I've handed plenty of nuclear waste in the lab which had decayed to safe levels. As long as you understand the composition of the waste and its activity at the time of disposal, simply physics tells you exactly what the hazard of it is. If it only emits alpha particles then it is safe as long as there is a barrier of any kind and doesn't leak into anything you consume. If the activity decays substantially, it is also safe.
Radioactivity is just like any other kind of hazardous material (chemicals, etc). It should not be feared, but it should be treated with care.
I'm generally not a fan of burying most radioactive waste in any case. The more dangerous stuff is better off being recycled. The less dangerous stuff can be buried, but most of that stuff is extremely low-level.
When there is an accident, nuclear plants can leave areas contaminated and unsafe for centuries.
Modern designs are fairly immune to releases due to accidents. Since we prohibit their construction, we end up sticking with much older report designs which do have the risk you mention.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
Risk is harm*probability. Now consider the maximum harm caused by sabotaging, say, a 1 GW nuclear plant, a 1 GW coal/NG plant, or a few thousand wind turbines. Except for the first option, you won't come up with a mode of sabotage that will take a few decades to clean up the resulting mess.
So, just build the nuclear plants in the middle of military bases.
If terrorists really want to kill a lot of people all they have to do is steal a strategic nuclear warhead. They're far more effective than sabotaging a nuclear power plant at killing people and contaminating huge areas. The reason terrorists don't do that is that we lock them up, and somehow for the last 50 years both the US and USSR managed to do that in a way that kept the nutcases out.
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
No doubt marketing plays a role. The last thing ANYBODY wants you to do is consider the facts. People making junk food don't want you to think about whether junk food is bad for you. People who sell $5 apples don't want you to think about the fact that no studies really show that they're any better for you than the 50 cent apples.
You're supposed to be a good consumer and do what the ads tell you to. That easily translates into doing what your pastor, friend, celebrity on TV tells you to.
Judging by the time on the posts, I'd say that this is more the European anti-science bias. People everywhere love their pseudoscience. In the US it tends to take the creationist stance most of the time, and in Europe anti-GM is all the rage. You will of course find examples of all forms of pseudoscience everywhere, but everybody has their preference.
Standby for accusations that I must work for Monsanto, or whatever big corporate conspiracy is supposed to be trying to deceive our kids with the evils of evolution.
Some good ideas. But keep in mind that in places like California, public employees represent a significant voting block. So anything you might propose to clean the system up will just get voted down.
Something like this would only benefit public employees. Right now they work for the promise of a pension, which it seems fairly likely the next generation will simply refuse to pay them. What incentive do they have to uphold the deal the previous generation made?
What I propose is to replace the current form of pensions with one where the money is paid out immediately to employees in accounts they own, but which are likely treated like 401ks/etc as far as access goes. That means that there is no promise for anybody else to keep.
It is possible that the amount of the "pensions" will go down, because it is easy to promise big money to somebody when you know you won't be the one having to come up with it in 30 years. However, unlike the promises currently being handed out to public-sector employees, they can actually take the new pensions to the bank.
But, I agree that change will be unlikely to happen. Instead public employees will fight hard to keep their current pensions, and then the next generation will just have municipalities declare bankruptcy and refuse to pay up. Courts have already upheld the right of municipal governments to do this, and when they do those promises are as worthless as those made by private corporations.
What's wrong with pricing insurance based on the risk being taken on? Why should I pay higher insurance premiums so higher risk people pay lower ones?
The problem with this is that it only works when very few people are adversely affected by such an approach. As the ability to predict risks increases, then you'll find people falling into two categories - people who realize that they don't need insurance, and people who are too expensive to insure. Then the whole industry collapses as nobody will be willing or able to buy insurance unless it comes with a big fat disclaimer that it only covers injuries due to accidents.
In theory the ACA attempted to fix that in the US by mandating universal coverage, and prohibiting charging extra or denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or most other risk factors. In practice I don't know if the law really went far enough with this, as lots of people still choose not to be insured.
But, I think this is a self-correcting problem. Progress gives people more and more knowledge of their health risks, which means that conventional voluntary insurance (where both parties can choose not to participate) will become less and less feasible.
Jobs are just as much of a requirement as food and shelter.
The job is what keeps a person from devolving into a total animal. More intelligent notions of human need actually account for stuff beyond where your next meal is coming from.
