I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible.
Which is pretty much the same state of affairs with English and American although there are quite a few words which are completely different: lift vs. elevator, car bonnet vs. car hood, courgette vs. zucchini, aubergine vs. egg plant, car boot vs. car trunk etc. and more confusing an English word can have a different meaning in American and vice versa often to embarrassing effect e.g. rubber, pants, suspenders, chips, fanny etc.
This is why it is helpful to give the two 'languages' different names: they may be mutually intelligible (for the most part) but it can be helpful to know whether the language is English or American so that words like 'chips' with different meanings can be correctly interpreted. Calling it 'English English' and 'American English' is just redundant and it typically gets shortened to just English and then you are left guessing based on spellings or context what is meant.
""The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll"
Interesting link but wow - good thing I was not on her thesis committee because with a claim like that she would fail (either than or they are reporting it wrongly).
The total solar radiation at the Earth, outside the atmosphere, is 1.36 kW/m^2. Multiply that by the area given and the number of hours in a year and you get 762,470 TWh. However this would be the power for a solar satellite always pointing at the sun - so not even in orbit around the earth but say at one of the Lagrange points.
However things are not so simple because the panels on the ground rotate with the Earth. This means that for half the time they get no power and for the daylight period their angle is only optimal at midday. Note that even tracking panels will not help here because they would have to be spaced out so that their shadows did not meet another panel and so you would have less power collected at midday. The day-night cycle reduces the total power to 381,235 TWh and the angle of the sun throughout the day - I'll assume an RMS average here - drops it further to 269,573 TWh.
Now this assumes that the station in on the equator. If it actually was in West Virginia the power would drop further to 209,498 TWh due to the latitude (39 degrees) of the land. Now we need to look at the solar cell efficiency. The best that has ever been achieved in a lab is 46% so this leaves a total energy generating capacity of 96,369 TWh.
Unfortunately in 2008 world energy consumption was 143,851 TWh. Hence there is absolutely no way whatsoever that a solar plant of 25,000 square miles can supply the energy needs of the world. Even if it was located on the equator, there were never any cloudy days, we could mass produce solar cells which have only ever been available in a lab AND world energy needs have not increased since 2008 we still could not power the world from such an area! If the thesis in question makes those claims as reported it is just plain wrong.
It also appears that the question was posted after the test was taken. In this case there is no security issue because the exam has already been administered. If they are not giving the same exam at the same time everywhere - or at least with enough of an overlap that nobody leaves before the exam starts anywhere else - then the problem is their own broken security model. It's not academic cheating if someone who has completed the exam discusses the questions in public and since they are minors they can't even sign a contract to enforce legal penalties.
I completely agree...but isn't this what you are also doing too? Wanting to kill someone while showing zero remorse about doing so? If you are going to argue for the death penalty a far better argument is to say that it removes any possibility that the person can ever re-offend and thus protects society. The problem is that, as practiced in the US, this is very hard to argue. Those convicted are held in prison for a decade or longer and even then there are a shockingly high percentage whose convictions are quashed when carefully examined.
If you want to argue for the death penalty then you need to restrict it to cases where the evidence is overwhelming and you need to make it rapid. Even then mistakes will be made which is why I have so much trouble with the concept. About the only time I would think that it is justified is when you have someone whom you cannot safely imprison e.g. the IRA terrorists in the 1980/90s who used their contacts with the terror organization to threaten guards' families unless they got special treatment while in prison: something which almost lead to their escape. In these cases I would argue that the need to protect society from extremely dangerous criminals might make it justifiable but I'd still have concerns.
We Americans write it that way because that's the way we say it.
Except that you don't always! You use the American date format most of the time except when referring to "the fourth of July" then, or all the times, you always use the English format.
