Americium: a dangerous, unstable element which decays with a half life of 141 years. On the periodic table exists below the lanthanide europium, with which it shares many similarities. It has a silvery-white metallic lustre when freshly prepared which slowly tarnishes over time. While similar to europium it is much denser partly due to the larger mass of its constituent atoms.
They'll turn all that Americium into smoke detectors and we'll all get to listen to that fucking beep in the middle of the night because nobody can seem to make a detector that has a light sensor on it.
Of course they have light sensors in them. That's how they know to wait until the middle of the night before they start beeping.
"Oops sorry that was the wrong command but it has been a while. Did I remember to tell you to run a backup before we started? No? Oops well I suppose its a good thing I can't get fired!"
Perhaps they could buy a station wagon, load it up with tapes and send it with the next dogsled. (I kid.)
Replace the station wagon with a transport plane and that's not an inaccurate picture.
It's not like they are using real-time data from this thing
There is a need for real time data. First you want to know that your detector is working. Finding out 6 months later when you are doing the detailed analysis that there is something seriously wrong with e.g. the trigger would be a very bad thing. Secondly there are astronomical events which can occur rapidly like Supernovae. If IceCube pick up a SN signal then you want to let the astronomers know quickly, not several months after the fact. However because of the limited bandwidth real time data is restricted to high priority uses which need it.
You don't need triangulation. The direction of the neutrino determines the point on the Earth's surface it comes from. The possible range of heights is severely restricted and a negligible effect when trying to determine a country. However you might even be able to determine the distance the neutrino travelled if you measure the neutrino energies and then use oscillations.
How would a single detector with global detection range let someone know that, say, Iran was running a secret nuclear reactor in some particular location it hadn't declared?
Non-chemical based neutrino detectors provide information about the direction of the neutrino which is detected. While this directionality is not perfect the more statistics you have the better the direction of the source can be determined. If you know the direction of the source then you know the country it is located in since all artificial sources are located, to a good approximation, on the Earth's surface. You might even be able to calculate the distance to the source if you know its energy spectrum by measuring the type and energy of neutrinos detected and using the fact that different energies oscillate at different rates to avoid the highly unlikely scenario of building a deep, underground reactor near a border to make it look like someone else's.
A machine is invented that can see into the past using neutrinos. The government runs a huge version trying to look into the past. One man discovers that a very simple version can be made...
Indeed a very simple version can be made. Get a light-tight bag and stick it over your head (just make sure you can breath somehow though). You now have an accurate view of the past as seen by neutrinos given that they almost never interact with matter and not at all with light. I guess this was part of Asimov's success: as a chemist he would never let physics get in the way of a good story!
Actually what the article talks about are short range detectors which only have a range of a few hundred kilometres. A better solution would be a huge, scalable detector, perhaps an extension of the south polar IceCube experiment to really low, MeV energies, which could have global reach. Not only would the facility be capable of detecting any nuclear reactor or weapon test anywhere on the planet but you could do some really amazing astro-particle physics with it. We expect to get the neutrino mass hierarchy from just dropping the energy threshold to ~1GeV with PINGU, with lower thresholds you might even be able to consider using neutrinos to do a sort of CT-scan of the planet (possible because while neutrinos rarely interact with matter, matter does affect how they oscillate - something called the MSW effect).
Ultimately all such a facility does is prevent anyone from operating any nuclear reactor in secret. I would argue that this is not a bad thing at all. Countries can still develop and use nuclear power but they cannot do so without everyone knowing about it. It would also provide a completely impossible to defeat (short of sabotaging the detector) means of enforcing the nuclear test ban treaty.
But we can determine the regions where hurricanes occur, when during the year they occur and how likely they are to occur. The result is that you can take measures to protect against like building houses strong enough to withstand them etc. In this sense it is like QM: you can get a probability distribution but not know exactly what will happen. You cannot do this with economics to a degree where anyone believes you are right with sufficient confidence to act on it.
It only seems that way to you because you know nothing about economics.
Then why does economics fail to predict so many economic problems before they happen? You do not have to be a scientist to see that science can make predictions that work consistently. If economics is a science then it too should be capable of making clear predictions which work consistently. You do not need to be an economist to see that this is not the case.