I don't think anybody is advocating that people should just sit and watch TV all day. Maybe if you gave them disposable income they'd find hobbies, or take up art or whatever. Organize community programs to give people things to do.
You don't need to chain somebody to a cash register for $7/hr under the threat of starvation to keep their mind nimble.
Sure they can. They can unfuck taxation such that it comes from the pockets of those with money, and then they can spend the money on public works, raising employment and actually improving infrastructure, making it easier to make money. Done and done. Problem is, they're not going to do either of those things unless forced, let alone both.
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Distributing money to poor people is easy if that is all you want to do. Just change the tax code, and offer credits to anybody making under $100k/yr, covering it with a 50% tax on wealth over some figure. Suddenly sitting on huge piles of money doesn't seem so attractive.
Or as you suggest spend it on infrastructure, which makes hiring locally more attractive and benefits the public besides.
Honestly tough, I've always thought it was a pretty fair trade-off to pay 30% to gan access to many millions of people who already have payment details entered and ready to go at the press of a button.
Amazon already has half of the planet's payment details already entered and ready to go at the press of the button. Heck, they even claim ownership of the "one click buy" idea.
They could easily do their own in-app purchases without any help from Apple if it weren't for the fact that Apple would ban them from iOS if they did so (and since iOS does not support alternative markets/sideloading/etc that would be it for Amazon).
I have to take Amazon's side on this one, but I'd gladly side against them if somebody were complaining about the fact that Amazon does the exact same thing on the Kindle/etc platforms. Everybody's hands are dirty, but that doesn't change the fact that this practice is very anti-consumer no matter who is doing it.
This is a dangerous precedent for the US to set, as their only possible responses to foreign country's requests for similar information would be either "sure, here it is" or "sorry, we have a bigger army. Don't mess with us." Land of the Free much?
How is that a dangerous precedent for the US to set? As you just pointed out, they can say that they have a bigger army, and that is true. It would be a dangerous precedent for another country to set for sure.
In practice this is how most countries have operated since the dawn of time. They fully expect their citizens and corporations to collaborate with them in intelligence gathering against other nations, and they expect those same citizens and corporations to not collaborate with other nations in intelligence gathering against them. It is a double standard to be sure, but one which EVERYBODY upholds.
To some extent you just have to pick a side and stick with it. If you're a retired Iranian general with knowledge of all kinds of classified information, then unless you intend to never return to Iran you'd be stupid to move to the US, and vice-versa. You have to know that you're going into a jurisdiction where those in power have the ability to compel you to do something that would be considered treason by your mother country. If you feel like you were born in the wrong country then you can always change sides once, but what you can't do is play both sides.
If these companies don't want to be subject to US law, then they should refrain from owning property in the US, being listed on a US stock exchange, selling in US markets, and so on. However, if they want to be able to call a US police department when somebody breaks into their building, then they can expect those same US police to come knocking on their door when they want something that they have access to. That is true of every nation on the planet.
What if I encrypted a block of my data, broke those blocks up, then stored separate (non-duplicate) pieces in every country in the world? Would a court need to get every country's permission to assemble the data? Is the data an entity that has to be pursued independently of the owner (me)? Or as the owner, can my citizenship country (or a country that is pursuing me) instead demand all pieces based on me as the owner?
To summarize: Is my data legally independent from me?
They would simply ask you nicely to produce the data within some period of time. Then if you didn't do it they'd just lock you up until you did.
In just about any country the court is only going to ask you nicely to do something once. So, think about that before you put data you might be asked to produce in a place where you might have trouble getting to it.
That is a small-minded view. That assumes there is some universal truth that could explain everyone. Logical, great for measuring things, great for science, but it just seems like the only tool you have is a hammer...
What makes you think the scientific community would give up their technology? They are about the last place I would head to for social issues. For other things, sure. You are asking the Pope to tell everyone he is an atheist. Sure, it could happen.
Science is nothing more than a process for systematically identifying processes that yield reproducible results. It does not require technology to work. No class of people own a monopoly on scientific inquiry. You just need to do the experiment.
If you don't do the experiment, then all you have is conjecture. You can talk about it all you want, and maybe your conjecture sounds better than somebody else's. However, skeptics will remain skeptical in the absence of scientific evidence, and rightly so.
The absence of evidence does not make a statement false. It merely makes it conjecture. At one point in time the statement that the Earth revolves around the Sun was purely conjecture, and anyone would have been right to be skeptical of such a claim. Eventually experiment supported the statement, and it became science.
