Maybe, just maybe, it's not dark matter but some of our "laws" are simply wrong.
Of course our theories are wrong. No scientist believes he has the discovered the absolute truth. But our theories are as good as they can be, given the current evidence.
In the case of dark matter, you have a single unknown blip in an otherwise elegant series of equations that explain a huge proportion of the data that astronomers can observe. Scientists knows that within this blip lies a messy tangle that will eventually drive an iteration of the accepted equations to the next level of complexity.
You claim to know your history of science, but you clearly don't understand the philosophy of it.
I worked fulltime for two years using genetic algorithms to solve a hard problem
I understand that process and what they're capable of (from a computational potential perspective) better than all but a handful of people on this planet
In academia, we call two years of experience a "Master's degree". It's the one that comes before PhD.
There are a great deal of PhD's in the world, and, at a guess, thousands of them are based on GA research. We have several in our department.
I smell someone whoring their ideas for grant money.
Big bucket of Katrina Federal Cash! How can we get some?
Ah ha! Stress fractures in metal are in some very vague sense similar to stress fractures in rock, and therefore dirt, and therefore levees and therefore profit!
Sending abortions before the courts is bad for two-reasons.
1. it makes it harder for the poor to get them. There will be court and legal fees, as well as paperwork and beuracratic hurdles that are difficult for a poor, uninformed person to know or find out about.
2. The court system is already groaning under the strain of its existing docket.
Many of the climate models you put so much stock in say that it's a runaway reaction once started. If you truly believe the models you refer to in step 3 of your plan, you should throw away step 1.
Regarding your second step, and alternative energies, absolutely. Fission Fission Fission. Ironically, and very sadly, environmentalists, with their short sighted and uninformed no-nucleaer agenda, may have done more to harm the environment than the oil industry.
If we can say with some level of certainty that our climate models are good enough to link humans to global warming and foresee serious consequences in the future, we need to take those same models and predict ways to offset those changes.
As a modeler, we cannot say with any certainty that our climate models are good enough. In any model with complex feedback cycles, neglecting a single factor can render all of your predictions wildly inaccurate. We know a lot, but we need to know just about everything to get it right if we're planning on being proactive.
Science on this level is really really hard. Much harder to do than it is to read newspaper stories and come up with 3 step plans.
I find it hard to believe that we have enough power to warm the planet, yet lack the power to cool it.
I can render a computer inoperative by running a steak knife across the motherboard. I couldn't then fix it.
#1. We have a deep and thorough understanding of the climate, sufficient to allow us to calculate the effect of increased CO2 emissions through multiple complex feedback cycles which were, up until a few years ago, poorly understood. This sophisticated theoretical understanding of the climate has yet to filter through to the world's meteorological institutes, with the result that we can predict climate change but not tomorrow's weather. After all, it takes time to train new weatherpeople.
#2. the climate appears to be changing, people are scared and as a result propose a variety of theories that fit the data on the surface without any real understanding of the underlying dynamics. Scientists are forced, by the crushing pressure of their funding agencies and popular opinion, to fit their square peg theories into the round peg hole of global warming to keep steaks in the freezer.
Based on past experience, I'd say #2 is far more likely. As a scientist, I can say that science is *hard*, and anyone claiming to understand the dynamics of something as complex as the climate is blowing smoke up your ass.
We can't even figure out if brocolli prevents colon cancer or not (it used to, now it does).
Fear is a powerful motivator. It guides our thoughts and actions, and convinces us that we are behaving rationally.
There is no such thing as an "accepted truth" in science. Not evolution, not even the phenomenon or explanation gravity are "truths"
Science has two things: data and theory.
You collect data, and you compose theories to explain that data. The more data that fits a theory, the more likely a theory is to represent the underlying dynamics of the physical world. Think of theories as data compression. You are compressing many data points into a simple anecdotal explanation that is easily remembered. The role of theories is to allow we humans, with our limited intellectual capacity to understand more and more of the world by constructing ever more elegant and compact anecdotal descriptions of the data we observe around us.
At no point, ever, does a theory graduate to "truth" status. Truth is something we will never know and every scientist that is true to the discipline understands this.
The common perception of science is that there is some ladder on which there's some arrangement of lemmas, hypotheses, theories and laws, and ideas graduate from one to the next. This is borne out of mathematics I think.... but in math there is "truth". The set of axioms that control the toy world you have defined is knowable.
Not so in the real world. There's theory, and data, and naught else.
I think this isn't really worth a front page article. I can't use the thing because it's already down, but I'm guessing that someone's got some 10 line algorithm that looks for primes or squares in your IP and computes some kind of score. It's not that it's not nerdy, or not interesting, it's just not enough.
People don't like to hear it, but the nazi's were another such group. Their rocket think-tank was largely responsible for the world's radical success in space travel in the next 30 years.
And it wasn't just the ideas they developed, it was also the people. As soon as the war was over, the allies snarfed up the pack of them and those men became critical to the rocket programs of the US and the soviets.
