I'm curious; how do you do a proper controlled trial? Double-blind testing seems out of the question.;) Acupuncture is not like a drug; you can't administer a sugar pill.
I'm not saying that it doesn't merit further investigation--the technique looks potentially very promising. But how do we know that this isn't just a potent placebo effect?
I know; I should do the literature search myself, but it's late, and I'm tired.
he called it Napster. the guy had absolutely no room to prove himself in the market and until the lawsuits rolled out, he was dominating it.
winamp is one of the most preferred mp3 players out there.
point is, you don't need "room to prove yourself". if your product is superior, the market will MAKE room for it.
You've demonstrated that it's easier to make room for oneself in a market by giving your product away for free. Now show me how to get a product adopted when your competitor is pushing a loss leader financed by $40 billion in cash reserves and MS Office.
Bit tougher, isn't it? Not to say that it can't be done, but this would not be the first time that MS has crushed a better product by pushing its own products at a loss--at least until the competition went away.
FYI, your mathematical model fails to account for hemaphrodites, pre-op transexuals, and The Artist Known As Prince Who Was Known As A Symbol After He Was Known As Prince The First Freakin' Time. Gotta check those equations, dude!;-)
I find it hard to believe that he's working anywhere these days, actually, so neglecting his group from the employment stats isn't particularly worrisome.
It was recently discovered, and posted on slashdot, that the speed of said force is 3x10^7m/s.
And THAT'S why, officer, your radar reported that I was going 60 in a 40 zone!
Well, no wonder you had a problem. The speed of light is ten times slower in your universe that in that of the officer's. When his radar beam slowed passing into your frame of reference, your apparent speed increased proportionally.
So, really, they're triumphantly announcing that the speed of the light is somewhere between 0.7 c and 1.2 c, and just supposing it has to be c for everything to make sense.
Physicists have been accused of being loose with rigour, but this is really stretching it.
That's an excellent measurement for astrophysics. Recall, there was a recent announcement that astronomers are 95% certain that the age of the universe is between 11 and 20 billion (thousand million in the UK) years old. That's 15.5 plus or minus 29%.
If you read the original paper proposing the measurements back in July, the technique requires interferometric measurements timed to within picoseconds (1e-12 seconds) to give an accuracy of at best plus or minus 10%. That translates to pegging the apparent position of a little speck of light (and radio waves) in the sky to within five millionths of a second of arc. (Roughly speaking, that's the apparent width of a bacterium at twenty miles.) I think that they did a pretty good job to be able to call the number to within 25%, especially given that nobody has ever attempted this sort of measurement before.
No doubt it will be refined in the future; meanwhile, it's another piece of evidence which supports a subtle result general relativity. GR is a really neat theory, in that it made predictions and had consequences that we are still only beginning to be able to test nearly a century later. Even more interesting, it has yet to be contradicted by a reproducible experimental result. Hats off to Einstein, yet again.
it might radiate a cone of 'compressed' gravity (similiar to a sonic boom). I imagine such a thing could make a very amusing weapon.
It would make a nifty radiation weapon anyway. You'd get a ton of seriously blue shifted photons in front of it from its own infrared radiation--UV, x-radiation, or hard gammas. The gravity would be pathetic by comparison.
Of course, such a device in the earth's atmosphere would just create a massive shock wave from travelling way faster than sound, before exploding from the heat of friction with air. Obviously, YMMV based on the mass, shape, and composition of the projectile.
Let me know if anybody is doing any interesting experiments accelerating macroscopic objects (milligrams or larger) to relativistic velocities. That would be pretty cool.
However good the odds are that there are Earth-like planets in the galaxy, what are the odds that any are within reach of any human exploration that will ever take place? It's a big place, and barring "warp drive" the prospects of anything more than observation seem dim.
The odds kinds of depend on how long a trip we decide is worthwhile. In principle, we could build large, slow vessels that cross the distances between stars over generations. In the next twenty or thirty years, I would be surprised if some sort of 'hibernation' technique were not developed that could be applied to long trips. (I'm sure it would be designed for other, more profitable purposes, but would be useful nonetheless.) The real problem is that we have no good way (right now) of investigating potential destinations.