2. E and O are mutually exclusive, so |N| = |E| + |O|
You skipped defining addition of cardinalities, and multiplication of them by scalars. However, if you define the cardinality of the union of two disjoint sets as the sum of the cardinalities of the individual sets, and you further define |A| + |A| = 2|A|, then I'm fine with |N|=2|N| by the argument you propose.
That huge pool of capital is privately held. They're not just looking for things to spend it on - they're looking to spend it on things that MAKE MONEY.
And have zero risk.
Following the collapse of the CDO market in '07, they don't have many good places to dump the high risk tranches of investment risk. And now, with the Federal Reserve backing out of their quantitative easing role, what's a wealthy capitalist to do?
Keep in mind that the biggest, most evil capitalists who are seeking guaranteed high returns aren't a bunch of fat capitalists. They are outfits like CalPERS, who absolutely must protect the pensions of their clients with all the political clout they can muster. Financial markets are now geared up to do their bidding. Screw the little guy who needs funding to run a business.
Understood, but I think the last thing we as a society ought to do is have economic policies that encourage people with wealth to just park it somewhere so that they can get free money. That includes pension funds - those funding them can either not promise pensions in the first place, or they can actually put enough money into the fund to pay for them.
I'm actually not a big fan of pensions in the first place. It isn't that I don't like the concept. What I dislike about them is that employees treat them like compensation and take a job that perhaps pays less now for the promise of a future pension. However, that pension isn't owned by them or managed by them, and if the company breaks its side of the deal the employee has no recourse. I'd be fine with pensions if companies didn't advertise the future value at all, but only the present contribution, and that those contributions went into a fund which was completely owned by the employee and not considered a company asset in the event of a bankruptcy. Then employees and their employers would be even at the issue of each paycheck, with neither side ever at risk of losing more than a few weeks worth of compensation in the event of a problem. I'd also forbid contributions to be based on years of service, because that encourages employees to accept less now in the hope of getting more later, when the company could very well go back on the deal.
The reason that state pensions want free money is that they've been promising fortunes to their employees for years, and as the bills come closer to being due they don't want to pay for them. If they had to pay in full each payday so that there was no future obligation, then there would be no problem. Employees would know exactly how much or little they're being paid, and employers would have to pay an honest wage to retain employees and not benefit from deception.
I never said that women and men are exactly the same physically. No one can deny that men are generally stronger than women. I was referring socially conditioned behavior and attitudes.
So, I'll just ask the same question. Is there any scientific evidence that the behavior and attitudes you're referring to are socially conditioned? I wouldn't be surprised if many if not most or even all of them were. However, in the absence of some kind of actual study, it is pure conjecture. One could just as easily argue that the reason there are so few women in tech is that most women just aren't cut out for it, as ridiculous as that may sound.
You can't pretend that is some kind of biological difference though. It is entirely socially constructed, the way we teach little girls to be caregivers and quiet little angels while we let boys run around playing loud, violent games.
Is there any actual evidence for this one way or another? It is nice to sit here and argue that men are strong or that women would be strong if their parents just made them join the football team. What actual scientific evidence exists one way or the other?
I tend to agree that its time will come, and I'm fully supportive of public R&D to make it happen. But, the difference between an iPad and a Newton is timing, and Wall Street is probably concerned about that.
Clearly there is no fundamental limitation on the supply of silicon - it is only about the cost to refine it/etc.
It is so illogical and insane it is so frustrating. The world capital markets are sloshing around with some 2 or 3 trillion dollars in cash. They don't find opportunities worth investing. At the same time converting free solar energy into usable form of electricity is deemed unviable because the capital costs are high. The only cost for solar and wind energy is the amortization and debt service. There is no more recurring expenses like buying coal or natural gas.... If you believe in free markets, Adam Smith and invisible hand of the markets, at least a few billion dollars will flow from these capital market to projects of solar energy and efficient hybrid motor cycles and pure electric mopeds. But the pundits of Wall Street keep saying the investment is not worth it.
That huge pool of capital is privately held. They're not just looking for things to spend it on - they're looking to spend it on things that MAKE MONEY.
Sure, the people of India could use solar panels. However, they don't have money to spend, so this huge pool of capital isn't going to do a thing for them. The only reason it would get spent on panels is if they could produce electricity cheaper than what the Indians are already paying, or if the Indians were willing to pay more for the privilege of not having brownouts when it gets hot out.