Apart from the highly dubious extrapolation of exponential growth when there are hard physical limits e.g. solar cell efficiency cannot exceed 100% and there is limited land available. There is another problem: what happens on a calm night? There was a study done several years ago in the UK (I apologize but I cannot find the link) which showed that because when you get calm conditions you can get huge areas of Europe becalmed at the same time you would need to convert almost every body of water in the UK into a pumped storage scheme in order to be able to provide power during calm weather...and that's assuming you can get everyone to agree that covering the landscape with wind farms is acceptable.
Wind and solar certainly have their place and are definitely worth developing but they are not the entire solution to our energy problems.
I think the real debate is not so much about freedom of speech - I would hope that everyone basically agrees with that to a large extent - but rather about anonymous speech. There are times at which this is essential: spilling the beans on a large corporation or a powerful government. However it is inevitably abused by idiots wanting to deliberately upset people for no good reason. Generally I tend to find anonymous speech far, far less interesting and insightful than non-anonymous...except for the odd exceptions which can be extremely important to learn about. What we really need is difficult, anonymous speech so that people are only willing to go to the lengths required for important messages and not just to troll the rest of us.
Most states... have rules about discussing promoting political views on the job.
That's funny I swear I've seen state politicians promoting their political views while on the job. I've almost never seen them promoting well established scientific discoveries though.
Then they should NOT be in prison. Put an ankle transponder on them, and sentence them to 60 hours per week cleaning toilets at the veteran's hospital.
How does that stop them continuing to commit crime? Someone could easily continue to perpetuate fraud with an internet connection. It is not enough to know where they are you also need to know what else is there and what they are doing otherwise they can just continue to operate.
please explain why you still use Imperial Units for keeping time?
There are no imperial units for time. However the second is part of the metric system and we do use it even if we also use hours and minutes which are not part of the metric system. So our time system is more metric than imperial and so the question really is: why do you use partly metric time but insist on imperial for everything else? (well except for the gallon, pint, fluid ounce etc. for which you came up with a different definition from the imperial one but still called it by the same name).
metric is great for scientific applications, but not always the best for people to relate to in some situations
The 95% of the world's population that use metric for everyday purposes would disagree.
Prison should be used as a way of removing a dangerous person from society until they're no longer a danger. Even people who sell millions of pirated copies are not dangerous.
Not quite, prison is used to remove people who damage our society and to prevent them causing further damage. Someone who embezzles money or commits fraud can hardly be classed as "dangerous" but at the same time society should not have to put up with them.
Piracy, both online and offline, should have the same, long sentences for those who run commercial operations which make significant money from selling copies of films, music etc. Sharing a legal copy with friends and family should not be illegal because the vast majority of the people see nothing ethically wrong with it: the artist was paid for the copy and that copy is now being shared. So the dividing line should not be online vs offline but commercial vs. private and for private I would argue that it should not be a crime.
In addition task one is also a trivial one to solve: use a laundry hamper into which you put your dirty clothes when you want them washed. If you don't do that then the problem is not so much finding the clothes as it is reading the human owner's mind to know which clothes they want washed. Even humans doing the laundry have to have some indication which clothes should be washed.
while my default position would be "you should grant them US citizenship... the tax bullshit really is onerous, and renunciation would be expensive.
I was actually in a very similar situation to the OP - I'm British and my wife is American. One of our kids was born in the US and so unfortunately automatically a citizen while our son was born in Canada and I signed to forms to allow him to get a US passport. In hindsight I wish I had never done this. The tax situation for them is unbelievably appalling - so bad that my wife is thinking of giving up her US citizenship (not that she wants to) once we get Canadian citizenship. Unfortunately that option is not available to our kids: it is impossible to revoke US citizenship before they are 18.
The reason the tax situation is bad is not just because you have to file US taxes if you earn anything - my wife stays home and looks after the kids at the moment so she has not actually had to file US tax returns. The killer is all the other paperwork that is not associated with taxes but with having accounts outside the US. If you have more than $10k outside the US you have to report every account that you own or are joint on to the US government separately of the tax form.