Well it does have a passing similarity to quantum mechanics in that the very act of making an observation of the financial system will change it because people try to use the observation to make money. The difference is that in quantum mechanics the effect of the observation is based on certain fundamental rules which cannot be changed and you can use these to calculate the probability distribution of outcomes. In economics it seems that there are no fundamental rules or at least if there are nobody has yet found them given the total inability of economics to predict the economy.
we will instinctively protect the in-group even when it makes no rational sense to do so.
I'm not so sure that it is entirely true. The problem is that the "in-group" make it very much in the rational, self-interest of whomever gets into power to support that in-group. What you need are politicians in power who are willing to go against their own self-interest and act in the interests of the people they represent. These are a rare breed and getting rarer since, when one appears, the "in-group" do all they can to stop them getting into power and/or corrupt them.
The result is a choice between politicians who will not act against the in-group and, because of the huge power and influence of that group, very little chance of that ever changing unless something severely damaged the in-group's power which, in our case, would probably need to be something like an economic collapse of biblical proportions.
As a male university professor, my answer to this is very clear. We should not protect them.
I completely agree...but we need to be careful that these accusations have evidence to back them up. If you just rely on a handful of students to make accusations then you risk scenarios where students can threaten false accusations for better grades. I think the real dilemma is when is the evidence strong enough to act on so that the guilty do not go free and the innocent do not get punished? Set the the threshold too high and you protect the guilty, set it too low and you can't effectively teach and do research.
No, it's not a science in the same way that political science is not science. Economics may borrow some scientific methods and use them to study the field but the ultimate aim is to predict what will happen not to understand why (although knowing why may help with predicting) whereas the ultimate goal of science is to understand how and why things work with the ability to predict being a good signal that we got the how and why right.
...put don't take my word for it have a look at how many university science faculties have an economics department. There may be some but I honestly can't think of any.
This is not unique to economics. Most scientific fields have problems with replication. Journals are strongly biased toward publishing positive results, and nobody gets tenure for negative results or replication.
Economics is not a scientific field and the fields which seems to have the most problems with this seem to be medical, not scientific ones and "nobody gets tenure for negative results" is simply not true because I did! Indeed it is common in particle physics where we search for evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model and, with only one exception so far, keep coming up empty handed. As for the most recent Nobel for a "failed" experiment try the one of two days ago: this was awarded to two experiments which failed to show that the Standard Model description of neutrinos was correct.
I think your definition of "failed experiment" needs almost completely reversing. Michelson-Morley was a stunning success: it completely destroyed the luminiferous aether model for light. It was not the result that was expected but that does not make it a failure. The same applies to neutrino oscillations. Not getting a result you expect from an experiment is the thing every scientist hopes for it because means that you have learnt something new about the universe which is why these experiments often win Nobel prizes. If anything is a failed experiment it is those that just end up confirming existing theories because you were hoping you might learn something new and instead just ended up confirming what you already knew.
Even better when the parents get the notification I'll bet that their first inclination will be to phone their child to tell them to stop. Then instead of having a teenager who's just speeding you'll now have one who is speeding while on a mobile and arguing with their parents!
Speaking as a university professor this is not really correct. As a physicist I can certainly do scientific research but that is not the same as investigating human behaviour since humans, and especially politicians, have been known to lie, hide information, behave irrationally etc. You also run into ethical issues if try to run experiments on them. This is why you do not see many scientists moonlighting as police detectives or, indeed, as journalists.
In addition we are not particularly skilled at writing things down in a way which draws the reader in and captivates their attention. Have you ever read a scientific paper? It's designed to impart a great deal of precise information not entertain and inform the reader.
While it is physics beyond the Standard Model it is really easy to incorporate it into the model. In fact it makes the leptons more like the quarks in that they now both have a mixing matrix.
It's fantastic to hear that Art finally won the Nobel though - many of us were wondering how long it would be before he did! It's very well deserved for a discovery which was at least as significant, and far more surprising, than the Higgs.
It is completely intellectually dishonest to the point of a LIE to assert that water delivered via a sterile, new, plastic container is the equivalent of what runs through the often old, sometimes lead, sometimes infused with bacteria and sediments stuff tossed through underground lines prone to breakage and then on premise, subject to the neglectful landlord's, and cheap ass developer's habits.
How do you think the tap water got to the company who put it in the bottles? It goes through those exact same pipes.
