Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying.
The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.
Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
the universe's expansion is accelerating...The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks.
Correct.
Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.
Now whether heat death or the 'big rip'
You jumped the gun!
The 'big rip' is a very specific model of accelerating expansion, one where the rate of acceleration itself is increasing, and the rip occurs at a finite time in the future. That model relies on dark energy being not the cosmological constant, but something known as phantom energy.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the accelerating expansion we're observing corresponds to a type that will lead to a big rip. The more likely scenario is that gravitationally bound concentrations of matter such as the local cluster of galaxies will remain so including at the timescales where black holes would have all evaporated, baryons would have decayed, and quantum tunneling would have smeared out the structure of matter. In this case, the real issue becomes growing entropy within the Hubble volume.
The point your post should have made is that the solution proposed by Freeman Dyson and discussed in TFA — that of slowing down life/thinking processes at a rate slightly higher than the loss of available energy differential usable for driving these life/thinking processes — has two fatal flaws, which were pointed out almost immediately after Dyson came out with his proposal (but TFA, sadly, omits).
The first one is that, as time tends to infinity, the probability tends to certainty that a quantum fluctuation will cause any possible timing mechanism used to control the life/thinking processes to fail. Eventually, the expected tick will never come, and that will be it.
The second one is something much more severe than just failing to allow for life/intelligence to exist indefinitely. Since our Hubble volume will contain finite amount of matter-energy forever, the Bekenstein bound applies and thus the Hubble volume can only contain a finite number of distinguishable quantum states. After some point, all possible thoughts in that Hubble volume would have been thought, and any new ones will be repeats of ones that previously occurred. Even if you could be alive in this situation, would you want to?
PS I do agree that this blog is overrepresented on/., by a wide margin.
Except, clearly, not seriously enough to have a proper and mandatory for employment certification as a Professional Engineer, the way the other, real engineering disciplines, do.
By the way, implying 1% rabies infection rate is not a concern is ludicrous, as it's plenty to prevent eradication of a infection with human mortality rates, when undiscovered before symptoms, only rivaled by prion disease.
As soon as I saw the summary, I wondered how they're able to do decent dead reckoning using the mediocre quality cell phone accelerometers; in the general case, the integration would give drift pretty quickly. We're not dealing with ICBM-quality accelerometers here. So the interesting bit is how they're able to make use of information that specializes the problem (the location of subway stations) together with machine learning to do much better than the general case. The paper is worth a read.
Sure, they can be cute; however, in terms of human health, bats are reservoirs for rabies and various coronaviruses that affect humans. For example, a recent paper in Nature showed that SARS can go from some bats to humans without an intermediate host, and the same likely applies to MERS. Worse, ebola-infected bats have also been found. Then, there's this quote from wiki: "Bats harbor more viruses than rodents and are capable of spreading disease over a wider geographic area owing to their ability to fly and their migration and roosting patterns."
My question for the armchair epidemiologists here is to what extent this is outweighed by bats' feeding on mosquitoes (in the areas which this story concerns).
Lest anyone think of investing in parent poster's father's company, consider that methylene blue is neurotoxic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
A few choice quotes from this research:
MB...initiated widespread neuronal apoptosis....rapid suppression of evoked excitatory field potentials by MB...dose-dependent effect of this drug on cell death....exposure to MB at non-cell-death-inducing concentrations could still induce significant retraction of dendritic arbor
And what's the researchers' conclusion?
MB exerts neurotoxic effects on the central nervous system
Thanks, but no thanks.
Parent poster, go peddle your pharmascam elsewhere.
If it was blind hatred, Windows wouldn't be my primary desktop and Visual Studio wouldn't be my primary development environment. GGP's post was funny nonetheless. By your age, you ought to have learned to be able not to take yourself too seriously.
Mod parent up for making the most insightful comment in the discussion here this far (and I say this as a computer scientist who is generally positive on academia).
How about "USAelection2016"? While Slashdot has always been somewhat US-centric (or, really, North America-centric), the level of unapologetic chauvinism here has gotten worse over the years. This site has a significant non-US user base and readership, and a lot of articles posted regarding international situations (UK government spying, EU IP laws, etc.). US posters and editors ought to maintain at least an iota of respect for the rest of the world, or risk alienating a good chunk of Slashdot's audience.
Gets made from what? Things don't ultimately belong to you, as demonstrated by the fact that eminent domain exists and gets exercised even in a place like the US, where the government can forcefully take possession of any land within its territories and give you money in return (in its currency, of course) -- because it has sovereignty over it. Until you have absolute sovereign title over the land you consider your property, it's not really yours and you don't have real economic freedom, just the illusion of it.