My wife was unaware of this requirement and only heard about it when there were reports on the radio of the US government fining US citizens in Canada 50% of their savings for not having reported their accounts. It gets even worse if you have any sort of investment: there are copious forms to report these to the US. But the worst thing is that this is poorly documented and when they change the rules they never bother informing their citizens abroad...they just wait for an opportune moment to start fining them.
So, provided your kids have citizenship in a European country so that travel will be easy for them there is absolutely no benefit from them having US citizenship and considerable problems. Looking back I really wish that I had been aware of the appalling behaviour of the US government to its own citizens because letting them get US citizenship has undoubtedly made their lives worse. I would strongly suggest that you do not register them as US citizens and if you are still not convinced check into whether this is a time-limited offer or not. For example as adults with a US mother I would expect that they could register as US citizens themselves once they turn 18 if they decided that they wanted to live in the US and perhaps by that time the US people will have managed to get their own government to treat them properly.
Just what we need a bunch of robot cars going around telling us that "You will be incorporated". Will they come with a red laser pointer strapped to the roof too?
Do pilots still need licenses in the age of autopilot? Well yes because machines aren't infallible.
This is a terrible analogy. First autopilot for a plane cannot taxi the aircraft so it is not feature complete. Secondly the consequences of mechanical failure in a car are far less severe and you can probably solve most of the ones which do not themselves involve the engine dying by having a kill switch and a steering wheel: all you have to do is yank the switch and steer the now rapidly braking car out of trouble. A kill switch on an aircraft is a somewhat less viable option which is why you need a pilot. This is also why commercial pilots have far more training than bus drivers.
A group of physicist-journalists have done an interesting experiment to show how light trapped in a tiny wave guide interacts with electrons. They then massively overhyped the results by making claims that are highly dubious at best in order to gain attention.
I wish physicists would stop using the word "measurement" when talking about quantum mechanics....We don't get to keep the original particle after we're done.
Actually that is not true if you go to high enough energy: have a look at this. Those four tracks coming out of the centre of the ATLAS detector at the LHC are muons, a heavy cousin of the electron. The muons are neither stopped nor destroyed by the detector but they do lose a little of their energy as they pass through it but for high energy particles this really is a very small, non-instrusive fraction of their energy. We can even use the curvature of the track in ATLAS' magnetic fields to measure the momentum of the particle.
Even if you stay at low energies there are biophysicists who can use lasers to pull apart single DNA and other organic molecules in non-destructive ways to study how they fold which involves quantum transitions between different folding states. So there are plenty of non-destructive QM based measurements which we can do both on fundamental, and non-fundamental particles.
If your objection is that we have 'changed' the system by making the measurement then perhaps it is worth reflecting that, at a fundamental level, everything is quantum mechanical. Hence there is no measurement that you can make which will not involve changing the system you are measuring. So if your criterion is that your measurement must not change the system you have just ruled out any measurement which any scientist has ever made.
every dual slit experiment shows light behaving as both particle and wave, because every photon only interferes with itself. Two or more photons never interfere with each other.
If you want to see two photons interfering in a double slit experiment you don't have to do anything more complex that direct a laser pointer at a narrow slit. This is generally what happens in almost all double slit experiments ever performed by school kids and undergrads to demonstrate diffraction. You are talking about a special version of it to show that photons self-interfere but this does not exclude them interfering with other photons if there are some present.
Anyway I didn't mean to pile on, it's not that bad an article or anything. It's just kind of general and without citations
I completely agree - these sort of articles are presenting science which we have known for a long time already, so it is hardly "news", and they don't present it well. I usually put it down to the submitter not knowing the science and so it is new to them and the editors not knowing any better either. However I could not resist pointing out the irony of your post...sorry!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible.
Which is pretty much the same state of affairs with English and American although there are quite a few words which are completely different: lift vs. elevator, car bonnet vs. car hood, courgette vs. zucchini, aubergine vs. egg plant, car boot vs. car trunk etc. and more confusing an English word can have a different meaning in American and vice versa often to embarrassing effect e.g. rubber, pants, suspenders, chips, fanny etc.
