You should care because the only way to make this work...
What do you mean "make it work"? Perhaps it already is? As far as I can see the ONLY data backed evidence in the article is that more men than women get VC dollars and that the women are equally, if not better, qualified. This is NOT evidence of sexism and could be easily due to the fact that women may find the high pressure and huge work load of starting up a company less appealing than men. This could even be viewed as a sign of superior intelligence!
All I'm saying is that perhaps, for the most part, stereotypes have been greatly relaxed (although there are still some throw-backs out there) and what we are seeing is the result of those relaxed stereotypes. We do know that there are differences between the genders so it should not be surprising that this results in differing levels of interest for different types of job. What we have to care about is ensuring equal opportunity for all and not worrying about differing take-up. While the article does conjecture about that there is no evidence to support those conjectures.
Both models have their place, or in the words of Thomas Edison
"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
You are mis-interpreting Edison - this statement does not at all represent the Murdoch model. If it did Edison would have said "We will make electricity so cheap that the candlemakers will have us banned". All Edison is saying is that if they can make electricity cheap enough then, given its inherent advantage over candles, why would anyone want to use them? He is not suggesting that anything be forced upon people like Murdoch is i.e. he is not saying that he wants to kill candles, just that most people will probably not want to use them in most cases because electricity will be so much cheaper.
This is exactly what I think will happen with books: nobody wants to set out to deliberately kill paper books but in the future I would imagine that only very popular "classic" books will end up in physical, high quality bindings and that the cheap paperback novels of today will be replaced by electronic media simply because eBooks are cheaper to make and more convenient.
You seem to have concentrated entirely on breaking the encryption. However, if we assume that this is hard to do (which your post seems to indicate) doesn't continuously making new connections put you more at risk of a man-in-the-middle attack whereas an already established connection cannot be interfered with in this way without first breaking the encryption?
First, the numbers presented on the page you link to are only for Britain (other areas have much more abundant solar resources)
...but far less wind, water and wave power. The book does discuss powering the UK from solar power stations located in the Sahara (probably sunnier than even Arizona) and you need an area the size of Wales. Since the US has a far larger energy consumption per person than the UK, or just about anywhere, you will need an even larger area.
he talks about how much area is practical to cover, rather than possible, and he talks about the cost, and so on
True - but these are important factors that have to be taken into account. For me the important conclusion of the book is that there is no practical way to fullfill all our current energy needs from "renewable" resources. You can quibble about the exact numbers here and there but it would be hard to get more than a factor 2 better since the author tended to be conservative.
People living in Arizona can easily extract all the energy they need from the sun. There are people doing it.
...even for their power consumption at night? I doubt that their hospital's and other essential, 24 hour services, are completely solar powered. This is the other problem with renewable energy - you need a massive storage capacity (e.g. pumped storage) to even out time varying generation capability. The report might be UK-centric but the issues are the same around the globe.
Not to mention that, if you actually look at the physics, it is not possible to supply all our current energy needs entirely through solar and wind (renewable) power. So we will always have to have another source to supplement it like nuclear or cleaned up fossil fuels.
This is only true if there is some mathematical value to their work e.g. they have solved a type of equation which nobody else has ever managed to achieve before. I don't think that this is the case here so you can hardly argue it as a mathematical discovery.
I think you'll find that it is the otherway around: release dates will get a lot harder to hit because less time appears to pass for the fast moving developers compared to the rest of the planet. Also mass (not weight!) is an invariant quantity so there will be no change. Yes I know that a lot of people often think that the mass increases but it does not the 'gamma' factor in momentum comes from the velocity NOT from the mass which is why things like "F=gamma ma" do not work.
I wouldnt be surprised if existing colliders and cosmic rays routinely make black holes.
I would. Black Holes are easy to see. Once you get above the production threshold the cross-section becomes huge, in fact so huge that practically all you will see is Black Holes being produced and decaying.
A helium atom has a mass of roughly 4 GeV/c2. The current lower limit on Black Holes at colliders is 1 TeV, or about 250 times more energy so it will have far, far more energy than a Helium atom.
