Of course it wouldn't be, or those more fundamental principles would be the laws we're looking for.
Which is one of the possibilities under discussion, yes.
Are there fundamental principles behind the FSC as we understand it today?
Nobody knows, but as long as it is a universal constant then there doesn't need to be to make sense of the universe.
Personally I don't find a look up table of arbitrary values to be any less satisfying than a single arbitrary value.
Maybe you should. You see if the FSC isn't constant, and there's no rhyme or reason to why it changes, then any long-distance observation is subject to the fact that we can't integrate the change of the FSC over that distance and our observations could mean an infinite number of things based on how the "constant" fluctuates. Any region of space where we are unable to make observations to fill in the lookup-table for that region would be essentially a big wall beyond which we could never say what exactly was happening.
Personally I find a universe where we can make sense of observations and deduce things from them to be more satisfying than one where we can't.
Again, though, that might be the universe we live in, and if it is we must accept it. I'm not going to let go of the assumption that physics is the same everywhere easily, though.
Now that Obama has shown the future of US conflicts is drone and air attacks w/out ground troops, the US Air Force could strip the Iranians' air defenses in a week followed by 2-3 weeks of carpet bombing, and then just pull back and let the people decide whom they want to lead them.
The answer -- which everyone already knows -- would be the Iranian regime. Every time the U.S. or other Western powers act against Iran, it strengthens the regime's hold because the only thing they hate more than their government is interference by others'. Especially ours. Most of the protesters still believe in, and the opposition's leaders participated in, the Islamic Revolution that removed the U.S.-backed Shah.
A bombing campaign initiated by the west would not dislodge the regime. Air power alone cannot do that. If regime change was the goal, then that would mean boots on the ground.
The reason Libya was able to follow the path it did is because the air campaign was launched in response to a home-grown revolution asking for our assistance. This is a crucial difference that somehow many people seem to miss when it is utterly fundamental to why the outcome was what it was, versus why Iraq's outcome was what it was.
P.S. There is evidence from war games that Iran could pose a naval threat. It's possible the weaknesses exposed in those games have been addressed. Though on the other hand since the response to those games was to push the admiral whose tactics were shown to be effective against us to the sidelines, and re-run them rigged so that the official doctrine could win, they might not have.
He's only one term in. Looks like you guys will be bombing Iran soon:
Interesting conclusion for an article that says that while Israel is contemplating action against Iran, the U.S. is emphatically not, with experts on US-Iran relations, the White house, and even the Pentagon all saying it's a bad idea and not going to happen.
Bush Jr. made a lot of noise about Iran and gave a lot more indication that he was actually considering action against Iran. Never happened. Because even he and his know-nothing neo-con buddies, the ones who thought Iraq was a great idea, knew what a fucking retarded idea Iran would be.
My point is that it's not up to the individual business to decided who is nice enough to buy thier technology.
It is up to every individual, whether they're a blue-collar working-class stiff, or CEO of a Fortune 500, to make ethical decisions.
Anyone who sold surveillance equipment to Iran knew they were making an unethical sale, but they simply didn't give a shit. Legality isn't ethics, so the defense that it was legal is just another way of saying that they don't give a shit about ethics or morals, they only care about any consequences they personally may face.
We try to make unethical business practices illegal, because we know the sociopaths running many corporations will not behave ethically willingly. Often this happens as a consequence of them engaging in unethical activity and using the "well it was legal" excuse.
Not everyone behaves ethically only to the extent that the law requires them to. Including CEOs. It is an individual choice to do so.
So sure, maybe selling this equipment to Iran was legal for the companies that did it. It was still unethical, it was still wrong, and I will not refrain from saying so.
The idea that because they can't be prosecuted for doing it, that therefore it wasn't unethical, or that it isn't their responsibility to be ethical, is the argument of amoral cads with no ethics to begin with.
If the fine structure constant changes depending on your location, there must be some y=f(x) where x is your location and y is the fine structure constant. That's your new universal law.
Of course there's an f(x), but it isn't necessarily a formula founded on more fundamental principles. It could end up being just a lookup table of empirically measured values. Perhaps including values where f(x) is undefined because physics in that section of the universe is different enough that the fine structure constant is irrelevant.
Can it really then be said to be a universal law? Sure you can say that, but you're losing something fundamental about the notion. It'd be like saying there's a "universal law" in the legal sense, when it's really just a book that contains all the laws of each individual country.