This is why it is helpful to give the two 'languages' different names: they may be mutually intelligible (for the most part) but it can be helpful to know whether the language is English or American so that words like 'chips' with different meanings can be correctly interpreted. Calling it 'English English' and 'American English' is just redundant and it typically gets shortened to just English and then you are left guessing based on spellings or context what is meant.
Actually the entire quote is:
""The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll"
Interesting link but wow - good thing I was not on her thesis committee because with a claim like that she would fail (either than or they are reporting it wrongly).
The total solar radiation at the Earth, outside the atmosphere, is 1.36 kW/m^2. Multiply that by the area given and the number of hours in a year and you get 762,470 TWh. However this would be the power for a solar satellite always pointing at the sun - so not even in orbit around the earth but say at one of the Lagrange points.
However things are not so simple because the panels on the ground rotate with the Earth. This means that for half the time they get no power and for the daylight period their angle is only optimal at midday. Note that even tracking panels will not help here because they would have to be spaced out so that their shadows did not meet another panel and so you would have less power collected at midday. The day-night cycle reduces the total power to 381,235 TWh and the angle of the sun throughout the day - I'll assume an RMS average here - drops it further to 269,573 TWh.
Now this assumes that the station in on the equator. If it actually was in West Virginia the power would drop further to 209,498 TWh due to the latitude (39 degrees) of the land. Now we need to look at the solar cell efficiency. The best that has ever been achieved in a lab is 46% so this leaves a total energy generating capacity of 96,369 TWh.
Unfortunately in 2008 world energy consumption was 143,851 TWh. Hence there is absolutely no way whatsoever that a solar plant of 25,000 square miles can supply the energy needs of the world. Even if it was located on the equator, there were never any cloudy days, we could mass produce solar cells which have only ever been available in a lab AND world energy needs have not increased since 2008 we still could not power the world from such an area! If the thesis in question makes those claims as reported it is just plain wrong.
It also appears that the question was posted after the test was taken. In this case there is no security issue because the exam has already been administered. If they are not giving the same exam at the same time everywhere - or at least with enough of an overlap that nobody leaves before the exam starts anywhere else - then the problem is their own broken security model. It's not academic cheating if someone who has completed the exam discusses the questions in public and since they are minors they can't even sign a contract to enforce legal penalties.
Showing zero remorse for doing it is despicable.
I completely agree...but isn't this what you are also doing too? Wanting to kill someone while showing zero remorse about doing so? If you are going to argue for the death penalty a far better argument is to say that it removes any possibility that the person can ever re-offend and thus protects society. The problem is that, as practiced in the US, this is very hard to argue. Those convicted are held in prison for a decade or longer and even then there are a shockingly high percentage whose convictions are quashed when carefully examined.
If you want to argue for the death penalty then you need to restrict it to cases where the evidence is overwhelming and you need to make it rapid. Even then mistakes will be made which is why I have so much trouble with the concept. About the only time I would think that it is justified is when you have someone whom you cannot safely imprison e.g. the IRA terrorists in the 1980/90s who used their contacts with the terror organization to threaten guards' families unless they got special treatment while in prison: something which almost lead to their escape. In these cases I would argue that the need to protect society from extremely dangerous criminals might make it justifiable but I'd still have concerns.
We Americans write it that way because that's the way we say it.
Except that you don't always! You use the American date format most of the time except when referring to "the fourth of July" then, or all the times, you always use the English format.
The 22nd of July works for the rest of the word. 22/7 is actually very slightly more accurate than 3.14.
Apart from the highly dubious extrapolation of exponential growth when there are hard physical limits e.g. solar cell efficiency cannot exceed 100% and there is limited land available. There is another problem: what happens on a calm night? There was a study done several years ago in the UK (I apologize but I cannot find the link) which showed that because when you get calm conditions you can get huge areas of Europe becalmed at the same time you would need to convert almost every body of water in the UK into a pumped storage scheme in order to be able to provide power during calm weather...and that's assuming you can get everyone to agree that covering the landscape with wind farms is acceptable.
