None of us is going to be around by then, and we probably wouldn't recognize our descendents
I'm hoping we don't have to wait that long to visit another star...but that is the time limit we (or our descendants) have. For all we know we might be the only life in existence and if so it would be a shame to see it all extinguished at once.
If malaria isn't a potential death sentence then how will curing it save people? The fact that curing it would save millions of lives indicates exactly how dangerous it is.
You are also asking the wrong question. The question really is: would you risk your life on the slim chance that it might save others knowing that, should the treatment not work, you risked it for very little indeed?
It is important if you want Earth-based life to survive more that the next ~5 billion years which is roughly when the sun runs out of fuel....think long term!
Actually I'd go for bacteria - some of those may be capable of surviving on other planets in the solar system. However I agree survival is a stupid intelligence metric. By that argument anything created recently is stupid simply because it hasn't survived very long yet (or at least we cannot know that it is intelligent). Plus survival often depends on the stability of the environment. Would we really try to argue that the Dinosaurs would have been more intelligent if the meteor that killed them had happened a few years later?
Intelligence might improve survivability but it is not a one-to-one mapping.
Just because as an academic, I could copy a commercial work and make a few changes to it with out fear of the copyright police coming after me...
What? Where did this come from? We are talking about original work here - what you describe is plagiarism - at least if you are passing the changed piece off as your own. Independent of copyright that is unethical.
This is like including snippets of BSD code in GPL code...
I agree - and if snippets is all it is then you are fine. However quite a few projects started as academic exercises, or are supported heavily by Universities. In these cases the bulk of the code would suddenly loose GPL protection.
Finally, if copyright is abolished in academia, this wouldn't stop you from selling a commercial textbook with protection against other commercial, it just means that students in academia won't have to pay to get a copy of it.
Ah - I suppose it depends on what you mean by "abolish copyright". If it means that copyright simply does not apply to academics i.e. we could just ignore copyright on any material that we use for academic purposes but any original material we produce is public domain then I'd go for that as a fair trade.
I agree that the free text book sector is beginning to look very interesting. I'd often thought of trying to do something like that myself and - if I find time to look into it - will have a proper look but a cursory glance has shown that the standard - at least in physics - is sometimes rather low. If I can get a book I can edit and then give my students for free that would be truly fantastic! However a lot of these work on the CC license which requires copyright to enforce it.
I agree - you write a textbook to educate....but while I would not care about making money I would care if someone else was able to take my work and make money off it without having to share any money they made with me.
I'm not sure I agree - but that is not what was under discussion: we were talking about removing copyright from academic work only, not all copyrights. Even if all copyright were abolished there would still be a reason for the GPL. The GPL requires companies to disclose modified source code if they distribute. Even if that source code had no copyright how would you actually get hold of it without the GPL? Leaks? That's one of the things I like about the GPL. If someone ever does something clever with something I've written I'll not only be able to appreciate it and use it I'll be able to understand how they did it too.
I agree. Without copyright every OSS product with significant academic contributions would suddenly lose GPL protection. There would also be huge legal fights for faculty over whether work was done on your own time (and therefore copyrighted) or done at work (and therefore public domain). You will also have trouble finding people to write academic textbooks - why write something if a publisher can just rip it off and make a (relatively small!) profit from your work? In addition you may see a significant brain drain from the US as faculty who make money from copyrights (authors from all disciplines, artists etc.) move to countries where their work is protected.
Indeed it would likely curtail sharing of material since I am more than happy to share my reserach code and educational material to those who ask for it under the CC non-comercial, share-alike license but would be far less likely to share if I knew some publisher could get hold of the material and sell it for profit (assuming they thought it worthwhile which is doubtful!) without my say. As you suggest what we really need is sensible fair use rights defined and enforced. Just because the current copyright system is being abused does not mean that the solution is to abolish it!
This is quite wrong; modern FORTRAN compilers perform as well and often better than C++.
