Current e-ink screens, while very nice outdoors, are far too small for a scientific paper. Until there is an A4-sized e-ink device you will not be able to use it to read scientific papers. I've found that using a tablet is the best way to go so far. While the screen is lower resolution and not very good outside the advantage is that it updates very quickly so it is easy to enlarge plots, enlarge the text and scroll around the now too-big-for-the-screen page etc. which you cannot do with e-ink.
If they ever release an affordable A4/letter e-ink device which displays PDFs then I'd go for that but until then tablets seem to be the best for scientific papers.
Sure you can. We're designing a whole new voting system so you just build in that ability.
No you cannot because, even if your computer system was absolutely 100% secure the electorate will not know that for certain. Just about anyone can see that a paper-based election system is secure and works. You provide physical security for the ballot boxes, they are opened in the presence of, and counted by, representatives of all candidates involved, end of story.
Replace that with a computer-based system and 95% of the electorate now have no clue how it works and so cannot be sure that it is secure and even the 5% (or whatever fraction it is) with decent IT skills cannot be sure that it is secure without knowing the details and having spent the required time to learn them. This is a dangerous state of affairs because when a surprise election result occurs, particularly if it is one that a sizeable number of people will not like, everyone has to be able to implicitly trust that the election was fair. What a computer system is likely to encourage is people questioning the actual result and whether their vote was truly counted. Having a large number of your electorate doing this will massively undermine your democracy which is a bad thing...and this is the case even if you do have a secure which I frankly doubt is really achievable given the stakes involved for people to break it.
You are missing the point. I am not disagreeing that cycling produces less environmental impact than driving. What I am pointing out as a complete fallacy is when people try to sound scientific by saying things like:
Given a "typical U.S. diet," you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint.
...because there is no agreed upon standard to calculate that "footprint". Indeed the above passage you refer to make no mention whether they subtract the "resting calories" of a person driving of taking public transport so perhaps it should be 200 or 300 miles instead? It is extremely easy to vary the result by changing the way you do the calculation while still keeping it reasonably fair. In this particular case the overall result is unlikely to change but I can easy see 400 miles becoming 200 or 800 depending on which factors you account for. If they want to be scientific they should either have an agreed standard or have an estimate of the uncertainty using different criteria to calculate the value i.e. quote 200-800 miles which will tell you how worthless the numerical value is.
The carbon footprint thing is overrated, but not useless.
No it is useless because of the lack of consistency. For example in this study did they consider the food usage of someone sitting on a bus or driving a car in their study - I would guess not. In fact since generally our food usage is in excess of our body requirements the difference between a cyclist and passenger is probably not that great, not to mention the health benefits of cycling which will reduce health care needs and so reduce the carbon footprint of that. Hence you end up with some apparently scientifically accurate numerical value such as "250kg" of carbon which has no objective scientific basis whatsoever.
The only way this can change is if there is some agreed upon standard which everyone follows to calculate these numbers. Until then such comparisons are likely to just reflect the political views of the person doing the study and so they really are useless.
And some types of dark matter are observed aka neutrinos.
Neutrinos are too light to be Dark Matter. Their low mass means that they are produced moving at almost the speed of light so, if they were the Dark Matter, the "wrinkles" we see in the Cosmic Microwave Background would be far more blurred out than they are.
If free neutrons didn't have such a short decay time, I'd consider that option as well.
Sorry but neutrons interact via the strong nuclear force and so cannot be dark matter otherwise we would see it interacting with atomic nuclei.
Without electrons the photon interaction with a neutron seems considerably hindered
Electrons have nothing to do with photon interactions with neutrons. Neutrons are made of quarks so photons of sufficient energy can directly interact. Electrons can interact with neutrons either via EM (photon) or weak nuclear interactions.
Go to a fundamentalist church group some time and tell me you really think they are more capable of understanding when they are wrong.
