You do realise the current white-clad wizard in the Vatican had quite a career in the Inquisition, and that during that period he actively pursued a policy of hiding from the public eye priests that raped children, moving them to other parished where they would keep raping children, so that the good name of the Vatican would not be blemished? That guy does not get anything of public relations.
They STILL use outdated nimh batteries instead of lithium.
I am not sure whether it's only a cost issue, but NiMH has the big advantage of being easy to recharge. Li-ion is very sensitive about high currents, and while it has a higher capacity per kg it has a current limit during charging. If the battery is supposed only to be a buffer on a car the size of the Prius, the weight/size savings is likely not worth it. On a full-electric car, though, you do need to squeeze all the energy you can get in the smaller battery, so they use Li-ion for electric cars even if it makes them slow to charge.
they also don't use any of these new awesome ultracapacitors, so what the hell are they doing?
I guess they are doing their math. Ultracapacitors have lower energy density than batteries (NiMH too), have high self-discharge, variable voltage as they discharge (so you need variable converters: trust me, they are mean beasts). The only advantage is faster charge/discharge, but the energy would be depleted in a matter of seconds. Not a significant buffer I guess.
[...] Fukashima [sic], which is expected to have zero deaths from radiation...
Frankly linking to a "news" source that has a gigantic banner on its main page "Choose freedom-Stop Obamacare" is somewhat questionable. It reeks to me like those idiots claiming there were no radiation deaths from Chernobyl or such nonsense, just because they could not get names and surnames of the victims. And all that article does, is quoting Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, saying that he was not aware of any fatalities. Shoudn't they ask a Japanese official maybe?
Well, here is one for you: Norikazu Otsuka ate contaminated produce from Fukushima (clearly believing his own bullshit about it being safe), and promptly got himself an acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He's not dead yet however, I hope he gets better and comes back to his work a wiser man.
pebble-bed was more about demonstrating idiot-proof safety
Then it did not work very well, considering that one of the two pebble-bed reactor ever built and operated is classified as the highest beta-contaminated site worldwide. In the other one, the pebble design caused a number of issued with feeding, as pebbles would get lodged (maybe only 0.0001% of the time) and required, well, someone to open the tube and shovel'em. Letting out lots of radioactivity in the process.
That, and pebble-bed reactors are the only ones using compressors (as opposed to liquid pumps) in the primary circuit. Compressors are mean beasts and are not unknown to surge and explode, plus the most efficient type (the axial) has its highest efficiency at the closest point to the stall line.
You are thinking of aluminium electrolysis, which does eat up the electrodes at a significant rate. Water electrolysis is nowhere near those rate of decay. With regular maintenance, you can run a water electrolyser for decades. Alkaline cells typically last several thousand hours of actual usage before requiring a change. Yes I am working with electrolysers these days.
Hydrogen is only 2-3x better than a lithium-ion battery [...]
According to Wikipedia, which you did not check properly, it's more like 10x.
Also, the chart does not consider that hydrogen conversion is about 50% efficient, compared to 10-30% efficiency in petrol engines (resp. city or highway usage). Fuel cells are not yet at their theoretical maximum efficiency (80-90% on thermal yield), whereas ICE and current batteries are pretty much at their maximum already.
You can't engineer better bydrogen but you can engineer better batteries.
False. You can engineer "better hydrogen", since there are plenty of other options to reduce volume (as liquid hydrogen, metal hydrides, chemical binding in methanol or formic acid and on-board reforming, etc.). Better rechargeable batteries by a factor of 10 or beyond? Unlikely, save technological revolutions. Also, batteries are extremely heavy: even if you could shrink them, you still have to carry them around.
I guess you would take the chunnel to France and then a plane from Paris CDG. Or a plane to any major hub in continental Europe with a flight to Canada (e.g. Frankfurt or Amsterdam), then buy another ticket with a non-British company.
Or wait for April Fool's day to wear off.
Uh uh no no, it does not turn out that way in practice. We have the system you describe in Italy and it's really rotten.