It may not be the case that constants and other laws of physics vary in a well-defined way across the universe. We assume otherwise, and it's a pretty safe assumption. But nevertheless.
If the "laws" change, they're not really laws. All this really implies is that there's some deeper law that governs the fine structure constant.
If the assumption that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere is true -- which I take to be by far the most likely case, even if these results hold up.
If that assumption is not true, then local laws are the best we can ever do.
Okay, it seems like the second one is just saying that there are constants whose numerical value is calculable, and constants where the numerical value is arbitrary because of unit choices.
I'm not sure I buy the argument in the first one that because something has units you can't tell when it changes. Yeah, you can say by definition c = 1 light second/second, and that this will be the case whether the speed of light increases or decreases. I maintain though that if tomorrow the speed of light increased by 10%, then when you went to measure it, you would measure it at 1.1 light second/second. You might change the value of your units and unit-conversions (e.g. light-seconds to meters) to account for this so that it is still 1, but this would only happen as a consequence of having observed a changing speed of light.
I mean it basically seems to be saying that if I have a meter stick which is the "standard", and you have a meter stick that's twice as long, and in the middle of the night you sneak in to the building where the meter stick is kept, that the next day nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Many astronomical/physics models _ASSUME_ that the universe has the same fundamental laws across the entire universe.
Indeed. It's an assumption that's worked very well for us so far, but it is still just an assumption.
Much like it is an assumption that we live in a causal universe; the loss of this sanity-preserving assumption being one of the possible consequences of the FTL neutrinos being real.
Personally, I find it very possible that there will be variations across the universe, based on dependencies we don't know/see/understand.
If those dependencies are the same everywhere, but local conditions cause the apparent behavior to differ, then our base assumption is still correct, it's just we weren't looking at a fundamental enough set of rules.
Just because I see snow everywhere I look in Antarctica doesn't mean I should expect to see snow everywhere I look in Africa.
The rules that cause it to snow in Antarctica are the same as the rules that cause it to not snow in the Sahara. The rules that cause there to be very little precipitation at all in both places are the same as the rules that cause it to rain a lot in the Amazon.
When one says that one shouldn't expect things to be the same in different places, this is trivial when "things" are conditions and thus effects, and a vastly deeper meaning when "things" are the laws that cause different conditions to result in different effects. It isn't obvious that this is a natural extension or expectation.
It still could be the universe we live in, though. I worry that if the laws of physics are truly different in different parts of the universe -- not that what we think of as the laws are the consequence of a deeper set of laws and varying conditions -- that this means it will be basically impossible for us to make sense of the large-scale universe. Much like how a non-causal universe would mean we might never be able to understand the universe outside of the range of conditions where causality appears to hold.
you can't say. Those all are things that have units, so you can always define them as "1" in the proper set of units. (The speed of light, for example, is always one light-second per second.)
You can still say, because even if you define your units so that the constant is 1 unit, if the constant changes, so does the size of the unit. You can then compare this size with the "previous" size, and get a meaningful ratio. It will be unitless, but still correctly represent that the constant has changed.
Just because we define a constant as X units doesn't mean our definition of the unit automagically changes if the "constant" does. For example, right now the meter is defined in terms of the speed of light. However, if the speed of light changed tomorrow, and you measured it using instruments calibrated today, then your measured m/s would be different.
I want this to work, but I'm having trouble shaking the sense that fission power is only safe when it's confined to PowerPoint slides, and becomes dangerous when it collides with reality.
The record of operating plants says differently.
The problem in some ways is similar to airplanes vs. cars. Without questions cars are more dangerous than airplanes. However airplanes are almost universally perceived as more risky because when an accident occurs it is highly visible in the news, involves dozens or even hundreds of people, and was completely out of the control of nearly everyone involved. It's a psychological truth that people feel safer when they feel in control of their destiny, even if that control is more likely to result in their death.
Throw in the fears -- both rational and irrational -- of radiation and radioactive materials and things are much, much worse for nuclear power. The consequences of coal power are mostly invisible to people, so their risk assessment is thrown off even more (people at least see car accidents on a regular basis).
By the way, the reason fission advocates constantly talk about future designs is because while existing designs are good, they can be a lot better. Advocates pushing for the building of new plants would of course rather newer, better, safer designs be built.
It might be a little disappointing that India isn't going whole-hog on exploring new designs, but personally I'm plenty happy to see them building a new and modern reactor.
The Osprey is what you get when the one branch of the military that isn't completely bogged down by inter-service political bullshit about who can use what kind of aircraft to avoid stepping on each other's toes asks for an aircraft that actually suits their needs which turned out to be a difficult thing to deliver in practice (but is working now).