It is obvious even with a simplistic high-school level of understanding that any black holes formed by the LHC (if such a thing is even possible) are completely harmless.
The reason that any Black Holes formed by the LHC are harmless is due to Hawking radiation which, since it requires understanding quantum mechanics, is not a result that is at all obviously to a secondary school student. It can be explained to someone with that level of knowledge but it is by no means obvious.
This is properly viewed as something in between a mathematical discovery and a physical one
No it is not. It is NOT properly viewed as any sort of discovery at all because it might be utterly wrong! It is far more like an unproven hypothesis in maths. It is something that MIGHT be true if the physical axioms hold for that situation but, until it is physically tested, there is no guarentee that this is the case. All this is, is a suggestion that something interesting may happen at a particular (currently unreachable) energy. That's not to say that it is not a worthwhile result but if this counts as a discovery then we also have a whole load of "discoveries" of simulated particles from LHC Monte-carlo simulations.
They did not use the term "exact"- read the title (or is even that too much to ask for Slashdot?;-). It says "with 100% accuracy" so I don't see any wriggle room.
You can know exactly where something is as long as you are completely uncertain about its momentum. So they can place something it an exact location just as long as they don't expect it to still be there when they come back for it. So either the submitter got the title completely wrong or they are in for a nasty surprise...
If I say "I'm going to blow up the world!!!" does that make it a real possibility?
I'm a physicist working on the LHC so that's not probably something it would be sensible for me to say (especially with a 'muhahahaha' afterwards!;-). Of course the problem is NOT that is it a real possibility but that there are some idiots who THINK that it is a real possibility who would then make a lot of unnecessary trouble. However you would have thought that a tough questioning session by the police and the THREAT of arrest for a repeat incident might be enough to get the message across that they take this seriously (as they should!). Arresting the guy, charging him and have him lose his job (possibly) is ridiculous overkill.
You don't even need a fancy gadget: text in electronic form is far easier to convert to Braille than written or printed text. Since using the Kindle requires the instructor to have material in electronic form stopping its use is not only stupid but actively counter productive! As a professor our student disability support service greatly prefers me to provide them with electronic material since it makes their life a lot easier. If I provide them with printed material they have to type it in themselves first and manually redraw diagrams which takes far longer.
Surely the point the this US act is to ensure that people with disabilities have access to the same material not that they have to access it through exactly the same device?
One could make a good argument that the Pope recognized Galileo's genius, and was trying to save him from himself.
I disagree. I think you could make a good argument that the Pope recognized Galileo's genius, saw it as a threat to his authority and was willing to let him carry on provided that he showed obedience to that authority. Indeed you could argue further that the only reason the church was interested in preserving Galileo's life and "persuading" him to recant was to consolidate their authority rather than having him go to the stake as a martyr for science. I don't know if I would go that far but it is the medieval Catholic church that we are talking about so I would not rule it out either.
Sorry - I read your post to put the major emphasis on the material things whereas I think it is the structure and consequences, regardless of wealth.
In the same vein I was not intending to put the onus on the educational system instead of the parents: it needs to be both. Given that we are a somewhat disappointed in the discipline at our kids' school that may have leaked through into the post more than was warranted!
I hope you are not the Sun of Sir Patrick Moore as I will phone him later today and have a laugh about this;-)
Afraid not - I do have an uncle named Patrick Moore but without the "sir"!;-) I did meet Sir Patrick Moore quite a few years ago when I was a school kid and he came to Harrogate to play the Xylophone in the Royal Hall!
will you please educate Americans' to stop using the word "Math". it is highly embarrasing.
Sorry but as a Brit now living in Canada I don't get much chance to do that any more. I did briefly live in the US and used to tease them that you could tell Europeans were smarter because we learnt maths whereas in the US they only managed to learn one "math"!;-) It is strange that they drop the 's' for maths - they still call my own field "physics" and not "physic".
Kids today get emo and suicidal because they have been given everything
I strongly disagree. I was extremely fortunate and had an excellent childhood. Certainly I never wanted for the essentials and had plenty of toys, games etc. However, growing up the the UK of the 70's and 80's, I also had limits. If I messed around at school I got into trouble with the teachers, if I got unruly at home I got into trouble with my parents. The problem I see today is that kids actions have no real consequences: somehow it is never their fault its a "syndrome" or a mental health problem or whatever.