The result is that several parties put unpopular, but powerful candidates high in the lists so they are guaranteed a place in parliament. These are often crooked politicians, plain simpletons, or even mafiosi like Nick Cosentino. The parties run the campaign promoting their logo, ideology or possibly the presentable candidates in their list (who are sitting so low that they do not stand a chance to be elected anyway). People are mostly dumb and do not notice.
Why having mafiosi in parliament? They get immunity (like the above mentioned Nick Cosentino did, he should be sitting in prison for several counts of mafia), and you get a lot of evil karma with their friends. Why simpletons? They are incapable of independent thought, and they will simply obey party leaders. It's party leaders, after all, who decide on their career, not voters.
I know this system works in countries such as Germany and Norway. To work, the system requires parties that are not just pretending to fight, but that actually oppose each other. In the US, I think you would get a situation more similar to Italy than Germany, with e.g. Dick Cheney having a permanent seat in Congress and steering the GOP as if it was his thing, and some just as crooked democrat on the other side.
What is necessary is to take power from the hands of party leaders and give it to the people. The parties may present a list, but citizens must be able to choose which candidate to vote, and whether someone is voted in or not must not depend on the position on the ballot list but only on the received votes.
They have the power to deposit money and withdraw it from my bank account.
Well, anyone has the power to deposit money in your account, and I guess most people don't have a problem with that. On the other hand, the Norwegian government does not have the power to take money from your account. They give you a bill like any other business.
I tried to work out their calculations, but not being a native Norwegian speaker, I struggled to understand how they were doing things.
Funny, I am no native Norwegian speaker either, and I am amazed at how simple the system is (not altinn, the tax system in general). The only thing you need to remember as a foreigner is to request the special tax deduction for the first two years of residence, which is the only thing they do not do automatically (because in some cases it can go in your disfavor).
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How do you know what treatments will become available tomorrow?
You cannot put back a soul into place once the brain matrix has rotten. The lungs or the heart may be restart, but it is no different than a computer with a fried CPU in which the cooling fans are still spinning. And no, you cannot repair the "CPU", because it would involve rebuilding trillions of neural connections that are unique to each human being and define, directly, who they are. Even in a far, far future in which you could repair these connections you would not know what to do since no one would bother (or afford) to take a backup of their own soul in case of trauma, and in such a sci-fi world rebuilding the body from scratch would probably be easier.
Brain death is irreversible, you don't come back from that. If something comes back, it will be a vegetable, not the original person.
As an engineer that has to do with compressors fairly often (though mostly on paper), I think your idea is much more sensible than installing a compressor. Compressors are hellishly expensive, require regular and competent maintenance (which is also expensive), and are prone to failure (more so than, say, pumps or valves). And anyway, a compressor that can start up and fill that kind of volume in a second is just a pipe dream; the study in the FA probably had a ludicrously overdimensioned compressor idling, and if you have to ask for how much it costs to idle a compressor 24/7 for decades waiting for an earthquake, you can't afford it—that's before considering its noise and how it would make your house uninhabitable.
My bet, however, would be on something like airbag chemicals. They react fast, the principle is well known and only needs to be scaled up. Compared to a valve, it is easier to build a fail-safe solution, and a large high-pressure air tanks will have all kinds of regulatory issues (for good reasons).
Also, in general the idea that diseases evolve to be less virulent over time is a myth. Think about rabies; if you catch full blown rabies (you don't get your shots in time), you're going to die. Mortality for rabies in humans approaches 100 percent. Once you develop symptoms, you'll be dead in a week. So is rabies "pricing itself out of the market"? No.
That's because evolution works by selecting traits that are present in the original gene pool. If they are not there, they cannot be selected. A mutation of rabies that killed its host later or not at all would have much more time to spread, and would diffuse much more rapidly. Either this mutation does not or cannot exist (possibly because it would end up contradicting some fundamental aspects of the rabies' modus operandi), or it maybe would cause the rabies to specialise too much on a species and lose its ability to jump from dogs to humans to other animals.