It was a rare concentration of funding and talent fired by a intense ambition (i.e. make rockets that can hit london from berlin) that set in motion decades of progress.
You are assuming that our energy usage won't increase over time.
I imagine that, much as my Mp3 collection expands to fill the available space as my hard drive gets larger, so too will mankind's energy usage expand to fill the available supply.
Yea, building stuff in space is easy. I'm sure you could take a rocket casing, coating with toxic and flammable chemicals and whip that into a new lifepod in about a day with an arc welder.
The real problem is the wildly different velocities of each different piece. These things are zooming along at bullet speeds, and some weigh more than an SUV. The problem is how one neutralizes these enormous differentials in kinetic energy.
If you tried to collect them in a ball by catching them, each new piece you intercepted would smack into it, creating 1000 new pieces of debris all with wildly random vectors of their own.
Perhaps if you had some kind of foamy goop that absorbed the energy... but it has to remain pliable in a frozen vacuum.
Alright everyone, I'm sure we can figure out how to solve this problem in our spare time between meetings and system rebuilds. After all, there's no problem NASA thinks is insurmountable that we can't convince ourselves is easily solved.
Surely we have worse things to worry about than a copper shortage.
I think our infrastructure can handle adopting different metals for certain purposes, and using what copper we have left for critical applications.
This is the way everything works, you piss away resource X like it's going out of style (e.g. copper tubing !?! ) and then when the resource starts to bottom out, you find replacements for most of the uses, and conserve the remainder for the neccessary applications
No big deal.
I swear, the media's getting worse by the day, what's next on the worry list? Not enough sand for making CPU's?
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly bio sensors are cool, but you should read the FA.
Sensors picked up the light, and then lights in the chamber simulated that light for the slime mold.
There's not much point in using a biological sensor if you first record it on silicon then replay a replica of it.
This may be useful at some point, but as of now it seems pretty silly.
Maybe, just maybe, it's not dark matter but some of our "laws" are simply wrong.
Of course our theories are wrong. No scientist believes he has the discovered the absolute truth. But our theories are as good as they can be, given the current evidence.
In the case of dark matter, you have a single unknown blip in an otherwise elegant series of equations that explain a huge proportion of the data that astronomers can observe. Scientists knows that within this blip lies a messy tangle that will eventually drive an iteration of the accepted equations to the next level of complexity.
You claim to know your history of science, but you clearly don't understand the philosophy of it.
Got a tip for ya, those are the people that couldn't get grants.
I worked fulltime for two years using genetic algorithms to solve a hard problem
I understand that process and what they're capable of (from a computational potential perspective) better than all but a handful of people on this planet
In academia, we call two years of experience a "Master's degree". It's the one that comes before PhD.
There are a great deal of PhD's in the world, and, at a guess, thousands of them are based on GA research. We have several in our department.
Mod parent up!
Hitting puberty early may not be a picnic, but hitting it late is no walk in the park either.
I refer all queries to the outstanding Tv series Freaks and Geeks.
I smell someone whoring their ideas for grant money.
Big bucket of Katrina Federal Cash! How can we get some?
Ah ha! Stress fractures in metal are in some very vague sense similar to stress fractures in rock, and therefore dirt, and therefore levees and therefore profit!
Free hotel, Free room service, Free Willy! WOOHOO
DRM is perfectly named. Your confusions stems from your assumption that the Rights are *yours*.
DRM refers to the rights of the digital data, to not be copied, or otherwise abused at the hands of filthy pirates.
Please won't somebody think of the bits?
I knew decepticons were just misunderstood.
Sending abortions before the courts is bad for two-reasons.
1. it makes it harder for the poor to get them. There will be court and legal fees, as well as paperwork and beuracratic hurdles that are difficult for a poor, uninformed person to know or find out about.
2. The court system is already groaning under the strain of its existing docket.
First, we need to delay
Many of the climate models you put so much stock in say that it's a runaway reaction once started. If you truly believe the models you refer to in step 3 of your plan, you should throw away step 1.
Regarding your second step, and alternative energies, absolutely. Fission Fission Fission. Ironically, and very sadly, environmentalists, with their short sighted and uninformed no-nucleaer agenda, may have done more to harm the environment than the oil industry.
If we can say with some level of certainty that our climate models are good enough to link humans to global warming and foresee serious consequences in the future, we need to take those same models and predict ways to offset those changes.
As a modeler, we cannot say with any certainty that our climate models are good enough. In any model with complex feedback cycles, neglecting a single factor can render all of your predictions wildly inaccurate. We know a lot, but we need to know just about everything to get it right if we're planning on being proactive.
Science on this level is really really hard. Much harder to do than it is to read newspaper stories and come up with 3 step plans.
I find it hard to believe that we have enough power to warm the planet, yet lack the power to cool it.
