The establishment has, for example, claimed the Chandra observations of the Bullet Cluster collisions definitely refute MOND as a hypothesis (which simply isn't true, but noone thought to ask the MOND people, or check the mathematics).
That isn't true. The Bullet Cluster is not claimed to refute MOND. The claim is that even MOND must predict additional, probably weakly interacting matter to explain the Bullet Cluster. Because even in MOND, gravity still points towards where the mass is. MOND isn't ruled out. MOND ruling out dark matter is ruled out.
Some people might conflate the two since the point of creating MOND was trying to figure out how to explain galactic motion without dark matter.
Omega Supreme doesn't technically interfere with the Decepticon's airplane monopoly by skipping right over stupid atmospheric flight into a sweet-ass space rocket. But as a concession to being more auto-bot like he also has to have a tank that is for some reason stuck on a track. I mean, being able to transform into a rocket and a tank that could go anywhere would be so awesome both sides of the war would just talk about how awesome he is and never get any fighting done.
So what would Kepler see if a Ringworld happened to be on edge to us? (yes I know it's dynamically unstable).
Nothing, because the ring would be consistently blocking part of the star so Kepler would see a constant luminosity for that star. The inner day/night panels might show up as changes in luminosity if the ring were at a slightly oblique angle, though I'm not sure if Kepler is sensitive enough.
It is unintuitive, because normally "information" has the connotation of something that is useful to us. But imagine a giant table of facts that you don't care about or even imagine any use for -- say, the number of jellybeans in the guess-the-jellybeans jars for carnivals in Havana for the years 1832-1875. Despite it's pointlessness, it's still information.
So for entropy, think about it in terms of the amount of information needed to describe the system (which is equivalent to information contained in the system). A piece of paper with an important phone number on it, while containing some information relevant to you, takes less information to describe than the cloud of hot gas that results from burning that piece of paper. The fact that you don't care about describing the chaotic gas and would have much rather it stayed in the less-information-dense but more useful piece of paper is irrelevant to nature.:)
What you describe sounds a lot like a 30 day free trail. If only he had one of those...
Not really, because I'm describing cracked pirated software with no time limit because it's pirated.
How many people used pirated versions of Photoshop for years before, because they went professional or otherwise decided they needed to go legit, payed for the license of the software they were intimately familiar with and even dependent on? I know several myself. The odds of that happening in 30 days are much slimmer.
My point is the cracked version itself serves as advertising for the full product. A crappy cracked pirate is a crappy advertisement. Which is probably why he's also saying the crackers should get on making a better crack. So, no, the 30 day trial is a separate issue.
Well, it's a new twist on the old classic that Microsoft and Adobe have been doing for decades. It's sorta innovative to directly call attention to a pirated source, but calling attention to it because it's (apparently) crappy seems like a bad choice. I see where he's going -- the pirated version sucks so if you want the real deal you gotta come to me -- but then that's basically the old crippleware model, only letting the pirates do the crippling for you.
When you "previewed" Photoshop, you got the full experience. And that un-crippled experience is I think what leads to familiarity and eventually to sales.
I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date.
Er, more like the most brutal (and direct) attack in recent times, or most brutal attack from the copyright lobby sure... I mean, when it was Czechoslovakia and under the Soviets, I think free culture took a worse beating.
Nope. The more entropy in a system, the more information is in it. Very ordered systems have very little information content. It's the same concept as why a file containing random data can't be compressed, but a file containing nothing but the word "booger" a billion times over can be compressed to barely larger than that one word. Because the former has a lot of information in it (even if it's not meaningful) and the latter does not. You'll sometimes even hear this directly referred to as the entropy of a file.
The movie Blade Runner, for instance, as much as I wished it had been, was not Science Fiction. Even though it was set in the future (2014), there was a long list of astounding scientific advances the viewer had to accept in addition to the main premise that an android could become self-aware and, in some cases, not even know that it is an android (I mean c'mom, imagine the science needed to produce utterly accurate bodily functions. Or did androids just think they had amazingly efficient digestive tracts?