Wind and solar certainly have their place and are definitely worth developing but they are not the entire solution to our energy problems.
If it's not the closest, are we going to rename it?
No, because it will presumably still be the nearest in the constellation of Centaurus. It's 'Proxima Centauri' not 'Proxima'
...but will you even be able to buy a replacement battery for it in 100 years? I doubt you can get a replacement battery for a 20 year old laptop now.
I think the real debate is not so much about freedom of speech - I would hope that everyone basically agrees with that to a large extent - but rather about anonymous speech. There are times at which this is essential: spilling the beans on a large corporation or a powerful government. However it is inevitably abused by idiots wanting to deliberately upset people for no good reason. Generally I tend to find anonymous speech far, far less interesting and insightful than non-anonymous...except for the odd exceptions which can be extremely important to learn about. What we really need is difficult, anonymous speech so that people are only willing to go to the lengths required for important messages and not just to troll the rest of us.
Most states ... have rules about discussing promoting political views on the job.
That's funny I swear I've seen state politicians promoting their political views while on the job. I've almost never seen them promoting well established scientific discoveries though.
Then they should NOT be in prison. Put an ankle transponder on them, and sentence them to 60 hours per week cleaning toilets at the veteran's hospital.
How does that stop them continuing to commit crime? Someone could easily continue to perpetuate fraud with an internet connection. It is not enough to know where they are you also need to know what else is there and what they are doing otherwise they can just continue to operate.
please explain why you still use Imperial Units for keeping time?
There are no imperial units for time. However the second is part of the metric system and we do use it even if we also use hours and minutes which are not part of the metric system. So our time system is more metric than imperial and so the question really is: why do you use partly metric time but insist on imperial for everything else? (well except for the gallon, pint, fluid ounce etc. for which you came up with a different definition from the imperial one but still called it by the same name).
metric is great for scientific applications, but not always the best for people to relate to in some situations
The 95% of the world's population that use metric for everyday purposes would disagree.
Prison should be used as a way of removing a dangerous person from society until they're no longer a danger. Even people who sell millions of pirated copies are not dangerous.
Not quite, prison is used to remove people who damage our society and to prevent them causing further damage. Someone who embezzles money or commits fraud can hardly be classed as "dangerous" but at the same time society should not have to put up with them.
Piracy, both online and offline, should have the same, long sentences for those who run commercial operations which make significant money from selling copies of films, music etc. Sharing a legal copy with friends and family should not be illegal because the vast majority of the people see nothing ethically wrong with it: the artist was paid for the copy and that copy is now being shared. So the dividing line should not be online vs offline but commercial vs. private and for private I would argue that it should not be a crime.
In addition task one is also a trivial one to solve: use a laundry hamper into which you put your dirty clothes when you want them washed. If you don't do that then the problem is not so much finding the clothes as it is reading the human owner's mind to know which clothes they want washed. Even humans doing the laundry have to have some indication which clothes should be washed.
Most likely, a ruler is not the first thing you put in your bag when you go to a Hackathon/conference.
while my default position would be "you should grant them US citizenship... the tax bullshit really is onerous, and renunciation would be expensive.
I was actually in a very similar situation to the OP - I'm British and my wife is American. One of our kids was born in the US and so unfortunately automatically a citizen while our son was born in Canada and I signed to forms to allow him to get a US passport. In hindsight I wish I had never done this. The tax situation for them is unbelievably appalling - so bad that my wife is thinking of giving up her US citizenship (not that she wants to) once we get Canadian citizenship. Unfortunately that option is not available to our kids: it is impossible to revoke US citizenship before they are 18.
The reason the tax situation is bad is not just because you have to file US taxes if you earn anything - my wife stays home and looks after the kids at the moment so she has not actually had to file US tax returns. The killer is all the other paperwork that is not associated with taxes but with having accounts outside the US. If you have more than $10k outside the US you have to report every account that you own or are joint on to the US government separately of the tax form.