Sorry but you are wrong. In old english 'man' meant person without any gender specification because 'wer' meant male human where is where "werewolf" comes from: literally "male person-wolf". However because we started to use the word 'man' to mean male human this interpretation has now been retroactively applied to words which were derived when the meaning was gender neutral.
And for what it's worth, for all of the complaints given about the US, the US is perhaps one of the least male-dominated societies out there.
Seriously? So how many female government leaders have you had? Your congress has under 20% women compared to ~25% for Canada, UK and Australia and 30% for New Zealand. Even Saudia Arabia has a 1% higher proportion of women in its national parliament than the US. In many European countries the ratio is in the upper thirties to forty percent.
Not in the politically correct portions of Northern Europe.
Which is ironic since the use of 'man' to mean 'person' in English comes from German where 'man' means 'one' and 'Mann' means man. So man-made actually means 'person-made' not made by a male. So instead of making the language clunky perhaps we should just educate people as to what it really means otherwise next we'll end up having to use 'huperson' instead of 'human'.
We use capacitors all over the place and most of the failures of them are demonstrably not from catastrophic discharge.
Large capacitors which store significant amounts of energy or the tiny ones in circuits? Particle physics bubble chamber experiments in the 1960/70s used to have magnets which were pulsed by capacitor when the beam hit them. The stories I've heard older colleagues tell about accidents involving the massive capacitor banks suggest that sudden, catastrophic failures can and do occur. With a small capacitors you get a puff of smoke, with massive capacitor banks you get people blown across rooms and seriously injured.
Here, fraud presents itself quite naturally and they can't seem to find it.
Perhaps they are worried that the US government could be charged with fraud too since it seems they passed an act which they said would make it illegal for car manufacturers to make highly polluting cars but which, it appears, does nothing of the sort.
Cellphone batteries are already pretty scary when punctured, imagine something holding several times as much energy.
One of the problems with capacitors charging rapidly is that they can also discharge very rapidly too so any failure would not be graceful. However I'm not sure there is much reason to be optimistic yet for these devices. The article mentions that the way they get high voltages is by connecting the capacitors together. This means they connect them in series which will significantly reduce the actual capacitance since capacitors in series add like resistors in parallel.
Slashdot Mirror
Americium: a dangerous, unstable element which decays with a half life of 141 years. On the periodic table exists below the lanthanide europium, with which it shares many similarities. It has a silvery-white metallic lustre when freshly prepared which slowly tarnishes over time. While similar to europium it is much denser partly due to the larger mass of its constituent atoms.
They'll turn all that Americium into smoke detectors and we'll all get to listen to that fucking beep in the middle of the night because nobody can seem to make a detector that has a light sensor on it.
Of course they have light sensors in them. That's how they know to wait until the middle of the night before they start beeping.
"Oops sorry that was the wrong command but it has been a while. Did I remember to tell you to run a backup before we started? No? Oops well I suppose its a good thing I can't get fired!"
Perhaps they could buy a station wagon, load it up with tapes and send it with the next dogsled. (I kid.)
Replace the station wagon with a transport plane and that's not an inaccurate picture.
It's not like they are using real-time data from this thing
There is a need for real time data. First you want to know that your detector is working. Finding out 6 months later when you are doing the detailed analysis that there is something seriously wrong with e.g. the trigger would be a very bad thing. Secondly there are astronomical events which can occur rapidly like Supernovae. If IceCube pick up a SN signal then you want to let the astronomers know quickly, not several months after the fact. However because of the limited bandwidth real time data is restricted to high priority uses which need it.
You don't need triangulation. The direction of the neutrino determines the point on the Earth's surface it comes from. The possible range of heights is severely restricted and a negligible effect when trying to determine a country. However you might even be able to determine the distance the neutrino travelled if you measure the neutrino energies and then use oscillations.
How would a single detector with global detection range let someone know that, say, Iran was running a secret nuclear reactor in some particular location it hadn't declared?
Non-chemical based neutrino detectors provide information about the direction of the neutrino which is detected. While this directionality is not perfect the more statistics you have the better the direction of the source can be determined. If you know the direction of the source then you know the country it is located in since all artificial sources are located, to a good approximation, on the Earth's surface. You might even be able to calculate the distance to the source if you know its energy spectrum by measuring the type and energy of neutrinos detected and using the fact that different energies oscillate at different rates to avoid the highly unlikely scenario of building a deep, underground reactor near a border to make it look like someone else's.