If your actions never have consequences then is it any wonder people lose the will to live and develop mental health issues? After all life is all about interacting with society and changing things. Of course having consequences also means that sometimes you are wrongly punished: someone will lie about what you did, you won't be believed etc. but, while you obviously want to minimize this (so no crazy "zero tolerance" policies), I really believe that this is a good thing in the end because it gives kids a practical lesson in WHY they need to behave e.g. make sure that you behave honestly so that people will believe you when it really matters, always treat people fairly because it makes you really mad when you are not treated fairly etc. The problem is that nowadays this is hard to implement because kids parents call in the lawyers and you end up with judges applying laws intended to deal with adult crimes and not with kids misbehaving at school or in public.
Then we say "this works for all but a few special cases... close enough."
Actually we don't - we just say that we don't know any way to do it better and it seems to work outside of these cases....so until someone can come up with something better we'll go with the best we have.
In theory one could predistort the image on the screen in such a way as to appear correct when focusing further away, right?
Wrong. Nice try but light rays have a direction as well which will be lacking if you simply reproduce an image on an OLED screen and so they will not be bend in the same way by a lens. If you have a screen which can control both the direction and intensity of light from each pixel then you could make a very nice 3D display.
They will have to make it a bit more transparent first - at 40% you'll be unlikely to make out much beyond the first two layers. I doubt thickening the pixels into voxels will be that hard though but to get a decent Z resolution you'll need several hundred layers which will require a very transparent screen.
Plus it completely defeats the purpose of the transparency: the optics will make you extremely short sighted so you would not be able to see anything further away.
Many schools, especially daycares/preschools, have enacted no-nut policies for similar reasons. I think these are generally reasonable
I've certainly noticed that in Canada they do this. However in the UK this is not usually done and not banning nuts is actually recommended by the Anaphylaxis Campaign because you cannot guarentee a nut free environment and it is important for kids to learn how to deal with their allergy in a safe environment where allergy medication is within easy reach. This also seems to help people deal sensibly with it rather than gross overreactions like we see here and I have never seen any evidence that there is a higher death rate from allergies in the UK than Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
You should care because the only way to make this work...
What do you mean "make it work"? Perhaps it already is? As far as I can see the ONLY data backed evidence in the article is that more men than women get VC dollars and that the women are equally, if not better, qualified. This is NOT evidence of sexism and could be easily due to the fact that women may find the high pressure and huge work load of starting up a company less appealing than men. This could even be viewed as a sign of superior intelligence!
All I'm saying is that perhaps, for the most part, stereotypes have been greatly relaxed (although there are still some throw-backs out there) and what we are seeing is the result of those relaxed stereotypes. We do know that there are differences between the genders so it should not be surprising that this results in differing levels of interest for different types of job. What we have to care about is ensuring equal opportunity for all and not worrying about differing take-up. While the article does conjecture about that there is no evidence to support those conjectures.
Both models have their place, or in the words of Thomas Edison "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
You are mis-interpreting Edison - this statement does not at all represent the Murdoch model. If it did Edison would have said "We will make electricity so cheap that the candlemakers will have us banned". All Edison is saying is that if they can make electricity cheap enough then, given its inherent advantage over candles, why would anyone want to use them? He is not suggesting that anything be forced upon people like Murdoch is i.e. he is not saying that he wants to kill candles, just that most people will probably not want to use them in most cases because electricity will be so much cheaper.
This is exactly what I think will happen with books: nobody wants to set out to deliberately kill paper books but in the future I would imagine that only very popular "classic" books will end up in physical, high quality bindings and that the cheap paperback novels of today will be replaced by electronic media simply because eBooks are cheaper to make and more convenient.
You seem to have concentrated entirely on breaking the encryption. However, if we assume that this is hard to do (which your post seems to indicate) doesn't continuously making new connections put you more at risk of a man-in-the-middle attack whereas an already established connection cannot be interfered with in this way without first breaking the encryption?