I always thought the implication was that the replicants were engineered biological organisms. Otherwise why would they bother with the Voight-Kampf test? Once you've accepted that they're biological, pooping comes for free. Really the only big leap is that such a level of bioengineering that they could make something that is indistinguishable from a human, but so much stronger, resistant to heat, etc.
That doesn't sound like significantly more of a stretch than presuming you could somehow accelerate human growth to super-speeds. Mr. Clone inexplicably knowing things he couldn't possibly have known is the bigger leap imo.
And what makes Blade Runner (and to a lesser extent The Island) true Sci-Fi is not that they restrict the degree to which they extrapolate from existing technology. It's that they posit a type of technology and a type of future in which that technology exists, and explore how that affects the human condition as we see it today. True sci-fi is always about the present, not the future.
A great way to remind people that they will be punished for thinking without permission.
Yeah, or further analysis will show the effect is real, they'll discover amazing new physics, win a Nobel Prize and get their names in every future physics text.
Sure there may be some resistance to and skepticism of the idea (and this "hm I'm skeptical" isn't even close to the resistance some ideas that successfully changed science forever faced), but that's only natural when the hypothesis seems to contradict existing evidence. When and if they are able to collect more convincing data and rule out alternative explanations, or make successful predictions based on their idea, you'll find the skepticism reduced in direct proportion.
As history has shown repeatedly. What's funny is that if their hypothesis is shown to be true, it'll become mainstream and folks like you will be calling that the new "conventional wisdom and authority" that nobody is allowed to question.
The universe works in weird ways, and you can't be put off by this kind of silliness if you want to explore. You will NEVER have permission or approval to explore outside the box. Never.
What's funny is how you say this, but we only know anything about the truly bizarre and unfathomably weird ways the universe works because scientists thought WAY outside the box and figured these things out. But because you've locked yourself into this "mainstream science is dogmatic and only I am the free thinker" box, you can't see it.
It's like, you couldn't say something that was more blatantly, demonstrably bullshit if you tried.
This is a very valid point, and it is one which must be wrestled with. The problem is that people, especially those in the sciences, have a tendency to go too far the other way, to the point of ignoring their perceptive abilities altogether. We are good at recognizing patterns because recognizing patterns improves the chances of survival. One would think that our naturally evolved systems have gotten pretty darned good at it. There are certainly false positives, but to ignore ALL pattern locks based on popular scientific dogma seems foolish to me.
Well good thing that isn't how it's done. Instead, the patterns humans see are examined in detail, with actual data and the scientific rigor necessary to separate accurate observations of real patterns, from false matches. We're only truly good at recognizing patterns directly related to survival -- the appearance of family, whether the members of another tribe coming close appear friendly or hostile, what a tiger hiding in a bush looks like, or the appearance and behaviors of pray animals, or the types and locations of tasty fruits. Everything else -- and even those -- are highly susceptible to the common failings of various biases and logical fallacies. It takes effort and discipline to eliminate these things, and once you do, you find that many of the patterns humans thought they had recognized turned out to be completely false. Some are not, though, and become established science.
Including the patterns seen by scientists. It's humorously detached from reality to say that scientists reject all pattern locks based on scientific dogma, when their own intuitive pattern matching is how most scientists come up with their initial ideas.
One example resulting from this distortion is the reaction to taboo material. Astrology, for instance, claims that the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun bears some effect upon personality. Personality is a result of subtle atomic reactions in the brain, (I am supposing). Those who (improperly) use science have laughed at this claim, saying that it is "impossible" for a distant stellar body to have any impact upon such reactions. And yet, right now, we are in the process of recognizing that the subtle atomic reactions which govern nuclear decay rates are indeed doing some peculiar things in time with the Earth's relative position to the Sun.
"Impossible" would be the wrong way to put it. It would be more correct to say that there is no reliable evidence whatsoever for this occurring, nor is there any theoretical mechanism, and so there is no reason to believe the phenomenon exists. Is it possible in the sense that nothing explicitly ruled out is possible? Yes. Is that alone enough reason to take it seriously? No.
