that suffers from positive bias...
Nevermind that what about the inaccuracies? Economics is not a science and 'biomedical research' (where the article claims is where the biggest problems lie) and epidemiology are medicine. Perhaps the solution is to educate people as to what science is because it is not defined as any subject which publishes research papers containing numbers and/or long sounding names.
Drink-driving is bad and must be placed under strict limits but it is by no means the only impairment to driving. The impairment from driving while using even a handsfree mobile is comparable to a 0.08 BAC. Having an alcohol limit 4 times lower that the limit which causes the same impairment as handsfree mobile use is inconsistent unless you ban them as well. So before getting on your high moral horse perhaps you could let us know why Norway has not banned handsfree mobiles? Perhaps because Norwegians would object strongly to that whereas, due to the massive taxes on alcohol, people are more willing to let that be banned because it affects them less?
Oh - and if you look at the stats you will see that Norway has a lower accident death rate than almost all the EU from all causes and does not report separate drink/driving stats. So the reason you have fewer road deaths has nothing to do with your drink-driving legislation and probably far more to do with population density.
Especially with this year being the 100th anniversary of the Titanic incident, where a large number of the fatalities were actually due to DHMO poisioning
No, most deaths on the Titanic were most likely due to hypothermia due to the cold water. Those that got hit on the head or trapped or were too infirm to stay afloat long enough for hypothermia to get them and so drowned died because their lungs could not extract oxygen from water. I am guessing that it is a very safe bet that nobody died from drinking too much water which is how you die of DHMO poisoning.
No, the only plan I can come up with is to sell your patent to a troll
How about just getting rid of software patents? No lawyers, no courts, can't stop innovative startups etc. Large corporations work around the patents to implement the same functionality in any case (or just ignore them if they think they can out spend and crush you). Since they fail so spectacularly in their stated aims unless we feel a need to provide jobs for lawyers it's clear they should simply not exist.
What exactly justified it to be called super-Earth?
Earth-like but significantly bigger than earth. The planet in question is 8 times the mass of Earth with twice the radius so roughly the same density. It might only be a factor of 8 in mass but if you saw a person with 8 times the average mass, say ~600kg, you'd certainly call them super-sized! As for temperature Venus is hotter than Earth but with a surface temperature of 460C it's decidedly nippy compared to the planet in question which is just over 1700C.
from that they know what 90% of case load is going to be for some doctors
This is my point though if doctors are going to choose to use the "90% is good enough" model and not examine to catch the other 10% of cases then we should replace them by a computer because that can do the job just as well. Then, just as with a doctor, if the computer-based common diagnosis is wrong you go to a doctor who does examine you. The only disadvantage is that you can easily game a computer by selecting the right options to get the drug you desire so if people decide that they need drug X e.g. antibiotics for a cold (which is silly because they do not work on viruses) they will now be able to go to the auto-dispenser and select the right symptoms to get it.
Well technically they should because you should be examined by a professional with some experience to make sure that the symptoms due to something "simple" and not something else. However one of the rare times I went to a doctor (in Canada though) I described the symptoms and he was so rushed he just gave me a prescription without examining me. Statistically it probably makes sense - treat the likely common causes and if that doesn't work then examine. However, if doctors are going to operate this way (and I do not think that they should) then why not replace them with a computer? It will make no difference to the level of care and will be much more convenient. If the AMA or Canadian equivalent want to push back against it then great - but that will mean that they must guarantee to do a better job than a computer - that means proper examinations and not being diagnosed from a description of the symptoms.
True but, as communication technology has improved the rise and fall of empires has speeded up considerably. The Roman empire took several centuries to collapse, the British empire took a few decades. If that trend carries on one day you may wake up to the new Slashdotian empire in the morning, watch it grow over lunchtime and it will have collapsed and disappeared in time for tea.
Being a decent member of society is not a prerequisite to being a CEO.
Sad, but probably true. However I'd use the same rule I do with politicians: it is almost inevitable that many are going to lie and cheat for their own advantage but they should at least be intelligent enough to be able to hide it. At least with this combination you know that you have politicians that have a sense of what ethical (even if they do not behave that way themselves) and are competent which is probably the best we can hope for. If they keep getting caught with their hands in the till they are clearly both dishonest AND incompetent which is worse.
Really? If he thinks it is acceptable to lie to make himself look better then on his CV then, were I a Yahoo! stock holder, I would be concerned that he might also think it acceptable to lie to make the company's bottom line (and by extension himself) look better. In many ways the ethical behaviour of the CEO is far more important than those in the rest of the company - if the sandwich guy decides to behave unethically you risk losing a few $100 of sandwiches. If the CEO behaves unethically you can lose everything.