Would you want someone to base their opinion of Americans based on trip to a US insane asylum? If not then why would you think a visit to a fundamentalist church would be a good way to judge a religion as a whole? Both are only fractions of their respective societies and both are filled with people who have a tenuous grasp on reality. It is bad science to use a biased sample like that on which to base your judgements.
I hope so. Dark matter is the ugliest kludge to the standard model ever.
So you'd replace a simple hypothesis that there is a neutral, weakly interacting massive particle which is too heavy to have been produced in our accelerators with something which requires a negative gravitational charge? This breaks the equivalence principle of General Relativity because, using anti-matter I can now trivially distinguish between an acceleration and a gravitational field.
Its also worth pointing out that one of the most promising theories to explain Dark Matter, Supersymmetry, was actually introduced to fix the hierarchy problem in the Standard Model (caused by the Higgs mass being so far below the Planck scale). So, rather than be a kludge to the SM, Dark Matter is actually something which can be explained by theories designed to fix other issues with the SM so it is really rather beautiful. A further "coincidence" (if you will) is that Supersymmetry also causes the strong, weak and EM forces to converge in strength at a single point around 10^16 GeV energy (~1mJ) which does not happen in the Standard Model.
Of course all this does not in any way make Supersymmetry correct but to suggest Dark Matter is a 'kludge' suggests that you already know what it is and the that theory explaining it is ugly. As a physicist working on the ATLAS experiment, to my knowledge we have no idea as to the nature of Dark Matter yet. Besides even when we really do have ugly "kludges" they are often just initial attempts to describe something which is real but new: the Bohr model of the atom paved the way for Quantum Mechanics; Kepler's laws lead to Newtonian Mechanics and Gravity etc.
So one who is the child of two Scottish people, and is born 1 mile from the border is not a Scotsman?
Correct, particularly if the child is a girl. Scotland is not an independent nation but a regional identity. Both parents and child would be British citizens. An equivalent example would be Yorkshire. To be a Yorkshireman (or woman) you have to be born in Yorkshire and, because Yorkshire is not an independent nation, there is no means to apply to become a Yorkshireman (/woman) because it would not mean anything - other than to give you bragging rights over southerners.;-)
The issue is that nanotechnology might wipe us out. I don't want that to happen, even if it is "natural".
Exactly, many of us have been working very hard on the LHC to ensure that we get to wipe us all out first. After all we all know from Hollywood documentary movies that all of us scientists are hell-bent on performing insanely dangerous experiments without regard to the fact that they would result in the deaths of our own families and loved ones, not to mention ourselves too.
...they have more time to spend on learning about frivolous stuff like numerical sequences and funny shapes.
This stuff is not frivolous - it is the next logical step. One you have shelter, dinner and warmth you want to make sure that you will continue to have these things. This means identifying the patterns of nature and coming up with strategies to cope with them or benefit from them in order to improve the quality of life. That is still what science is about today. Just because it is a little more abstract than designing a better spear to skewer a boar does not mean that the basic purpose of all this learning has changed.
Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.
No, the cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing hardware was great it was just a shame it was typically crippled by MS-DOS. The speed difference of running code between MS-DOS 5.x (IIRC, may be 6.x) and Linux 0.99 on the same hardware was amazing to behold. Hence the reason MSDOS turned out badly for users is that it enabled MS to get a stranglehold on the OS market which, to a large extent, they still hold today. That killed a lot of competition and stifled innovation for quite some period
They didn't say they found the Higgs and acknowledged there wasn't enough data for it to be conclusive.
True but only after the headline claiming "tantalizing evidence" (which is wrong - we have no evidence yet) and hyping the whole thing up to be way more than the "no clear evidence" result. Hence the article is dishonest and unscientific in that it gives a false impression to attract the reader and only when they get to the small print does it actually admit that there is no evidence yet. Frankly when the mainstream media, like the BBC, write an article with a far better explanation of what the results mean (explaining sigma significance in terms of coin tosses etc) than a company which is supposed to be a scientific publisher it makes you wonder exactly how competent they are. They need to decide what they want to do: publish misleading, sensational articles or stick to serious science. You cannot do both for long.