Astrology is a perfect example of human pattern-matching run amok due to confirmation bias and other failings of the undisciplined mind. People will always tell you about the times they met some aggressive alpha male and asked them if they were an Aries and they were! They won't tell you about the times they were wrong, often because they don't remember. They won't tell you about the time they met someone with no obvious personality quirks and so didn't bother asking them their sign. If they're taking money from you in exchange for a reading, they sure as hell won't tell you that your subconscious body language in response to their vague pronouncements is telling them what they need to know to further tune their statements to convince you that the Stars Know All. Astrology is barely above psychics and mediums in terms of the amount of fraud, with the difference made up by self-delusion. Every time these ideas are required to show actual evidence for their efficacy in a scientific setting they utterly, utterly fail.
You can try to marshal the hypothesis of this article as support for astrology if you want, but fact remains there is still no hypothetical mechanisms by which a miniscule change in radioactive decay rates effects macroscopic
Er, okay, "several orders of magnitude less massive" isn't correct... Ceres is about a third as massive as the rest of the belt, and Pluto is under a tenth as massive. They are still less than the mass of the other objects in their zones, while for instance Mars is over 100,000 times more massive than the other objects in its orbit. There's a table here showing these ratios for all the planets and dwarf planets.
It looks like neither planet really meet the guideline of "clearing its neighborhood"...
Sure they have. It doesn't mean there can't be any other object in their orbit. Think of it in terms of ratios. Earth plus its moon, and Mars are both several orders of magnitude more massive than the sum of every other object in their orbits. Non-planets like Pluto or Ceres are several orders of magnitude less massive than the rest of the mass in their orbits.
Oh, and there is a difference between "smaller jovian moons" (which would all be indistinguishable from Jupiter on this scale) and the Trojan asteroids (which are all more or less at Jupiter's orbital radius, and a good 3-6 AU from Jupiter, not "between Earth and Jupiter." There have been a lot of Trojans found recently.
Right, which is why one would expect that if astronomers were pointing their telescopes at Jupiter in order to find new Jovian moons, they'd be likely to find asteroids between earth and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt, which is what the summary says, and the video seems to bear it out.
The Ninth is the most over-ruled circuit in the entire country. Stay tuned.
By quantity, not ratio. It's by far the busiest circuit in the country. Most cases that go to SCOTUS are overturned (which makes sense as the Court would only see the case if there was some issue with the lower court's decision or a need to resolve it with other decisions), the 9th is overruled roughly as much as any other, e.g. in 2007 it was overruled 19/22 times, while the next busiest district was overruled 4/5 times.
So, I wouldn't bet on the results of the inevitable SCOTUS case based solely on the 9th's largely mythical "most overturned" status.
I'd like to bet on the results on the basis that it's fucking obviously a 4th Amendment violation. But if that reasoning worked, they wouldn't have ruled that way to begin with.:P
Based on this NY Times article, the current state of things in the medical devices world is fucking retarded! In the electronics world, we carefully make incompatible devices with incompatible plugs, and/or use color coding for similar plugs (keyboard/mouse and microphone/speaker/line-in come to mind).
Actually that's only been the case starting in the late 90s. Earlier than that, and you could get sound cards with nothing more than nearly invisible etched markings to indicate what the ports were for or completely unmarked keyboard/mouse PS/2 ports. And that's just outside the case. Inside, before mobo makers started catering to the build-your-own crowd, was a complete fucking nightmare. ATA disk cable connections didn't even have guides, much less a notch to prevent you from putting them in backwards. Oh, and the fucking AT power connector consisted of two separate connectors that went in side by side with nothing preventing you from hooking them up backwards, guaranteeing a short and the death of (at least) your mobo if you turned the power on.
The best part was when the manual had a typo when specifying pin 1 of a given connector. Oh yeah, those were fun times.
Anyway, I think my point is, even the electronics world took a while to get its shit together, and that was mostly inspired by an influx of amateur enthusiasts. I can't say I'm surprised that the medical profession doesn't aggressively leap on new standards when, because everyone is highly trained, the existing methods mostly work.
