That's great but Google are using gigahertz frequencies, not terahertz frequencies. There is a three order of magnitude difference. This roughly the same as the difference between visible light and extreme UV/X-rays and there is clearly a huge difference in how these two types of radiation interact with the body.
But hey, it's only probable that it'll also give you "leukemia, lymphoma, and other stem, blood, and bone marrow cancers", so let's totally play it down.
Actually it is only possible, not probable, and as such from a carcinogenic point of view is technically less dangerous than bacon which the WHO classes as "probably carcinogenic". As far as the summary is concerned it is more a case of "let's just mention this slight possibility of cancer and not mention any other of the apparently proven and very serious effects of the gas". If this summary had been written about the dangers of guns it would have probably only have discussed the possibility of lead poisoning.
Apparently one of the gases is "probably not carcinogenic" and the other is only classed as a "possible human carcinogen" so really the title should read "Desktop 3D Printers Shown to Emit Gases some of which might be hazardous". Not to mention that if the safe exposure level is 50g/m^3 that's almost 5% by weight of air so either someone messed up the units or one of the gases emitted are safer than carbon dioxide and nobody suggests that we ban candles.
While that could explain why sunrise reaches two points of the globe at different times, it fails when considering the timing of sunset for the same two points.
Not at all. You see where the sun rises will have a longer day because it will take longer for the sunset to reach them. As the disc rotates the point where the sunrises will change through out the year which is how you get seasons. Provided that you don't do anything silly like actually think about any of the details then it works just fine. As an added bonus it also means that somewhere like Canada that has a large seasonal variation in temperature must be very close to the edge so anyone who believes in a flat earth should definitely stay a long way away from Canada just to be safe because the edge is not marked on any map.
The magnets in the LHC require a ~9,000 amp current and the ability to dump it somewhere fast in the event of a quench. Care to explain how you plan to do that wirelessly? It's also worth pointing out that the part of the accelerator complex they are recabling was built in 1954, 13 years before Fermilab existed and 17 years before the first wireless packet network.
Since the cables have been bombarded by high energy particles,....
...they are now likely to be slightly activated and so radioactive. I'd not want cables which have been in a high intensity environment like the injectors in my house. While much of the activity is short lived because it involves light elements (we used to have to wait about an hour after beam before we could go anywhere near the upper end of a fixed target experiment I used to work on in the north area of CERN) copper is a heavier element and so likely to have longer lived activity.
Having said that, I would be really interested in their explanation of how it can be noon in Hawaii at the same time as it's the middle of the night in Paris. That's got to be a good one.
Simple it's the incredibly slow speed of light. That way when the sun rises over the rim it takes hours for the dawn to reach the hub. Of course now you have to add all us physicists to the conspiracy theory.
Seriously, why would anyone lie? Did you even think through your argument
You are clearly not a scientist. When doing a scientific study you need to be able to measure how good your result is not merely cross your fingers and hope that it is accurate. Why would people lie on a poll about voting in an election? I don't know but given the number of polls which get things very, very wrong there is clear evidence that they do.
With marijuana there used to be a stigma attached to having smoked it. Perhaps the more intelligent twins realized that this was no longer case but that the less intelligent ones did not? When you are doing a study on intelligence and you are relying on that intelligence in the first place to get accurate data you have a bias problem.
Cops violate civilian law all the time for the sake of enforcing the law. The main thing that comes to mind is speeding, running red lights, and blocking traffic.
Aren't those specific exceptions to the law granted to police officers? i.e. the law specifically allows emergency vehicles to go through red lights and for them to speed when responding to an emergency. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty certain there will not be an exemption to the laws about distribution of child pornography to let the police do it.
In similar types of cases involving lures to catch criminals in the act the police stop short of actually committing the crime themselves: if posing as a hitman they don't actually kill people to see if they can get more criminal clients. What I don't understand is why this strategy would not have worked here. If you blurred out the pictures and videos or arrange for the links to just timeout then you would still get the IP addresses without actually distributing the material. You might catch fewer of the criminals before they knew something was wrong but, like the hitman example, surely that's better than actually committing the crime?
Attending lectures works for many. But some reads on their own and do just as well that way. Nothing wrong with attending the gym or the bar either
All this is true the problem is getting the balance correct: you can't spend ever night in the bar, you must spend a reasonable amount of time reading etc. The problem students have getting this balance right is that the standards in secondary schools has dropped significantly over the past few years. Couple that with insane new initiatives at schools such as "no grade zeros" and retakes of exams if they don't do well enough the first time and you have incoming university students who don't expect to need to work hard and who expect to be able to retake exams if they don't do well the first time. We've even had students who were surprised to learn that when they failed courses they could not carry on at university!