It hasn't opened a wormhole to another dimension yet...
We also have not found the Higgs yet there is not enough data to distinguish this from a fluctuation in the background. Frankly I'm appalled at Nature for printing wild, inflammatory speculation like this. If their editors have this level of ignorance of science you have to question what sort of decisions they are making regarding the journal itself...not that many particle physics papers are typically submitted there: perhaps this is why!
Imagine what your life at work would be like if everybody in the company had to agree with every aspect of how anything the company does happened
Yes but it would not be like that would it? First internal company policy, as long as it is consistent with the law, is entirely up to them so why would people object to that any more than normal since there is no change. Secondly a corporate death sentence would only be appropriate in serious cases where there are major, systematic, violations of the law going on to profit the company and/or its management. If someone in accounting is following dodgy practices when soliciting orders you either take the person on one side and point out the problem or report them to the police depending on how serious it is. The idea behind a corporate death sentence would be to remove companies which are unlikely to be able to fix themselves (probably because the corruption is at the top level of the company) and/or which, as a whole, have done major harm to society through illegal and unethical actions e.g. Enron, News International [Corporation?] (whichever it is that ultimately owned NotW), various financial institutions etc.
Doing that punishes far more innocent people... than it does guilty.
That is not necessarily true. You also have to take into account the innocent people that are will be affected if you do not remove toxic corporations from society. In addition many of the "innocent" people may be innocent in that they, themselves, did nothing wrong but it is hard to see how some of these large corporations get away with such appalling behaviour without others knowing, or at least suspecting, what is going on.
At the moment shareholders and employees have little to benefit by pointing out suspect behaviour and a lot to lose if they do: their profits and/or jobs are potentially on the line. However if the result of not speaking out is a potential corporate death sentence then it makes the consequence of staying silent just as bad, if not worse.
Since the US treats corporations as individuals this is not a bad idea and has the huge benefit that nobody actually dies. Just shut the corporation down, all property is confiscated and sold to recompense the victims and any excess donated to relevant charities and all IP is released the to public domain (to repay damage to society the company caused). Executives get nothing - all pay, bonues, pensions etc cancelled (and they may be liable for further criminal charges/penalties if warranted) and most importantly even the shareholders get nothing so that they are very strongly motivated to not turn a blind eye if they suspect something is rotten.
Of course we will never see anything like that actually happen because the corporations are far too powerful but wouldn't that be an amazing deterrent to corporate misbehaviour!
These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself
True but any radiation exposure increases the risk of cancer. The risk is acceptable if there is a corresponding benefit to be gained from taking it. However for security screening X-raying is not needed. Tera-hertz imaging can produce the same quality of images with no known risks. There are some people concerned about it but, if there is a harmful effect, it is so small that it has not yet been detected. This is before you even start asking about effective this type of screening really is at stopping terrorists.
Although I disagree with it, I can see the argument for security theatre like this but when that theatre increases the risk to my health, even by a tiny "almost negligible" amount, for no reason it has gone too far. Besides, multiply that tiny risk factor by the ~800 million people who fly each year and you'll almost certainly get a number greater than one as the people who will get cancer each year just from airport security scans.
Actually the concept of the last night is rather flawed for an orbit too. Given the average orbital period is 90 minutes the title refers to the last 45 minutes in orbit.
Really that is just one problem. If energy were a lot cheaper then flying would be a lot cheaper and far more people would have pilot's licenses because it would be a lot cheaper to get one and to own a plane.
The FCC could apply a "bid multiplier" for bids that plan to make the spectrum open access.
Isn't that like paying to get back what you already own? Any government doing it's job properly should be allocating the bandwidth in a way which benefits its people. This might be to sell it off to a private company for profit in order to reduce taxes but it might equally well be to make it open access and available to everyone. Any process to allocate bandwidth should consider both possibilities and judge which is the most beneficial...especially since governments will make tax revenue from the sale of devices to exploit any new open access bandwidth.