All we have is all we make
This is also BS. You don't make anything; you just transform (usually minimally) bits and pieces whose provenance is ultimately from the land which you do not own. The idiocy of your comment is further highlighted by the fact that the majority of what is considered value is in intangibles which have even less to do with the physical world than fiat currency -- a trend that will continue.
I thoroughly enjoyed your response-sequence to DrYak and dave420 (420+environmentalist, what are the chances!). To be honest, though, I have my background biases as well that helped motivate my response above: I'm a fan of nuclear power (which, by the way, causes far less human deaths per terrawatt-hour generated than wind turbines); and also, as an avid hiker, I have great aesthetic objection to wind turbines.
I'm strongly pro-handwriting -- and even dabble in calligraphy -- though I'm a software developer. Having said that, I live in Vancouver, where the Georgia Straight is published, and I'd like to caution those who would use it as a source of information: it is a shamelessly radical leftist publication.
They first confiscate it from you and me, whether we want it or not.
A common misconception, but one that doesn't match reality. Governments create money through the treasury and central bank (a.k.a. federal reserve in the US). Government spending doesn't proceed from money taken in by taxation; rather, money is created ex nihilo and electronically credited to appropriate accounts, then spent. There's no constitutional requirement that the money removed from circulation by taxation has to balance spending in pretty much any developed country in the world: the two are not operationally linked. Indeed, one of the major purposes of taxation (besides reducing the money supply) is enforcing the use of the official national currency -- and that's why you can only pay your taxes in that currency. Tax "revenue" is not for extinguishing debt. And the debt issue itself is another one attracting misunderstanding, because of the tendency by people to apply microeconomic "common sense" to macroeconomics, which is a well-known fallacy. The majority of the debt of a nation like the US is just a number registered between treasury and central bank/fed, and is like debt between husband and wife, pretty much an accounting fiction that doesn't have to be repaid (reducing it, however, makes for good politics); of the rest, much is held by nationals, not foreigners/foreign governments. This configuration gives governments great power to influence their economies through control of the money supply, something they have exclusive legal power to as monetary sovereigns**. Whether this is generally done correctly, incompetently, or abused, is a matter of politics. I'll point out this, however: the common argument against government spending -- inflation -- only applies when you're close to full employment; otherwise, spending feeds aggregate demand rather than inflation.
** The glaring exception being, of course, the euro currency, which nicely shows how attempting a monetary union without having a fiscal and economic union only benefits those who can maintain a trade surplus (Germany), thus beggaring their neighbors in classic mercantilist manner.
Disclaimer: my post is descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm simply pointing out how things are, not passing judgment on whether this is how they ought to be, and will keep my opinion to myself as I've no interest in a political discussion on Slashdot.
Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do. [implication: it's not worth worrying about wind turbines killing birds]
Almost every time bird-killing wind turbines are discussed, someone posts this non-argument.
Let's apply well-known Slashdot troll NatasRevol's logic to other things:
- Heart disease kills at least an order of magnitude more people than diabetes. [implication: it's not worth worrying about diabetes killing people]
- Windows runs on at least an order of magnitude more personal desktops than Linux. [implication: it's not worth being concerned about the Linux desktop experience]
- Slashdot user BarbaraHudson posts at least an order of magnitude more troll posts than NatasRevol. [implication: it's not worth being annoyed at NatasRevol shitposting]
And then there's this: how many eagles and other large threatened and endangered birds are cats killing?
BarbaraHudson is a well-known troll on/., but I'll bite: it serves the purpose of giving the justice system the moral high ground. Else, it's just vengeful retribution and doesn't rise above his level. And to preempt the fundamentalists who are itching to whip out the Old Testament's eye-for-an-eye: any Christian theologian will confirm that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament.
Unless its 's too urgent and you can't wait for a throat swab result to come back identifying the strain (and thus most appropriate antibiotic -- or even if it's bacterial in the first place), you shouldn't be popping just any random antibiotics, and neither should your doctor be prescribing them. People with attitude like yours are contributing to the ever more serious global antibiotic resistance threat. Doctors here now generally exercise this patient restraint, with the exception of the old dogs that can't learn new tricks.
I don't know about the US, but the tendency here in Canada (at least with younger doctors who didn't get used to prescribe antibiotics like candy pills the way old ones do before resistance became a big deal) is to not rush to antibiotics before the throat swab comes back, not just because it may not be bacterial, but because different bacteria are best targeted by different antibiotics. Using the wrong or just any generic wide-spectrum antibiotic still contributes to the resistance problem. In the past, these tests were mostly done only after a first-line antibiotic treatment failed, but that's changing.