People used to have $30/month cell phone plans with freebie phones. Now they're willing to spend $100/month on a plan and $200 for the phone as long as it has a touchscreen and internet access. As a result gobs of money get spent on making fancy phones. Sure, the first company to do it took a much bigger risk, but the risk to the follow-ons is from the competition, not the uncertainty of the market. Companies didn't just decide to spend lots of money on smartphones to be charitable - people are spending a lot MORE money than they used to on phones, and the investment is chasing that money.
This sort of issue isn't limited to India. The US has crumbling bridges all over the place, and yet is the home of that huge capital pool you speak of. However, not a dime of that money is going to get spent on fixing bridges, unless people decide that they're willing to pay a toll to cross every little creek in their town just for a bit more assurance that the bridge won't collapse under them.
The only way this pool of money is going to get spent on projects that have no likelihood of return is if somebody taxes it and just spends it (not caring about there being a profit).
On making people slightly less miserable for the 99% of their lifespan that's actually worth living. And providing palliative care to people who are dying, so they won't suffer needlessly. Or simply legalizing euthanasia so people can have the freedom to choose to die with dignity.
Spending billions to keep 90-year-olds alive for an extra month in a decrepit state using current technology does seem like a waste.
However, this is about longevity research. I don't consider that a waste at all. Nobody knows what it will yield, but if it does work out it might end up being that people take $100 worth of pills each year and they end up being as fit as a horse at the age of 300. That certainly seems like a worthwhile expenditure.
Research into healthcare is fundamentally different from the current practice of healthcare. Sure, they intersect in areas like clinical trials or taking samples (as in this article), but nobody spent millions of dollars trying to keep this woman alive just so that they could collect her blood. Instead, for whatever reason she naturally lived a long life and scientists are spending perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to understand why so that it benefits everybody.
Now I have to go get some dry ice and see if I can set up a CO2 siphon. It would be fun to try it with sulfur hexafluoride, but my grocery store still refuses to stock that.
If you can set up a siphon for a dense gas -- and my intuition, which is admittedly out of its depth here, tells me it should work -- that would seem to argue against the "pulling on water" explanation.
Well, pulling on water would work over short distances I would think, but the surface tension of water isn't THAT strong.
A siphon works due to a combination of gravity and air pressure. It doesn't work in general without both being present. The slashdot summary is pretty weak, as TFA more-or-less points this out (if you lower the air pressure sufficiently the water columns on both sides of the siphon separate and flow stops).
In a siphon the water on the one side falls due to gravity. That creates a reduction in pressure on that side of the tube, which means the other side of the tube has atmospheric pressure on one side, and less than atmospheric pressure on the other, which causes its fluid to rise. However, atmospheric pressure can only lift it so far - a tall enough siphon tube will just create a vacuum at the top and the water will not flow over the top..
For each natural number n there are exactly 2 natural numbers: one positive even number 2*n, and one positive odd number n*2-1.
Thus there are exactly twice as many natural numbers as there are natural numbers.
I accept your first sentence (at least, if you intend it the way I read it). I don't see how your second sentence follows from the first.
We're getting sloppy with definitions here.
Two sets have the same cardinality if there exists is a 1:1 function that maps between their members. Such a relationship exists between the set of natural numbers and the set of positive odd numbers.
I'm not sure which two sets you're actually trying to compare here - I see three different sets in your first sentence, and one set mentioned twice in your second.
While both numbers are infinite, I can say with reasonable precision that there are twice as many natural numbers as there are positive odd numbers and that every positive odd number is also a natural number.
I would disagree. There are exactly the same number of natural numbers as there are positive odd numbers.
For each natural number n there is exactly one positive odd number n*2-1. This pairing accounts for every natural number once, and for every odd number once. Thus, there must be the same number of them.
Now, you can argue that there are more real numbers than natural numbers, because it is not possible to account for them in this way. You can also argue that there are the same number of rational numbers as natural numbers, because there is a way to pair them up.
The concept of the cardinality of infinite sets is a fairly established one in mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
I've handed plenty of nuclear waste in the lab which had decayed to safe levels. As long as you understand the composition of the waste and its activity at the time of disposal, simply physics tells you exactly what the hazard of it is. If it only emits alpha particles then it is safe as long as there is a barrier of any kind and doesn't leak into anything you consume. If the activity decays substantially, it is also safe.