Also, in general the idea that diseases evolve to be less virulent over time is a myth.
They evolve towards the forms that allow the greatest diffusion, which in modern society means the forms that do not put the patient in a bed at home or in a hospital ward.
I was already convinced this rule about liquids was bogus and mostly aimed at increasing the sales of beverages in airports, but a few months back I had a shock at just how stupid the system is.
I was taking a plane (international within Scandinavia) and I had noticed a bit late I had a very short time from landing to the departure of the train I wanted to get on. I had only a small piece of luggage, which I usually check in for convenience, so to cut the baggage claim I decide to carry it on the plane instead. Of course at the security checkpoint they notice there are a bunch of liquids inside (toothpaste, shampoo and the like), and I decide I'd rather buy them back upon arrival.
Funny thing, they take the 120 ml toothpaste tube, but leave a 500 ml bottle of liquid for contact lenses. I ask whether it is because it is almost empty (I thought the prohibition was based on containers, which is the case), but that was not it.
In fact I found out that there is an exception to the 100 ml rule: medical supplies, which apparently includes liquid for contact lenses (no, no special liquid; your average, run-of-the-mill, over-the-counter liquid for soft contacts; no prescription whatsoever). Security personnel did not perform any test whatsoever on the contents of the bottle (which was of a brand unavailable in that country, so they did not even recognise it). They did not even open it! It could have been sulphuric acid for all they knew.
So, next time you want to bring your soda on the plane, buy a bottle of contact lens liquid, empty it, and refill it with whatever you want.
I think there is a fundamental bias when measuring the age of best work with the proposed metric, i.e. measuring when the work for which a Nobel was awarded was originally published.
Nobel prizes are awarded only to living physicists (and that's why Einstein never got one for relativity, he died too soon).
So, only the work done early in life can lead to a Nobel prize, since it needs to be revolutionary to be worth of the prize, it needs to be settled so it will not be controversial, and revolutionary ideas take a long time to settle (see, again, relativity). Consider also all those physicists working on radioactivity and X-rays in the early days: many died very young simply because nobody knew of the dangers of what they were researching.
So, I think the increase in "genius age" is only due to the fact that scientists, as everybody else, are living longer.
It wasn't done by those specialists reviewing his papers either. They simply accepted his data sight unseen.
That's what you always do with data, you trust the submitter. What would the alternative be? Replicating the experiments is costly and there is no guarantee that reviewers (who work anonymously and for no money) have the resources for that. Still reviewers are the most likely people to spot errors or inconsistencies as they are experts in the field.
Reviewers filter bad logic and bad math. Bad data is filtered down the road, when someone else tries to reproduce the results. It can take a few years, but if you are caught making up data like this guy Stapel you mention (there was a similar crook in my university for that sake), you usually get your doctorate retired and your reputation tarnished. Good luck with your career after that.
When you find a paper which is not fit for publication (let's say some results are obviously faked), what happens?
Not obviously faked, but I was given a paper to review that had one obviously wrong parameter value. It was off 6 orders of magnitude from typical real values. Substituting a realistic value invalidated the whole paper, as they were solving a problem due to the value of that parameter. The paper was well written and logically consistent, but they solved a non-existing problem.
What I did was to send back with "major revision" being requested, making it clear to the editor that they had to come with pretty convincing evidence for their parameters, or they should be rejected. Rejection followed.
If you can convince an editor to drop such a paper, it will only be picked up by another journal.
That's what happened with that paper. It ended up somewhere else, even though this time it carried a notice about the unrealistic value of the parameter.
The critical review you get by publishing in mass media is more complete and honest than what you get in a peer reviewed scientific publication. Why publish in a scientific journal just to say you did it? The peer review and publishing process has ceased to be intellectually valuable and completely fails to separate lies from truth.