It's a ghastly arighmetic, but it ought to be done: a nuclear strike against Iran would kill many, but it can decisively bring the country to its knees and nip in the bud a coming clash of civilizations that would in the long run result in far more deaths and suffering.
This would work best if it's part of an operation against Iran's larger and even more dangerous ally, Russia. Don't forget that the US has come to be in a position where it can execute a pre-emptive counterforce nuclear strike against Russia: http://belfercenter.hks.harvar... The silo locations are known and the mobile katyusha launchers are being tracked. That only leaves submarine launches as a retaliatory possibility for the russkies, which would be sufficiently few to be mopped up by missile defense. Given the Russian populace's fervent nationalism, their deep-seated need to be ruled by tyrants -- from the tzars through the commies to Putin, and their propensity to export their brotherly love to their unfortunate neighbors, justification for neutering the evil now is easy to come by.
Any fellow Canadians reading my post: lest you disagree, I remind you the Russian bear has its eye on the whole arctic, and the current framework under which negotiations over territory are unfolding is but a game: a signature to any resultant agreement will be no more binding to the Russians than their signature was on the Budapest Memorandum of 1995 which gave Ukraine security assurances in exchange for them giving up their nuclear arsenal. The Russian doesn't understand diplomacy, agreements, international law, or honor -- he only understands force, and perceives the lack of aggression as weakness.
I forgot to mention an important consideration: one also has to take into account the tradeoff compared to using lots of sugar/glucose/HFCS/etc. While, optimally, intake from both groups should be restricted, I know that's not realistic for many people. I'm lucky in that my metabolism and insulin sensitivity allow me to handle large quantities of the high glycaemic index foods I love, but if you also have a sweet tooth -- depending on your genetics -- the artificial sweeteners may be the lesser evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying. The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist. Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
the universe's expansion is accelerating...The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks.
Correct.
Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist. Now whether heat death or the 'big rip'
You jumped the gun!
/., by a wide margin.
The 'big rip' is a very specific model of accelerating expansion, one where the rate of acceleration itself is increasing, and the rip occurs at a finite time in the future. That model relies on dark energy being not the cosmological constant, but something known as phantom energy. There is no evidence whatsoever that the accelerating expansion we're observing corresponds to a type that will lead to a big rip. The more likely scenario is that gravitationally bound concentrations of matter such as the local cluster of galaxies will remain so including at the timescales where black holes would have all evaporated, baryons would have decayed, and quantum tunneling would have smeared out the structure of matter. In this case, the real issue becomes growing entropy within the Hubble volume.
The point your post should have made is that the solution proposed by Freeman Dyson and discussed in TFA — that of slowing down life/thinking processes at a rate slightly higher than the loss of available energy differential usable for driving these life/thinking processes — has two fatal flaws, which were pointed out almost immediately after Dyson came out with his proposal (but TFA, sadly, omits).
The first one is that, as time tends to infinity, the probability tends to certainty that a quantum fluctuation will cause any possible timing mechanism used to control the life/thinking processes to fail. Eventually, the expected tick will never come, and that will be it.
The second one is something much more severe than just failing to allow for life/intelligence to exist indefinitely. Since our Hubble volume will contain finite amount of matter-energy forever, the Bekenstein bound applies and thus the Hubble volume can only contain a finite number of distinguishable quantum states. After some point, all possible thoughts in that Hubble volume would have been thought, and any new ones will be repeats of ones that previously occurred. Even if you could be alive in this situation, would you want to?
PS I do agree that this blog is overrepresented on
Except, clearly, not seriously enough to have a proper and mandatory for employment certification as a Professional Engineer, the way the other, real engineering disciplines, do.
Cue in the false flag operations.
I see his citation and raise you these:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...
By the way, implying 1% rabies infection rate is not a concern is ludicrous, as it's plenty to prevent eradication of a infection with human mortality rates, when undiscovered before symptoms, only rivaled by prion disease.
As soon as I saw the summary, I wondered how they're able to do decent dead reckoning using the mediocre quality cell phone accelerometers; in the general case, the integration would give drift pretty quickly. We're not dealing with ICBM-quality accelerometers here. So the interesting bit is how they're able to make use of information that specializes the problem (the location of subway stations) together with machine learning to do much better than the general case. The paper is worth a read.