One solution is what seems to be proposed here: programme a computer to nanny them. I'd argue a better solution is to fix the schools, bring back the level of academic rigour they used to have (at least in the UK), dump all these silly "no grade zero"-type policies that they have introduced (at least in Canada) and instead of programming a computer to monitor performance we would have taught the students how to do this themselves which would be a far, far better outcome because they need this skill in the real world.
It has already been done - sort of - by a town in Norway that uses mirrors to reflect sunlight down into the valley to extend the daylight hours. At a reasonably high latitude in the northern hemisphere there are not many flora or fauna to worry about in the middle of winter in an urban setting.
The only time you'd need to worry about it is if they focus the light a lot to create a heat based-death ray. That would also be far more like the plot of a bond film...
The trajectory of a projectile requires 2 spacial dimensions. Even if you use curvilinear coordinates you still need to understand that the line it curved in a direction orthogonal to direction of the line and hence you need to understand 2 spacial dimensions. See any first year physics textbook - or even a high school textbook for that matter - for a simple explanation. You might find that textbooks are generally a more reliable source of science knowledge that a science FICTION novel (there's a not-so-subtle hint in the name as to why that's the case!).
Can anyone understand imagine a 4D space as more than just a mathematical model? How about the behavior of time as something that dialates?
You don't need to grasp 4D space to understand relativity in the same way that you do not need to grasp 3D space to understand newtonian mechanics. It is easy to consider problems which use less than the maximum number of dimensions e.g. a projectile uses 2D despite being in a 3D world. Similarly high speed rockets limit relativistic problems to one time and one space dimension which is easy to grasp and even particle decays and trajectories can limit it to 2 space and one time.
Time is not "something which dilates" it is just another direction which we perceive differently. A fast moving object (relative to us) just has a different direction for time than we do. This means that some of its space direction lies along our time direction and vice versa. Hence the object appears shorter because we see the part of the length which points along our time direction as a difference in time for different part of the object and not as spacial separation. Also the passage of time at one point of the object is slower because we see part of that temporal separation as a spacial separation.
Relativity is not hard to grasp. The problem with the Big Bang though is that it created space and possibly time as well. At the moment there is no physical theory which can explain how to do this because it is not clear how things can happen without time. However just because we can't conceive of that yet does not mean that we cannot in the future. Perhaps understanding the small-scale, possibly quantum, nature of space-time will give us a hint? 120 years ago nobody could conceive how physics worked at atomic scales but once we got experimental evidence of that physics we figured it out despite the fact that some of the physicists involved (e.g. Einstein) did not really believe what they were finding and had real trouble grabbing the concepts.
You can say a lot about the US but the one thing we've got going here are legions of researchers looking for ways to make people healthier...
That's not quote correct is it though. You have legions of researchers looking for ways to make RICH people healthier. The conditions which often attract the most research are the ones which affect patients who tend to be more affluent. For life-threatening conditions this is ethically no better than holding a gun to someone's head: pay us lots of money for your treatment or die.
Interesting - the US survey puts Volvo near the bottom, but the UK survey near the top... maybe surveys like this are just flawed.
...or maybe the different countries want different things from their cars. US cars tend to be large, have very soft suspensions and the technology seems to be devoted to removing control from the driver (or at least incessantly beeping at him). European cars tend to be smaller, more responsive and the technology is devoted to providing the driver with more control. European cars are far better for relatively short journeys on busy roads but if you are going to be driving for many hours on a relatively empty road US cars are far more comfortable.
You don't know and understand browser caching or do you have a good understanding of the reasons it would not work effectively ?
Ok so now, before I want to use the app in offline mode, I have to go to the webpage first and do something to make sure that it downloads and caches all the code and data that the app will need to run offline which will need some special functionality on the website to do reliably so better hope they support it. Then I need to somehow make sure that the browser keeps this information cached and does not delete it from the cache when I download a different page. Finally I'll then need a special URL which goes to the cache without having the browser wait for an internet timeout.
Exactly how is this better than an app I just download once and click on when I need it? Especially if I have one which exercises the CPU since implementing it s a webpage will kill the performance.
I am more concerned about the universe being 46 billion light years in all directions....More likely we can only see 46 billion light years.