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Current e-ink screens, while very nice outdoors, are far too small for a scientific paper. Until there is an A4-sized e-ink device you will not be able to use it to read scientific papers. I've found that using a tablet is the best way to go so far. While the screen is lower resolution and not very good outside the advantage is that it updates very quickly so it is easy to enlarge plots, enlarge the text and scroll around the now too-big-for-the-screen page etc. which you cannot do with e-ink.
If they ever release an affordable A4/letter e-ink device which displays PDFs then I'd go for that but until then tablets seem to be the best for scientific papers.
Sure you can. We're designing a whole new voting system so you just build in that ability.
No you cannot because, even if your computer system was absolutely 100% secure the electorate will not know that for certain. Just about anyone can see that a paper-based election system is secure and works. You provide physical security for the ballot boxes, they are opened in the presence of, and counted by, representatives of all candidates involved, end of story.
Replace that with a computer-based system and 95% of the electorate now have no clue how it works and so cannot be sure that it is secure and even the 5% (or whatever fraction it is) with decent IT skills cannot be sure that it is secure without knowing the details and having spent the required time to learn them. This is a dangerous state of affairs because when a surprise election result occurs, particularly if it is one that a sizeable number of people will not like, everyone has to be able to implicitly trust that the election was fair. What a computer system is likely to encourage is people questioning the actual result and whether their vote was truly counted. Having a large number of your electorate doing this will massively undermine your democracy which is a bad thing...and this is the case even if you do have a secure which I frankly doubt is really achievable given the stakes involved for people to break it.
Given a "typical U.S. diet," you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint.
The carbon footprint thing is overrated, but not useless.
No it is useless because of the lack of consistency. For example in this study did they consider the food usage of someone sitting on a bus or driving a car in their study - I would guess not. In fact since generally our food usage is in excess of our body requirements the difference between a cyclist and passenger is probably not that great, not to mention the health benefits of cycling which will reduce health care needs and so reduce the carbon footprint of that. Hence you end up with some apparently scientifically accurate numerical value such as "250kg" of carbon which has no objective scientific basis whatsoever.
The only way this can change is if there is some agreed upon standard which everyone follows to calculate these numbers. Until then such comparisons are likely to just reflect the political views of the person doing the study and so they really are useless.
Dark matter is invisible, and if science has taught us anything repeatedly it is that nothing is invisible: End of story
Electric fields, gravitational fields, magnetic fields, neutrinos, oxygen gas, nitrogen gas, carbon dioxide....don't mind me I'm just typing out loud.
And some types of dark matter are observed aka neutrinos.
Neutrinos are too light to be Dark Matter. Their low mass means that they are produced moving at almost the speed of light so, if they were the Dark Matter, the "wrinkles" we see in the Cosmic Microwave Background would be far more blurred out than they are.
If free neutrons didn't have such a short decay time, I'd consider that option as well.
Sorry but neutrons interact via the strong nuclear force and so cannot be dark matter otherwise we would see it interacting with atomic nuclei.
Without electrons the photon interaction with a neutron seems considerably hindered
Electrons have nothing to do with photon interactions with neutrons. Neutrons are made of quarks so photons of sufficient energy can directly interact. Electrons can interact with neutrons either via EM (photon) or weak nuclear interactions.
Go to a fundamentalist church group some time and tell me you really think they are more capable of understanding when they are wrong.
Would you want someone to base their opinion of Americans based on trip to a US insane asylum? If not then why would you think a visit to a fundamentalist church would be a good way to judge a religion as a whole? Both are only fractions of their respective societies and both are filled with people who have a tenuous grasp on reality. It is bad science to use a biased sample like that on which to base your judgements.
I hope so. Dark matter is the ugliest kludge to the standard model ever.
So you'd replace a simple hypothesis that there is a neutral, weakly interacting massive particle which is too heavy to have been produced in our accelerators with something which requires a negative gravitational charge? This breaks the equivalence principle of General Relativity because, using anti-matter I can now trivially distinguish between an acceleration and a gravitational field.