Radioactivity is just like any other kind of hazardous material (chemicals, etc). It should not be feared, but it should be treated with care.
I'm generally not a fan of burying most radioactive waste in any case. The more dangerous stuff is better off being recycled. The less dangerous stuff can be buried, but most of that stuff is extremely low-level.
When there is an accident, nuclear plants can leave areas contaminated and unsafe for centuries.
Modern designs are fairly immune to releases due to accidents. Since we prohibit their construction, we end up sticking with much older report designs which do have the risk you mention.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
Risk is harm*probability. Now consider the maximum harm caused by sabotaging, say, a 1 GW nuclear plant, a 1 GW coal/NG plant, or a few thousand wind turbines. Except for the first option, you won't come up with a mode of sabotage that will take a few decades to clean up the resulting mess.
So, just build the nuclear plants in the middle of military bases.
If terrorists really want to kill a lot of people all they have to do is steal a strategic nuclear warhead. They're far more effective than sabotaging a nuclear power plant at killing people and contaminating huge areas. The reason terrorists don't do that is that we lock them up, and somehow for the last 50 years both the US and USSR managed to do that in a way that kept the nutcases out.
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
No doubt marketing plays a role. The last thing ANYBODY wants you to do is consider the facts. People making junk food don't want you to think about whether junk food is bad for you. People who sell $5 apples don't want you to think about the fact that no studies really show that they're any better for you than the 50 cent apples.
You're supposed to be a good consumer and do what the ads tell you to. That easily translates into doing what your pastor, friend, celebrity on TV tells you to.
Judging by the time on the posts, I'd say that this is more the European anti-science bias. People everywhere love their pseudoscience. In the US it tends to take the creationist stance most of the time, and in Europe anti-GM is all the rage. You will of course find examples of all forms of pseudoscience everywhere, but everybody has their preference.
Standby for accusations that I must work for Monsanto, or whatever big corporate conspiracy is supposed to be trying to deceive our kids with the evils of evolution.
Some good ideas. But keep in mind that in places like California, public employees represent a significant voting block. So anything you might propose to clean the system up will just get voted down.
Something like this would only benefit public employees. Right now they work for the promise of a pension, which it seems fairly likely the next generation will simply refuse to pay them. What incentive do they have to uphold the deal the previous generation made?
What I propose is to replace the current form of pensions with one where the money is paid out immediately to employees in accounts they own, but which are likely treated like 401ks/etc as far as access goes. That means that there is no promise for anybody else to keep.
It is possible that the amount of the "pensions" will go down, because it is easy to promise big money to somebody when you know you won't be the one having to come up with it in 30 years. However, unlike the promises currently being handed out to public-sector employees, they can actually take the new pensions to the bank.
But, I agree that change will be unlikely to happen. Instead public employees will fight hard to keep their current pensions, and then the next generation will just have municipalities declare bankruptcy and refuse to pay up. Courts have already upheld the right of municipal governments to do this, and when they do those promises are as worthless as those made by private corporations.
What's wrong with pricing insurance based on the risk being taken on? Why should I pay higher insurance premiums so higher risk people pay lower ones?
The problem with this is that it only works when very few people are adversely affected by such an approach. As the ability to predict risks increases, then you'll find people falling into two categories - people who realize that they don't need insurance, and people who are too expensive to insure. Then the whole industry collapses as nobody will be willing or able to buy insurance unless it comes with a big fat disclaimer that it only covers injuries due to accidents.
In theory the ACA attempted to fix that in the US by mandating universal coverage, and prohibiting charging extra or denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or most other risk factors. In practice I don't know if the law really went far enough with this, as lots of people still choose not to be insured.
But, I think this is a self-correcting problem. Progress gives people more and more knowledge of their health risks, which means that conventional voluntary insurance (where both parties can choose not to participate) will become less and less feasible.
Jobs are just as much of a requirement as food and shelter.
The job is what keeps a person from devolving into a total animal. More intelligent notions of human need actually account for stuff beyond where your next meal is coming from.
I don't think anybody is advocating that people should just sit and watch TV all day. Maybe if you gave them disposable income they'd find hobbies, or take up art or whatever. Organize community programs to give people things to do.
You don't need to chain somebody to a cash register for $7/hr under the threat of starvation to keep their mind nimble.