Actually we can only see 13.8 billion light years in each direction because that is the age of the universe and so the furtherest possible distance that light can travel in that time. You should indeed be very skeptical about the 46 billion light year number because that is an extrapolation as to where the objects we can see now are but, without actual knowledge of the rate of expansion, there is no way to know whether that number is right. It's also rather strange to take a photo of something and then state the distance where the object is now rather than the distance shown in the photo.
However you should not be skeptical about the distance being uniform. If we lived in a 2D universe then you could imagine it as being on the surface of an expanding sphere. If you looked in all directions around you then the universe would appear the same but this would also be true for anyone else in the universe since you would all be sitting on the surface of a sphere. This is the same thing for our 3D universe but it is far harder to imagine!
The second problem is the Big Bang Theory is not-even-Science -- there is no way to replicate or reproduce the experiment!
I completely agree with your assessment of the one you colourfully name "Starts-With-A-Shit" since he gets his particle physics wrong all the time too. However I have to disagree with your assessment of the Big Bang Theory.
For a start it has made several predictions which have turned out to be correct: the relative abundances of the elements in the Universe and the cosmic microwave background. Secondly it is partly reproducible in the Large Hadron Collider in that we can recreate the conditions of the early universe to figure out the physics and then make predictions on how the universe would look today if it had started in a Big Bang.
There are still some unknowns such as Dark Matter and how the matter/antimatter asymmetry came about but that is one way to test the model: if we find that the physics behind these is incompatible with the Big Bang then we will have falsified the model. Hence since it makes predictions, is falsifiable and is partly reproducible it is hard to argue that it is not science.
No, it can not be users selectable unless cars that have chosen the user first mode are not allowed on public roadways. When you drive on public roadways you accept that you have to obey certain "rules of the road", such as speed limits.
You do realize that this would automatically disqualify all human drivers right? Humans will always prioritize themselves and will not always obey the rules of the road. A computer which prioritizes is occupants but which always obeys traffic rules would still be a huge improvement.
We make fun all the time by saying "Think of the Children", but I'll bet if you polled a sizable group of people in some hypothetical You could save one person, an adult or a child scenario, probably most would save the child and leave the adult to die.
True, but suppose we change the "adult" to your wife/husband who is in the car with you and the "child" to a 12 year-old running away from a policeman and who dashes into the street. Do you swerve into the oncoming lorry and kill the adult you love or hit the child who was probably a delinquent? In that situation I think you'd get far more people saying they would protect the adult they love over the child: the closeness of the relationship with the people affected is a huge factor.
This is the problem with a car making life and death decisions which might prioritize the lives of those outside the car higher than those in it. The people you are driving with are those you are far more likely to have close relationships with and so want to prioritize. Indeed even if we stick to the purely abstract case suppose the car had a child in it? How would it know even that unambiguously and, without that, even the simple abstract case becomes impossible since it might be a choice of a child vs. another child.
That's precisely the point: sideswiping the car next to you is such a risky manoeuver that machine nor man can probably make that judgment call very well, with any vehicle.
That depends - if there is an oncoming lorry in your lane and the only way to avoid it is to side swipe the vehicle next to you that's what I would do to avoid what looks like impending death. That's what I would expect a self-driving car to do to: take whatever it perceives to be the lowest risk to the health of the car's occupants because that is what a human driver would do instinctively. To do otherwise and you are only one step above Futurama's suicide booths. How long will it be before you get some idiot who walks out in front of car which then causes it to swerve into an oncoming lorry, killing the occupants, where a human driver may just have hit the idiot? The advantage that a smart car would have though is that it could perhaps tell the lorry what it is going to do, get confirmation back from the lorry that it too will swerve and then both vehicles synchronize their motion to minimize casualties...but preservation of occupants must still come first as it would for a human.
It is the one thing so far. The String Theorists themselves cannot even "predict" the Standard Model yet so how on earth can you possibly know that every other phenomena is explainable by just "twiddling knobs" in String Theory when we don't even know if the Standard Model is compatible with String Theory?
No negative or positive finding tests string theory, it just suggests more knobs to twiddle. The one shining hope is that if we don't find supersymmetry, it is dead as a theory since it cannot accommodate a universe without.
You just contradicted yourself there. There is a negative finding which tests String Theory: not finding SUSY would exclude it as a viable model. That is the one test which we know about so far but the problem is that String Theorists are overwhelmed by the number of possible models and also lack the tools needed to extrapolate from the Planck-scale down to the LHC-scale.