Its also worth pointing out that one of the most promising theories to explain Dark Matter, Supersymmetry, was actually introduced to fix the hierarchy problem in the Standard Model (caused by the Higgs mass being so far below the Planck scale). So, rather than be a kludge to the SM, Dark Matter is actually something which can be explained by theories designed to fix other issues with the SM so it is really rather beautiful. A further "coincidence" (if you will) is that Supersymmetry also causes the strong, weak and EM forces to converge in strength at a single point around 10^16 GeV energy (~1mJ) which does not happen in the Standard Model.
Of course all this does not in any way make Supersymmetry correct but to suggest Dark Matter is a 'kludge' suggests that you already know what it is and the that theory explaining it is ugly. As a physicist working on the ATLAS experiment, to my knowledge we have no idea as to the nature of Dark Matter yet. Besides even when we really do have ugly "kludges" they are often just initial attempts to describe something which is real but new: the Bohr model of the atom paved the way for Quantum Mechanics; Kepler's laws lead to Newtonian Mechanics and Gravity etc.
So one who is the child of two Scottish people, and is born 1 mile from the border is not a Scotsman?
Correct, particularly if the child is a girl. Scotland is not an independent nation but a regional identity. Both parents and child would be British citizens. An equivalent example would be Yorkshire. To be a Yorkshireman (or woman) you have to be born in Yorkshire and, because Yorkshire is not an independent nation, there is no means to apply to become a Yorkshireman (/woman) because it would not mean anything - other than to give you bragging rights over southerners. ;-)
The issue is that nanotechnology might wipe us out. I don't want that to happen, even if it is "natural".
Exactly, many of us have been working very hard on the LHC to ensure that we get to wipe us all out first. After all we all know from Hollywood documentary movies that all of us scientists are hell-bent on performing insanely dangerous experiments without regard to the fact that they would result in the deaths of our own families and loved ones, not to mention ourselves too.
...they have more time to spend on learning about frivolous stuff like numerical sequences and funny shapes.
This stuff is not frivolous - it is the next logical step. One you have shelter, dinner and warmth you want to make sure that you will continue to have these things. This means identifying the patterns of nature and coming up with strategies to cope with them or benefit from them in order to improve the quality of life. That is still what science is about today. Just because it is a little more abstract than designing a better spear to skewer a boar does not mean that the basic purpose of all this learning has changed.
Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.
No, the cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing hardware was great it was just a shame it was typically crippled by MS-DOS. The speed difference of running code between MS-DOS 5.x (IIRC, may be 6.x) and Linux 0.99 on the same hardware was amazing to behold. Hence the reason MSDOS turned out badly for users is that it enabled MS to get a stranglehold on the OS market which, to a large extent, they still hold today. That killed a lot of competition and stifled innovation for quite some period
They didn't say they found the Higgs and acknowledged there wasn't enough data for it to be conclusive.
True but only after the headline claiming "tantalizing evidence" (which is wrong - we have no evidence yet) and hyping the whole thing up to be way more than the "no clear evidence" result. Hence the article is dishonest and unscientific in that it gives a false impression to attract the reader and only when they get to the small print does it actually admit that there is no evidence yet. Frankly when the mainstream media, like the BBC, write an article with a far better explanation of what the results mean (explaining sigma significance in terms of coin tosses etc) than a company which is supposed to be a scientific publisher it makes you wonder exactly how competent they are. They need to decide what they want to do: publish misleading, sensational articles or stick to serious science. You cannot do both for long.
Sounds like a win to me.
Yes win for MS, win for IBM...shame about us users though, isn't it!
It hasn't opened a wormhole to another dimension yet...
We also have not found the Higgs yet there is not enough data to distinguish this from a fluctuation in the background. Frankly I'm appalled at Nature for printing wild, inflammatory speculation like this. If their editors have this level of ignorance of science you have to question what sort of decisions they are making regarding the journal itself...not that many particle physics papers are typically submitted there: perhaps this is why!