That has not been my experience, so perhaps you are quite wrong. It is true that C++ is "dangerous" in that if you have no clue what you are doing it is easy to introduce dynamic memory allocation or indirect function calls. However, when I last compared the assembly generated with a Fortran compiler vs. that for a C++ compiler the Fortran code lacked some hints for conditionals and loops and was not as well optimized (compiled with optimization turned on) as a result the code executed 10-20% slower.
I realize that the usual argument for Fortran is the it is supposedly faster than other languages but with modern CPUs and carefully written C++ that does not appear to be the case.
FWIW I am very comfortable w/ FORTRAN and prefer it for serious numerical work
You might want to re-evaluate that position. Modern CPUs benefit enormously from 'hints' embedded in the machine code generated by compilers. My experience has been that this can have a significant impact on performance given the right circumstances - in fact I've even seen that compiling C with a C++ compiler can give significant performance increases simply because the C++ compiler was more mainstream and so better maintained and optimized. I cannot help but think that a Fortran compiler is so far off the mainstream that the performance of its code will be significantly worse than a C++ compiler.
Of course there are lots of things you can do in C++ that will slow down your code so you have to be careful but given a level comparison of C++ vs. Fortran I would expect the C++ code to be no slower and potentially faster.
You need to learn some quantum physics - which is actually where the Planck spectrum comes from. The universe does not define photon energies (i.e. wavelengths) to such an arbitrary precision. In addition the spectrum comes from the allowed standing waves which the object can emit. While the spacing of these is tiny it is not a continuus spectrum - although given the limitations on measuring the wavelengths precisely it appears so.
See my reply above - you need to account for the solid angle of a single rod. This means that the rate seen at a single rod will be a lot lower than 1 photon/second unless you crush you eyeball!
Your calculus text book is right. Unfortunately your understanding of physics is wrong. dN/dlambda is the number of photons emitted per unit lambda i.e. you do not need to integrate it, it already is the quantity you need.
I know the article said that but, as a physicist, I would not trust a biologist to have checked something like black body radiation to see if it could be responsible. They might have checked and ruled it out but it is the sort of thing that could easily be missed by a non-physicist.
Ah - but you are forgetting the solid angle. My rate is 100 photons/second/per steradian. I have no idea how small a rod is but probably on the 1 micrometre? (it has to be bigger that the wavelengths it detects which are 100's of nm). Hence you would have to place your retina within ~5 micrometres of the source for each rod to subtend a solid angle of 0.01 steradians to get one photon a second - which the article says that you still won't be conscious of - particularly since at this point you've rammed the source into your eyeball!
You could print your own copy if you wished, but the equpiment to do so is cost prohibitive.
Actually with modern, automated printing presses that is becoming less the case. We print a conference proceedings for 7 cents/page for a fully bound soft cover book that looks professional. All you would need to do is download the scans from Google, OCR them and do the layout. Still not a trivial amount of work but not impossible if you were somehow motivated by wanting to save a few dollars.
Correct. Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation a human body will emit one photon with a wavelength of 600nm every 10 seconds. If we scale that up by a factor of 1,000 that would mean the human eye would need to be capable of seeing a flux of 100 photons/second per unit solid angle. This is well below the threshold of a human eye - you'd need a photomultiplier or low temp photon counter device to pick this up. So clearly this is not the source of light.
The laws of nature do not change in our time frame.
That is an assumption. As the Universe expands it is entirely possible for it to undergo a spontaneous phase change to a lower energy state which will effectively alter the current way that particles interact, just like it did very shortly after the Big Bang.
Isn't that ironically prove that we are ready to sacrifice some assumptions just to get any result ? Even if this result could potentially lead us to the end of everything we have.
No this is not irony nor could it "lead us to the end of everyting we have". If the LHC was dangerous we would already be dead thanks to cosmic rays. In addition stars, planets etc. would be disapearing from our skies as they are converted into Black Holes by cosmic rays as well. We have never, ever seen this happen. Hence either we conclude that it is so rare that there is a neglible chance of it happening with the LHC (on the millions of years timescale) or it does not happen ever.