Sure, they can be cute; however, in terms of human health, bats are reservoirs for rabies and various coronaviruses that affect humans. For example, a recent paper in Nature showed that SARS can go from some bats to humans without an intermediate host, and the same likely applies to MERS. Worse, ebola-infected bats have also been found. Then, there's this quote from wiki: "Bats harbor more viruses than rodents and are capable of spreading disease over a wider geographic area owing to their ability to fly and their migration and roosting patterns."
My question for the armchair epidemiologists here is to what extent this is outweighed by bats' feeding on mosquitoes (in the areas which this story concerns).
A few choice quotes from this research:
MB...initiated widespread neuronal apoptosis....rapid suppression of evoked excitatory field potentials by MB...dose-dependent effect of this drug on cell death....exposure to MB at non-cell-death-inducing concentrations could still induce significant retraction of dendritic arbor
And what's the researchers' conclusion?
MB exerts neurotoxic effects on the central nervous system
Thanks, but no thanks. Parent poster, go peddle your pharmascam elsewhere.
If it was blind hatred, Windows wouldn't be my primary desktop and Visual Studio wouldn't be my primary development environment. GGP's post was funny nonetheless. By your age, you ought to have learned to be able not to take yourself too seriously.
You nailed it. I wish I had mod points...
Mod parent up for making the most insightful comment in the discussion here this far (and I say this as a computer scientist who is generally positive on academia).
Your post has given rise to one of the few occasions I wish Slashdot supported embedded images. http://i.imgur.com/31RF4Za.png
I'm tagging this story "election2016."
How about "USAelection2016"? While Slashdot has always been somewhat US-centric (or, really, North America-centric), the level of unapologetic chauvinism here has gotten worse over the years. This site has a significant non-US user base and readership, and a lot of articles posted regarding international situations (UK government spying, EU IP laws, etc.). US posters and editors ought to maintain at least an iota of respect for the rest of the world, or risk alienating a good chunk of Slashdot's audience.
the amount of stuff that gets made
Gets made from what? Things don't ultimately belong to you, as demonstrated by the fact that eminent domain exists and gets exercised even in a place like the US, where the government can forcefully take possession of any land within its territories and give you money in return (in its currency, of course) -- because it has sovereignty over it. Until you have absolute sovereign title over the land you consider your property, it's not really yours and you don't have real economic freedom, just the illusion of it.
All we have is all we make
This is also BS. You don't make anything; you just transform (usually minimally) bits and pieces whose provenance is ultimately from the land which you do not own. The idiocy of your comment is further highlighted by the fact that the majority of what is considered value is in intangibles which have even less to do with the physical world than fiat currency -- a trend that will continue.
I thoroughly enjoyed your response-sequence to DrYak and dave420 (420+environmentalist, what are the chances!). To be honest, though, I have my background biases as well that helped motivate my response above: I'm a fan of nuclear power (which, by the way, causes far less human deaths per terrawatt-hour generated than wind turbines); and also, as an avid hiker, I have great aesthetic objection to wind turbines.
You're not a very good troll: neither mine nor Opportunist's posts imply lifetime incarceration. I'm all for rehabilitation and restorative justice.
I'm strongly pro-handwriting -- and even dabble in calligraphy -- though I'm a software developer. Having said that, I live in Vancouver, where the Georgia Straight is published, and I'd like to caution those who would use it as a source of information: it is a shamelessly radical leftist publication.
They first confiscate it from you and me, whether we want it or not.
A common misconception, but one that doesn't match reality. Governments create money through the treasury and central bank (a.k.a. federal reserve in the US). Government spending doesn't proceed from money taken in by taxation; rather, money is created ex nihilo and electronically credited to appropriate accounts, then spent. There's no constitutional requirement that the money removed from circulation by taxation has to balance spending in pretty much any developed country in the world: the two are not operationally linked. Indeed, one of the major purposes of taxation (besides reducing the money supply) is enforcing the use of the official national currency -- and that's why you can only pay your taxes in that currency. Tax "revenue" is not for extinguishing debt. And the debt issue itself is another one attracting misunderstanding, because of the tendency by people to apply microeconomic "common sense" to macroeconomics, which is a well-known fallacy. The majority of the debt of a nation like the US is just a number registered between treasury and central bank/fed, and is like debt between husband and wife, pretty much an accounting fiction that doesn't have to be repaid (reducing it, however, makes for good politics); of the rest, much is held by nationals, not foreigners/foreign governments. This configuration gives governments great power to influence their economies through control of the money supply, something they have exclusive legal power to as monetary sovereigns**. Whether this is generally done correctly, incompetently, or abused, is a matter of politics. I'll point out this, however: the common argument against government spending -- inflation -- only applies when you're close to full employment; otherwise, spending feeds aggregate demand rather than inflation.
