Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot.
By that argument after spending $100B we'll get ITER/NIF to work but the cost of building any more fusion plants will be so overwhelmingly expensive that we will not build anymore for the next 40 (and counting) years. Instead why not take a chance on something a lot simpler like General Fusion. These guys have a beautiful reactor design and are working on a shoestring budget to develop it. While the chance of success is not known (they themselves estimate it to be 10-50%) if it were successful it would be instantly deployable and have massive repercussions for energy generation - certainly the basic physics behing it is good the only question is in the complexities of plasma dynamics and interactions and whether they can fire the pistons to compress the molten lead with a sufficiently accurate timing.
Survival is not required for being the first person to break the sound barrier without a means of propulsion.
He is not that first: astronauts do it all the time because a space craft does not use it engines once it is in orbit. If your argument is that they use propulsion initially to get to orbit then the same can be said of this attempt because it uses a mean of propulsion to get him up to ~40km high. Besides from a physics point of view, since the earth orbits the sun at ~29km/s, every human is already travelling at well over the speed of sound without propulsion and has been doing so since we first evolved - speed is all relative.
Part of the current effort for extreme altitude sky dives is in part to suggest an alternative re-entry method for astronauts that might be able to simply parachute to the Earth from LEO
Re-entry from orbit is a LOT harder - the lateral speed needed for LEO is ~7 km/s or about 21 times the speed of sound (at sea level). I suppose this is a start but from orbit you'll have ~400 times more KE to dissipate somehow which will not be trivial.
Paparazzi can follow and harass him all they like and he can do nothing about it.
Not true - he can decide not to be a celebrity. The victims of crime or accidents, who not only had no choice but are also suffering from the repercussions of the event are the ones who need the protection. However I think the most effective way to stop them is to stop buying their papers. We do not need governments to do this for us - we can, and should, do it ourselves by making such activity (at least in the case of victims) highly unprofitable. Afterall in a democracy the government should reflect the will of the people and if the will of the people is to read gutter journalism like this we should not expect governments to act until we show we are willing to stop reading such stories.
If you are a business why not make it into a money making opportunity with a reply along the lines of "Thank you for interest in hiring us to take part in your software audit. We would be happy to assist you and our estimated costs are included. In addition, since the audit may require access to computers with sensitive information you will be required to sign the enclosed NDA.".
This way you have shown due diligence in responding and even agreed to the audit....of course I doubt they will take you up on the offer!
We would have priced it at $999.99. Dumb limeys, they had it coming.
Apparently you did not realize that since 1900 the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published by a US company and has switched its content, if not its name, to become a heavily American Encyclopaedia (at the risk of rubbing salt into the wound here is the Wikipedia link). I wonder who's feeling dumb now...
The orbits of planets would not be constrained by the galactic plane.
Unless you have a spherical halo of Dark Matter which is what I understand you need to stabilize spiral galaxies otherwise they rapidly (on galactic timescales) turn into elliptical galaxies....at least according to an astrophysics talk I heard a couple of weeks ago.
Sounds like they're hypothesising that all the "dark matter" is actually made of planets, or did i miss something...
DM cannot be made of planets because it cannot be made of atoms (it was not part of the plasma which filled the universe ~380k years after the Big Bang) nor does it have the same distribution as matter in a galaxy (rather than a disc it forms a spherical halo). The "gravitational effect" the summary misleading refers to is not the gravitational field of the galaxy but the local gravitational field of the object which bends light creating a lens effect. If the object passes between us and a distant star then the field will bend more light towards us causing the star to get brighter which is how you can detect them without seeing them.
If your kid is black and ends up in the low math track as early as 4th grade. He'll never get out of it. Tracking (which is what the term is called in the education space) has horrible effects.
If the problem is that minority students suffer when streaming (it is called streaming in the UK, or was when I was at school) after all other effects are correctly accounted for - including cultural effects, e.g. the parents attitude to education, then you have a problem with racism and the solution is to address that issue NOT to ignore it and try to come up with a system which tries to hide it. You do not treat a brain tumour with just an asprin - it might mask the symptoms for a while but the malignancy is still there and the problems will eventually come back but much worse.