I mean I'm not saying this was a good use of money compared to, say, funding extra science curriculum in high schools across the nation.
I just find it disappointing that of all the military boondoggles to pick on, people seem to gravitate towards the one that was actually something useful and innovative but risky, rather than the truly unnecessary money sinks (the Crusader mobile howitzer would be the first one that springs to my mind).
LOL. It's your head that's telling you that we're suddenly only talking about Star Trek even though it's not been mentioned specifically at any point in the sequence of comments leading up to this point and the original thread establishing the context of "any show". It's also your head that's telling you that I'm only talking about "lasers that are tractor beams".
I'm talking about any show and I'm talking about lasers in said show. Whether or not the tractor beams in said shows are also lasers is the thing we're talking about trying to establish. This is why I specifically discussed lasers on their own, separate from the question of what the tractor beams are.
My point is: depending on their depiction of lasers in the show, figuring out if their version of tractor beams uses lasers or not is a moot point.
So, way to not understand and thus completely fail to address the point due to catastrophic context failure.
P.S. "they said 'tractor beam', which is, as we know, not a laser" is begging the question.
Naw, I wouldn't make that a filter criterion at all, because even if they weren't explicitly stated to be lasers, one could hypothetically deduce this from other clues. So while it would make a good point of discussion, it doesn't serve as a good filter.
The point of the 1st Filter was that if they show things that are supposed to be lasers, but are visible from any angle in space, then there's no point in further investigation. Because in that universe/the writers' heads, a "laser" is the thing what makes a glowy line in space. So either the answer is "No the tractor beam doesn't use lasers because even the thing they call lasers aren't lasers", or if you accept the in-universe definition then the answer is "If the tractor beam makes a glowy line in space then its a laser because that's what a laser is."
Which either way is a banal and trivial answer and not worth thinking about further. Thus, a good filter.:)
This is just another case of light being used improperly to refer to anything to do with EM waves for "simplicity".
Actually it's another case of "light" being used correctly to refer to anything to do with EM waves, underestimating the "simplicity" of the audience.
Which is a fair point for people who are only used to the colloquial usage of "light" which is equivalent to the scientific "visible light", but not for tossers who want to turn around and say that it's incorrect in a scientific context.
Any sort of EM radiation can be beamed; the term is not exclusive to visible light.
Right, and any sort of EM radiation is light. The term is not exclusive to visible light (which is why when talking in a scientific context one says "visible light" to distinguish).
RTFA, that was exactly Goetz's argument on the second page:
Huh? It doesn't sound like Goetz is saying complexity has jack shit to do with patentability... It sounds like he's saying complexity is exactly why software should be patentable.
Those software doomsayers who say software is just ideas, mental processes or mathematics would change their mind if they examined the different phases of the life cycle of a software product.
LOL.
Just because it takes a lot of effort to develop a specific piece of math doesn't mean that would, could, or should change anyone's mind about software just being ideas, just being mental processes, and most of all just being math.
Because software is just mathematical algorithms.
Not something that "can be reduced to" algorithms. Software and hardware are completely unlike each other in this respect. Hardware can be described by math. Software describes math in exactly the same way that "2 + 2 = 4" describes math. The only difference is that software is math in a machine-readable language.
But every single statement that can be made in that language is a statement about manipulating the state of an abstract mathematical model. Every collection of such statements is a mathematical algorithm. Those statements, that algorithm, are meant to be interpreted by a computer, but they need not be. You can execute the software by hand, performing the calculations at a greatly reduced rate but with the same result. You can execute the software inside of a software simulator written in the ISA of a completely different computer, because software is just manipulation of a mathematical model and thus can be converted into any equivalent math. You can run that simulation of a computer running software inside another software simulator and so on until the actual computer you're running on -- the thing that isn't a pure, abstract representation of math -- runs out of resources.
So, yeah, I get it, making software is complex and takes a lot of effort and time to develop. But software was, is, and will always be math. Complex math, to be sure, but math nonetheless. Arguing for software patents is arguing for patents on math. If someone wants to argue for the patentability of software, then they must argue for the patentability of math and defend that stance.
Of course, whatever the fundamental identity is, few bits of software are derived through formal mathematical methods - and in that case it just shifts the "inventive step" from writing the code to transforming the real-world problem you want to solve into a formal specification from which you can derive algorithms.
It doesn't matter if you do math "formally", math is math. Software is math.