Our current detection techniques are inadequate for observing (or inferring) an Earth-size planet at an Earth-normal distance from even the nearest stars. There could be Earth-like planets in our own stellar backyard, but we can't yet see them. All the current observations do is bolster the idea that the formation of planets is not in and of itself an unusual occurrance. To really do a proper planet search, we're going to need some long baseline interferometric telescopes--preferably including some in space so we can get good infrared data. With such telescopes, we can resolve (and do direct spectroscopic measurements on) Earth-size planets at light-year distances, looking for oxygen atmospheres and water vapour.
Such observations (if they suggested any sort of life-bearing world) would no doubt spur quite a bit of research into techniques for interstellar travel. If I were a biologist, I'd gladly spend the rest of my life in space in exchange for a look at alien plankton--as long as I was reasonably sure there would be something to look at once I got there.
Photons are treated (sometimes) as particles with a rest mass of zero--but when was the last time you saw a stationary photon? Photons are massless in any conventional sense, but they still have momentum. You can apply a force to an object by bouncing photons off of it. Of course, all of this makes no sense at all if we treat light as a wave phenomenon...
As Sir William Bragg stated, "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday."
This stuff is just not meant to be readily grasped by our hunter-gatherer brains, and just about any analogy relying on our conventional notions of mass or 'real' objects is going to fall down sooner or later.
Seqways belong on the sidewalk more then the road, it's a worstcase of a broken arm if you hit a person on the road, if someone hits you riding a segway with truck, your road pizza.
That's tantamount to saying that bicycles also belong on the sidewalk, not on the road. Collisions with pedestrians hurt less than collisions with trucks. Duh.
Just because the worst-case scenario is 'only' a broken arm, as a pedestrian I don't want to have some jackass on a Segway decide that's an okay risk for me to have to take. Sidewalks are for pedestrians and pedestrians only. For the record, I do most of my in-town travelling by bicycle, and wherever possible, I stick to the roads--where I belong.
What would really be useful would be city planning that considers cyclists and pedestrians, and not just SUVs. If there were comfortably wide bicycle lanes on major roads, perhaps that would be a suitable place for the Segway, too.
I just came back from a trip to Disneyworld and they have 32 Segways for what seemed like managerial staff and patrolling the parking lots.
I gotta wonder about that last potential application. For those who have been to Disneyworld--do you remember how large the parking lots are? There are trams running continuously from the far reaches of the parking lots to the gates. Specially trained service people help tourists locate their lost rental cars (all identical). The Segway has a range of only fifteen miles--how big are the parking lots? And why can't any other vehicle navigate them? Under most circumstances, they move thousands of full-sized cars through those lots. Can't you buy a golf cart with more range, storage capacity, and a nice sun shade for three thousand dollars?
Right you are about Kamen. My hat's off to him for all the brilliant advertainment at Epcot. And I agree; the Segway probably is well-suited to the selling-glowsticks-and-crappy-tourist-knicknacks niche. Then again--how hard was it for the guys selling this stuff to walk?
The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual circa 1975 by Franz Joseph shows a similar list of Constitution class vessels, with the following changes.
the Defiant is not listed.
Excalibur is numbered NCC-1705,
Exceter is NCC-1706,
Farragut is NCC-1702 (lost in the line of duty),
Hood is NCC-1707,
Intrepid is NCC-1708 (lost in the line of duty; presumably replaced with the NCC-1831 you cite),
the USS Kongo (NCC-1710) is added,
Lexington is NCC-1703,
Potempkin is NCC-1711,
the USS Valiant (NCC-1709) has been added to the list, but is listed as lost in the line of duty; and
Yorktown is NCC-1704.
So there is some flexibilty to the canon, it would seem. Regardless, I've already spent much more time on this than I meant to. I really do have a life. Honest.
Hurricanes do not contribute substantially to population control.
Neither does disease, really. We'll always die of _something_. The lag time is pretty much irrelevant over the long term.
I agree with you on hurricanes. On a global scale, their effect on population is quite limited. Disease is an entirely different beast, however. The "lag time" that you refer to is quite significant. With the same number of births, things will get a lot more crowded if the average person lives to sixty, rather than to twenty.