The problem with your argument is that it is completely false. It is not at all a convention to use "all clear, indistinguishable tubes". IV tubing is clear. A nasal cannula for oxygen is maybe a little similar, but larger, more flexible, and (most importantly) uses a completely different Christmas-tree-type connector instead of a Luer adaptor. Nasal feeding tubes are similar in size to IV tubing, but are opaque and white. And so forth...
These devices really do look quite a bit different. Errors like this probably occur once in several thousand times they are used, and it is very hard to reduce "rare events" to "zero events". Nonetheless, the health care industry is highly sensitized to issues like this, and there has been a huge push to enact safeguards to make it even harder for such errors to occur.
If the adapters are different, how is it even possible for the error to occur? If there are some types of tubes that use different connectors such that they can't be connected incorrectly, but other types of tubes that aren't different and thus makes error possible, why not fix that subset? If the adapters are different, but not so different that you can't incorrectly stick them together, why not fix that?
You have scientists and engineers who have long been using the incorrect convention and do not want to change because all of their work has been based on it. On the other hand, you have students who are trying to learn a model that is physically wrong, and they are wasting time and energy doing it. When you get to semiconductors, things REALLY suck.
No, we don't want to change because it'd take tons of work and is completely irrelevant. Students aren't learning anything wrong, they're just learning a convention for a unit. How much time and energy does it take to learn "Current is defined to be in the direction of positive current flow, but it's actually the negative charge carriers that move, so when you calculate a positive current in one direction, it means electrons are flowing in the opposite direction". Oh right, as long as it takes to say that sentence, and maybe explain why (because at the time the convention was made, we didn't know which it was that was actually moving, but we still needed a convention).
It doesn't suck for semiconductors at all, it's still irrelevant. For a MOSFET, you calculate your doping and number of dots/holes, calculate the amount of electrons that will flow across at a given source/drain/gate voltage, and then when you want to specify that flow in terms of current, you flip the sign. Woopty-fucking-do! To go from current to electron flow to analyze problems like electron migration, you just -- what was that again -- flip the sign. By the time you get to semiconductors, this should be utterly second nature.
If you wanted, you could get rid of the "wrongness" by simply defining current to be negative in the direction of negative charge movement, and not have to change a single calculation. It's mathematically and logically indistinguishable.
And then you get beyond talking strictly about currents through conductors, realize that a proton beam is a current in which -- GASP -- it's the positive charge carriers that are moving, so the "current is in the direction of negative charge movement" convention would be equally "wrong", and hopefully realize that it really doesn't fucking matter how you set your convention.
You just have to understand that some things that people say are more abstract than you may be able to comprehend. If you haven't spent time with microelectronics (many here have), this might not be your argument to fight.
Yeah, it's an abstraction with no practical consequence what-so-fucking-ever. Get over it!
If you're still lost, think about it this way. Medical equipment is a huge expense, and it's neither cheap nor trivial to just go in and replace it without costing the industry probably billions of dollars in the short term which means that you and I pay these billions of dollars. Got it?
Yeah, but not everything needs to be replaced. Connectors and tubes. Expensive, sure, but still completely unanalagous to the current convention. Lemme break it down for you:
Current convention: * Affects every single current calculation done by electrical engineers, ever. * Has absolutely zero real-world consequence
Medical tubing: * Affects only a subset of medical devices. * Has practical real-world consequences in the form of preventable deaths.
So, yeah. One is crazily expensive and not worth doing anything about regardless of cost because it is meaningless. The other is expensive, but doesn't require replacing everything, and has demonstrable value which must be weighed against the cost.
Slashdot Mirror
The establishment has, for example, claimed the Chandra observations of the Bullet Cluster collisions definitely refute MOND as a hypothesis (which simply isn't true, but noone thought to ask the MOND people, or check the mathematics).
That isn't true. The Bullet Cluster is not claimed to refute MOND. The claim is that even MOND must predict additional, probably weakly interacting matter to explain the Bullet Cluster. Because even in MOND, gravity still points towards where the mass is. MOND isn't ruled out. MOND ruling out dark matter is ruled out.