Of course, the whole proposition is non-falsifiable unless someone can come up with a testable definition of what "x 'is' mathematics/y 'is not' mathematics" actually means.
For these purposes, something "is" math if it is an abstract representation of mathematical operations, constructs, algorithms, etc. "a^2 + b^2 = c^2" is math because it is just a symbolic representation of math.
Software is literally a machine-readable language for describing math. Some people argue that "anything can be described by math", but not everything describes math. That is exactly, and only, what software is. Software is nothing more than a list of mathematical operations in an algebraic model.
I have trouble with flash-based video at work so I don't know if it has altered audio or anything, but a quick google for "TMBG Tiny Toons" (not animaniacs) gave me this:
But yeah. Obviously the copyright holders can do a lot of damage to the "virtual public domain". It's not a replacement. But as a 'what happens if the public domain as a legal concept is destroyed" it's not the worst practical result. It's not "The Right to Read". Thus, heartening.
God damn. I was inclined to believe that guy, as he was going against his bias, but now it seems that he WAS biased for AGW.
His results did go against his bias. He thought the proxy data was flawed and as a consequence the hockey stick graph was wrong. He found out that it was he that was wrong.
Lack of skepticism is the single most deadly sin in science and in any economic system. Anyone calling for less of it is much more likely to have an agenda that he doesn't want people examining.
This is a perfect example of real skepticism resulting in good science.
Of course all good scientists are skeptical, especially of themselves. That's why, despite their biases, those scientists did good work that was corroborated by someone who was biased towards thinking that they had not done good work.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that scientists know that they are biased, know that they will want something to be true. And that all the nuts and bolts of the scientific method are about trying to eliminate that bias in their own work. Because they don't just want to be able to think something is true and be happy to create a pleasant illusion for themselves. They want it to really be true, and if it isn't, they want to know that too.
I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince me of this theory any more. There have simply been too many lies
So because Mueller is an actual skeptic of the very science he was seeking to reproduce, but not the kind of all-purpose all-denying skeptic that you thought he was, that's a lie and so you don't have to listen to any evidence anymore. Because you feel a news article mislead you, therefore climate scientists are all liars and nothing they say can ever convince you.
You, at least, no longer have to be skeptical.
Well that's a fine chain of logic to validate your preconceived notions you have there. At least you admit that you're abandoning the virtue that is integral to science. I guess that's something.
I take it more like "Selling off our national parkland doesn't affect me because despite the wishes of the purchasers it will remain undeveloped and open to the public regardless; Yellowstone will still be Yellowstone"
There's a practical public domain much larger than the real one, thanks to the Internet. While I still value the public domain, and am frightened of the continued attempts to prevent anything from ever going in it again, I am heartened by the notion that there is a mostly functional equivalent.
What I want is irrelevant... My point, of course, is that this guy is not a "Global Warming Skeptic", as TFA points him out to be.
What you want is clearly of prime importance, since it is what you wanted "Global Warming Skeptic" to mean that is the basis for your complaint, and your sense of being personally lied to and thus not able to trust climate scientists.
You wanted it to mean someone who thinks like you, who rejects all the science and thinks the whole thing is a sham. And who then did their own research and concluded that it really wasn't, based on the scientific evidence. Which will never happen, because nobody who rejects the existing science to the point where they deny GW in its entirety is starting from a place of respecting science and being open to changing their mind via evidence.
If you really agreed with much of what I wrote, then you would realize that Mueller is a climate skeptic as much as one can be and still be in touch with scientific reality and not a "skeptic" who will never, ever change their mind. If you really appreciated scientists doing good, unbiased science and in so doing arriving at conclusions contrary to their preconceptions, then you would take this result as the headlines intended -- that someone who doubted the data, who was skeptical and well know for being so, checked and found out it was good -- rather than taking it as more evidence that climate scientists are liars, like you did.
Mueller is a climate skeptic. He's not a "skeptic", and I guess you can say it's the two Posts' fault for not making the distinction clearer given the way the term "skeptic" is tied in with the culture war and by extension your own personal feelings on the subject. I suppose they could have included several paragraphs explaining what it means to really be a skeptic, so it would have been clear to you that they don't mean the kind of "skeptic" you're thinking of. Kinda like how I did in my post.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it wouldn't be, or those more fundamental principles would be the laws we're looking for.
Which is one of the possibilities under discussion, yes.
Are there fundamental principles behind the FSC as we understand it today?