Disease historically has a tremendous effect on population. The bubonic plague has caused tremendous devasation when introduced to previously unexposed populations. In the eastern Roman Empire under Justinian, between 25 and 50% of the population died between 540 and 590. A similar pandemic swept Europe in 1347-1351, killing roughly a third of the Eurpoean population. The plague returned again in 1663-1668, leaving another twenty million or so dead.
In the influenza pandemic of 1918, more than twenty million died. The flu killed more people than World War I.
Currently, there are approximately forty million people infected with HIV, including five million new cases just in 2002. Last year, there were more than three million deaths due to AIDS. There are some sub-Saharan nations that have HIV infection rates of twenty or even thirty percent--don't try to tell me that that fact won't have a significant impact on population.
If a terrorist organization chose to deliberately release the plague or smallpox in an urban area, millions would die even with the tremendous quality of care available in the United States. Hundreds of millions would die if such a release occurred in Asia, in the crowded cities of India or China.
What responsibility does a professor have besides showing up if this is the case?
At my university, students in the Faculty of Science (presumably in other faculties as well) fill out (anonymous) evaluations of their professors at the end of each term. The results aren't released to the professors until after the class' marks have been submitted to the Registrar's office. There's a 'bubble sheet' on one side to rate the professor's knowledge, ability to answer questions, organization in presenting material, and so forth. The other side of the page has good-sized blanks for constructive criticism and encouragement.
The best part is that part of each professor's annual raise are based on these student evaluations.
Re:Teachers are teachers, not babysitters
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 2
Keyboard clatter and mouse clicks--and the pr0n on the screen of the guy in front of us--are distracting. I can choose to pay attention to the lecturer (or not) but the lecturer does have some responsibility to maintain a good learning environment. This may sometimes include telling people to shut down their laptops when they become an annoyance to others.
So while sleeping you multi-tasking brain was able to wake you up when the prof got interesting?
I've found that one learns very quickly to take brief catnaps in university. Nod off for a couple of minutes in lectures and snap awake when the professor's voice changes tone or inflection to indicate a new topic or more interesting problem. When working on assignments in class, one can sample the lecture every so often and pay full attention when an interesting keyword ('exam') goes by.
There's only so many hours in the day, and I'm not going to waste that time in unproductive lectures---but it's not safe to miss lectures entirely, in case something important happens. That said, I'm opposed to laptops in class, just because the mouse clicks and keyboard clatter--not to mention watching someone play solitaire--are annoying and distracting to other students.
There are various versions of the Cookbook circulating in print and on the web; some contain gross inaccuracies, some have been corrected--partially. Consult a chemist, or a real textbook, before you try anything.
Well equipped university libraries should have books on the chemistry of fireworks--they're not a bad source of ideas. Information on explosives can be found at schools with good chem. eng. or mining programs.
Be very careful with organic synthesis of any kind, in any quantity. Plan ahead--have a fire extinguisher on hand, and work where there is good ventilation. Don't work where nobody will hear you scream. A litre of solvent triggered with a blasting cap will throw shards of glass a couple hundred feet, except for the bits that are slowed down by your body. Less spectacular errors can be just as fatal. Consider yourself warned.
prove to me my Toyota pickup 'causes more wear to the roads' than you pissant geo metro.
For the most part, I travel by bicycle, actually--but I'll bite.
The most-cited work on road wear as a function of vehicle type and weight was conducted by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their Road Test found an approximate fourth-power relation between rate of road wear and axle weight. Much modern highway policy around the world is based on these tests.
In 1989 Irick et al. (working for ARE Inc.) prepared a report Impact of Truck Characteristics on Pavements: Truck Load Equivalency Factors for the U.S. Federal Highway Administration; it cited a second to third-power dependence affected by road type and number of axles. Also in 1989 Small, Winston, and Evans published a book, Road Work: A New Highway Pricing and Investment Policy. It cites a third-power relationship between axle weight and road wear.
Depending on the experimental conditions, doubling vehicle weight will result in anywhere from four to sixteen times as much road wear. An SUV is not going to cause immediate catastrophic failure of roadways, but it does cause significantly more wear than a smaller automobile.
That said, the amount of wear caused by any passenger vehicle--Geo Metro or Ford Explorer--is virtually nil compared to the damage done by a semi. The difference is three to four orders of magnitude. Strictly speaking, it is logical to charge an SUV owner more per driving mile than a subcompact driver--but it would be much more effective to get as many large trucks off the road as possible. How to do so is left as an exercise for the Oregon state legislature.