I can render a computer inoperative by running a steak knife across the motherboard. I couldn't then fix it.
I personally survived a small gas vapor fire where my body was essentially entirely inside the fireball
I, too, have survived fireballs. The critical factor, it would seem, is the ratio of hit points to the level of the caster.
"Alarming" "dramatically".... Can you make your point without scare words?
The philosophy of science is different than science
Essentially, there are two possibilities:
#1. We have a deep and thorough understanding of the climate, sufficient to allow us to calculate the effect of increased CO2 emissions through multiple complex feedback cycles which were, up until a few years ago, poorly understood. This sophisticated theoretical understanding of the climate has yet to filter through to the world's meteorological institutes, with the result that we can predict climate change but not tomorrow's weather. After all, it takes time to train new weatherpeople.
#2. the climate appears to be changing, people are scared and as a result propose a variety of theories that fit the data on the surface without any real understanding of the underlying dynamics. Scientists are forced, by the crushing pressure of their funding agencies and popular opinion, to fit their square peg theories into the round peg hole of global warming to keep steaks in the freezer.
Based on past experience, I'd say #2 is far more likely. As a scientist, I can say that science is *hard*, and anyone claiming to understand the dynamics of something as complex as the climate is blowing smoke up your ass.
We can't even figure out if brocolli prevents colon cancer or not (it used to, now it does).
Fear is a powerful motivator. It guides our thoughts and actions, and convinces us that we are behaving rationally.
That humans can do anything to affect global warming is about as untested as theories can possibly get.
The GGP is arguing, as someone else has pointed out, from a point of consensus as truth. That's about as specious as arguments get.
Here's a third "fact":
You fundamentally misunderstand science.
There is no such thing as an "accepted truth" in science. Not evolution, not even the phenomenon or explanation gravity are "truths"
Science has two things: data and theory.
You collect data, and you compose theories to explain that data. The more data that fits a theory, the more likely a theory is to represent the underlying dynamics of the physical world. Think of theories as data compression. You are compressing many data points into a simple anecdotal explanation that is easily remembered. The role of theories is to allow we humans, with our limited intellectual capacity to understand more and more of the world by constructing ever more elegant and compact anecdotal descriptions of the data we observe around us.
At no point, ever, does a theory graduate to "truth" status. Truth is something we will never know and every scientist that is true to the discipline understands this.
The common perception of science is that there is some ladder on which there's some arrangement of lemmas, hypotheses, theories and laws, and ideas graduate from one to the next. This is borne out of mathematics I think.... but in math there is "truth". The set of axioms that control the toy world you have defined is knowable.
Not so in the real world. There's theory, and data, and naught else.
I think this isn't really worth a front page article. I can't use the thing because it's already down, but I'm guessing that someone's got some 10 line algorithm that looks for primes or squares in your IP and computes some kind of score. It's not that it's not nerdy, or not interesting, it's just not enough.
This would be better suited for slashback.
People don't like to hear it, but the nazi's were another such group. Their rocket think-tank was largely responsible for the world's radical success in space travel in the next 30 years.
And it wasn't just the ideas they developed, it was also the people. As soon as the war was over, the allies snarfed up the pack of them and those men became critical to the rocket programs of the US and the soviets.
It was a rare concentration of funding and talent fired by a intense ambition (i.e. make rockets that can hit london from berlin) that set in motion decades of progress.
You are assuming that our energy usage won't increase over time.
I imagine that, much as my Mp3 collection expands to fill the available space as my hard drive gets larger, so too will mankind's energy usage expand to fill the available supply.
Call me crazy....
Yea, building stuff in space is easy. I'm sure you could take a rocket casing, coating with toxic and flammable chemicals and whip that into a new lifepod in about a day with an arc welder.
Wearing a space suit.
I knew we could figure it out. Good job.
it's not so easy to collect them.
The real problem is the wildly different velocities of each different piece. These things are zooming along at bullet speeds, and some weigh more than an SUV. The problem is how one neutralizes these enormous differentials in kinetic energy.
If you tried to collect them in a ball by catching them, each new piece you intercepted would smack into it, creating 1000 new pieces of debris all with wildly random vectors of their own.
Perhaps if you had some kind of foamy goop that absorbed the energy... but it has to remain pliable in a frozen vacuum.
Alright everyone, I'm sure we can figure out how to solve this problem in our spare time between meetings and system rebuilds. After all, there's no problem NASA thinks is insurmountable that we can't convince ourselves is easily solved.
Surely we have worse things to worry about than a copper shortage.
I think our infrastructure can handle adopting different metals for certain purposes, and using what copper we have left for critical applications.
This is the way everything works, you piss away resource X like it's going out of style (e.g. copper tubing !?! ) and then when the resource starts to bottom out, you find replacements for most of the uses, and conserve the remainder for the neccessary applications
No big deal.
I swear, the media's getting worse by the day, what's next on the worry list? Not enough sand for making CPU's?