First, the numbers presented on the page you link to are only for Britain (other areas have much more abundant solar resources)
he talks about how much area is practical to cover, rather than possible, and he talks about the cost, and so on
True - but these are important factors that have to be taken into account. For me the important conclusion of the book is that there is no practical way to fullfill all our current energy needs from "renewable" resources. You can quibble about the exact numbers here and there but it would be hard to get more than a factor 2 better since the author tended to be conservative.
People living in Arizona can easily extract all the energy they need from the sun. There are people doing it.
Not to mention that, if you actually look at the physics, it is not possible to supply all our current energy needs entirely through solar and wind (renewable) power. So we will always have to have another source to supplement it like nuclear or cleaned up fossil fuels.
This is only true if there is some mathematical value to their work e.g. they have solved a type of equation which nobody else has ever managed to achieve before. I don't think that this is the case here so you can hardly argue it as a mathematical discovery.
I think you'll find that it is the otherway around: release dates will get a lot harder to hit because less time appears to pass for the fast moving developers compared to the rest of the planet. Also mass (not weight!) is an invariant quantity so there will be no change. Yes I know that a lot of people often think that the mass increases but it does not the 'gamma' factor in momentum comes from the velocity NOT from the mass which is why things like "F=gamma ma" do not work.
I wouldnt be surprised if existing colliders and cosmic rays routinely make black holes.
I would. Black Holes are easy to see. Once you get above the production threshold the cross-section becomes huge, in fact so huge that practically all you will see is Black Holes being produced and decaying.
A helium atom has a mass of roughly 4 GeV/c2. The current lower limit on Black Holes at colliders is 1 TeV, or about 250 times more energy so it will have far, far more energy than a Helium atom.
It is obvious even with a simplistic high-school level of understanding that any black holes formed by the LHC (if such a thing is even possible) are completely harmless.
The reason that any Black Holes formed by the LHC are harmless is due to Hawking radiation which, since it requires understanding quantum mechanics, is not a result that is at all obviously to a secondary school student. It can be explained to someone with that level of knowledge but it is by no means obvious.
This is properly viewed as something in between a mathematical discovery and a physical one
No it is not. It is NOT properly viewed as any sort of discovery at all because it might be utterly wrong! It is far more like an unproven hypothesis in maths. It is something that MIGHT be true if the physical axioms hold for that situation but, until it is physically tested, there is no guarentee that this is the case. All this is, is a suggestion that something interesting may happen at a particular (currently unreachable) energy. That's not to say that it is not a worthwhile result but if this counts as a discovery then we also have a whole load of "discoveries" of simulated particles from LHC Monte-carlo simulations.
They did not use the term "exact"- read the title (or is even that too much to ask for Slashdot? ;-). It says "with 100% accuracy" so I don't see any wriggle room.
You can know exactly where something is as long as you are completely uncertain about its momentum. So they can place something it an exact location just as long as they don't expect it to still be there when they come back for it. So either the submitter got the title completely wrong or they are in for a nasty surprise...
If I say "I'm going to blow up the world!!!" does that make it a real possibility?
I'm a physicist working on the LHC so that's not probably something it would be sensible for me to say (especially with a 'muhahahaha' afterwards! ;-). Of course the problem is NOT that is it a real possibility but that there are some idiots who THINK that it is a real possibility who would then make a lot of unnecessary trouble. However you would have thought that a tough questioning session by the police and the THREAT of arrest for a repeat incident might be enough to get the message across that they take this seriously (as they should!). Arresting the guy, charging him and have him lose his job (possibly) is ridiculous overkill.
You don't even need a fancy gadget: text in electronic form is far easier to convert to Braille than written or printed text. Since using the Kindle requires the instructor to have material in electronic form stopping its use is not only stupid but actively counter productive! As a professor our student disability support service greatly prefers me to provide them with electronic material since it makes their life a lot easier. If I provide them with printed material they have to type it in themselves first and manually redraw diagrams which takes far longer.
Surely the point the this US act is to ensure that people with disabilities have access to the same material not that they have to access it through exactly the same device?