Maybe the rich snobs in their Lincoln Navigators and Ford Excursions don't like paying more than the poor guy in the Geo Metro?
Right! Because people who drive heavier vehicles don't cause any more wear to the roads...oh, wait...
Granted, people who drive hybrids or all-electric vehicles (or CNG or propane, for that matter) get a free (or at least discounted) ride with gasoline taxes. I think they deserve it for keeping the state's air cleaner.
If Oregon was really interested in going after the real source of wear and tear on the highways, they'd be taxing the hell out of large trucks--but that wouldn't fly with any number of well-funded lobbyists, so this sort of ridiculous overly complicated scheme comes up instead.
This one really rocked the science world because it calls into question the whole peer-review process.
I don't know about that. Peer reviewers, presented with convincingly manufactured data, failed to catch a careful, deliberate forgery prepared by a fellow expert in the field. Short of actually repeating all the work, sometimes it can be very difficult to review the veracity of a manuscript. Peer reviewers are looking for well-designed experiments and interesting, useful results. They check for errors of methodology or theory--most probably don't look for deliberate fraud unless they catch an obvious flaw.
The scientific method as a whole seems to still work--once the work was published, it was tested, challenged, and eventually withdrawn. Schon is utterly disgraced in the scientific community, and any future claims will be met with careful scrutiny.
Just like any other field, there are bad apples. In science, I suspect that fraudulent work is less likely to be presented and more likely to be caught simply because other people will test it.
On the other hand, the described pranks perpetrated by Stealth Force Beta involved--usually at worst, and usually only incidentally--misdemeanors. Tresspassing, minor vandalism, petty theft. Felony murder would be difficult to apply under these circumstances, because there were no felonies.
Also, the only lives that were ever at risk as a consequence of any of their stunts were their own. There was no reckless endangerment of other people, unlike the linked case in the parent post. They did not perpetrate malicious acts against others, just some fairly harmless--and often public-spirited--fun.
Why not sit down with a cup of hot cocoa (especially nice with a splash of Bailey's) and read a good book (banned or otherwise)?
Accept that people will argue for their beliefs. You do, why shouldn't they? You want them to form groups to fight government surveillance or property rights violations ("How about you whores do something useful...", in your tactful phrasing). Good causes, probably.
"Oh no. That would require a committment to actually bettering the lot of everyone as opposed to allowing you people to feel like you've imposed morality on the hedonistic, unwashed masses."
Why not make your own commitment to better humanity (how noble!) and put in your own time and effort to support ideas you think important?
If that's too hard for you, why not just respect other people's right to hold opinions? You're welcome to present them with reasoned arguments. Be determined, but not obnoxious. You might just change some minds.
Guess what. Ranting and cursing on Slashdot--though cathartic, perhaps--isn't going to impress anyone. It certainly won't change the world--for the better, or otherwise. You're right; it is an unpleasant place outside our windows, sometimes. Needed are dedicated souls armed with goodwill. Of no use whatsoever are the anger, intolerance, and seething invective of your post.
Now finish your cocoa and go to bed. Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. I suggest going out and doing a good deed. End the year on a positive note.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that it doesn't merit further investigation--the technique looks potentially very promising. But how do we know that this isn't just a potent placebo effect?
I know; I should do the literature search myself, but it's late, and I'm tired.
winamp is one of the most preferred mp3 players out there.
point is, you don't need "room to prove yourself". if your product is superior, the market will MAKE room for it.
You've demonstrated that it's easier to make room for oneself in a market by giving your product away for free. Now show me how to get a product adopted when your competitor is pushing a loss leader financed by $40 billion in cash reserves and MS Office.
Bit tougher, isn't it? Not to say that it can't be done, but this would not be the first time that MS has crushed a better product by pushing its own products at a loss--at least until the competition went away.
I'm sorry; I'm as much of a geek as the next guy, but if your women are finding pleasure in Perl scripts, then you're doing something horribly wrong.
I find it hard to believe that he's working anywhere these days, actually, so neglecting his group from the employment stats isn't particularly worrisome.
And THAT'S why, officer, your radar reported that I was going 60 in a 40 zone!
