...if someone publishes a paper saying that water isn't wet then there's a high probability of not being wet. It's completely obvious to anyone without a vested interest in some crackpot physical theory that the LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to produce black holes and that the whole black hole scare is nothing but a bit of creative writing. If someone publishes this fact, it doesn't suddenly become unreliable.
High energy cosmic rays dwarf what LHC can do. LHC was built, not because it produces higher energy particles than these cosmic rays, but because it produces high energy particles on demand.
That's correct, but for trivial semantic reaons: 'astronomically' means 'using a scale where we talk about really distant things as if they're a lot closer'. You know, like the way 'geologically' means 'using a scale where really long times are considered short'. So saying 'geologically speaking, a million years ago is just a blink of an eye' is tautological.:-)
Anyone who tinkers with these things soon discovers that if you build a time machine in the vicinity of a large mass, such as the planet Earth, you get general relativistic frame dragging meaning that as you travel through time, your position relative to that mass remains roughly constant. In effect, the presence of mass means you have local breaking of Lorentz symmetry so that inertial frames are no longer equivalent.
It's related to the way the warp drives in Star Trek don't work as well in the presence of matter. In a complete vacuum away from all mass (eg. in intergalactic space), warp n corresponds to n^3 times the speed of light. But in the vicinity of stars and planets warp drive is actually much slower.
Anyway, this was meant to be a brief post as I'm on my way back to the fourth millennium.
> Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design?
No.
Take a look at one of the earlier papers on the holographic hypothesis here. It comes about, not because some physicist has simply thought "what happens if the universe is a giant hologram". It's implicit, in an incredibly surprising and beautiful way, in general relativity, a well tested physical model.
Hints can also been seen in a bunch of other independent physical results like the Bekenstein bound which point towards the 'granularity' of the 2D surface.
Nobody's copping out. People aren't even making up that much new stuff. They're working out the details of what's already contained within existing (and in some cases, well tested) physical theories.
It's probably worth remembering that for every press release made by a physics department there are probably years of work and thought by multiple physicists.
Harriot did much more than map the moon and I've always thought it was an injustice that he wasn't better known. Galileo was a giant among giants. He practically invented modern science and certainly helped break the grip of philosophers and priests. But Galileo's being a giant shouldn't take away from the excellence of some of his near contemporaries.
> Or why not let the blackouts happen so people will figure it out themselves
Who's "people"? If I figure it out for myself and my neighbors don't then I still suffer blackouts.
> The free market works...
The free market "works" if your definition of "work" is the circular "what the free market determines". But if I get blackouts because of my neighbors actions I don't think it has worked at all.
> CS at least potentially has a built-in reality check that pure math lacks
The truth is that in many parts of CS it's easy to publish a tissue of lies because there is no policy of publishing source code with algorithms, you just publish timings for the one case that worked and graphs of the output for the trivial case that nobody else cares about. (I'm sure lots of people in graphics will be nodding their heads at this right now...) Mathematicians, on the other hand, are expected to provide proofs, and reviewers actually check those proofs (really! they actually check them! it's not at all like CS were someone goes "oh, that's plausible" and lets it go), unless you can find a crackpot journal like El Naschie's.
You got to the heart of the matter. Ultimately this is the primary complaint that Baez is directing at Elsevier. There's also the issue that it makes a bit of a mockery of the publication process and suggests some things need improving. But Baez is a long-time campaigner against high journal prices and I think that was one of the reasons he felt so strongly about this issue. Elsevier distribute this journal as part of a larger package that libraries pay for and it bulks up the apparent size of that package, ripping off libraries.
The Bogdanov affair is a little different. I did PhD research in theoretical physics but I was a bit unsure about the work of the Bogdanovs. There were bits of it that I could nitpick at and say it was definitely mistaken, but overall it was a little tricky to judge the bigger ideas without being a specialist in their particular subfield. The Bogdanovs had some smart people fooled. It's a very good hoax.
El Naschie's writing looks like nonsense even to non-specialists (though I guess you still need a degree in mathematics or physics). There's no way it could fool even beginners in the areas his work covers. That makes it all the more astonishing that he survived with Elsevier for so long. Apathy I guess.
25% of people claim benefit from painkillers and you think there's a scam?
It may be that there's no significant effect from painkillers and the 25% corresponds to people reporting random changes in their pain.
But it also may be that 25% respond really well to painkillers.
From this data, there's no way to tell.
For me, ibuprofen is a miracle drug for my migraines. I'm one of the lucky people for whom ibuprofen seems to act at source and lessen the underlying problem (probably some form of inflammation) rather than just masking the pain. Ibuprofen is a miracle drug.
"endorphine release" is just pop-science mumbo-jumbo that's almost as bad as alternative medicine. Yes, endorphins exist. Yes, they bind to opioid receptors. People just mumble these words as a universal explanation for countless phenomena when in actual fact very few of these phenomena have been shown definitively to be associated with endorphins, and in some cases there is good evidence that endorphins are not associated.
Same goes, I might add, for the association between sugar and hyperactivity in children.
Re:Painting with a very broad brush
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The cool thing about Moffat is that he can straddle genre and non-genre writing. He knows how to write a (very entertaining) sitcom and yet knows science fiction. He can appeal to the geeks and the non-geeks. What's good about Russell is that he got non-geeks interested using a bunch of methods from family drama to guest stars like Kylie Minogue, but at the cost of losing the geeks to some extent. I think Moffat might be able to keep *everyone* interested.
(We're talking Doctor Who here. By geek I mean people vaguely interested in space, aliens, monsters, time travel and so on, not just hard core nerds.)