A machine is invented that can see into the past using neutrinos. The government runs a huge version trying to look into the past. One man discovers that a very simple version can be made...
Indeed a very simple version can be made. Get a light-tight bag and stick it over your head (just make sure you can breath somehow though). You now have an accurate view of the past as seen by neutrinos given that they almost never interact with matter and not at all with light. I guess this was part of Asimov's success: as a chemist he would never let physics get in the way of a good story!
Actually what the article talks about are short range detectors which only have a range of a few hundred kilometres. A better solution would be a huge, scalable detector, perhaps an extension of the south polar IceCube experiment to really low, MeV energies, which could have global reach. Not only would the facility be capable of detecting any nuclear reactor or weapon test anywhere on the planet but you could do some really amazing astro-particle physics with it. We expect to get the neutrino mass hierarchy from just dropping the energy threshold to ~1GeV with PINGU, with lower thresholds you might even be able to consider using neutrinos to do a sort of CT-scan of the planet (possible because while neutrinos rarely interact with matter, matter does affect how they oscillate - something called the MSW effect).
Ultimately all such a facility does is prevent anyone from operating any nuclear reactor in secret. I would argue that this is not a bad thing at all. Countries can still develop and use nuclear power but they cannot do so without everyone knowing about it. It would also provide a completely impossible to defeat (short of sabotaging the detector) means of enforcing the nuclear test ban treaty.
But we can determine the regions where hurricanes occur, when during the year they occur and how likely they are to occur. The result is that you can take measures to protect against like building houses strong enough to withstand them etc. In this sense it is like QM: you can get a probability distribution but not know exactly what will happen. You cannot do this with economics to a degree where anyone believes you are right with sufficient confidence to act on it.
It only seems that way to you because you know nothing about economics.
Then why does economics fail to predict so many economic problems before they happen? You do not have to be a scientist to see that science can make predictions that work consistently. If economics is a science then it too should be capable of making clear predictions which work consistently. You do not need to be an economist to see that this is not the case.
Well it does have a passing similarity to quantum mechanics in that the very act of making an observation of the financial system will change it because people try to use the observation to make money. The difference is that in quantum mechanics the effect of the observation is based on certain fundamental rules which cannot be changed and you can use these to calculate the probability distribution of outcomes. In economics it seems that there are no fundamental rules or at least if there are nobody has yet found them given the total inability of economics to predict the economy.
we will instinctively protect the in-group even when it makes no rational sense to do so.
I'm not so sure that it is entirely true. The problem is that the "in-group" make it very much in the rational, self-interest of whomever gets into power to support that in-group. What you need are politicians in power who are willing to go against their own self-interest and act in the interests of the people they represent. These are a rare breed and getting rarer since, when one appears, the "in-group" do all they can to stop them getting into power and/or corrupt them.
The result is a choice between politicians who will not act against the in-group and, because of the huge power and influence of that group, very little chance of that ever changing unless something severely damaged the in-group's power which, in our case, would probably need to be something like an economic collapse of biblical proportions.
As a male university professor, my answer to this is very clear. We should not protect them.
I completely agree...but we need to be careful that these accusations have evidence to back them up. If you just rely on a handful of students to make accusations then you risk scenarios where students can threaten false accusations for better grades. I think the real dilemma is when is the evidence strong enough to act on so that the guilty do not go free and the innocent do not get punished? Set the the threshold too high and you protect the guilty, set it too low and you can't effectively teach and do research.
It's indeed a science
No, it's not a science in the same way that political science is not science. Economics may borrow some scientific methods and use them to study the field but the ultimate aim is to predict what will happen not to understand why (although knowing why may help with predicting) whereas the ultimate goal of science is to understand how and why things work with the ability to predict being a good signal that we got the how and why right.
...put don't take my word for it have a look at how many university science faculties have an economics department. There may be some but I honestly can't think of any.
This is not unique to economics. Most scientific fields have problems with replication. Journals are strongly biased toward publishing positive results, and nobody gets tenure for negative results or replication.
Economics is not a scientific field and the fields which seems to have the most problems with this seem to be medical, not scientific ones and "nobody gets tenure for negative results" is simply not true because I did! Indeed it is common in particle physics where we search for evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model and, with only one exception so far, keep coming up empty handed. As for the most recent Nobel for a "failed" experiment try the one of two days ago: this was awarded to two experiments which failed to show that the Standard Model description of neutrinos was correct.