This is why there are no concrete signatures indeed last I heard there were no candidate theories which even generated the know physics of the Standard Model because they had no way to figure out how the models look at low energy. Once they have the maths to do this the number of possibilities will rapidly reduce and we can start on whittling away the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
That's great but Google are using gigahertz frequencies, not terahertz frequencies. There is a three order of magnitude difference. This roughly the same as the difference between visible light and extreme UV/X-rays and there is clearly a huge difference in how these two types of radiation interact with the body.
But hey, it's only probable that it'll also give you "leukemia, lymphoma, and other stem, blood, and bone marrow cancers", so let's totally play it down.
Actually it is only possible, not probable, and as such from a carcinogenic point of view is technically less dangerous than bacon which the WHO classes as "probably carcinogenic". As far as the summary is concerned it is more a case of "let's just mention this slight possibility of cancer and not mention any other of the apparently proven and very serious effects of the gas". If this summary had been written about the dangers of guns it would have probably only have discussed the possibility of lead poisoning.
Apparently one of the gases is "probably not carcinogenic" and the other is only classed as a "possible human carcinogen" so really the title should read "Desktop 3D Printers Shown to Emit Gases some of which might be hazardous". Not to mention that if the safe exposure level is 50g/m^3 that's almost 5% by weight of air so either someone messed up the units or one of the gases emitted are safer than carbon dioxide and nobody suggests that we ban candles.
I think that will be the Lunites.
No, it will be the Luddites.
While that could explain why sunrise reaches two points of the globe at different times, it fails when considering the timing of sunset for the same two points.
Not at all. You see where the sun rises will have a longer day because it will take longer for the sunset to reach them. As the disc rotates the point where the sunrises will change through out the year which is how you get seasons. Provided that you don't do anything silly like actually think about any of the details then it works just fine. As an added bonus it also means that somewhere like Canada that has a large seasonal variation in temperature must be very close to the edge so anyone who believes in a flat earth should definitely stay a long way away from Canada just to be safe because the edge is not marked on any map.
LHC.....No wireless.
The magnets in the LHC require a ~9,000 amp current and the ability to dump it somewhere fast in the event of a quench. Care to explain how you plan to do that wirelessly? It's also worth pointing out that the part of the accelerator complex they are recabling was built in 1954, 13 years before Fermilab existed and 17 years before the first wireless packet network.
Since the cables have been bombarded by high energy particles,....
Having said that, I would be really interested in their explanation of how it can be noon in Hawaii at the same time as it's the middle of the night in Paris. That's got to be a good one.
Simple it's the incredibly slow speed of light. That way when the sun rises over the rim it takes hours for the dawn to reach the hub. Of course now you have to add all us physicists to the conspiracy theory.
Seriously, why would anyone lie? Did you even think through your argument
You are clearly not a scientist. When doing a scientific study you need to be able to measure how good your result is not merely cross your fingers and hope that it is accurate. Why would people lie on a poll about voting in an election? I don't know but given the number of polls which get things very, very wrong there is clear evidence that they do.
With marijuana there used to be a stigma attached to having smoked it. Perhaps the more intelligent twins realized that this was no longer case but that the less intelligent ones did not? When you are doing a study on intelligence and you are relying on that intelligence in the first place to get accurate data you have a bias problem.
Cops violate civilian law all the time for the sake of enforcing the law. The main thing that comes to mind is speeding, running red lights, and blocking traffic.
Aren't those specific exceptions to the law granted to police officers? i.e. the law specifically allows emergency vehicles to go through red lights and for them to speed when responding to an emergency. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty certain there will not be an exemption to the laws about distribution of child pornography to let the police do it.
In similar types of cases involving lures to catch criminals in the act the police stop short of actually committing the crime themselves: if posing as a hitman they don't actually kill people to see if they can get more criminal clients. What I don't understand is why this strategy would not have worked here. If you blurred out the pictures and videos or arrange for the links to just timeout then you would still get the IP addresses without actually distributing the material. You might catch fewer of the criminals before they knew something was wrong but, like the hitman example, surely that's better than actually committing the crime?
Attending lectures works for many. But some reads on their own and do just as well that way. Nothing wrong with attending the gym or the bar either
All this is true the problem is getting the balance correct: you can't spend ever night in the bar, you must spend a reasonable amount of time reading etc. The problem students have getting this balance right is that the standards in secondary schools has dropped significantly over the past few years. Couple that with insane new initiatives at schools such as "no grade zeros" and retakes of exams if they don't do well enough the first time and you have incoming university students who don't expect to need to work hard and who expect to be able to retake exams if they don't do well the first time. We've even had students who were surprised to learn that when they failed courses they could not carry on at university!