Well, no wonder you had a problem. The speed of light is ten times slower in your universe that in that of the officer's. When his radar beam slowed passing into your frame of reference, your apparent speed increased proportionally.
But just try explaining that to a jury.
Physicists have been accused of being loose with rigour, but this is really stretching it.
That's an excellent measurement for astrophysics. Recall, there was a recent announcement that astronomers are 95% certain that the age of the universe is between 11 and 20 billion (thousand million in the UK) years old. That's 15.5 plus or minus 29%.
If you read the original paper proposing the measurements back in July, the technique requires interferometric measurements timed to within picoseconds (1e-12 seconds) to give an accuracy of at best plus or minus 10%. That translates to pegging the apparent position of a little speck of light (and radio waves) in the sky to within five millionths of a second of arc. (Roughly speaking, that's the apparent width of a bacterium at twenty miles.) I think that they did a pretty good job to be able to call the number to within 25%, especially given that nobody has ever attempted this sort of measurement before.
No doubt it will be refined in the future; meanwhile, it's another piece of evidence which supports a subtle result general relativity. GR is a really neat theory, in that it made predictions and had consequences that we are still only beginning to be able to test nearly a century later. Even more interesting, it has yet to be contradicted by a reproducible experimental result. Hats off to Einstein, yet again.
It would make a nifty radiation weapon anyway. You'd get a ton of seriously blue shifted photons in front of it from its own infrared radiation--UV, x-radiation, or hard gammas. The gravity would be pathetic by comparison.
Of course, such a device in the earth's atmosphere would just create a massive shock wave from travelling way faster than sound, before exploding from the heat of friction with air. Obviously, YMMV based on the mass, shape, and composition of the projectile.
Let me know if anybody is doing any interesting experiments accelerating macroscopic objects (milligrams or larger) to relativistic velocities. That would be pretty cool.
The odds kinds of depend on how long a trip we decide is worthwhile. In principle, we could build large, slow vessels that cross the distances between stars over generations. In the next twenty or thirty years, I would be surprised if some sort of 'hibernation' technique were not developed that could be applied to long trips. (I'm sure it would be designed for other, more profitable purposes, but would be useful nonetheless.) The real problem is that we have no good way (right now) of investigating potential destinations.
Our current detection techniques are inadequate for observing (or inferring) an Earth-size planet at an Earth-normal distance from even the nearest stars. There could be Earth-like planets in our own stellar backyard, but we can't yet see them. All the current observations do is bolster the idea that the formation of planets is not in and of itself an unusual occurrance. To really do a proper planet search, we're going to need some long baseline interferometric telescopes--preferably including some in space so we can get good infrared data. With such telescopes, we can resolve (and do direct spectroscopic measurements on) Earth-size planets at light-year distances, looking for oxygen atmospheres and water vapour.
Such observations (if they suggested any sort of life-bearing world) would no doubt spur quite a bit of research into techniques for interstellar travel. If I were a biologist, I'd gladly spend the rest of my life in space in exchange for a look at alien plankton--as long as I was reasonably sure there would be something to look at once I got there.
As Sir William Bragg stated, "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday."
This stuff is just not meant to be readily grasped by our hunter-gatherer brains, and just about any analogy relying on our conventional notions of mass or 'real' objects is going to fall down sooner or later.
That's tantamount to saying that bicycles also belong on the sidewalk, not on the road. Collisions with pedestrians hurt less than collisions with trucks. Duh.
Just because the worst-case scenario is 'only' a broken arm, as a pedestrian I don't want to have some jackass on a Segway decide that's an okay risk for me to have to take. Sidewalks are for pedestrians and pedestrians only. For the record, I do most of my in-town travelling by bicycle, and wherever possible, I stick to the roads--where I belong.
What would really be useful would be city planning that considers cyclists and pedestrians, and not just SUVs. If there were comfortably wide bicycle lanes on major roads, perhaps that would be a suitable place for the Segway, too.
I gotta wonder about that last potential application. For those who have been to Disneyworld--do you remember how large the parking lots are? There are trams running continuously from the far reaches of the parking lots to the gates. Specially trained service people help tourists locate their lost rental cars (all identical). The Segway has a range of only fifteen miles--how big are the parking lots? And why can't any other vehicle navigate them? Under most circumstances, they move thousands of full-sized cars through those lots. Can't you buy a golf cart with more range, storage capacity, and a nice sun shade for three thousand dollars?