Sure they can. They can unfuck taxation such that it comes from the pockets of those with money, and then they can spend the money on public works, raising employment and actually improving infrastructure, making it easier to make money. Done and done. Problem is, they're not going to do either of those things unless forced, let alone both.
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Distributing money to poor people is easy if that is all you want to do. Just change the tax code, and offer credits to anybody making under $100k/yr, covering it with a 50% tax on wealth over some figure. Suddenly sitting on huge piles of money doesn't seem so attractive.
Or as you suggest spend it on infrastructure, which makes hiring locally more attractive and benefits the public besides.
Surely you live in the US, which to you must be "the planet." Amazon is irrelevant to most of the world.
Sure, but I imagine they have virtually all the credit card numbers Apple has, which was the point...
Honestly tough, I've always thought it was a pretty fair trade-off to pay 30% to gan access to many millions of people who already have payment details entered and ready to go at the press of a button.
Amazon already has half of the planet's payment details already entered and ready to go at the press of the button. Heck, they even claim ownership of the "one click buy" idea.
They could easily do their own in-app purchases without any help from Apple if it weren't for the fact that Apple would ban them from iOS if they did so (and since iOS does not support alternative markets/sideloading/etc that would be it for Amazon).
I have to take Amazon's side on this one, but I'd gladly side against them if somebody were complaining about the fact that Amazon does the exact same thing on the Kindle/etc platforms. Everybody's hands are dirty, but that doesn't change the fact that this practice is very anti-consumer no matter who is doing it.
This is a dangerous precedent for the US to set, as their only possible responses to foreign country's requests for similar information would be either "sure, here it is" or "sorry, we have a bigger army. Don't mess with us." Land of the Free much?
How is that a dangerous precedent for the US to set? As you just pointed out, they can say that they have a bigger army, and that is true. It would be a dangerous precedent for another country to set for sure.
In practice this is how most countries have operated since the dawn of time. They fully expect their citizens and corporations to collaborate with them in intelligence gathering against other nations, and they expect those same citizens and corporations to not collaborate with other nations in intelligence gathering against them. It is a double standard to be sure, but one which EVERYBODY upholds.
To some extent you just have to pick a side and stick with it. If you're a retired Iranian general with knowledge of all kinds of classified information, then unless you intend to never return to Iran you'd be stupid to move to the US, and vice-versa. You have to know that you're going into a jurisdiction where those in power have the ability to compel you to do something that would be considered treason by your mother country. If you feel like you were born in the wrong country then you can always change sides once, but what you can't do is play both sides.
If these companies don't want to be subject to US law, then they should refrain from owning property in the US, being listed on a US stock exchange, selling in US markets, and so on. However, if they want to be able to call a US police department when somebody breaks into their building, then they can expect those same US police to come knocking on their door when they want something that they have access to. That is true of every nation on the planet.
What if I encrypted a block of my data, broke those blocks up, then stored separate (non-duplicate) pieces in every country in the world? Would a court need to get every country's permission to assemble the data? Is the data an entity that has to be pursued independently of the owner (me)? Or as the owner, can my citizenship country (or a country that is pursuing me) instead demand all pieces based on me as the owner?
To summarize: Is my data legally independent from me?
They would simply ask you nicely to produce the data within some period of time. Then if you didn't do it they'd just lock you up until you did.
In just about any country the court is only going to ask you nicely to do something once. So, think about that before you put data you might be asked to produce in a place where you might have trouble getting to it.
That is a small-minded view. That assumes there is some universal truth that could explain everyone. Logical, great for measuring things, great for science, but it just seems like the only tool you have is a hammer...
What makes you think the scientific community would give up their technology? They are about the last place I would head to for social issues. For other things, sure. You are asking the Pope to tell everyone he is an atheist. Sure, it could happen.
Science is nothing more than a process for systematically identifying processes that yield reproducible results. It does not require technology to work. No class of people own a monopoly on scientific inquiry. You just need to do the experiment.
If you don't do the experiment, then all you have is conjecture. You can talk about it all you want, and maybe your conjecture sounds better than somebody else's. However, skeptics will remain skeptical in the absence of scientific evidence, and rightly so.
The absence of evidence does not make a statement false. It merely makes it conjecture. At one point in time the statement that the Earth revolves around the Sun was purely conjecture, and anyone would have been right to be skeptical of such a claim. Eventually experiment supported the statement, and it became science.