Nobody knows, but as long as it is a universal constant then there doesn't need to be to make sense of the universe.
Personally I don't find a look up table of arbitrary values to be any less satisfying than a single arbitrary value.
Maybe you should. You see if the FSC isn't constant, and there's no rhyme or reason to why it changes, then any long-distance observation is subject to the fact that we can't integrate the change of the FSC over that distance and our observations could mean an infinite number of things based on how the "constant" fluctuates. Any region of space where we are unable to make observations to fill in the lookup-table for that region would be essentially a big wall beyond which we could never say what exactly was happening.
Personally I find a universe where we can make sense of observations and deduce things from them to be more satisfying than one where we can't.
Again, though, that might be the universe we live in, and if it is we must accept it. I'm not going to let go of the assumption that physics is the same everywhere easily, though.
Now that Obama has shown the future of US conflicts is drone and air attacks w/out ground troops, the US Air Force could strip the Iranians' air defenses in a week followed by 2-3 weeks of carpet bombing, and then just pull back and let the people decide whom they want to lead them.
The answer -- which everyone already knows -- would be the Iranian regime. Every time the U.S. or other Western powers act against Iran, it strengthens the regime's hold because the only thing they hate more than their government is interference by others'. Especially ours. Most of the protesters still believe in, and the opposition's leaders participated in, the Islamic Revolution that removed the U.S.-backed Shah.
A bombing campaign initiated by the west would not dislodge the regime. Air power alone cannot do that. If regime change was the goal, then that would mean boots on the ground.
The reason Libya was able to follow the path it did is because the air campaign was launched in response to a home-grown revolution asking for our assistance. This is a crucial difference that somehow many people seem to miss when it is utterly fundamental to why the outcome was what it was, versus why Iraq's outcome was what it was.
P.S. There is evidence from war games that Iran could pose a naval threat. It's possible the weaknesses exposed in those games have been addressed. Though on the other hand since the response to those games was to push the admiral whose tactics were shown to be effective against us to the sidelines, and re-run them rigged so that the official doctrine could win, they might not have.
That's really beside the point, though.
He's only one term in. Looks like you guys will be bombing Iran soon:
Interesting conclusion for an article that says that while Israel is contemplating action against Iran, the U.S. is emphatically not, with experts on US-Iran relations, the White house, and even the Pentagon all saying it's a bad idea and not going to happen.
Bush Jr. made a lot of noise about Iran and gave a lot more indication that he was actually considering action against Iran. Never happened. Because even he and his know-nothing neo-con buddies, the ones who thought Iraq was a great idea, knew what a fucking retarded idea Iran would be.
Um, the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, not judicial.
My point is that it's not up to the individual business to decided who is nice enough to buy thier technology.
It is up to every individual, whether they're a blue-collar working-class stiff, or CEO of a Fortune 500, to make ethical decisions.
Anyone who sold surveillance equipment to Iran knew they were making an unethical sale, but they simply didn't give a shit. Legality isn't ethics, so the defense that it was legal is just another way of saying that they don't give a shit about ethics or morals, they only care about any consequences they personally may face.
We try to make unethical business practices illegal, because we know the sociopaths running many corporations will not behave ethically willingly. Often this happens as a consequence of them engaging in unethical activity and using the "well it was legal" excuse.
Not everyone behaves ethically only to the extent that the law requires them to. Including CEOs. It is an individual choice to do so.
So sure, maybe selling this equipment to Iran was legal for the companies that did it. It was still unethical, it was still wrong, and I will not refrain from saying so.
The idea that because they can't be prosecuted for doing it, that therefore it wasn't unethical, or that it isn't their responsibility to be ethical, is the argument of amoral cads with no ethics to begin with.
If the fine structure constant changes depending on your location, there must be some y=f(x) where x is your location and y is the fine structure constant. That's your new universal law.
Of course there's an f(x), but it isn't necessarily a formula founded on more fundamental principles. It could end up being just a lookup table of empirically measured values. Perhaps including values where f(x) is undefined because physics in that section of the universe is different enough that the fine structure constant is irrelevant.
Can it really then be said to be a universal law? Sure you can say that, but you're losing something fundamental about the notion. It'd be like saying there's a "universal law" in the legal sense, when it's really just a book that contains all the laws of each individual country.
It may not be the case that constants and other laws of physics vary in a well-defined way across the universe. We assume otherwise, and it's a pretty safe assumption. But nevertheless.
If the "laws" change, they're not really laws. All this really implies is that there's some deeper law that governs the fine structure constant.