Right you are about Kamen. My hat's off to him for all the brilliant advertainment at Epcot. And I agree; the Segway probably is well-suited to the selling-glowsticks-and-crappy-tourist-knicknacks niche. Then again--how hard was it for the guys selling this stuff to walk?
the Defiant is not listed.
Excalibur is numbered NCC-1705,
Exceter is NCC-1706,
Farragut is NCC-1702 (lost in the line of duty),
Hood is NCC-1707,
Intrepid is NCC-1708 (lost in the line of duty; presumably replaced with the NCC-1831 you cite),
the USS Kongo (NCC-1710) is added,
Lexington is NCC-1703,
Potempkin is NCC-1711,
the USS Valiant (NCC-1709) has been added to the list, but is listed as lost in the line of duty; and
Yorktown is NCC-1704.
So there is some flexibilty to the canon, it would seem. Regardless, I've already spent much more time on this than I meant to. I really do have a life. Honest.
Neither does disease, really. We'll always die of _something_. The lag time is pretty much irrelevant over the long term.
I agree with you on hurricanes. On a global scale, their effect on population is quite limited. Disease is an entirely different beast, however. The "lag time" that you refer to is quite significant. With the same number of births, things will get a lot more crowded if the average person lives to sixty, rather than to twenty.
Disease historically has a tremendous effect on population. The bubonic plague has caused tremendous devasation when introduced to previously unexposed populations. In the eastern Roman Empire under Justinian, between 25 and 50% of the population died between 540 and 590. A similar pandemic swept Europe in 1347-1351, killing roughly a third of the Eurpoean population. The plague returned again in 1663-1668, leaving another twenty million or so dead.
In the influenza pandemic of 1918, more than twenty million died. The flu killed more people than World War I.
Currently, there are approximately forty million people infected with HIV, including five million new cases just in 2002. Last year, there were more than three million deaths due to AIDS. There are some sub-Saharan nations that have HIV infection rates of twenty or even thirty percent--don't try to tell me that that fact won't have a significant impact on population.
If a terrorist organization chose to deliberately release the plague or smallpox in an urban area, millions would die even with the tremendous quality of care available in the United States. Hundreds of millions would die if such a release occurred in Asia, in the crowded cities of India or China.
At my university, students in the Faculty of Science (presumably in other faculties as well) fill out (anonymous) evaluations of their professors at the end of each term. The results aren't released to the professors until after the class' marks have been submitted to the Registrar's office. There's a 'bubble sheet' on one side to rate the professor's knowledge, ability to answer questions, organization in presenting material, and so forth. The other side of the page has good-sized blanks for constructive criticism and encouragement.
The best part is that part of each professor's annual raise are based on these student evaluations.
Keyboard clatter and mouse clicks--and the pr0n on the screen of the guy in front of us--are distracting. I can choose to pay attention to the lecturer (or not) but the lecturer does have some responsibility to maintain a good learning environment. This may sometimes include telling people to shut down their laptops when they become an annoyance to others.
I've found that one learns very quickly to take brief catnaps in university. Nod off for a couple of minutes in lectures and snap awake when the professor's voice changes tone or inflection to indicate a new topic or more interesting problem. When working on assignments in class, one can sample the lecture every so often and pay full attention when an interesting keyword ('exam') goes by.
There's only so many hours in the day, and I'm not going to waste that time in unproductive lectures---but it's not safe to miss lectures entirely, in case something important happens. That said, I'm opposed to laptops in class, just because the mouse clicks and keyboard clatter--not to mention watching someone play solitaire--are annoying and distracting to other students.
Well equipped university libraries should have books on the chemistry of fireworks--they're not a bad source of ideas. Information on explosives can be found at schools with good chem. eng. or mining programs.
Be very careful with organic synthesis of any kind, in any quantity. Plan ahead--have a fire extinguisher on hand, and work where there is good ventilation. Don't work where nobody will hear you scream. A litre of solvent triggered with a blasting cap will throw shards of glass a couple hundred feet, except for the bits that are slowed down by your body. Less spectacular errors can be just as fatal. Consider yourself warned.
For the most part, I travel by bicycle, actually--but I'll bite.