Some people might conflate the two since the point of creating MOND was trying to figure out how to explain galactic motion without dark matter.
Holy Shit!
Omega Supreme doesn't technically interfere with the Decepticon's airplane monopoly by skipping right over stupid atmospheric flight into a sweet-ass space rocket. But as a concession to being more auto-bot like he also has to have a tank that is for some reason stuck on a track. I mean, being able to transform into a rocket and a tank that could go anywhere would be so awesome both sides of the war would just talk about how awesome he is and never get any fighting done.
Yay!
Well yeah, it was basically censorship and suppression of anything that could be construed as anti-Soviet that I was referring to.
So what would Kepler see if a Ringworld happened to be on edge to us? (yes I know it's dynamically unstable).
Nothing, because the ring would be consistently blocking part of the star so Kepler would see a constant luminosity for that star. The inner day/night panels might show up as changes in luminosity if the ring were at a slightly oblique angle, though I'm not sure if Kepler is sensitive enough.
The problem isn't with the length of the trial
The problem is people keep bringing up the trial when we're talking about pointing to the pirated torrent as a form of advertising.
It is unintuitive, because normally "information" has the connotation of something that is useful to us. But imagine a giant table of facts that you don't care about or even imagine any use for -- say, the number of jellybeans in the guess-the-jellybeans jars for carnivals in Havana for the years 1832-1875. Despite it's pointlessness, it's still information.
So for entropy, think about it in terms of the amount of information needed to describe the system (which is equivalent to information contained in the system). A piece of paper with an important phone number on it, while containing some information relevant to you, takes less information to describe than the cloud of hot gas that results from burning that piece of paper. The fact that you don't care about describing the chaotic gas and would have much rather it stayed in the less-information-dense but more useful piece of paper is irrelevant to nature. :)
What you describe sounds a lot like a 30 day free trail. If only he had one of those...
Not really, because I'm describing cracked pirated software with no time limit because it's pirated.
How many people used pirated versions of Photoshop for years before, because they went professional or otherwise decided they needed to go legit, payed for the license of the software they were intimately familiar with and even dependent on? I know several myself. The odds of that happening in 30 days are much slimmer.
My point is the cracked version itself serves as advertising for the full product. A crappy cracked pirate is a crappy advertisement. Which is probably why he's also saying the crackers should get on making a better crack. So, no, the 30 day trial is a separate issue.
Developer Demonstrates Cutting Edge Advertising Techniques
Well, it's a new twist on the old classic that Microsoft and Adobe have been doing for decades. It's sorta innovative to directly call attention to a pirated source, but calling attention to it because it's (apparently) crappy seems like a bad choice. I see where he's going -- the pirated version sucks so if you want the real deal you gotta come to me -- but then that's basically the old crippleware model, only letting the pirates do the crippling for you.
When you "previewed" Photoshop, you got the full experience. And that un-crippled experience is I think what leads to familiarity and eventually to sales.
I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date.
Er, more like the most brutal (and direct) attack in recent times, or most brutal attack from the copyright lobby sure... I mean, when it was Czechoslovakia and under the Soviets, I think free culture took a worse beating.
Shouldn't that be that information decreases?
Nope. The more entropy in a system, the more information is in it. Very ordered systems have very little information content. It's the same concept as why a file containing random data can't be compressed, but a file containing nothing but the word "booger" a billion times over can be compressed to barely larger than that one word. Because the former has a lot of information in it (even if it's not meaningful) and the latter does not. You'll sometimes even hear this directly referred to as the entropy of a file.
The movie Blade Runner, for instance, as much as I wished it had been, was not Science Fiction. Even though it was set in the future (2014), there was a long list of astounding scientific advances the viewer had to accept in addition to the main premise that an android could become self-aware and, in some cases, not even know that it is an android (I mean c'mom, imagine the science needed to produce utterly accurate bodily functions. Or did androids just think they had amazingly efficient digestive tracts?
I always thought the implication was that the replicants were engineered biological organisms. Otherwise why would they bother with the Voight-Kampf test? Once you've accepted that they're biological, pooping comes for free. Really the only big leap is that such a level of bioengineering
that they could make something that is indistinguishable from a human, but so much stronger, resistant to heat, etc.