...and yes you can assume that we got it wrong in which case you should also be worrying that we are wrong about the current vacuum being stable in which case we are all doomed anyway!
Yes - but you need "duct tape" that works at -271C and you need to warm up the magnet first so you can open it up to put it there and then cool it down again. You have to do this very slowly (~month) so that everything can expand and contract together.
All of science is based on an assumption namely that the laws of nature do not change. You cannot prove that tomorrow gravity will continue to work as it did today. However given that, as far as we can tell, gravity seems to have worked since the Big Bang, it seems a very reasonable assumption that it will continue to work tomorrow.
So saying that things are based on assumptions is meaningless unless you state what those assumptions are and what evidence there is to point out that they are wrong. Otherwise we might make the assumption that the author has no clue what they are talking about...
You could try some of the books by Frank Close. He's a British author and, while I've heard that some don't like his style, I appreciate it a lot more than Brian Greene - but then I work in the field so I might have a different point of view to a layperson.
...and yet, given the free hand to manipulate the government, they go and pass laws like this.
When ANYONE is given a free hand to manipulate government they pass laws like this. Look at the anti-religion laws of the communists. This is precisely why no one group should ever be given a free hand with government, least of all politicians.
No it isn't. Atheism is the default position. It is, simply, a case of not endorsing or subscribing to purported religious facts for which there is no evidence.
No Atheism is not the "default" - where default presumably means completely rational and provable - position. Agnosticism is because it implies that the person is open to be persuaded by evidence one way or the other whereas active disbelief, (the definition of atheism), to be rational, requires evidence to prove that whatever is disbelieved does not exist. As any scientist will tell you: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Dawkins has a point when he complains that we don't make the fine distinction between "no evidence one way or the other" vs. "does not exist" for things like unicorns and dragons. However we do make the distinction for religion. So either he has a faithed based position (atheism) or a purely rational based position (agnosticism). He might not like it but it's the language we have.
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None of us is going to be around by then, and we probably wouldn't recognize our descendents
I'm hoping we don't have to wait that long to visit another star...but that is the time limit we (or our descendants) have. For all we know we might be the only life in existence and if so it would be a shame to see it all extinguished at once.
If malaria isn't a potential death sentence then how will curing it save people? The fact that curing it would save millions of lives indicates exactly how dangerous it is.
You are also asking the wrong question. The question really is: would you risk your life on the slim chance that it might save others knowing that, should the treatment not work, you risked it for very little indeed?
Why is intelligence even a metric?
It is important if you want Earth-based life to survive more that the next ~5 billion years which is roughly when the sun runs out of fuel....think long term!
Actually I'd go for bacteria - some of those may be capable of surviving on other planets in the solar system. However I agree survival is a stupid intelligence metric. By that argument anything created recently is stupid simply because it hasn't survived very long yet (or at least we cannot know that it is intelligent). Plus survival often depends on the stability of the environment. Would we really try to argue that the Dinosaurs would have been more intelligent if the meteor that killed them had happened a few years later?
Intelligence might improve survivability but it is not a one-to-one mapping.
Just because as an academic, I could copy a commercial work and make a few changes to it with out fear of the copyright police coming after me...
What? Where did this come from? We are talking about original work here - what you describe is plagiarism - at least if you are passing the changed piece off as your own. Independent of copyright that is unethical.
This is like including snippets of BSD code in GPL code...
I agree - and if snippets is all it is then you are fine. However quite a few projects started as academic exercises, or are supported heavily by Universities. In these cases the bulk of the code would suddenly loose GPL protection.
Finally, if copyright is abolished in academia, this wouldn't stop you from selling a commercial textbook with protection against other commercial, it just means that students in academia won't have to pay to get a copy of it.
Ah - I suppose it depends on what you mean by "abolish copyright". If it means that copyright simply does not apply to academics i.e. we could just ignore copyright on any material that we use for academic purposes but any original material we produce is public domain then I'd go for that as a fair trade.