The most-cited work on road wear as a function of vehicle type and weight was conducted by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their Road Test found an approximate fourth-power relation between rate of road wear and axle weight. Much modern highway policy around the world is based on these tests.
In 1989 Irick et al. (working for ARE Inc.) prepared a report Impact of Truck Characteristics on Pavements: Truck Load Equivalency Factors for the U.S. Federal Highway Administration; it cited a second to third-power dependence affected by road type and number of axles. Also in 1989 Small, Winston, and Evans published a book, Road Work: A New Highway Pricing and Investment Policy. It cites a third-power relationship between axle weight and road wear.
Depending on the experimental conditions, doubling vehicle weight will result in anywhere from four to sixteen times as much road wear. An SUV is not going to cause immediate catastrophic failure of roadways, but it does cause significantly more wear than a smaller automobile.
That said, the amount of wear caused by any passenger vehicle--Geo Metro or Ford Explorer--is virtually nil compared to the damage done by a semi. The difference is three to four orders of magnitude. Strictly speaking, it is logical to charge an SUV owner more per driving mile than a subcompact driver--but it would be much more effective to get as many large trucks off the road as possible. How to do so is left as an exercise for the Oregon state legislature.
Right! Because people who drive heavier vehicles don't cause any more wear to the roads...oh, wait...
Granted, people who drive hybrids or all-electric vehicles (or CNG or propane, for that matter) get a free (or at least discounted) ride with gasoline taxes. I think they deserve it for keeping the state's air cleaner.
If Oregon was really interested in going after the real source of wear and tear on the highways, they'd be taxing the hell out of large trucks--but that wouldn't fly with any number of well-funded lobbyists, so this sort of ridiculous overly complicated scheme comes up instead.
I don't know about that. Peer reviewers, presented with convincingly manufactured data, failed to catch a careful, deliberate forgery prepared by a fellow expert in the field. Short of actually repeating all the work, sometimes it can be very difficult to review the veracity of a manuscript. Peer reviewers are looking for well-designed experiments and interesting, useful results. They check for errors of methodology or theory--most probably don't look for deliberate fraud unless they catch an obvious flaw.
The scientific method as a whole seems to still work--once the work was published, it was tested, challenged, and eventually withdrawn. Schon is utterly disgraced in the scientific community, and any future claims will be met with careful scrutiny.
Just like any other field, there are bad apples. In science, I suspect that fraudulent work is less likely to be presented and more likely to be caught simply because other people will test it.
The Segway is an engineering story; it doesn't belong on a science story top twenty-five list.
Incidentally, the parent post was probably meant to be funny.
Happy new year, everyone!
Also, the only lives that were ever at risk as a consequence of any of their stunts were their own. There was no reckless endangerment of other people, unlike the linked case in the parent post. They did not perpetrate malicious acts against others, just some fairly harmless--and often public-spirited--fun.
Why not sit down with a cup of hot cocoa (especially nice with a splash of Bailey's) and read a good book (banned or otherwise)?
Accept that people will argue for their beliefs. You do, why shouldn't they? You want them to form groups to fight government surveillance or property rights violations ("How about you whores do something useful...", in your tactful phrasing). Good causes, probably.
"Oh no. That would require a committment to actually bettering the lot of everyone as opposed to allowing you people to feel like you've imposed morality on the hedonistic, unwashed masses."
Why not make your own commitment to better humanity (how noble!) and put in your own time and effort to support ideas you think important?
If that's too hard for you, why not just respect other people's right to hold opinions? You're welcome to present them with reasoned arguments. Be determined, but not obnoxious. You might just change some minds.
Guess what. Ranting and cursing on Slashdot--though cathartic, perhaps--isn't going to impress anyone. It certainly won't change the world--for the better, or otherwise. You're right; it is an unpleasant place outside our windows, sometimes. Needed are dedicated souls armed with goodwill. Of no use whatsoever are the anger, intolerance, and seething invective of your post.
Now finish your cocoa and go to bed. Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. I suggest going out and doing a good deed. End the year on a positive note.
Try not to swear at anyone.
Good night.
The poster didn't even realize that the linked site was a hoax. Ye gods.
Moderators! You must read the article before moderating! We do not need more of the blind moderating the blind...
Please?