Uh, I don't think so. Have you gone through peer review in a scientific journal? The process is long and can last 6 months or even a year. It is very thorough as there is always something that can be improved in a paper. In my experience papers usually come out better than the entered the process. You do encounter the occasional dick reviewer, but that is not enough to break the system.
Critical review by mass media is not done by specialists who have several months to write their comments. It is done by journalists on a field they are incompetent in within an afternoon. It is done by pundits with an agenda (in this case against videogames and Internet), who will put their own spin on the issue. It is then fed to the unwashed masses who know nothing of the subject and can easily be swayed.
The proper process is: first peer review, then, when the findings have been verified, you go to the public.
[I]s there some journal somewhere which would publish this, even if it was wrong or falsified?
You betcha. The results are interesting either way.
Of course I do not, for there is no issue to begin with. They are withholding construction details and refusing others to inspect the apparatus. They ask us to believe their word for it, which means that their credibility, not the actual science (which they do not make available, supposing there is some), becomes the issue. An their credibility is zero.
"Republish"? I wrote that a few weeks ago. I have not changed opinion on the matter. I see no reason to change the text.
Also, these guys are not explaining how their magical device is producing energy, nor they allow anyone to inspect it. Had they done so, I would shut up and let nuclear engineers do the bashing. As they basically ask us to trust them, an analysis of their credibility is very much warranted. Ad hominem? Sure, credibility always is.
And by the way, I have myself two patents being processed these days, so I am no complete foreigner to the procedure. Neither is a world-changing revelation, though one can have some economical worth. You don't see me going around press conferences, in fact my company's patent lawyers were very adamant that publication must be avoided before the patent is filed, otherwise the patent will not be accepted. If Rossi and Focardi really had something, they would have filed the patent (filed, not waited to be awarded, it takes a few weeks) and then started looking for investors, showing off all their tech. Tech they do not show because it obviously does not exist.
Actually Focardi has published papers on cold fusion [...] I'll leave the literature search for you as an exercise, since you are a professional.
So, word of Elsevier's portal on one side, random Slashdot anonymous coward on the other side. Now, since I am obviously ignorant, would you point out which papers Focardi ever published, in which journal, which issue, which pages? Because if he had actually proved cold fusion he would have made a lot of noise in the scientific community before.
Note: newspaper articles do not count. Press releases do not count. Conference presentations do not count. And even disreputable journals count very little. I see your cards, sir.
About a month ago I got an email from my dad in which he asked my opinion on this issue, since I have a PhD in engineering and work as a researcher. The case had been presented to the public in a Italian TV magazine. I drafted a debunking on various grounds, which for your benefit I report here.
Short version: this Rossi guy is a convicted felon, his buddy Focardi an old, crooked professor with no relevant publications since the 60s, and they are after the money of naive investors.
Detailed version:
Mr. Rossi is a convicted felon, known for the Petroldragon affair: in the 70s, he claimed he could make oil out of garbage. He was eventually sentenced five times, including bankruptcy fraud of said Petroldragon society. He managed to dodge some more convictions thanks to Italy's statutory limitations law.
Prof. Focardi has an academic career spanning over 50 years, yet he has amazingly few publications. On ScienceDirect only about 10 publications show up, of which only 2 as first author and dating to the 60s, the other ones are publication orgies with a dozen of authors or so dating to the early 70s. The greatest is the latest publication, dating back to 1986, with TWENTY-ONE other authors, that over 25 years gathered only 4 citations.
In any case, Focardi never published anything on fusion, cold or warm.
The patent filed by Rossi is titled "process and apparatus to obtain exothermal reactions, in particular from nickel and hydrogen". There is no mention whatsoever that the reaction is nuclear.
The mysterious device is explained vaguely (also in Italian sources) referring to likewise mysterious unknown nuclear forces. So, there is no theory, no experiment that can be reproduced, only claims.
Mr. Rossi is therefore only looking for rich, greedy fools that will pump money in his next bankruptcy fraud. As a consequence of a certain prime minister and his modifications to the legal system, crimes like bankruptcy fraud are now very difficult to prosecute in Italy, so Rossi could just get away with it this time.