One solution is what seems to be proposed here: programme a computer to nanny them. I'd argue a better solution is to fix the schools, bring back the level of academic rigour they used to have (at least in the UK), dump all these silly "no grade zero"-type policies that they have introduced (at least in Canada) and instead of programming a computer to monitor performance we would have taught the students how to do this themselves which would be a far, far better outcome because they need this skill in the real world.
It has already been done - sort of - by a town in Norway that uses mirrors to reflect sunlight down into the valley to extend the daylight hours. At a reasonably high latitude in the northern hemisphere there are not many flora or fauna to worry about in the middle of winter in an urban setting.
The only time you'd need to worry about it is if they focus the light a lot to create a heat based-death ray. That would also be far more like the plot of a bond film...
Adults who had used marijuana as teens were studied.
No, adults who SAID that they had used marijuana as teens were studied. How many of them were honest about it?
The trajectory of a projectile requires 2 spacial dimensions. Even if you use curvilinear coordinates you still need to understand that the line it curved in a direction orthogonal to direction of the line and hence you need to understand 2 spacial dimensions. See any first year physics textbook - or even a high school textbook for that matter - for a simple explanation. You might find that textbooks are generally a more reliable source of science knowledge that a science FICTION novel (there's a not-so-subtle hint in the name as to why that's the case!).
Can anyone understand imagine a 4D space as more than just a mathematical model? How about the behavior of time as something that dialates?
You don't need to grasp 4D space to understand relativity in the same way that you do not need to grasp 3D space to understand newtonian mechanics. It is easy to consider problems which use less than the maximum number of dimensions e.g. a projectile uses 2D despite being in a 3D world. Similarly high speed rockets limit relativistic problems to one time and one space dimension which is easy to grasp and even particle decays and trajectories can limit it to 2 space and one time.
Time is not "something which dilates" it is just another direction which we perceive differently. A fast moving object (relative to us) just has a different direction for time than we do. This means that some of its space direction lies along our time direction and vice versa. Hence the object appears shorter because we see the part of the length which points along our time direction as a difference in time for different part of the object and not as spacial separation. Also the passage of time at one point of the object is slower because we see part of that temporal separation as a spacial separation.
Relativity is not hard to grasp. The problem with the Big Bang though is that it created space and possibly time as well. At the moment there is no physical theory which can explain how to do this because it is not clear how things can happen without time. However just because we can't conceive of that yet does not mean that we cannot in the future. Perhaps understanding the small-scale, possibly quantum, nature of space-time will give us a hint? 120 years ago nobody could conceive how physics worked at atomic scales but once we got experimental evidence of that physics we figured it out despite the fact that some of the physicists involved (e.g. Einstein) did not really believe what they were finding and had real trouble grabbing the concepts.
You can say a lot about the US but the one thing we've got going here are legions of researchers looking for ways to make people healthier...
That's not quote correct is it though. You have legions of researchers looking for ways to make RICH people healthier. The conditions which often attract the most research are the ones which affect patients who tend to be more affluent. For life-threatening conditions this is ethically no better than holding a gun to someone's head: pay us lots of money for your treatment or die.
Interesting - the US survey puts Volvo near the bottom, but the UK survey near the top... maybe surveys like this are just flawed.
You don't know and understand browser caching or do you have a good understanding of the reasons it would not work effectively ?
Ok so now, before I want to use the app in offline mode, I have to go to the webpage first and do something to make sure that it downloads and caches all the code and data that the app will need to run offline which will need some special functionality on the website to do reliably so better hope they support it. Then I need to somehow make sure that the browser keeps this information cached and does not delete it from the cache when I download a different page. Finally I'll then need a special URL which goes to the cache without having the browser wait for an internet timeout.
Exactly how is this better than an app I just download once and click on when I need it? Especially if I have one which exercises the CPU since implementing it s a webpage will kill the performance.
I am more concerned about the universe being 46 billion light years in all directions....More likely we can only see 46 billion light years.
Actually we can only see 13.8 billion light years in each direction because that is the age of the universe and so the furtherest possible distance that light can travel in that time. You should indeed be very skeptical about the 46 billion light year number because that is an extrapolation as to where the objects we can see now are but, without actual knowledge of the rate of expansion, there is no way to know whether that number is right. It's also rather strange to take a photo of something and then state the distance where the object is now rather than the distance shown in the photo.