If the assumption that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere is true -- which I take to be by far the most likely case, even if these results hold up.
If that assumption is not true, then local laws are the best we can ever do.
Okay, it seems like the second one is just saying that there are constants whose numerical value is calculable, and constants where the numerical value is arbitrary because of unit choices.
I'm not sure I buy the argument in the first one that because something has units you can't tell when it changes. Yeah, you can say by definition c = 1 light second/second, and that this will be the case whether the speed of light increases or decreases. I maintain though that if tomorrow the speed of light increased by 10%, then when you went to measure it, you would measure it at 1.1 light second/second. You might change the value of your units and unit-conversions (e.g. light-seconds to meters) to account for this so that it is still 1, but this would only happen as a consequence of having observed a changing speed of light.
I mean it basically seems to be saying that if I have a meter stick which is the "standard", and you have a meter stick that's twice as long, and in the middle of the night you sneak in to the building where the meter stick is kept, that the next day nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Many astronomical/physics models _ASSUME_ that the universe has the same fundamental laws across the entire universe.
Indeed. It's an assumption that's worked very well for us so far, but it is still just an assumption.
Much like it is an assumption that we live in a causal universe; the loss of this sanity-preserving assumption being one of the possible consequences of the FTL neutrinos being real.
Personally, I find it very possible that there will be variations across the universe, based on dependencies we don't know/see/understand.
If those dependencies are the same everywhere, but local conditions cause the apparent behavior to differ, then our base assumption is still correct, it's just we weren't looking at a fundamental enough set of rules.
Just because I see snow everywhere I look in Antarctica doesn't mean I should expect to see snow everywhere I look in Africa.
The rules that cause it to snow in Antarctica are the same as the rules that cause it to not snow in the Sahara. The rules that cause there to be very little precipitation at all in both places are the same as the rules that cause it to rain a lot in the Amazon.
When one says that one shouldn't expect things to be the same in different places, this is trivial when "things" are conditions and thus effects, and a vastly deeper meaning when "things" are the laws that cause different conditions to result in different effects. It isn't obvious that this is a natural extension or expectation.
It still could be the universe we live in, though. I worry that if the laws of physics are truly different in different parts of the universe -- not that what we think of as the laws are the consequence of a deeper set of laws and varying conditions -- that this means it will be basically impossible for us to make sense of the large-scale universe. Much like how a non-causal universe would mean we might never be able to understand the universe outside of the range of conditions where causality appears to hold.
you can't say. Those all are things that have units, so you can always define them as "1" in the proper set of units. (The speed of light, for example, is always one light-second per second.)
You can still say, because even if you define your units so that the constant is 1 unit, if the constant changes, so does the size of the unit. You can then compare this size with the "previous" size, and get a meaningful ratio. It will be unitless, but still correctly represent that the constant has changed.
Just because we define a constant as X units doesn't mean our definition of the unit automagically changes if the "constant" does. For example, right now the meter is defined in terms of the speed of light. However, if the speed of light changed tomorrow, and you measured it using instruments calibrated today, then your measured m/s would be different.
I want this to work, but I'm having trouble shaking the sense that fission power is only safe when it's confined to PowerPoint slides, and becomes dangerous when it collides with reality.
The record of operating plants says differently.
The problem in some ways is similar to airplanes vs. cars. Without questions cars are more dangerous than airplanes. However airplanes are almost universally perceived as more risky because when an accident occurs it is highly visible in the news, involves dozens or even hundreds of people, and was completely out of the control of nearly everyone involved. It's a psychological truth that people feel safer when they feel in control of their destiny, even if that control is more likely to result in their death.
Throw in the fears -- both rational and irrational -- of radiation and radioactive materials and things are much, much worse for nuclear power. The consequences of coal power are mostly invisible to people, so their risk assessment is thrown off even more (people at least see car accidents on a regular basis).
By the way, the reason fission advocates constantly talk about future designs is because while existing designs are good, they can be a lot better. Advocates pushing for the building of new plants would of course rather newer, better, safer designs be built.
It might be a little disappointing that India isn't going whole-hog on exploring new designs, but personally I'm plenty happy to see them building a new and modern reactor.
And the Osprey.
The Osprey is what you get when the one branch of the military that isn't completely bogged down by inter-service political bullshit about who can use what kind of aircraft to avoid stepping on each other's toes asks for an aircraft that actually suits their needs which turned out to be a difficult thing to deliver in practice (but is working now).