It seems to me that this sort of thing might actually be enough for the sane Italians to wake up and realize how fucked up their government is. Th But so far, they've had a lot of crazy crap and haven't yet done so, [...]
Actually approval ratings for Berlusconi">Berlusconi and his coalition are below 25% and 20% respectively. Berlusconi is 6.5% behind in opinion polls, even if the main opposition party is made out by real-life Jar-Jar Binks.
Italy was never "allowed in". Italy is a founding member (along with France, Germany and Benelux) and was never held to any standard for joining.
As an Italian I am pretty sure that if we were to be kicked out of the EU we would take the place behind Turkey in the line to come back in.
I never understood assert() either, just seems like a recipe for disaster in production; it's not difficult to test conditions and invoke actual error handling and recovery
assert() is very useful if used properly. It is supposed to be a debug support tool, crashing the program the moment something happens that cannot possibly be right, e.g. a function being called with an array with the wrong number of elements. This way, when the program crashes, you have immediately an idea of what went wrong, and must not dig as long into the code. This is different from exceptions or other error handling because the latter can legitimately happen in operation, while assertions indicate conditions that cannot happen if the program is not buggy.
If you are correct about the Unreal server, it seems clear they used an assert() where an exception was due, since the program is not broken only because it is fed bad data.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realise the current white-clad wizard in the Vatican had quite a career in the Inquisition, and that during that period he actively pursued a policy of hiding from the public eye priests that raped children, moving them to other parished where they would keep raping children, so that the good name of the Vatican would not be blemished? That guy does not get anything of public relations.
I am not sure whether it's only a cost issue, but NiMH has the big advantage of being easy to recharge. Li-ion is very sensitive about high currents, and while it has a higher capacity per kg it has a current limit during charging. If the battery is supposed only to be a buffer on a car the size of the Prius, the weight/size savings is likely not worth it. On a full-electric car, though, you do need to squeeze all the energy you can get in the smaller battery, so they use Li-ion for electric cars even if it makes them slow to charge.
I guess they are doing their math. Ultracapacitors have lower energy density than batteries (NiMH too), have high self-discharge, variable voltage as they discharge (so you need variable converters: trust me, they are mean beasts). The only advantage is faster charge/discharge, but the energy would be depleted in a matter of seconds. Not a significant buffer I guess.
Frankly linking to a "news" source that has a gigantic banner on its main page "Choose freedom-Stop Obamacare" is somewhat questionable. It reeks to me like those idiots claiming there were no radiation deaths from Chernobyl or such nonsense, just because they could not get names and surnames of the victims. And all that article does, is quoting Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, saying that he was not aware of any fatalities. Shoudn't they ask a Japanese official maybe?
Well, here is one for you: Norikazu Otsuka ate contaminated produce from Fukushima (clearly believing his own bullshit about it being safe), and promptly got himself an acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He's not dead yet however, I hope he gets better and comes back to his work a wiser man.
Then it did not work very well, considering that one of the two pebble-bed reactor ever built and operated is classified as the highest beta-contaminated site worldwide. In the other one, the pebble design caused a number of issued with feeding, as pebbles would get lodged (maybe only 0.0001% of the time) and required, well, someone to open the tube and shovel'em. Letting out lots of radioactivity in the process.
That, and pebble-bed reactors are the only ones using compressors (as opposed to liquid pumps) in the primary circuit. Compressors are mean beasts and are not unknown to surge and explode, plus the most efficient type (the axial) has its highest efficiency at the closest point to the stall line.
You are thinking of aluminium electrolysis, which does eat up the electrodes at a significant rate. Water electrolysis is nowhere near those rate of decay. With regular maintenance, you can run a water electrolyser for decades. Alkaline cells typically last several thousand hours of actual usage before requiring a change. Yes I am working with electrolysers these days.