Actually I'd say that here the problem is more to do with lawyers than politicians. Even if you had good politicians lawyers are getting so good at finding and exploiting loop holes that you would be in a constant cycle of patch followed by crack as lawyers attempt to "jailbreak" a company's profits into low tax countries.
If it happens in adults, isn't it also likely to happen in kids? They may be hard-headed at times, but still...
Yes but does it happen in adults? An alternative conclusion to that study - given the available information - is that professional football players are not as good at memory, planning etc. compared to elite non-contact sport athletes. A far better control group would have been young football players who are new to the sport because different sports select different traits.
You are misusing logic. If we went by that standard, nothing would be responsible for anything. It is reasonable to assume that thousands of head-on collisions would damage the brain.
That might be a reasonable assumption but, assuming we are talking about American football here, another reasonable assumption is that it attracts people with more violent natures who may already have suffered brain damage due to trauma before they started playing. To really show that American Football causes brain damage you need to show that players start without brain damage and develop it while playing and that there is an established mechanism by which this occurs. There is an established mechanism but, as far as I can tell, no evidence of the initial condition of players. Without both what you have is a suggestion that there might be a relation but not evidence of it.
It would immediately evaporate (due to insufficient mass to hold itself together) and explode!
Not quite - it evaporates due to quantum effects (Hawking radiation) and not because its mass is insufficient to hold itself together - if that were the case it would never form in the first place.
Possibly even with enough force to damage the detectors, if it was close enough.
Even if we created a BH with the entire energy of one p-p collision the maximum energy involved is 8 TeV. In more common units this is approx. 1.3 millionths of a joule (i.e. 1.3 micro-joules) so the explosion is hardly big! Further more, since matter is mainly empty space, the particles produced actually penetrate into the detector to quite some distance and so do not produce a force but do produce heating and local ionization. So damage to detectors is not from a 'force' but from getting too hot or from radiation damage....and if we were producing so many BHs that this was an issue we would have definitely noticed that by now!
The mass of the BH is determined by the invariant mass of the system which forms it, not the invariant mass of the particles which make up that system. So for the current 8 TeV centre of mass energy we could create BHs up to 8 TeV/c2 in mass i.e. ~8,000 times the mass of a single proton (although, even if possible to make a BH with that energy, it is highly unlikely that the parts of the proton which collide will carry almost all the energy of the proton).
It's pronounced "chi b star" and the discovery was by the CMS collaboration. The analysis was done by physicists from Zurich (apparently including one of my former postdocs) but they require data generated by the experiment so typically we credit the experiment. The discovery is of a new bound state of 3-quarks - not a new fundamental particle - so while interesting and definitely worthwhile it is not particularly exciting.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to this: IMHO, a study that finds no increased accident rates when comparing drunk driving with normal driving has some serious design errors.
Sorry but that is highly unscientific! Just because the data do not agree with your preconceived correct answer is not a reason to disregard the data. It would be a reason to look closely at the data and the test setup to see whether there was a problem but, given that the alcohol limit was the legally maximum amount and that the conditions were controlled I see no reason to doubt the data.
The study showed that alcohol made things worse but, if the conditions were not sufficient to mean that the degradation in performance was sufficient to convert a near miss into an accident why should the accident rate have increased? After all if driving at the legal maximum did significantly increase the accident rate under normal conditions then clearly it would mean the limit is too high.
every integer can be expressed as the sum of two primes
but this seems trivially easy to disprove. There is only one even prime, 2, so if I take an odd integer I have to construct it from the sum of an even and an odd number hence if N-2 is not a prime number Goldbach (as stated) cannot be correct. Now consider '11': since 9 is not a prime number and '2' is the only even prime this cannot hold true for all integers, only even integers which are constructed from the sum of two odd numbers.
So is the article wrong? Should Goldbach actually be limited to 'every even integer' or does the mistake lie somewhere else?
It sounds like they want to copy KDE.
Let me know when the copy the almost virus and malware free feature offered by KDE/Linux - it's not quite the same as the free virus and malware feature they seem to have in the current versions of Windows.
Wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics [wikipedia.org]
Only if you take the original latin meaning of the word meaning "knowledge". Since you trust Wikipedia I'm surprised that you did not look up science itself, and I quote from the article:
In modern use, "science" more often refers to a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself. It is "often treated as synonymous with ‘natural and physical science’...
Clearly this is not economics or indeed any of the social sciences where social critique and symbolic interpretation are acceptable tools to use - something that is an anathema to what the vast majority of people would undersand when you say "science". Medicine is closer to but, in case you are unaware of what natural science is I quote again from the relevant Wikipedia article:
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using scientific methods.