2. E and O are mutually exclusive, so |N| = |E| + |O|
You skipped defining addition of cardinalities, and multiplication of them by scalars. However, if you define the cardinality of the union of two disjoint sets as the sum of the cardinalities of the individual sets, and you further define |A| + |A| = 2|A|, then I'm fine with |N|=2|N| by the argument you propose.
That huge pool of capital is privately held. They're not just looking for things to spend it on - they're looking to spend it on things that MAKE MONEY.
And have zero risk.
Following the collapse of the CDO market in '07, they don't have many good places to dump the high risk tranches of investment risk. And now, with the Federal Reserve backing out of their quantitative easing role, what's a wealthy capitalist to do?
Keep in mind that the biggest, most evil capitalists who are seeking guaranteed high returns aren't a bunch of fat capitalists. They are outfits like CalPERS, who absolutely must protect the pensions of their clients with all the political clout they can muster. Financial markets are now geared up to do their bidding. Screw the little guy who needs funding to run a business.
Understood, but I think the last thing we as a society ought to do is have economic policies that encourage people with wealth to just park it somewhere so that they can get free money. That includes pension funds - those funding them can either not promise pensions in the first place, or they can actually put enough money into the fund to pay for them.
I'm actually not a big fan of pensions in the first place. It isn't that I don't like the concept. What I dislike about them is that employees treat them like compensation and take a job that perhaps pays less now for the promise of a future pension. However, that pension isn't owned by them or managed by them, and if the company breaks its side of the deal the employee has no recourse. I'd be fine with pensions if companies didn't advertise the future value at all, but only the present contribution, and that those contributions went into a fund which was completely owned by the employee and not considered a company asset in the event of a bankruptcy. Then employees and their employers would be even at the issue of each paycheck, with neither side ever at risk of losing more than a few weeks worth of compensation in the event of a problem. I'd also forbid contributions to be based on years of service, because that encourages employees to accept less now in the hope of getting more later, when the company could very well go back on the deal.
The reason that state pensions want free money is that they've been promising fortunes to their employees for years, and as the bills come closer to being due they don't want to pay for them. If they had to pay in full each payday so that there was no future obligation, then there would be no problem. Employees would know exactly how much or little they're being paid, and employers would have to pay an honest wage to retain employees and not benefit from deception.
I never said that women and men are exactly the same physically. No one can deny that men are generally stronger than women. I was referring socially conditioned behavior and attitudes.
So, I'll just ask the same question. Is there any scientific evidence that the behavior and attitudes you're referring to are socially conditioned? I wouldn't be surprised if many if not most or even all of them were. However, in the absence of some kind of actual study, it is pure conjecture. One could just as easily argue that the reason there are so few women in tech is that most women just aren't cut out for it, as ridiculous as that may sound.
You can't pretend that is some kind of biological difference though. It is entirely socially constructed, the way we teach little girls to be caregivers and quiet little angels while we let boys run around playing loud, violent games.
Is there any actual evidence for this one way or another? It is nice to sit here and argue that men are strong or that women would be strong if their parents just made them join the football team. What actual scientific evidence exists one way or the other?
I tend to agree that its time will come, and I'm fully supportive of public R&D to make it happen. But, the difference between an iPad and a Newton is timing, and Wall Street is probably concerned about that.
Clearly there is no fundamental limitation on the supply of silicon - it is only about the cost to refine it/etc.
It is so illogical and insane it is so frustrating. The world capital markets are sloshing around with some 2 or 3 trillion dollars in cash. They don't find opportunities worth investing. At the same time converting free solar energy into usable form of electricity is deemed unviable because the capital costs are high. The only cost for solar and wind energy is the amortization and debt service. There is no more recurring expenses like buying coal or natural gas. ...
If you believe in free markets, Adam Smith and invisible hand of the markets, at least a few billion dollars will flow from these capital market to projects of solar energy and efficient hybrid motor cycles and pure electric mopeds. But the pundits of Wall Street keep saying the investment is not worth it.
That huge pool of capital is privately held. They're not just looking for things to spend it on - they're looking to spend it on things that MAKE MONEY.
Sure, the people of India could use solar panels. However, they don't have money to spend, so this huge pool of capital isn't going to do a thing for them. The only reason it would get spent on panels is if they could produce electricity cheaper than what the Indians are already paying, or if the Indians were willing to pay more for the privilege of not having brownouts when it gets hot out.