The problem you're talking about can be solved with making learning be more personalized. Keep everyone in the same classroom...
I believe that is the reason the US, and Canada, are showing a marked increase in home schooling. What I fail to see is why you want to do this in the same classroom. I would expect that this would be worse than streaming - if one kid is significantly behind the rest how will they feel seeing everyone else well ahead of them? At least if they are streamed they will be in a class with similar ability.
The biggest disadvantage with streaming that I see is that it is hard to move between streams if a student (regardless of race) improves, gets worse or is initially mis-classified. However that's where I'd see the place for personalized tuition to cover the gaps so a student could be moved from one stream to the next. While this is a big issue for those students affected surely it is better to go with a system that does not perform as well as is hoped for a small minority of students than one, built on a false premise, which is bad for everyone?
The biggest problem I see is the lack of streaming in education. Trying to give everyone the same education is simply stupid. There is no way that you can teach at a level such that the slowest students are keeping up while the top students are stretched - someone, somewhere has to suffer. However the moment you try to stream students there are cries of discrimination and unfairness. Frankly I do not think that education will be fixed until there are governments willing to tackle this politically sensitive issue.
The curious thing is that, somehow, this does not apply to sports. Nobody would think it sensible that footballers, athletes etc. are held back and denied more advanced training because it is discriminatory against those who have less physical ability...but the moment it comes to academics it is a completely different story. I think the key difference is that society can easily see the benefit of a good sports person - they entertain. However the benefit of a good academic - jobs created, industries founded, science discovered etc. - is less clear and being smart is perceived as benefiting the individual only.
So perhaps that X prize should go to the best idea for turning academic subjects into a spectator sport. The moment we have people interested in watching teams of physicists competing there will be no problem in getting a more rigorous education for those who need it.
Why should a publisher/author/whatever not be able to charge whatever they want for an eBook?
For the same reason that we are not allowed to copy eBooks. If the law is going to give them a monopoly on a particular book then it is not unreasonable to expect that this privilege comes with some restrictions to prevent excessive abuse. Being able to charge what you like works only works in a free market. Some books can compete across publishers - for example textbooks - but it is hard to argue that for fiction books in a series.
I agree with you completely; civics test to demonstrate you care enough about the process to learn about the candidates
Fantastic solution - I volunteer to me the grader. I promise to make sure that only those who have answered all the questions "correctly" get to pass and to vote.
I can't justify forcing people to take years of classes just to help them memorize the basics. It sounds more like it's appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Ah but that is the beauty of the "old" system. The lowest common denominator did not gain much from the more advanced topics other than learning the basics. However as you go up the ability spectrum people retained more and more and so could use maths in more complex ways - compound interest for mortgages or savings, basic trig and geometry for carpentry, gardening etc. It is the current system, where nothing but the basics are taught, that is aimed at the lowest common denominator.
Given that there clearly is a problem now with declining knowledge of basics maths (and science) there are only two possibilities: either general intelligence is declining or the quality of education is declining. Since I doubt that intelligence can possibly decline so rapidly, given evolutionary timescales, the only reasonable conclusion is that educational standards have dropped. This is easily backed up if you look at the current GCSE maths syllabus vs. what it was 20 years ago with the last O' levels. The same applies for A' level physics - indeed you know need to do a 4 year degree in physics if you want to move into research because of the declining standards at schools.
Whether that curriculum is taught correctly, and whether the students absorb and retain the knowledge, is another thing. But the basics seem to be there.
It is not enough to have the basics there - you have to go beyond the basics because post-school people will forget much of the what they learnt most recently. In teaching more advanced concepts you use the basics over and over again and it gets drilled into your skull for good. The old O' levels which I took went up to basic, polynomial calculus and I do not seem to remember any complaints the people did not know primary school maths at that time. If the UK raised the academic standards of schools to what they once were the problem will go away because, when we had those standards, it did not exist.