According to Wikipedia, which you did not check properly, it's more like 10x. Also, the chart does not consider that hydrogen conversion is about 50% efficient, compared to 10-30% efficiency in petrol engines (resp. city or highway usage). Fuel cells are not yet at their theoretical maximum efficiency (80-90% on thermal yield), whereas ICE and current batteries are pretty much at their maximum already.
False. You can engineer "better hydrogen", since there are plenty of other options to reduce volume (as liquid hydrogen, metal hydrides, chemical binding in methanol or formic acid and on-board reforming, etc.). Better rechargeable batteries by a factor of 10 or beyond? Unlikely, save technological revolutions. Also, batteries are extremely heavy: even if you could shrink them, you still have to carry them around.
I guess you would take the chunnel to France and then a plane from Paris CDG. Or a plane to any major hub in continental Europe with a flight to Canada (e.g. Frankfurt or Amsterdam), then buy another ticket with a non-British company. Or wait for April Fool's day to wear off.
Uh uh no no, it does not turn out that way in practice. We have the system you describe in Italy and it's really rotten.
The result is that several parties put unpopular, but powerful candidates high in the lists so they are guaranteed a place in parliament. These are often crooked politicians, plain simpletons, or even mafiosi like Nick Cosentino. The parties run the campaign promoting their logo, ideology or possibly the presentable candidates in their list (who are sitting so low that they do not stand a chance to be elected anyway). People are mostly dumb and do not notice.
Why having mafiosi in parliament? They get immunity (like the above mentioned Nick Cosentino did, he should be sitting in prison for several counts of mafia), and you get a lot of evil karma with their friends. Why simpletons? They are incapable of independent thought, and they will simply obey party leaders. It's party leaders, after all, who decide on their career, not voters.
I know this system works in countries such as Germany and Norway. To work, the system requires parties that are not just pretending to fight, but that actually oppose each other. In the US, I think you would get a situation more similar to Italy than Germany, with e.g. Dick Cheney having a permanent seat in Congress and steering the GOP as if it was his thing, and some just as crooked democrat on the other side.
What is necessary is to take power from the hands of party leaders and give it to the people. The parties may present a list, but citizens must be able to choose which candidate to vote, and whether someone is voted in or not must not depend on the position on the ballot list but only on the received votes.
Well, anyone has the power to deposit money in your account, and I guess most people don't have a problem with that. On the other hand, the Norwegian government does not have the power to take money from your account. They give you a bill like any other business.
Funny, I am no native Norwegian speaker either, and I am amazed at how simple the system is (not altinn, the tax system in general). The only thing you need to remember as a foreigner is to request the special tax deduction for the first two years of residence, which is the only thing they do not do automatically (because in some cases it can go in your disfavor).
You cannot put back a soul into place once the brain matrix has rotten. The lungs or the heart may be restart, but it is no different than a computer with a fried CPU in which the cooling fans are still spinning. And no, you cannot repair the "CPU", because it would involve rebuilding trillions of neural connections that are unique to each human being and define, directly, who they are. Even in a far, far future in which you could repair these connections you would not know what to do since no one would bother (or afford) to take a backup of their own soul in case of trauma, and in such a sci-fi world rebuilding the body from scratch would probably be easier.
Brain death is irreversible, you don't come back from that. If something comes back, it will be a vegetable, not the original person.
You could just as well cure a T-Rex fossil.
As an engineer that has to do with compressors fairly often (though mostly on paper), I think your idea is much more sensible than installing a compressor. Compressors are hellishly expensive, require regular and competent maintenance (which is also expensive), and are prone to failure (more so than, say, pumps or valves). And anyway, a compressor that can start up and fill that kind of volume in a second is just a pipe dream; the study in the FA probably had a ludicrously overdimensioned compressor idling, and if you have to ask for how much it costs to idle a compressor 24/7 for decades waiting for an earthquake, you can't afford it—that's before considering its noise and how it would make your house uninhabitable.