Medicine applies science, so yes technically using the ancient definition of the word it is a "science" but using the definition of the word that most people (though clearly not you) use it is not science. As an example: if a doctor studies the effects of Magic Pill A on patients with a disease and finds that it cures them then he is a huge success medically because the aim of medicine is to cure people. Scientifically he would be far less of a success because he does not know why Magic Pill A cures people.
The scientist is interested in understanding how and why things behave the way they do. Some medics are indeed scientists because in order to develop the best way to cure people they want to understand how something works but in many cases the focus is on the result rather than the understanding which is not science in the modern, natural science, meaning of the word.
That you think your attempt at pedantry
Who is the pedant? The person using the modern, generally accepted interpretation of the word or someone insisting on the ancient dictionary definition? My apologies if I inadvertently caused the modern world to intrude on you but I had not realized that Slashdot posts were available in ancient Greece....still perhaps you have managed to learn something!
So up from approximately 0% to approximately 0%?
It it increases by the same factor of 7.57 over three years then in under 21 years you will all have renounced your US citizenship. Of course that is exceeding unlikely to happen but this is why you need to be concerned about large factor increases even when the numbers are small because they can grow very fast - although I don't see any reason to suspect that such a huge growth factor will be maintained.
You forgot to mention that it is yet another piece of published work that suffers from positive bias...
Nevermind that what about the inaccuracies? Economics is not a science and 'biomedical research' (where the article claims is where the biggest problems lie) and epidemiology are medicine. Perhaps the solution is to educate people as to what science is because it is not defined as any subject which publishes research papers containing numbers and/or long sounding names.
Drink-driving is bad and must be placed under strict limits but it is by no means the only impairment to driving. The impairment from driving while using even a handsfree mobile is comparable to a 0.08 BAC. Having an alcohol limit 4 times lower that the limit which causes the same impairment as handsfree mobile use is inconsistent unless you ban them as well. So before getting on your high moral horse perhaps you could let us know why Norway has not banned handsfree mobiles? Perhaps because Norwegians would object strongly to that whereas, due to the massive taxes on alcohol, people are more willing to let that be banned because it affects them less?
Oh - and if you look at the stats you will see that Norway has a lower accident death rate than almost all the EU from all causes and does not report separate drink/driving stats. So the reason you have fewer road deaths has nothing to do with your drink-driving legislation and probably far more to do with population density.
Especially with this year being the 100th anniversary of the Titanic incident, where a large number of the fatalities were actually due to DHMO poisioning
No, most deaths on the Titanic were most likely due to hypothermia due to the cold water. Those that got hit on the head or trapped or were too infirm to stay afloat long enough for hypothermia to get them and so drowned died because their lungs could not extract oxygen from water. I am guessing that it is a very safe bet that nobody died from drinking too much water which is how you die of DHMO poisoning.
No, the only plan I can come up with is to sell your patent to a troll
How about just getting rid of software patents? No lawyers, no courts, can't stop innovative startups etc. Large corporations work around the patents to implement the same functionality in any case (or just ignore them if they think they can out spend and crush you). Since they fail so spectacularly in their stated aims unless we feel a need to provide jobs for lawyers it's clear they should simply not exist.
What exactly justified it to be called super-Earth?
Earth-like but significantly bigger than earth. The planet in question is 8 times the mass of Earth with twice the radius so roughly the same density. It might only be a factor of 8 in mass but if you saw a person with 8 times the average mass, say ~600kg, you'd certainly call them super-sized! As for temperature Venus is hotter than Earth but with a surface temperature of 460C it's decidedly nippy compared to the planet in question which is just over 1700C.
from that they know what 90% of case load is going to be for some doctors
This is my point though if doctors are going to choose to use the "90% is good enough" model and not examine to catch the other 10% of cases then we should replace them by a computer because that can do the job just as well. Then, just as with a doctor, if the computer-based common diagnosis is wrong you go to a doctor who does examine you. The only disadvantage is that you can easily game a computer by selecting the right options to get the drug you desire so if people decide that they need drug X e.g. antibiotics for a cold (which is silly because they do not work on viruses) they will now be able to go to the auto-dispenser and select the right symptoms to get it.
Well technically they should because you should be examined by a professional with some experience to make sure that the symptoms due to something "simple" and not something else. However one of the rare times I went to a doctor (in Canada though) I described the symptoms and he was so rushed he just gave me a prescription without examining me. Statistically it probably makes sense - treat the likely common causes and if that doesn't work then examine. However, if doctors are going to operate this way (and I do not think that they should) then why not replace them with a computer? It will make no difference to the level of care and will be much more convenient. If the AMA or Canadian equivalent want to push back against it then great - but that will mean that they must guarantee to do a better job than a computer - that means proper examinations and not being diagnosed from a description of the symptoms.