Really - I would have thought "Air bus" would be closer but I suppose it is not US Homeland security we'd have to worry about then but the more insidious threat of corporate lawyers.
No but "Airplane (and derivatives)" are which puts many on Slashdot in danger. Apparently integrals are fine though. Interestingly us brits also apparently get away with our aeroplanes which is undoubtedly where "airplane" was itself derived from.
Ummm....yes I did read their paper when it was released but if you got as far as reading the abstract (you know - the summary paragraph at the start of the paper) you will note the following:
An early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of
light in vacuum of (57.8 ± 7.8 (stat.) (sys.)) ns was measured. This anomaly corresponds to a relative
difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v-c)/c = (2.37 ± 0.32 (stat.)
(sys.)) ×10^-5. The above result....
Perhaps English is not your first language but as a native English speaker let me assure you that there is absolutely no wiggle room given the above statement. The only meaning is that they are claiming faster than light neutrinos. There is no mention of this being due to some unknown systematic. The reference to "anomaly" is physics-speak for something other than what is expected, not that they are uncertain that their result is correct.
My post wasn't against seatbelts, it was showing that requiring the presence of a breathanalyser is not fundamentally different.
Actually there is one very important difference. Most seatbelt laws require the installation and USE of seatbelts. The French breathalyser law requires that a breathalyser is present in the car but does not require that it is used - it is not connected to the ignition. In fact if you DID use it, found yourself to be under the limit and then drove you would be breaking the law because you no longer have a working breathalyser! As such I see no way that the french law will have any effect at all other than temporarily boosting the sales of single use breathalysers in France.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot.
By that argument after spending $100B we'll get ITER/NIF to work but the cost of building any more fusion plants will be so overwhelmingly expensive that we will not build anymore for the next 40 (and counting) years. Instead why not take a chance on something a lot simpler like General Fusion. These guys have a beautiful reactor design and are working on a shoestring budget to develop it. While the chance of success is not known (they themselves estimate it to be 10-50%) if it were successful it would be instantly deployable and have massive repercussions for energy generation - certainly the basic physics behing it is good the only question is in the complexities of plasma dynamics and interactions and whether they can fire the pistons to compress the molten lead with a sufficiently accurate timing.
Survival is not required for being the first person to break the sound barrier without a means of propulsion.
He is not that first: astronauts do it all the time because a space craft does not use it engines once it is in orbit. If your argument is that they use propulsion initially to get to orbit then the same can be said of this attempt because it uses a mean of propulsion to get him up to ~40km high. Besides from a physics point of view, since the earth orbits the sun at ~29km/s, every human is already travelling at well over the speed of sound without propulsion and has been doing so since we first evolved - speed is all relative.
Part of the current effort for extreme altitude sky dives is in part to suggest an alternative re-entry method for astronauts that might be able to simply parachute to the Earth from LEO
Re-entry from orbit is a LOT harder - the lateral speed needed for LEO is ~7 km/s or about 21 times the speed of sound (at sea level). I suppose this is a start but from orbit you'll have ~400 times more KE to dissipate somehow which will not be trivial.
Paparazzi can follow and harass him all they like and he can do nothing about it.
Not true - he can decide not to be a celebrity. The victims of crime or accidents, who not only had no choice but are also suffering from the repercussions of the event are the ones who need the protection. However I think the most effective way to stop them is to stop buying their papers. We do not need governments to do this for us - we can, and should, do it ourselves by making such activity (at least in the case of victims) highly unprofitable. Afterall in a democracy the government should reflect the will of the people and if the will of the people is to read gutter journalism like this we should not expect governments to act until we show we are willing to stop reading such stories.
If you are a business why not make it into a money making opportunity with a reply along the lines of "Thank you for interest in hiring us to take part in your software audit. We would be happy to assist you and our estimated costs are included. In addition, since the audit may require access to computers with sensitive information you will be required to sign the enclosed NDA.".
This way you have shown due diligence in responding and even agreed to the audit....of course I doubt they will take you up on the offer!