** The glaring exception being, of course, the euro currency, which nicely shows how attempting a monetary union without having a fiscal and economic union only benefits those who can maintain a trade surplus (Germany), thus beggaring their neighbors in classic mercantilist manner.
Some further reading: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n...
Disclaimer: my post is descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm simply pointing out how things are, not passing judgment on whether this is how they ought to be, and will keep my opinion to myself as I've no interest in a political discussion on Slashdot.
Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do. [implication: it's not worth worrying about wind turbines killing birds]
Almost every time bird-killing wind turbines are discussed, someone posts this non-argument.
Let's apply well-known Slashdot troll NatasRevol's logic to other things:
- Heart disease kills at least an order of magnitude more people than diabetes. [implication: it's not worth worrying about diabetes killing people]
- Windows runs on at least an order of magnitude more personal desktops than Linux. [implication: it's not worth being concerned about the Linux desktop experience]
- Slashdot user BarbaraHudson posts at least an order of magnitude more troll posts than NatasRevol. [implication: it's not worth being annoyed at NatasRevol shitposting]
And then there's this: how many eagles and other large threatened and endangered birds are cats killing?
Federal Court Rules Massive Wind Energy Project in Violation of Endangered Species Act
BarbaraHudson is a well-known troll on /., but I'll bite: it serves the purpose of giving the justice system the moral high ground. Else, it's just vengeful retribution and doesn't rise above his level. And to preempt the fundamentalists who are itching to whip out the Old Testament's eye-for-an-eye: any Christian theologian will confirm that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament.
Unless its 's too urgent and you can't wait for a throat swab result to come back identifying the strain (and thus most appropriate antibiotic -- or even if it's bacterial in the first place), you shouldn't be popping just any random antibiotics, and neither should your doctor be prescribing them. People with attitude like yours are contributing to the ever more serious global antibiotic resistance threat. Doctors here now generally exercise this patient restraint, with the exception of the old dogs that can't learn new tricks.
I don't know about the US, but the tendency here in Canada (at least with younger doctors who didn't get used to prescribe antibiotics like candy pills the way old ones do before resistance became a big deal) is to not rush to antibiotics before the throat swab comes back, not just because it may not be bacterial, but because different bacteria are best targeted by different antibiotics. Using the wrong or just any generic wide-spectrum antibiotic still contributes to the resistance problem. In the past, these tests were mostly done only after a first-line antibiotic treatment failed, but that's changing.
It's a ghastly arighmetic, but it ought to be done: a nuclear strike against Iran would kill many, but it can decisively bring the country to its knees and nip in the bud a coming clash of civilizations that would in the long run result in far more deaths and suffering.
This would work best if it's part of an operation against Iran's larger and even more dangerous ally, Russia. Don't forget that the US has come to be in a position where it can execute a pre-emptive counterforce nuclear strike against Russia: http://belfercenter.hks.harvar... The silo locations are known and the mobile katyusha launchers are being tracked. That only leaves submarine launches as a retaliatory possibility for the russkies, which would be sufficiently few to be mopped up by missile defense. Given the Russian populace's fervent nationalism, their deep-seated need to be ruled by tyrants -- from the tzars through the commies to Putin, and their propensity to export their brotherly love to their unfortunate neighbors, justification for neutering the evil now is easy to come by.
Any fellow Canadians reading my post: lest you disagree, I remind you the Russian bear has its eye on the whole arctic, and the current framework under which negotiations over territory are unfolding is but a game: a signature to any resultant agreement will be no more binding to the Russians than their signature was on the Budapest Memorandum of 1995 which gave Ukraine security assurances in exchange for them giving up their nuclear arsenal. The Russian doesn't understand diplomacy, agreements, international law, or honor -- he only understands force, and perceives the lack of aggression as weakness.
interact biologically [globalresearch.ca]
globalresearch.ca is a well-known crackpot and conspiracy theory outlet. Among various outrageous articles and radical political views, they even became a channel for pro-Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine. Anyone who cites information from the same outlet that produced works of journamlism like North Korea, a Land of Human Achievement, Love and Joy is a fucking tool.
^5 for the Brazil reference.
I forgot to mention an important consideration: one also has to take into account the tradeoff compared to using lots of sugar/glucose/HFCS/etc. While, optimally, intake from both groups should be restricted, I know that's not realistic for many people. I'm lucky in that my metabolism and insulin sensitivity allow me to handle large quantities of the high glycaemic index foods I love, but if you also have a sweet tooth -- depending on your genetics -- the artificial sweeteners may be the lesser evil.