My bet, however, would be on something like airbag chemicals. They react fast, the principle is well known and only needs to be scaled up. Compared to a valve, it is easier to build a fail-safe solution, and a large high-pressure air tanks will have all kinds of regulatory issues (for good reasons).
That's because evolution works by selecting traits that are present in the original gene pool. If they are not there, they cannot be selected. A mutation of rabies that killed its host later or not at all would have much more time to spread, and would diffuse much more rapidly. Either this mutation does not or cannot exist (possibly because it would end up contradicting some fundamental aspects of the rabies' modus operandi), or it maybe would cause the rabies to specialise too much on a species and lose its ability to jump from dogs to humans to other animals.
They evolve towards the forms that allow the greatest diffusion, which in modern society means the forms that do not put the patient in a bed at home or in a hospital ward.
I was already convinced this rule about liquids was bogus and mostly aimed at increasing the sales of beverages in airports, but a few months back I had a shock at just how stupid the system is.
I was taking a plane (international within Scandinavia) and I had noticed a bit late I had a very short time from landing to the departure of the train I wanted to get on. I had only a small piece of luggage, which I usually check in for convenience, so to cut the baggage claim I decide to carry it on the plane instead. Of course at the security checkpoint they notice there are a bunch of liquids inside (toothpaste, shampoo and the like), and I decide I'd rather buy them back upon arrival.
Funny thing, they take the 120 ml toothpaste tube, but leave a 500 ml bottle of liquid for contact lenses. I ask whether it is because it is almost empty (I thought the prohibition was based on containers, which is the case), but that was not it.
In fact I found out that there is an exception to the 100 ml rule: medical supplies, which apparently includes liquid for contact lenses (no, no special liquid; your average, run-of-the-mill, over-the-counter liquid for soft contacts; no prescription whatsoever). Security personnel did not perform any test whatsoever on the contents of the bottle (which was of a brand unavailable in that country, so they did not even recognise it). They did not even open it! It could have been sulphuric acid for all they knew.
So, next time you want to bring your soda on the plane, buy a bottle of contact lens liquid, empty it, and refill it with whatever you want.
I think there is a fundamental bias when measuring the age of best work with the proposed metric, i.e. measuring when the work for which a Nobel was awarded was originally published.
Nobel prizes are awarded only to living physicists (and that's why Einstein never got one for relativity, he died too soon). So, only the work done early in life can lead to a Nobel prize, since it needs to be revolutionary to be worth of the prize, it needs to be settled so it will not be controversial, and revolutionary ideas take a long time to settle (see, again, relativity). Consider also all those physicists working on radioactivity and X-rays in the early days: many died very young simply because nobody knew of the dangers of what they were researching.
So, I think the increase in "genius age" is only due to the fact that scientists, as everybody else, are living longer.
That's what you always do with data, you trust the submitter. What would the alternative be? Replicating the experiments is costly and there is no guarantee that reviewers (who work anonymously and for no money) have the resources for that. Still reviewers are the most likely people to spot errors or inconsistencies as they are experts in the field.
Reviewers filter bad logic and bad math. Bad data is filtered down the road, when someone else tries to reproduce the results. It can take a few years, but if you are caught making up data like this guy Stapel you mention (there was a similar crook in my university for that sake), you usually get your doctorate retired and your reputation tarnished. Good luck with your career after that.
Why yes I did.
Not obviously faked, but I was given a paper to review that had one obviously wrong parameter value. It was off 6 orders of magnitude from typical real values. Substituting a realistic value invalidated the whole paper, as they were solving a problem due to the value of that parameter. The paper was well written and logically consistent, but they solved a non-existing problem.
What I did was to send back with "major revision" being requested, making it clear to the editor that they had to come with pretty convincing evidence for their parameters, or they should be rejected. Rejection followed.
That's what happened with that paper. It ended up somewhere else, even though this time it carried a notice about the unrealistic value of the parameter.