Imagine what your life at work would be like if everybody in the company had to agree with every aspect of how anything the company does happened
Yes but it would not be like that would it? First internal company policy, as long as it is consistent with the law, is entirely up to them so why would people object to that any more than normal since there is no change. Secondly a corporate death sentence would only be appropriate in serious cases where there are major, systematic, violations of the law going on to profit the company and/or its management. If someone in accounting is following dodgy practices when soliciting orders you either take the person on one side and point out the problem or report them to the police depending on how serious it is. The idea behind a corporate death sentence would be to remove companies which are unlikely to be able to fix themselves (probably because the corruption is at the top level of the company) and/or which, as a whole, have done major harm to society through illegal and unethical actions e.g. Enron, News International [Corporation?] (whichever it is that ultimately owned NotW), various financial institutions etc.
Doing that punishes far more innocent people ... than it does guilty.
That is not necessarily true. You also have to take into account the innocent people that are will be affected if you do not remove toxic corporations from society. In addition many of the "innocent" people may be innocent in that they, themselves, did nothing wrong but it is hard to see how some of these large corporations get away with such appalling behaviour without others knowing, or at least suspecting, what is going on.
At the moment shareholders and employees have little to benefit by pointing out suspect behaviour and a lot to lose if they do: their profits and/or jobs are potentially on the line. However if the result of not speaking out is a potential corporate death sentence then it makes the consequence of staying silent just as bad, if not worse.
Corporate Death Penalty
Since the US treats corporations as individuals this is not a bad idea and has the huge benefit that nobody actually dies. Just shut the corporation down, all property is confiscated and sold to recompense the victims and any excess donated to relevant charities and all IP is released the to public domain (to repay damage to society the company caused). Executives get nothing - all pay, bonues, pensions etc cancelled (and they may be liable for further criminal charges/penalties if warranted) and most importantly even the shareholders get nothing so that they are very strongly motivated to not turn a blind eye if they suspect something is rotten.
Of course we will never see anything like that actually happen because the corporations are far too powerful but wouldn't that be an amazing deterrent to corporate misbehaviour!
Just wait until some idiot terrorist sticks explosives up his backside to avoid the body scanner - then we'll all be getting free enemas too!
These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself
True but any radiation exposure increases the risk of cancer. The risk is acceptable if there is a corresponding benefit to be gained from taking it. However for security screening X-raying is not needed. Tera-hertz imaging can produce the same quality of images with no known risks. There are some people concerned about it but, if there is a harmful effect, it is so small that it has not yet been detected. This is before you even start asking about effective this type of screening really is at stopping terrorists.
Although I disagree with it, I can see the argument for security theatre like this but when that theatre increases the risk to my health, even by a tiny "almost negligible" amount, for no reason it has gone too far. Besides, multiply that tiny risk factor by the ~800 million people who fly each year and you'll almost certainly get a number greater than one as the people who will get cancer each year just from airport security scans.
Actually the concept of the last night is rather flawed for an orbit too. Given the average orbital period is 90 minutes the title refers to the last 45 minutes in orbit.
I was written in COBOL. It will outlast the pyramids.
I doubt it - they were written in stone.
Really that is just one problem. If energy were a lot cheaper then flying would be a lot cheaper and far more people would have pilot's licenses because it would be a lot cheaper to get one and to own a plane.
...face the vastly more likely odds of dying as an infant, or being a serf, or a racial or religious minority.
I don't think you have properly grasped the concept of minority.
The FCC could apply a "bid multiplier" for bids that plan to make the spectrum open access.
Isn't that like paying to get back what you already own? Any government doing it's job properly should be allocating the bandwidth in a way which benefits its people. This might be to sell it off to a private company for profit in order to reduce taxes but it might equally well be to make it open access and available to everyone. Any process to allocate bandwidth should consider both possibilities and judge which is the most beneficial...especially since governments will make tax revenue from the sale of devices to exploit any new open access bandwidth.