People used to have $30/month cell phone plans with freebie phones. Now they're willing to spend $100/month on a plan and $200 for the phone as long as it has a touchscreen and internet access. As a result gobs of money get spent on making fancy phones. Sure, the first company to do it took a much bigger risk, but the risk to the follow-ons is from the competition, not the uncertainty of the market. Companies didn't just decide to spend lots of money on smartphones to be charitable - people are spending a lot MORE money than they used to on phones, and the investment is chasing that money.
This sort of issue isn't limited to India. The US has crumbling bridges all over the place, and yet is the home of that huge capital pool you speak of. However, not a dime of that money is going to get spent on fixing bridges, unless people decide that they're willing to pay a toll to cross every little creek in their town just for a bit more assurance that the bridge won't collapse under them.
The only way this pool of money is going to get spent on projects that have no likelihood of return is if somebody taxes it and just spends it (not caring about there being a profit).
On making people slightly less miserable for the 99% of their lifespan that's actually worth living. And providing palliative care to people who are dying, so they won't suffer needlessly. Or simply legalizing euthanasia so people can have the freedom to choose to die with dignity.
Spending billions to keep 90-year-olds alive for an extra month in a decrepit state using current technology does seem like a waste.
However, this is about longevity research. I don't consider that a waste at all. Nobody knows what it will yield, but if it does work out it might end up being that people take $100 worth of pills each year and they end up being as fit as a horse at the age of 300. That certainly seems like a worthwhile expenditure.
Research into healthcare is fundamentally different from the current practice of healthcare. Sure, they intersect in areas like clinical trials or taking samples (as in this article), but nobody spent millions of dollars trying to keep this woman alive just so that they could collect her blood. Instead, for whatever reason she naturally lived a long life and scientists are spending perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to understand why so that it benefits everybody.
Now I have to go get some dry ice and see if I can set up a CO2 siphon. It would be fun to try it with sulfur hexafluoride, but my grocery store still refuses to stock that.
If you can set up a siphon for a dense gas -- and my intuition, which is admittedly out of its depth here, tells me it should work -- that would seem to argue against the "pulling on water" explanation.
Well, pulling on water would work over short distances I would think, but the surface tension of water isn't THAT strong.
A siphon works due to a combination of gravity and air pressure. It doesn't work in general without both being present. The slashdot summary is pretty weak, as TFA more-or-less points this out (if you lower the air pressure sufficiently the water columns on both sides of the siphon separate and flow stops).
In a siphon the water on the one side falls due to gravity. That creates a reduction in pressure on that side of the tube, which means the other side of the tube has atmospheric pressure on one side, and less than atmospheric pressure on the other, which causes its fluid to rise. However, atmospheric pressure can only lift it so far - a tall enough siphon tube will just create a vacuum at the top and the water will not flow over the top..
For each natural number n there are exactly 2 natural numbers: one positive even number 2*n, and one positive odd number n*2-1.
Thus there are exactly twice as many natural numbers as there are natural numbers.
I accept your first sentence (at least, if you intend it the way I read it). I don't see how your second sentence follows from the first.
We're getting sloppy with definitions here.
Two sets have the same cardinality if there exists is a 1:1 function that maps between their members. Such a relationship exists between the set of natural numbers and the set of positive odd numbers.
I'm not sure which two sets you're actually trying to compare here - I see three different sets in your first sentence, and one set mentioned twice in your second.
While both numbers are infinite, I can say with reasonable precision that there are twice as many natural numbers as there are positive odd numbers and that every positive odd number is also a natural number.
I would disagree. There are exactly the same number of natural numbers as there are positive odd numbers.
For each natural number n there is exactly one positive odd number n*2-1. This pairing accounts for every natural number once, and for every odd number once. Thus, there must be the same number of them.
Now, you can argue that there are more real numbers than natural numbers, because it is not possible to account for them in this way. You can also argue that there are the same number of rational numbers as natural numbers, because there is a way to pair them up.
The concept of the cardinality of infinite sets is a fairly established one in mathematics.
They're talking about training "Data scientists". The folks who, for example, look at Twitter hastags to find out who will the PResidential election.; turned out the guy got it better than anyone - even the statisticians came in second.
Would you be talking about them if they didn't?
How many projects like this were attempted but gave bad answers, and thus we don't talk about them?
The predictive power of something like this is far from proven.