Uh, I don't think so. Have you gone through peer review in a scientific journal? The process is long and can last 6 months or even a year. It is very thorough as there is always something that can be improved in a paper. In my experience papers usually come out better than the entered the process. You do encounter the occasional dick reviewer, but that is not enough to break the system.
Critical review by mass media is not done by specialists who have several months to write their comments. It is done by journalists on a field they are incompetent in within an afternoon. It is done by pundits with an agenda (in this case against videogames and Internet), who will put their own spin on the issue. It is then fed to the unwashed masses who know nothing of the subject and can easily be swayed.
The proper process is: first peer review, then, when the findings have been verified, you go to the public.
You betcha. The results are interesting either way.
Of course I do not, for there is no issue to begin with. They are withholding construction details and refusing others to inspect the apparatus. They ask us to believe their word for it, which means that their credibility, not the actual science (which they do not make available, supposing there is some), becomes the issue. An their credibility is zero.
"Republish"? I wrote that a few weeks ago. I have not changed opinion on the matter. I see no reason to change the text.
Also, these guys are not explaining how their magical device is producing energy, nor they allow anyone to inspect it. Had they done so, I would shut up and let nuclear engineers do the bashing. As they basically ask us to trust them, an analysis of their credibility is very much warranted. Ad hominem? Sure, credibility always is.
And by the way, I have myself two patents being processed these days, so I am no complete foreigner to the procedure. Neither is a world-changing revelation, though one can have some economical worth. You don't see me going around press conferences, in fact my company's patent lawyers were very adamant that publication must be avoided before the patent is filed, otherwise the patent will not be accepted. If Rossi and Focardi really had something, they would have filed the patent (filed, not waited to be awarded, it takes a few weeks) and then started looking for investors, showing off all their tech. Tech they do not show because it obviously does not exist.
Seriously? The heading is "Andrea Rossi's Petroldragon Story—by Andrea Rossi".
It could be just as well be titled "Trust me, I am a convicted felon."
So, word of Elsevier's portal on one side, random Slashdot anonymous coward on the other side. Now, since I am obviously ignorant, would you point out which papers Focardi ever published, in which journal, which issue, which pages? Because if he had actually proved cold fusion he would have made a lot of noise in the scientific community before.
Note: newspaper articles do not count. Press releases do not count. Conference presentations do not count. And even disreputable journals count very little. I see your cards, sir.
About a month ago I got an email from my dad in which he asked my opinion on this issue, since I have a PhD in engineering and work as a researcher. The case had been presented to the public in a Italian TV magazine. I drafted a debunking on various grounds, which for your benefit I report here.
Short version: this Rossi guy is a convicted felon, his buddy Focardi an old, crooked professor with no relevant publications since the 60s, and they are after the money of naive investors.
Detailed version:
Mr. Rossi is therefore only looking for rich, greedy fools that will pump money in his next bankruptcy fraud. As a consequence of a certain prime minister and his modifications to the legal system, crimes like bankruptcy fraud are now very difficult to prosecute in Italy, so Rossi could just get away with it this time.
Actually approval ratings for Berlusconi">Berlusconi and his coalition are below 25% and 20% respectively. Berlusconi is 6.5% behind in opinion polls, even if the main opposition party is made out by real-life Jar-Jar Binks.
Italy was never "allowed in". Italy is a founding member (along with France, Germany and Benelux) and was never held to any standard for joining. As an Italian I am pretty sure that if we were to be kicked out of the EU we would take the place behind Turkey in the line to come back in.
assert() is very useful if used properly. It is supposed to be a debug support tool, crashing the program the moment something happens that cannot possibly be right, e.g. a function being called with an array with the wrong number of elements. This way, when the program crashes, you have immediately an idea of what went wrong, and must not dig as long into the code. This is different from exceptions or other error handling because the latter can legitimately happen in operation, while assertions indicate conditions that cannot happen if the program is not buggy.
If you are correct about the Unreal server, it seems clear they used an assert() where an exception was due, since the program is not broken only because it is fed bad data.