One could make a good argument that the Pope recognized Galileo's genius, and was trying to save him from himself.
I disagree. I think you could make a good argument that the Pope recognized Galileo's genius, saw it as a threat to his authority and was willing to let him carry on provided that he showed obedience to that authority. Indeed you could argue further that the only reason the church was interested in preserving Galileo's life and "persuading" him to recant was to consolidate their authority rather than having him go to the stake as a martyr for science. I don't know if I would go that far but it is the medieval Catholic church that we are talking about so I would not rule it out either.
Sorry - I read your post to put the major emphasis on the material things whereas I think it is the structure and consequences, regardless of wealth.
In the same vein I was not intending to put the onus on the educational system instead of the parents: it needs to be both. Given that we are a somewhat disappointed in the discipline at our kids' school that may have leaked through into the post more than was warranted!
I hope you are not the Sun of Sir Patrick Moore as I will phone him later today and have a laugh about this ;-)
Afraid not - I do have an uncle named Patrick Moore but without the "sir"! ;-) I did meet Sir Patrick Moore quite a few years ago when I was a school kid and he came to Harrogate to play the Xylophone in the Royal Hall!
will you please educate Americans' to stop using the word "Math". it is highly embarrasing.
Sorry but as a Brit now living in Canada I don't get much chance to do that any more. I did briefly live in the US and used to tease them that you could tell Europeans were smarter because we learnt maths whereas in the US they only managed to learn one "math"! ;-) It is strange that they drop the 's' for maths - they still call my own field "physics" and not "physic".
Kids today get emo and suicidal because they have been given everything
I strongly disagree. I was extremely fortunate and had an excellent childhood. Certainly I never wanted for the essentials and had plenty of toys, games etc. However, growing up the the UK of the 70's and 80's, I also had limits. If I messed around at school I got into trouble with the teachers, if I got unruly at home I got into trouble with my parents. The problem I see today is that kids actions have no real consequences: somehow it is never their fault its a "syndrome" or a mental health problem or whatever.
If your actions never have consequences then is it any wonder people lose the will to live and develop mental health issues? After all life is all about interacting with society and changing things. Of course having consequences also means that sometimes you are wrongly punished: someone will lie about what you did, you won't be believed etc. but, while you obviously want to minimize this (so no crazy "zero tolerance" policies), I really believe that this is a good thing in the end because it gives kids a practical lesson in WHY they need to behave e.g. make sure that you behave honestly so that people will believe you when it really matters, always treat people fairly because it makes you really mad when you are not treated fairly etc. The problem is that nowadays this is hard to implement because kids parents call in the lawyers and you end up with judges applying laws intended to deal with adult crimes and not with kids misbehaving at school or in public.
Then we say "this works for all but a few special cases... close enough."
Actually we don't - we just say that we don't know any way to do it better and it seems to work outside of these cases....so until someone can come up with something better we'll go with the best we have.
In theory one could predistort the image on the screen in such a way as to appear correct when focusing further away, right?
Wrong. Nice try but light rays have a direction as well which will be lacking if you simply reproduce an image on an OLED screen and so they will not be bend in the same way by a lens. If you have a screen which can control both the direction and intensity of light from each pixel then you could make a very nice 3D display.
They will have to make it a bit more transparent first - at 40% you'll be unlikely to make out much beyond the first two layers. I doubt thickening the pixels into voxels will be that hard though but to get a decent Z resolution you'll need several hundred layers which will require a very transparent screen.
Plus it completely defeats the purpose of the transparency: the optics will make you extremely short sighted so you would not be able to see anything further away.
They already do this. Apparently this woman was not happy with just that.
Many schools, especially daycares/preschools, have enacted no-nut policies for similar reasons. I think these are generally reasonable
I've certainly noticed that in Canada they do this. However in the UK this is not usually done and not banning nuts is actually recommended by the Anaphylaxis Campaign because you cannot guarentee a nut free environment and it is important for kids to learn how to deal with their allergy in a safe environment where allergy medication is within easy reach. This also seems to help people deal sensibly with it rather than gross overreactions like we see here and I have never seen any evidence that there is a higher death rate from allergies in the UK than Canada.