My wife was unaware of this requirement and only heard about it when there were reports on the radio of the US government fining US citizens in Canada 50% of their savings for not having reported their accounts. It gets even worse if you have any sort of investment: there are copious forms to report these to the US. But the worst thing is that this is poorly documented and when they change the rules they never bother informing their citizens abroad...they just wait for an opportune moment to start fining them.
So, provided your kids have citizenship in a European country so that travel will be easy for them there is absolutely no benefit from them having US citizenship and considerable problems. Looking back I really wish that I had been aware of the appalling behaviour of the US government to its own citizens because letting them get US citizenship has undoubtedly made their lives worse. I would strongly suggest that you do not register them as US citizens and if you are still not convinced check into whether this is a time-limited offer or not. For example as adults with a US mother I would expect that they could register as US citizens themselves once they turn 18 if they decided that they wanted to live in the US and perhaps by that time the US people will have managed to get their own government to treat them properly.
Why don't we just incorporate them?
Just what we need a bunch of robot cars going around telling us that "You will be incorporated". Will they come with a red laser pointer strapped to the roof too?
Do pilots still need licenses in the age of autopilot? Well yes because machines aren't infallible.
This is a terrible analogy. First autopilot for a plane cannot taxi the aircraft so it is not feature complete. Secondly the consequences of mechanical failure in a car are far less severe and you can probably solve most of the ones which do not themselves involve the engine dying by having a kill switch and a steering wheel: all you have to do is yank the switch and steer the now rapidly braking car out of trouble. A kill switch on an aircraft is a somewhat less viable option which is why you need a pilot. This is also why commercial pilots have far more training than bus drivers.
A group of physicist-journalists have done an interesting experiment to show how light trapped in a tiny wave guide interacts with electrons. They then massively overhyped the results by making claims that are highly dubious at best in order to gain attention.
I wish physicists would stop using the word "measurement" when talking about quantum mechanics....We don't get to keep the original particle after we're done.
Actually that is not true if you go to high enough energy: have a look at this. Those four tracks coming out of the centre of the ATLAS detector at the LHC are muons, a heavy cousin of the electron. The muons are neither stopped nor destroyed by the detector but they do lose a little of their energy as they pass through it but for high energy particles this really is a very small, non-instrusive fraction of their energy. We can even use the curvature of the track in ATLAS' magnetic fields to measure the momentum of the particle.
Even if you stay at low energies there are biophysicists who can use lasers to pull apart single DNA and other organic molecules in non-destructive ways to study how they fold which involves quantum transitions between different folding states. So there are plenty of non-destructive QM based measurements which we can do both on fundamental, and non-fundamental particles.
If your objection is that we have 'changed' the system by making the measurement then perhaps it is worth reflecting that, at a fundamental level, everything is quantum mechanical. Hence there is no measurement that you can make which will not involve changing the system you are measuring. So if your criterion is that your measurement must not change the system you have just ruled out any measurement which any scientist has ever made.
every dual slit experiment shows light behaving as both particle and wave, because every photon only interferes with itself. Two or more photons never interfere with each other.
If you want to see two photons interfering in a double slit experiment you don't have to do anything more complex that direct a laser pointer at a narrow slit. This is generally what happens in almost all double slit experiments ever performed by school kids and undergrads to demonstrate diffraction. You are talking about a special version of it to show that photons self-interfere but this does not exclude them interfering with other photons if there are some present.
I still bet they don't know about the GR corrections due to gravitational time dilation.
Anyway I didn't mean to pile on, it's not that bad an article or anything. It's just kind of general and without citations
I completely agree - these sort of articles are presenting science which we have known for a long time already, so it is hardly "news", and they don't present it well. I usually put it down to the submitter not knowing the science and so it is new to them and the editors not knowing any better either. However I could not resist pointing out the irony of your post...sorry! ;-)