Rome wasn't burnt in a day, either.
True but, as communication technology has improved the rise and fall of empires has speeded up considerably. The Roman empire took several centuries to collapse, the British empire took a few decades. If that trend carries on one day you may wake up to the new Slashdotian empire in the morning, watch it grow over lunchtime and it will have collapsed and disappeared in time for tea.
Being a decent member of society is not a prerequisite to being a CEO.
Sad, but probably true. However I'd use the same rule I do with politicians: it is almost inevitable that many are going to lie and cheat for their own advantage but they should at least be intelligent enough to be able to hide it. At least with this combination you know that you have politicians that have a sense of what ethical (even if they do not behave that way themselves) and are competent which is probably the best we can hope for. If they keep getting caught with their hands in the till they are clearly both dishonest AND incompetent which is worse.
It depends on WHEN he lied.
Really? If he thinks it is acceptable to lie to make himself look better then on his CV then, were I a Yahoo! stock holder, I would be concerned that he might also think it acceptable to lie to make the company's bottom line (and by extension himself) look better. In many ways the ethical behaviour of the CEO is far more important than those in the rest of the company - if the sandwich guy decides to behave unethically you risk losing a few $100 of sandwiches. If the CEO behaves unethically you can lose everything.
The Web over Internet is a true cognition multiplier.
Very true, the only problem is that the multiplicative factor is highly variable and in many cases can be much less than 1.0.
Actually I'd say that here the problem is more to do with lawyers than politicians. Even if you had good politicians lawyers are getting so good at finding and exploiting loop holes that you would be in a constant cycle of patch followed by crack as lawyers attempt to "jailbreak" a company's profits into low tax countries.
...creation basically says "god made chickens"...if you decide to take that specific piece of the bible literally...then chickens came first.
Ah but the bible does not say how god made chickens. Suppose he just created an egg and waited for it to hatch?
If it happens in adults, isn't it also likely to happen in kids? They may be hard-headed at times, but still ...
Yes but does it happen in adults? An alternative conclusion to that study - given the available information - is that professional football players are not as good at memory, planning etc. compared to elite non-contact sport athletes. A far better control group would have been young football players who are new to the sport because different sports select different traits.
You are misusing logic. If we went by that standard, nothing would be responsible for anything. It is reasonable to assume that thousands of head-on collisions would damage the brain.
That might be a reasonable assumption but, assuming we are talking about American football here, another reasonable assumption is that it attracts people with more violent natures who may already have suffered brain damage due to trauma before they started playing. To really show that American Football causes brain damage you need to show that players start without brain damage and develop it while playing and that there is an established mechanism by which this occurs. There is an established mechanism but, as far as I can tell, no evidence of the initial condition of players. Without both what you have is a suggestion that there might be a relation but not evidence of it.
the Navy rejected the design because it didn't look like a ship an admiral would be seen dead in.
If I were an admiral I'd consider that a good thing. I'd much rather that than a ship that looks like I would be seen dead in it.
Sorry - #$%@! autocorrect 'fixed' it and I did not notice, I've clearly written chi-squared too many times!
It would immediately evaporate (due to insufficient mass to hold itself together) and explode!
Not quite - it evaporates due to quantum effects (Hawking radiation) and not because its mass is insufficient to hold itself together - if that were the case it would never form in the first place.
Possibly even with enough force to damage the detectors, if it was close enough.
Even if we created a BH with the entire energy of one p-p collision the maximum energy involved is 8 TeV. In more common units this is approx. 1.3 millionths of a joule (i.e. 1.3 micro-joules) so the explosion is hardly big! Further more, since matter is mainly empty space, the particles produced actually penetrate into the detector to quite some distance and so do not produce a force but do produce heating and local ionization. So damage to detectors is not from a 'force' but from getting too hot or from radiation damage....and if we were producing so many BHs that this was an issue we would have definitely noticed that by now!
The mass of the BH is determined by the invariant mass of the system which forms it, not the invariant mass of the particles which make up that system. So for the current 8 TeV centre of mass energy we could create BHs up to 8 TeV/c2 in mass i.e. ~8,000 times the mass of a single proton (although, even if possible to make a BH with that energy, it is highly unlikely that the parts of the proton which collide will carry almost all the energy of the proton).
It's pronounced "chi b star" and the discovery was by the CMS collaboration. The analysis was done by physicists from Zurich (apparently including one of my former postdocs) but they require data generated by the experiment so typically we credit the experiment. The discovery is of a new bound state of 3-quarks - not a new fundamental particle - so while interesting and definitely worthwhile it is not particularly exciting.