I mean I'm not saying this was a good use of money compared to, say, funding extra science curriculum in high schools across the nation.
I just find it disappointing that of all the military boondoggles to pick on, people seem to gravitate towards the one that was actually something useful and innovative but risky, rather than the truly unnecessary money sinks (the Crusader mobile howitzer would be the first one that springs to my mind).
LOL. It's your head that's telling you that we're suddenly only talking about Star Trek even though it's not been mentioned specifically at any point in the sequence of comments leading up to this point and the original thread establishing the context of "any show". It's also your head that's telling you that I'm only talking about "lasers that are tractor beams".
I'm talking about any show and I'm talking about lasers in said show. Whether or not the tractor beams in said shows are also lasers is the thing we're talking about trying to establish. This is why I specifically discussed lasers on their own, separate from the question of what the tractor beams are.
My point is: depending on their depiction of lasers in the show, figuring out if their version of tractor beams uses lasers or not is a moot point.
So, way to not understand and thus completely fail to address the point due to catastrophic context failure.
P.S. "they said 'tractor beam', which is, as we know, not a laser" is begging the question.
Of course not. *pat pat*
*my head asplode*
Naw, I wouldn't make that a filter criterion at all, because even if they weren't explicitly stated to be lasers, one could hypothetically deduce this from other clues. So while it would make a good point of discussion, it doesn't serve as a good filter.
The point of the 1st Filter was that if they show things that are supposed to be lasers, but are visible from any angle in space, then there's no point in further investigation. Because in that universe/the writers' heads, a "laser" is the thing what makes a glowy line in space. So either the answer is "No the tractor beam doesn't use lasers because even the thing they call lasers aren't lasers", or if you accept the in-universe definition then the answer is "If the tractor beam makes a glowy line in space then its a laser because that's what a laser is."
Which either way is a banal and trivial answer and not worth thinking about further. Thus, a good filter. :)
Can you provide a reference that the visible light was depicted as the effective mechanism, rather than as a side effect?
First filter criterion: Does the show depict laser beams as visible from any direction in space?
This is just another case of light being used improperly to refer to anything to do with EM waves for "simplicity".
Actually it's another case of "light" being used correctly to refer to anything to do with EM waves, underestimating the "simplicity" of the audience.
Which is a fair point for people who are only used to the colloquial usage of "light" which is equivalent to the scientific "visible light", but not for tossers who want to turn around and say that it's incorrect in a scientific context.
Any sort of EM radiation can be beamed; the term is not exclusive to visible light.
Right, and any sort of EM radiation is light. The term is not exclusive to visible light (which is why when talking in a scientific context one says "visible light" to distinguish).
RTFA, that was exactly Goetz's argument on the second page:
Huh? It doesn't sound like Goetz is saying complexity has jack shit to do with patentability... It sounds like he's saying complexity is exactly why software should be patentable.
Those software doomsayers who say software is just ideas, mental processes or mathematics would change their mind if they examined the different phases of the life cycle of a software product.
LOL.
Just because it takes a lot of effort to develop a specific piece of math doesn't mean that would, could, or should change anyone's mind about software just being ideas, just being mental processes, and most of all just being math.
Because software is just mathematical algorithms.
Not something that "can be reduced to" algorithms. Software and hardware are completely unlike each other in this respect. Hardware can be described by math. Software describes math in exactly the same way that "2 + 2 = 4" describes math. The only difference is that software is math in a machine-readable language.
But every single statement that can be made in that language is a statement about manipulating the state of an abstract mathematical model. Every collection of such statements is a mathematical algorithm. Those statements, that algorithm, are meant to be interpreted by a computer, but they need not be. You can execute the software by hand, performing the calculations at a greatly reduced rate but with the same result. You can execute the software inside of a software simulator written in the ISA of a completely different computer, because software is just manipulation of a mathematical model and thus can be converted into any equivalent math. You can run that simulation of a computer running software inside another software simulator and so on until the actual computer you're running on -- the thing that isn't a pure, abstract representation of math -- runs out of resources.
So, yeah, I get it, making software is complex and takes a lot of effort and time to develop. But software was, is, and will always be math. Complex math, to be sure, but math nonetheless. Arguing for software patents is arguing for patents on math. If someone wants to argue for the patentability of software, then they must argue for the patentability of math and defend that stance.
Of course, whatever the fundamental identity is, few bits of software are derived through formal mathematical methods - and in that case it just shifts the "inventive step" from writing the code to transforming the real-world problem you want to solve into a formal specification from which you can derive algorithms.