I agree that the free text book sector is beginning to look very interesting. I'd often thought of trying to do something like that myself and - if I find time to look into it - will have a proper look but a cursory glance has shown that the standard - at least in physics - is sometimes rather low. If I can get a book I can edit and then give my students for free that would be truly fantastic! However a lot of these work on the CC license which requires copyright to enforce it.
I agree - you write a textbook to educate....but while I would not care about making money I would care if someone else was able to take my work and make money off it without having to share any money they made with me.
GPL wouldn't be needed without copyright.
I'm not sure I agree - but that is not what was under discussion: we were talking about removing copyright from academic work only, not all copyrights. Even if all copyright were abolished there would still be a reason for the GPL. The GPL requires companies to disclose modified source code if they distribute. Even if that source code had no copyright how would you actually get hold of it without the GPL? Leaks? That's one of the things I like about the GPL. If someone ever does something clever with something I've written I'll not only be able to appreciate it and use it I'll be able to understand how they did it too.
I agree. Without copyright every OSS product with significant academic contributions would suddenly lose GPL protection. There would also be huge legal fights for faculty over whether work was done on your own time (and therefore copyrighted) or done at work (and therefore public domain). You will also have trouble finding people to write academic textbooks - why write something if a publisher can just rip it off and make a (relatively small!) profit from your work? In addition you may see a significant brain drain from the US as faculty who make money from copyrights (authors from all disciplines, artists etc.) move to countries where their work is protected.
Indeed it would likely curtail sharing of material since I am more than happy to share my reserach code and educational material to those who ask for it under the CC non-comercial, share-alike license but would be far less likely to share if I knew some publisher could get hold of the material and sell it for profit (assuming they thought it worthwhile which is doubtful!) without my say. As you suggest what we really need is sensible fair use rights defined and enforced. Just because the current copyright system is being abused does not mean that the solution is to abolish it!
Integrate the black body spectrum (dN/dlambda) between those two points and figure it out yourself.
This is quite wrong; modern FORTRAN compilers perform as well and often better than C++.
That has not been my experience, so perhaps you are quite wrong. It is true that C++ is "dangerous" in that if you have no clue what you are doing it is easy to introduce dynamic memory allocation or indirect function calls. However, when I last compared the assembly generated with a Fortran compiler vs. that for a C++ compiler the Fortran code lacked some hints for conditionals and loops and was not as well optimized (compiled with optimization turned on) as a result the code executed 10-20% slower.
I realize that the usual argument for Fortran is the it is supposedly faster than other languages but with modern CPUs and carefully written C++ that does not appear to be the case.
FWIW I am very comfortable w/ FORTRAN and prefer it for serious numerical work
You might want to re-evaluate that position. Modern CPUs benefit enormously from 'hints' embedded in the machine code generated by compilers. My experience has been that this can have a significant impact on performance given the right circumstances - in fact I've even seen that compiling C with a C++ compiler can give significant performance increases simply because the C++ compiler was more mainstream and so better maintained and optimized. I cannot help but think that a Fortran compiler is so far off the mainstream that the performance of its code will be significantly worse than a C++ compiler.
Of course there are lots of things you can do in C++ that will slow down your code so you have to be careful but given a level comparison of C++ vs. Fortran I would expect the C++ code to be no slower and potentially faster.
You need to learn some quantum physics - which is actually where the Planck spectrum comes from. The universe does not define photon energies (i.e. wavelengths) to such an arbitrary precision. In addition the spectrum comes from the allowed standing waves which the object can emit. While the spacing of these is tiny it is not a continuus spectrum - although given the limitations on measuring the wavelengths precisely it appears so.
See my reply above - you need to account for the solid angle of a single rod. This means that the rate seen at a single rod will be a lot lower than 1 photon/second unless you crush you eyeball!
Your calculus text book is right. Unfortunately your understanding of physics is wrong. dN/dlambda is the number of photons emitted per unit lambda i.e. you do not need to integrate it, it already is the quantity you need.
I know the article said that but, as a physicist, I would not trust a biologist to have checked something like black body radiation to see if it could be responsible. They might have checked and ruled it out but it is the sort of thing that could easily be missed by a non-physicist.