That doesn't sound like significantly more of a stretch than presuming you could somehow accelerate human growth to super-speeds. Mr. Clone inexplicably knowing things he couldn't possibly have known is the bigger leap imo.
And what makes Blade Runner (and to a lesser extent The Island) true Sci-Fi is not that they restrict the degree to which they extrapolate from existing technology. It's that they posit a type of technology and a type of future in which that technology exists, and explore how that affects the human condition as we see it today. True sci-fi is always about the present, not the future.
A great way to remind people that they will be punished for thinking without permission.
Yeah, or further analysis will show the effect is real, they'll discover amazing new physics, win a Nobel Prize and get their names in every future physics text.
Sure there may be some resistance to and skepticism of the idea (and this "hm I'm skeptical" isn't even close to the resistance some ideas that successfully changed science forever faced), but that's only natural when the hypothesis seems to contradict existing evidence. When and if they are able to collect more convincing data and rule out alternative explanations, or make successful predictions based on their idea, you'll find the skepticism reduced in direct proportion.
As history has shown repeatedly. What's funny is that if their hypothesis is shown to be true, it'll become mainstream and folks like you will be calling that the new "conventional wisdom and authority" that nobody is allowed to question.
The universe works in weird ways, and you can't be put off by this kind of silliness if you want to explore. You will NEVER have permission or approval to explore outside the box. Never.
What's funny is how you say this, but we only know anything about the truly bizarre and unfathomably weird ways the universe works because scientists thought WAY outside the box and figured these things out. But because you've locked yourself into this "mainstream science is dogmatic and only I am the free thinker" box, you can't see it.
It's like, you couldn't say something that was more blatantly, demonstrably bullshit if you tried.
Fake Moon Landing
Nevermind, I stand corrected.
This is a very valid point, and it is one which must be wrestled with. The problem is that people, especially those in the sciences, have a tendency to go too far the other way, to the point of ignoring their perceptive abilities altogether. We are good at recognizing patterns because recognizing patterns improves the chances of survival. One would think that our naturally evolved systems have gotten pretty darned good at it. There are certainly false positives, but to ignore ALL pattern locks based on popular scientific dogma seems foolish to me.
Well good thing that isn't how it's done. Instead, the patterns humans see are examined in detail, with actual data and the scientific rigor necessary to separate accurate observations of real patterns, from false matches. We're only truly good at recognizing patterns directly related to survival -- the appearance of family, whether the members of another tribe coming close appear friendly or hostile, what a tiger hiding in a bush looks like, or the appearance and behaviors of pray animals, or the types and locations of tasty fruits. Everything else -- and even those -- are highly susceptible to the common failings of various biases and logical fallacies. It takes effort and discipline to eliminate these things, and once you do, you find that many of the patterns humans thought they had recognized turned out to be completely false. Some are not, though, and become established science.
Including the patterns seen by scientists. It's humorously detached from reality to say that scientists reject all pattern locks based on scientific dogma, when their own intuitive pattern matching is how most scientists come up with their initial ideas.
One example resulting from this distortion is the reaction to taboo material. Astrology, for instance, claims that the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun bears some effect upon personality. Personality is a result of subtle atomic reactions in the brain, (I am supposing). Those who (improperly) use science have laughed at this claim, saying that it is "impossible" for a distant stellar body to have any impact upon such reactions. And yet, right now, we are in the process of recognizing that the subtle atomic reactions which govern nuclear decay rates are indeed doing some peculiar things in time with the Earth's relative position to the Sun.
"Impossible" would be the wrong way to put it. It would be more correct to say that there is no reliable evidence whatsoever for this occurring, nor is there any theoretical mechanism, and so there is no reason to believe the phenomenon exists. Is it possible in the sense that nothing explicitly ruled out is possible? Yes. Is that alone enough reason to take it seriously? No.