I think your definition of "failed experiment" needs almost completely reversing. Michelson-Morley was a stunning success: it completely destroyed the luminiferous aether model for light. It was not the result that was expected but that does not make it a failure. The same applies to neutrino oscillations. Not getting a result you expect from an experiment is the thing every scientist hopes for it because means that you have learnt something new about the universe which is why these experiments often win Nobel prizes. If anything is a failed experiment it is those that just end up confirming existing theories because you were hoping you might learn something new and instead just ended up confirming what you already knew.
Even better when the parents get the notification I'll bet that their first inclination will be to phone their child to tell them to stop. Then instead of having a teenager who's just speeding you'll now have one who is speeding while on a mobile and arguing with their parents!
Speaking as a university professor this is not really correct. As a physicist I can certainly do scientific research but that is not the same as investigating human behaviour since humans, and especially politicians, have been known to lie, hide information, behave irrationally etc. You also run into ethical issues if try to run experiments on them. This is why you do not see many scientists moonlighting as police detectives or, indeed, as journalists.
In addition we are not particularly skilled at writing things down in a way which draws the reader in and captivates their attention. Have you ever read a scientific paper? It's designed to impart a great deal of precise information not entertain and inform the reader.
While it is physics beyond the Standard Model it is really easy to incorporate it into the model. In fact it makes the leptons more like the quarks in that they now both have a mixing matrix.
It's fantastic to hear that Art finally won the Nobel though - many of us were wondering how long it would be before he did! It's very well deserved for a discovery which was at least as significant, and far more surprising, than the Higgs.
It is completely intellectually dishonest to the point of a LIE to assert that water delivered via a sterile, new, plastic container is the equivalent of what runs through the often old, sometimes lead, sometimes infused with bacteria and sediments stuff tossed through underground lines prone to breakage and then on premise, subject to the neglectful landlord's, and cheap ass developer's habits.
How do you think the tap water got to the company who put it in the bottles? It goes through those exact same pipes.
It would be a trade description failure if anyone tried to sell tap water as mineral water.
True, so you know what they do? They call it 'spring water' which is far less regulated.
No, that's not it.
Sorry but you are wrong. In old english 'man' meant person without any gender specification because 'wer' meant male human where is where "werewolf" comes from: literally "male person-wolf". However because we started to use the word 'man' to mean male human this interpretation has now been retroactively applied to words which were derived when the meaning was gender neutral.
And for what it's worth, for all of the complaints given about the US, the US is perhaps one of the least male-dominated societies out there.
Seriously? So how many female government leaders have you had? Your congress has under 20% women compared to ~25% for Canada, UK and Australia and 30% for New Zealand. Even Saudia Arabia has a 1% higher proportion of women in its national parliament than the US. In many European countries the ratio is in the upper thirties to forty percent.
Not in the politically correct portions of Northern Europe.
Which is ironic since the use of 'man' to mean 'person' in English comes from German where 'man' means 'one' and 'Mann' means man. So man-made actually means 'person-made' not made by a male. So instead of making the language clunky perhaps we should just educate people as to what it really means otherwise next we'll end up having to use 'huperson' instead of 'human'.
We use capacitors all over the place and most of the failures of them are demonstrably not from catastrophic discharge.
Large capacitors which store significant amounts of energy or the tiny ones in circuits? Particle physics bubble chamber experiments in the 1960/70s used to have magnets which were pulsed by capacitor when the beam hit them. The stories I've heard older colleagues tell about accidents involving the massive capacitor banks suggest that sudden, catastrophic failures can and do occur. With a small capacitors you get a puff of smoke, with massive capacitor banks you get people blown across rooms and seriously injured.
Here, fraud presents itself quite naturally and they can't seem to find it.
Perhaps they are worried that the US government could be charged with fraud too since it seems they passed an act which they said would make it illegal for car manufacturers to make highly polluting cars but which, it appears, does nothing of the sort.
Cellphone batteries are already pretty scary when punctured, imagine something holding several times as much energy.
One of the problems with capacitors charging rapidly is that they can also discharge very rapidly too so any failure would not be graceful. However I'm not sure there is much reason to be optimistic yet for these devices. The article mentions that the way they get high voltages is by connecting the capacitors together. This means they connect them in series which will significantly reduce the actual capacitance since capacitors in series add like resistors in parallel.