It doesn't matter if you do math "formally", math is math. Software is math.
Of course, the whole proposition is non-falsifiable unless someone can come up with a testable definition of what "x 'is' mathematics/y 'is not' mathematics" actually means.
For these purposes, something "is" math if it is an abstract representation of mathematical operations, constructs, algorithms, etc. "a^2 + b^2 = c^2" is math because it is just a symbolic representation of math.
Software is literally a machine-readable language for describing math. Some people argue that "anything can be described by math", but not everything describes math. That is exactly, and only, what software is. Software is nothing more than a list of mathematical operations in an algebraic model.
Software is math.
I have trouble with flash-based video at work so I don't know if it has altered audio or anything, but a quick google for "TMBG Tiny Toons" (not animaniacs) gave me this:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1dscb_they-might-be-giants-istanbul-tiny_shortfilms
But yeah. Obviously the copyright holders can do a lot of damage to the "virtual public domain". It's not a replacement. But as a 'what happens if the public domain as a legal concept is destroyed" it's not the worst practical result. It's not "The Right to Read". Thus, heartening.
God damn. I was inclined to believe that guy, as he was going against his bias, but now it seems that he WAS biased for AGW.
His results did go against his bias. He thought the proxy data was flawed and as a consequence the hockey stick graph was wrong. He found out that it was he that was wrong.
Lack of skepticism is the single most deadly sin in science and in any economic system. Anyone calling for less of it is much more likely to have an agenda that he doesn't want people examining.
This is a perfect example of real skepticism resulting in good science.
Of course all good scientists are skeptical, especially of themselves. That's why, despite their biases, those scientists did good work that was corroborated by someone who was biased towards thinking that they had not done good work.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that scientists know that they are biased, know that they will want something to be true. And that all the nuts and bolts of the scientific method are about trying to eliminate that bias in their own work. Because they don't just want to be able to think something is true and be happy to create a pleasant illusion for themselves. They want it to really be true, and if it isn't, they want to know that too.
I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince me of this theory any more. There have simply been too many lies
So because Mueller is an actual skeptic of the very science he was seeking to reproduce, but not the kind of all-purpose all-denying skeptic that you thought he was, that's a lie and so you don't have to listen to any evidence anymore. Because you feel a news article mislead you, therefore climate scientists are all liars and nothing they say can ever convince you.
You, at least, no longer have to be skeptical.
Well that's a fine chain of logic to validate your preconceived notions you have there. At least you admit that you're abandoning the virtue that is integral to science. I guess that's something.
I take it more like "Selling off our national parkland doesn't affect me because despite the wishes of the purchasers it will remain undeveloped and open to the public regardless; Yellowstone will still be Yellowstone"
There's a practical public domain much larger than the real one, thanks to the Internet. While I still value the public domain, and am frightened of the continued attempts to prevent anything from ever going in it again, I am heartened by the notion that there is a mostly functional equivalent.
What I want is irrelevant... My point, of course, is that this guy is not a "Global Warming Skeptic", as TFA points him out to be.
What you want is clearly of prime importance, since it is what you wanted "Global Warming Skeptic" to mean that is the basis for your complaint, and your sense of being personally lied to and thus not able to trust climate scientists.
You wanted it to mean someone who thinks like you, who rejects all the science and thinks the whole thing is a sham. And who then did their own research and concluded that it really wasn't, based on the scientific evidence. Which will never happen, because nobody who rejects the existing science to the point where they deny GW in its entirety is starting from a place of respecting science and being open to changing their mind via evidence.
If you really agreed with much of what I wrote, then you would realize that Mueller is a climate skeptic as much as one can be and still be in touch with scientific reality and not a "skeptic" who will never, ever change their mind. If you really appreciated scientists doing good, unbiased science and in so doing arriving at conclusions contrary to their preconceptions, then you would take this result as the headlines intended -- that someone who doubted the data, who was skeptical and well know for being so, checked and found out it was good -- rather than taking it as more evidence that climate scientists are liars, like you did.
Mueller is a climate skeptic. He's not a "skeptic", and I guess you can say it's the two Posts' fault for not making the distinction clearer given the way the term "skeptic" is tied in with the culture war and by extension your own personal feelings on the subject. I suppose they could have included several paragraphs explaining what it means to really be a skeptic, so it would have been clear to you that they don't mean the kind of "skeptic" you're thinking of. Kinda like how I did in my post.
So maybe now you see the relevance.