Astrology is a perfect example of human pattern-matching run amok due to confirmation bias and other failings of the undisciplined mind. People will always tell you about the times they met some aggressive alpha male and asked them if they were an Aries and they were! They won't tell you about the times they were wrong, often because they don't remember. They won't tell you about the time they met someone with no obvious personality quirks and so didn't bother asking them their sign. If they're taking money from you in exchange for a reading, they sure as hell won't tell you that your subconscious body language in response to their vague pronouncements is telling them what they need to know to further tune their statements to convince you that the Stars Know All. Astrology is barely above psychics and mediums in terms of the amount of fraud, with the difference made up by self-delusion. Every time these ideas are required to show actual evidence for their efficacy in a scientific setting they utterly, utterly fail.
You can try to marshal the hypothesis of this article as support for astrology if you want, but fact remains there is still no hypothetical mechanisms by which a miniscule change in radioactive decay rates effects macroscopic
How big are these asteroids? They must be tiny on average otherwise I don't see how we can still be here. We are swimming in the things.
From a few hundred kilometers across down to dust particles. There are around a million objects over 1km in size.
Also why hasn't the asteroid belt become a planet? What prevents the rocks for grouping together?
I think the leading theory is that Jupiter's gravity disturbs the belt enough that it can't accrete into a planet.
Er, okay, "several orders of magnitude less massive" isn't correct... Ceres is about a third as massive as the rest of the belt, and Pluto is under a tenth as massive. They are still less than the mass of the other objects in their zones, while for instance Mars is over 100,000 times more massive than the other objects in its orbit. There's a table here showing these ratios for all the planets and dwarf planets.
Whether terrestrial or space-based, telescopes are generally going to be pointed away from the sun.
Plus the asteroids in opposition at any given point in time are also the ones closest to earth and thus easiest to see.
It looks like neither planet really meet the guideline of "clearing its neighborhood"...
Sure they have. It doesn't mean there can't be any other object in their orbit. Think of it in terms of ratios. Earth plus its moon, and Mars are both several orders of magnitude more massive than the sum of every other object in their orbits. Non-planets like Pluto or Ceres are several orders of magnitude less massive than the rest of the mass in their orbits.
Oh, and there is a difference between "smaller jovian moons" (which would all be indistinguishable from Jupiter on this scale) and the Trojan asteroids (which are all more or less at Jupiter's orbital radius, and a good 3-6 AU from Jupiter, not "between Earth and Jupiter." There have been a lot of Trojans found recently.
Right, which is why one would expect that if astronomers were pointing their telescopes at Jupiter in order to find new Jovian moons, they'd be likely to find asteroids between earth and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt, which is what the summary says, and the video seems to bear it out.
Ebola and an anti-ebola shot juuuuuuuust out of reach.
The Ninth is the most over-ruled circuit in the entire country. Stay tuned.
By quantity, not ratio. It's by far the busiest circuit in the country. Most cases that go to SCOTUS are overturned (which makes sense as the Court would only see the case if there was some issue with the lower court's decision or a need to resolve it with other decisions), the 9th is overruled roughly as much as any other, e.g. in 2007 it was overruled 19/22 times, while the next busiest district was overruled 4/5 times.
So, I wouldn't bet on the results of the inevitable SCOTUS case based solely on the 9th's largely mythical "most overturned" status.
I'd like to bet on the results on the basis that it's fucking obviously a 4th Amendment violation. But if that reasoning worked, they wouldn't have ruled that way to begin with. :P
Based on this NY Times article, the current state of things in the medical devices world is fucking retarded! In the electronics world, we carefully make incompatible devices with incompatible plugs, and/or use color coding for similar plugs (keyboard/mouse and microphone/speaker/line-in come to mind).
Actually that's only been the case starting in the late 90s. Earlier than that, and you could get sound cards with nothing more than nearly invisible etched markings to indicate what the ports were for or completely unmarked keyboard/mouse PS/2 ports. And that's just outside the case. Inside, before mobo makers started catering to the build-your-own crowd, was a complete fucking nightmare. ATA disk cable connections didn't even have guides, much less a notch to prevent you from putting them in backwards. Oh, and the fucking AT power connector consisted of two separate connectors that went in side by side with nothing preventing you from hooking them up backwards, guaranteeing a short and the death of (at least) your mobo if you turned the power on.