Ah - but you are forgetting the solid angle. My rate is 100 photons/second/per steradian. I have no idea how small a rod is but probably on the 1 micrometre? (it has to be bigger that the wavelengths it detects which are 100's of nm). Hence you would have to place your retina within ~5 micrometres of the source for each rod to subtend a solid angle of 0.01 steradians to get one photon a second - which the article says that you still won't be conscious of - particularly since at this point you've rammed the source into your eyeball!
You could print your own copy if you wished, but the equpiment to do so is cost prohibitive.
Actually with modern, automated printing presses that is becoming less the case. We print a conference proceedings for 7 cents/page for a fully bound soft cover book that looks professional. All you would need to do is download the scans from Google, OCR them and do the layout. Still not a trivial amount of work but not impossible if you were somehow motivated by wanting to save a few dollars.
Correct. Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation a human body will emit one photon with a wavelength of 600nm every 10 seconds. If we scale that up by a factor of 1,000 that would mean the human eye would need to be capable of seeing a flux of 100 photons/second per unit solid angle. This is well below the threshold of a human eye - you'd need a photomultiplier or low temp photon counter device to pick this up. So clearly this is not the source of light.
The laws of nature do not change in our time frame.
That is an assumption. As the Universe expands it is entirely possible for it to undergo a spontaneous phase change to a lower energy state which will effectively alter the current way that particles interact, just like it did very shortly after the Big Bang.
Isn't that ironically prove that we are ready to sacrifice some assumptions just to get any result ? Even if this result could potentially lead us to the end of everything we have.
No this is not irony nor could it "lead us to the end of everyting we have". If the LHC was dangerous we would already be dead thanks to cosmic rays. In addition stars, planets etc. would be disapearing from our skies as they are converted into Black Holes by cosmic rays as well. We have never, ever seen this happen. Hence either we conclude that it is so rare that there is a neglible chance of it happening with the LHC (on the millions of years timescale) or it does not happen ever.
...and yes you can assume that we got it wrong in which case you should also be worrying that we are wrong about the current vacuum being stable in which case we are all doomed anyway!
Yes - but you need "duct tape" that works at -271C and you need to warm up the magnet first so you can open it up to put it there and then cool it down again. You have to do this very slowly (~month) so that everything can expand and contract together.
All of science is based on an assumption namely that the laws of nature do not change. You cannot prove that tomorrow gravity will continue to work as it did today. However given that, as far as we can tell, gravity seems to have worked since the Big Bang, it seems a very reasonable assumption that it will continue to work tomorrow.
So saying that things are based on assumptions is meaningless unless you state what those assumptions are and what evidence there is to point out that they are wrong. Otherwise we might make the assumption that the author has no clue what they are talking about...
As a member of the LHC/ATLAS team let me say that you are in a good position if you have to break them first! ;-)
You could try some of the books by Frank Close. He's a British author and, while I've heard that some don't like his style, I appreciate it a lot more than Brian Greene - but then I work in the field so I might have a different point of view to a layperson.
...and yet, given the free hand to manipulate the government, they go and pass laws like this.
When ANYONE is given a free hand to manipulate government they pass laws like this. Look at the anti-religion laws of the communists. This is precisely why no one group should ever be given a free hand with government, least of all politicians.
No it isn't. Atheism is the default position. It is, simply, a case of not endorsing or subscribing to purported religious facts for which there is no evidence.
No Atheism is not the "default" - where default presumably means completely rational and provable - position. Agnosticism is because it implies that the person is open to be persuaded by evidence one way or the other whereas active disbelief, (the definition of atheism), to be rational, requires evidence to prove that whatever is disbelieved does not exist. As any scientist will tell you: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Dawkins has a point when he complains that we don't make the fine distinction between "no evidence one way or the other" vs. "does not exist" for things like unicorns and dragons. However we do make the distinction for religion. So either he has a faithed based position (atheism) or a purely rational based position (agnosticism). He might not like it but it's the language we have.