Ah, you must celebrate the "American Pi" day.
14th March is American Pi day...unless you live on some strange space-time metric where pi is 14.3.
We would have priced it at $999.99. Dumb limeys, they had it coming.
Apparently you did not realize that since 1900 the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published by a US company and has switched its content, if not its name, to become a heavily American Encyclopaedia (at the risk of rubbing salt into the wound here is the Wikipedia link). I wonder who's feeling dumb now...
The orbits of planets would not be constrained by the galactic plane.
Unless you have a spherical halo of Dark Matter which is what I understand you need to stabilize spiral galaxies otherwise they rapidly (on galactic timescales) turn into elliptical galaxies....at least according to an astrophysics talk I heard a couple of weeks ago.
Sounds like they're hypothesising that all the "dark matter" is actually made of planets, or did i miss something...
DM cannot be made of planets because it cannot be made of atoms (it was not part of the plasma which filled the universe ~380k years after the Big Bang) nor does it have the same distribution as matter in a galaxy (rather than a disc it forms a spherical halo). The "gravitational effect" the summary misleading refers to is not the gravitational field of the galaxy but the local gravitational field of the object which bends light creating a lens effect. If the object passes between us and a distant star then the field will bend more light towards us causing the star to get brighter which is how you can detect them without seeing them.
With Tau, you can have two pies.
Actually, if you are a particle physicist you can have a lot more - one tau can decay into 5 pis (although 3 is more common).
Pi is now 201203.14 (201.203,14 with European punctuation).
Depends upon which part of Europe you are from. In the English speaking part it would be 201,203.14
Has to be reflective, though; if it's just resistive/dissipative, then you're wrapped in flaming fabric.
So with these things resistance really is futile.
If your kid is black and ends up in the low math track as early as 4th grade. He'll never get out of it. Tracking (which is what the term is called in the education space) has horrible effects.
If the problem is that minority students suffer when streaming (it is called streaming in the UK, or was when I was at school) after all other effects are correctly accounted for - including cultural effects, e.g. the parents attitude to education, then you have a problem with racism and the solution is to address that issue NOT to ignore it and try to come up with a system which tries to hide it. You do not treat a brain tumour with just an asprin - it might mask the symptoms for a while but the malignancy is still there and the problems will eventually come back but much worse.
The problem you're talking about can be solved with making learning be more personalized. Keep everyone in the same classroom...
I believe that is the reason the US, and Canada, are showing a marked increase in home schooling. What I fail to see is why you want to do this in the same classroom. I would expect that this would be worse than streaming - if one kid is significantly behind the rest how will they feel seeing everyone else well ahead of them? At least if they are streamed they will be in a class with similar ability.
The biggest disadvantage with streaming that I see is that it is hard to move between streams if a student (regardless of race) improves, gets worse or is initially mis-classified. However that's where I'd see the place for personalized tuition to cover the gaps so a student could be moved from one stream to the next. While this is a big issue for those students affected surely it is better to go with a system that does not perform as well as is hoped for a small minority of students than one, built on a false premise, which is bad for everyone?
The biggest problem I see is the lack of streaming in education. Trying to give everyone the same education is simply stupid. There is no way that you can teach at a level such that the slowest students are keeping up while the top students are stretched - someone, somewhere has to suffer. However the moment you try to stream students there are cries of discrimination and unfairness. Frankly I do not think that education will be fixed until there are governments willing to tackle this politically sensitive issue.
The curious thing is that, somehow, this does not apply to sports. Nobody would think it sensible that footballers, athletes etc. are held back and denied more advanced training because it is discriminatory against those who have less physical ability...but the moment it comes to academics it is a completely different story. I think the key difference is that society can easily see the benefit of a good sports person - they entertain. However the benefit of a good academic - jobs created, industries founded, science discovered etc. - is less clear and being smart is perceived as benefiting the individual only.
So perhaps that X prize should go to the best idea for turning academic subjects into a spectator sport. The moment we have people interested in watching teams of physicists competing there will be no problem in getting a more rigorous education for those who need it.