The best part was when the manual had a typo when specifying pin 1 of a given connector. Oh yeah, those were fun times.
Anyway, I think my point is, even the electronics world took a while to get its shit together, and that was mostly inspired by an influx of amateur enthusiasts. I can't say I'm surprised that the medical profession doesn't aggressively leap on new standards when, because everyone is highly trained, the existing methods mostly work.
The problem with your argument is that it is completely false. It is not at all a convention to use "all clear, indistinguishable tubes". IV tubing is clear. A nasal cannula for oxygen is maybe a little similar, but larger, more flexible, and (most importantly) uses a completely different Christmas-tree-type connector instead of a Luer adaptor. Nasal feeding tubes are similar in size to IV tubing, but are opaque and white. And so forth...
These devices really do look quite a bit different. Errors like this probably occur once in several thousand times they are used, and it is very hard to reduce "rare events" to "zero events". Nonetheless, the health care industry is highly sensitized to issues like this, and there has been a huge push to enact safeguards to make it even harder for such errors to occur.
If the adapters are different, how is it even possible for the error to occur? If there are some types of tubes that use different connectors such that they can't be connected incorrectly, but other types of tubes that aren't different and thus makes error possible, why not fix that subset? If the adapters are different, but not so different that you can't incorrectly stick them together, why not fix that?
You have scientists and engineers who have long been using the incorrect convention and do not want to change because all of their work has been based on it. On the other hand, you have students who are trying to learn a model that is physically wrong, and they are wasting time and energy doing it. When you get to semiconductors, things REALLY suck.
No, we don't want to change because it'd take tons of work and is completely irrelevant. Students aren't learning anything wrong, they're just learning a convention for a unit. How much time and energy does it take to learn "Current is defined to be in the direction of positive current flow, but it's actually the negative charge carriers that move, so when you calculate a positive current in one direction, it means electrons are flowing in the opposite direction". Oh right, as long as it takes to say that sentence, and maybe explain why (because at the time the convention was made, we didn't know which it was that was actually moving, but we still needed a convention).
It doesn't suck for semiconductors at all, it's still irrelevant. For a MOSFET, you calculate your doping and number of dots/holes, calculate the amount of electrons that will flow across at a given source/drain/gate voltage, and then when you want to specify that flow in terms of current, you flip the sign. Woopty-fucking-do! To go from current to electron flow to analyze problems like electron migration, you just -- what was that again -- flip the sign. By the time you get to semiconductors, this should be utterly second nature.
If you wanted, you could get rid of the "wrongness" by simply defining current to be negative in the direction of negative charge movement, and not have to change a single calculation. It's mathematically and logically indistinguishable.
And then you get beyond talking strictly about currents through conductors, realize that a proton beam is a current in which -- GASP -- it's the positive charge carriers that are moving, so the "current is in the direction of negative charge movement" convention would be equally "wrong", and hopefully realize that it really doesn't fucking matter how you set your convention.
You just have to understand that some things that people say are more abstract than you may be able to comprehend. If you haven't spent time with microelectronics (many here have), this might not be your argument to fight.
Yeah, it's an abstraction with no practical consequence what-so-fucking-ever. Get over it!
If you're still lost, think about it this way. Medical equipment is a huge expense, and it's neither cheap nor trivial to just go in and replace it without costing the industry probably billions of dollars in the short term which means that you and I pay these billions of dollars. Got it?
Yeah, but not everything needs to be replaced. Connectors and tubes. Expensive, sure, but still completely unanalagous to the current convention. Lemme break it down for you:
Current convention:
* Affects every single current calculation done by electrical engineers, ever.
* Has absolutely zero real-world consequence
Medical tubing:
* Affects only a subset of medical devices.
* Has practical real-world consequences in the form of preventable deaths.
So, yeah. One is crazily expensive and not worth doing anything about regardless of cost because it is meaningless. The other is expensive, but doesn't require replacing everything, and has demonstrable value which must be weighed against the cost.