However you should not be skeptical about the distance being uniform. If we lived in a 2D universe then you could imagine it as being on the surface of an expanding sphere. If you looked in all directions around you then the universe would appear the same but this would also be true for anyone else in the universe since you would all be sitting on the surface of a sphere. This is the same thing for our 3D universe but it is far harder to imagine!
The second problem is the Big Bang Theory is not-even-Science -- there is no way to replicate or reproduce the experiment!
I completely agree with your assessment of the one you colourfully name "Starts-With-A-Shit" since he gets his particle physics wrong all the time too. However I have to disagree with your assessment of the Big Bang Theory.
For a start it has made several predictions which have turned out to be correct: the relative abundances of the elements in the Universe and the cosmic microwave background. Secondly it is partly reproducible in the Large Hadron Collider in that we can recreate the conditions of the early universe to figure out the physics and then make predictions on how the universe would look today if it had started in a Big Bang.
There are still some unknowns such as Dark Matter and how the matter/antimatter asymmetry came about but that is one way to test the model: if we find that the physics behind these is incompatible with the Big Bang then we will have falsified the model. Hence since it makes predictions, is falsifiable and is partly reproducible it is hard to argue that it is not science.
No, it can not be users selectable unless cars that have chosen the user first mode are not allowed on public roadways. When you drive on public roadways you accept that you have to obey certain "rules of the road", such as speed limits.
You do realize that this would automatically disqualify all human drivers right? Humans will always prioritize themselves and will not always obey the rules of the road. A computer which prioritizes is occupants but which always obeys traffic rules would still be a huge improvement.
We make fun all the time by saying "Think of the Children", but I'll bet if you polled a sizable group of people in some hypothetical You could save one person, an adult or a child scenario, probably most would save the child and leave the adult to die.
True, but suppose we change the "adult" to your wife/husband who is in the car with you and the "child" to a 12 year-old running away from a policeman and who dashes into the street. Do you swerve into the oncoming lorry and kill the adult you love or hit the child who was probably a delinquent? In that situation I think you'd get far more people saying they would protect the adult they love over the child: the closeness of the relationship with the people affected is a huge factor.
This is the problem with a car making life and death decisions which might prioritize the lives of those outside the car higher than those in it. The people you are driving with are those you are far more likely to have close relationships with and so want to prioritize. Indeed even if we stick to the purely abstract case suppose the car had a child in it? How would it know even that unambiguously and, without that, even the simple abstract case becomes impossible since it might be a choice of a child vs. another child.
That's precisely the point: sideswiping the car next to you is such a risky manoeuver that machine nor man can probably make that judgment call very well, with any vehicle.
That depends - if there is an oncoming lorry in your lane and the only way to avoid it is to side swipe the vehicle next to you that's what I would do to avoid what looks like impending death. That's what I would expect a self-driving car to do to: take whatever it perceives to be the lowest risk to the health of the car's occupants because that is what a human driver would do instinctively. To do otherwise and you are only one step above Futurama's suicide booths. How long will it be before you get some idiot who walks out in front of car which then causes it to swerve into an oncoming lorry, killing the occupants, where a human driver may just have hit the idiot? The advantage that a smart car would have though is that it could perhaps tell the lorry what it is going to do, get confirmation back from the lorry that it too will swerve and then both vehicles synchronize their motion to minimize casualties...but preservation of occupants must still come first as it would for a human.
It is the one and only thing testable.
It is the one thing so far. The String Theorists themselves cannot even "predict" the Standard Model yet so how on earth can you possibly know that every other phenomena is explainable by just "twiddling knobs" in String Theory when we don't even know if the Standard Model is compatible with String Theory?
No negative or positive finding tests string theory, it just suggests more knobs to twiddle. The one shining hope is that if we don't find supersymmetry, it is dead as a theory since it cannot accommodate a universe without.
You just contradicted yourself there. There is a negative finding which tests String Theory: not finding SUSY would exclude it as a viable model. That is the one test which we know about so far but the problem is that String Theorists are overwhelmed by the number of possible models and also lack the tools needed to extrapolate from the Planck-scale down to the LHC-scale.
This is why there are no concrete signatures indeed last I heard there were no candidate theories which even generated the know physics of the Standard Model because they had no way to figure out how the models look at low energy. Once they have the maths to do this the number of possibilities will rapidly reduce and we can start on whittling away the rest.