Not if I'm the grader ;-)
Why should a publisher/author/whatever not be able to charge whatever they want for an eBook?
For the same reason that we are not allowed to copy eBooks. If the law is going to give them a monopoly on a particular book then it is not unreasonable to expect that this privilege comes with some restrictions to prevent excessive abuse. Being able to charge what you like works only works in a free market. Some books can compete across publishers - for example textbooks - but it is hard to argue that for fiction books in a series.
I agree with you completely; civics test to demonstrate you care enough about the process to learn about the candidates
Fantastic solution - I volunteer to me the grader. I promise to make sure that only those who have answered all the questions "correctly" get to pass and to vote.
I can't justify forcing people to take years of classes just to help them memorize the basics. It sounds more like it's appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Ah but that is the beauty of the "old" system. The lowest common denominator did not gain much from the more advanced topics other than learning the basics. However as you go up the ability spectrum people retained more and more and so could use maths in more complex ways - compound interest for mortgages or savings, basic trig and geometry for carpentry, gardening etc. It is the current system, where nothing but the basics are taught, that is aimed at the lowest common denominator.
Given that there clearly is a problem now with declining knowledge of basics maths (and science) there are only two possibilities: either general intelligence is declining or the quality of education is declining. Since I doubt that intelligence can possibly decline so rapidly, given evolutionary timescales, the only reasonable conclusion is that educational standards have dropped. This is easily backed up if you look at the current GCSE maths syllabus vs. what it was 20 years ago with the last O' levels. The same applies for A' level physics - indeed you know need to do a 4 year degree in physics if you want to move into research because of the declining standards at schools.
Every computer and mobile phone has a calculator.
Whether that curriculum is taught correctly, and whether the students absorb and retain the knowledge, is another thing. But the basics seem to be there.
It is not enough to have the basics there - you have to go beyond the basics because post-school people will forget much of the what they learnt most recently. In teaching more advanced concepts you use the basics over and over again and it gets drilled into your skull for good. The old O' levels which I took went up to basic, polynomial calculus and I do not seem to remember any complaints the people did not know primary school maths at that time. If the UK raised the academic standards of schools to what they once were the problem will go away because, when we had those standards, it did not exist.
I prefer the term "air cars" myself.
Really - I would have thought "Air bus" would be closer but I suppose it is not US Homeland security we'd have to worry about then but the more insidious threat of corporate lawyers.
The word "troll" is not yet a "terr'rist term".
No but "Airplane (and derivatives)" are which puts many on Slashdot in danger. Apparently integrals are fine though. Interestingly us brits also apparently get away with our aeroplanes which is undoubtedly where "airplane" was itself derived from.
An early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum of (57.8 ± 7.8 (stat.) (sys.)) ns was measured. This anomaly corresponds to a relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v-c)/c = (2.37 ± 0.32 (stat.) (sys.)) ×10^-5. The above result....
Perhaps English is not your first language but as a native English speaker let me assure you that there is absolutely no wiggle room given the above statement. The only meaning is that they are claiming faster than light neutrinos. There is no mention of this being due to some unknown systematic. The reference to "anomaly" is physics-speak for something other than what is expected, not that they are uncertain that their result is correct.
My post wasn't against seatbelts, it was showing that requiring the presence of a breathanalyser is not fundamentally different.
Actually there is one very important difference. Most seatbelt laws require the installation and USE of seatbelts. The French breathalyser law requires that a breathalyser is present in the car but does not require that it is used - it is not connected to the ignition. In fact if you DID use it, found yourself to be under the limit and then drove you would be breaking the law because you no longer have a working breathalyser! As such I see no way that the french law will have any effect at all other than temporarily boosting the sales of single use breathalysers in France.
I don't think you'll get anywhere until you have a law to not judge computer drivers harsher than human drivers.
I agree - but that is not protecting them from lawsuits just making them no more susceptible to lawsuits than a human driver which is fair.