The original series had *some* contradictions and *some* discontinuities. But it was consistent enough that there were stories. Without any shred of consistency there is no possibility of dramatic tension because at any moment anything can happen. Almost all good storytelling requires some kind of internal logic, some reason why B follows A and why X chose to do Y. In Russell T Davies finales anything can happen at any moment. They are simply random sequences of events with no connection. They are pure spectacle, worse than even the trashiest movies produced by Hollywood. This is acceptable in a musical, but then the musical is the lowest form of art, something that Davies seems to aspire to writing, except that he probably can't write the music or the words.
Consider Moffat's "Blink". It was one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time. In fact, one of the best short horror/science fiction shows I've seen. It laid down some rules (you gotta keep looking) and as a result the audience knew what horrible outcome seemed inevitable and was drawn into the story. By comparison, Davies' writing is just brown sludge, the science fiction/horror equivalent of mixing all the paints of the palette until you get something indistinguishable from the color of a turd.
Even your hypothesis is overly complicated. There's a human behavior that explains every single feature of the story and is very common in humans. It's called 'lying'.
Oh dear. You must be one of those people they call "young". Everything you say about Doctor Who applies only to the last four seasons. It always used to have at least a hint of coherence and logic (not too much admittedly), we always used to worry about the Doctor running out of regenerations (this added a certain tension to the story) and you know what? The daleks never used to appear in the season finale because there was no such thing as a season finale. What you've been watching isn't Doctor Who, it's more like "Carry On Up The Doctor - the Musical". (But you'll be too young to remember the Carry On movies.)
Slashdot Mirror
If the universe, to you, is no bigger than the links you can access with one click, then that's your problem.
...if someone publishes a paper saying that water isn't wet then there's a high probability of not being wet. It's completely obvious to anyone without a vested interest in some crackpot physical theory that the LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to produce black holes and that the whole black hole scare is nothing but a bit of creative writing. If someone publishes this fact, it doesn't suddenly become unreliable.
High energy cosmic rays dwarf what LHC can do. LHC was built, not because it produces higher energy particles than these cosmic rays, but because it produces high energy particles on demand.
Dumbies?
> Astronomically, it's kind of close.
That's correct, but for trivial semantic reaons: 'astronomically' means 'using a scale where we talk about really distant things as if they're a lot closer'. You know, like the way 'geologically' means 'using a scale where really long times are considered short'. So saying 'geologically speaking, a million years ago is just a blink of an eye' is tautological. :-)
Saying that this asteroid is passing by Earth is like saying that I just passed by Jessica Alba, even though I'm in Australia and she's in the US.
Anyone who tinkers with these things soon discovers that if you build a time machine in the vicinity of a large mass, such as the planet Earth, you get general relativistic frame dragging meaning that as you travel through time, your position relative to that mass remains roughly constant. In effect, the presence of mass means you have local breaking of Lorentz symmetry so that inertial frames are no longer equivalent.
It's related to the way the warp drives in Star Trek don't work as well in the presence of matter. In a complete vacuum away from all mass (eg. in intergalactic space), warp n corresponds to n^3 times the speed of light. But in the vicinity of stars and planets warp drive is actually much slower.
Anyway, this was meant to be a brief post as I'm on my way back to the fourth millennium.
> Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design?
No.
Take a look at one of the earlier papers on the holographic hypothesis here. It comes about, not because some physicist has simply thought "what happens if the universe is a giant hologram". It's implicit, in an incredibly surprising and beautiful way, in general relativity, a well tested physical model.
Hints can also been seen in a bunch of other independent physical results like the Bekenstein bound which point towards the 'granularity' of the 2D surface.
Nobody's copping out. People aren't even making up that much new stuff. They're working out the details of what's already contained within existing (and in some cases, well tested) physical theories.
It's probably worth remembering that for every press release made by a physics department there are probably years of work and thought by multiple physicists.
...bad actor. That's saying something isn't it?
Harriot did much more than map the moon and I've always thought it was an injustice that he wasn't better known. Galileo was a giant among giants. He practically invented modern science and certainly helped break the grip of philosophers and priests. But Galileo's being a giant shouldn't take away from the excellence of some of his near contemporaries.
> Or why not let the blackouts happen so people will figure it out themselves
Who's "people"? If I figure it out for myself and my neighbors don't then I still suffer blackouts.
> The free market works...
The free market "works" if your definition of "work" is the circular "what the free market determines". But if I get blackouts because of my neighbors actions I don't think it has worked at all.
Do you wake up in the morning and realise that you no longer have an idea that you had yesterday? Maybe you should see a doctor.
> CS at least potentially has a built-in reality check that pure math lacks
The truth is that in many parts of CS it's easy to publish a tissue of lies because there is no policy of publishing source code with algorithms, you just publish timings for the one case that worked and graphs of the output for the trivial case that nobody else cares about. (I'm sure lots of people in graphics will be nodding their heads at this right now...) Mathematicians, on the other hand, are expected to provide proofs, and reviewers actually check those proofs (really! they actually check them! it's not at all like CS were someone goes "oh, that's plausible" and lets it go), unless you can find a crackpot journal like El Naschie's.
> At worst, libraries have paid to subscribe.
You got to the heart of the matter. Ultimately this is the primary complaint that Baez is directing at Elsevier. There's also the issue that it makes a bit of a mockery of the publication process and suggests some things need improving. But Baez is a long-time campaigner against high journal prices and I think that was one of the reasons he felt so strongly about this issue. Elsevier distribute this journal as part of a larger package that libraries pay for and it bulks up the apparent size of that package, ripping off libraries.
The Bogdanov affair is a little different. I did PhD research in theoretical physics but I was a bit unsure about the work of the Bogdanovs. There were bits of it that I could nitpick at and say it was definitely mistaken, but overall it was a little tricky to judge the bigger ideas without being a specialist in their particular subfield. The Bogdanovs had some smart people fooled. It's a very good hoax.
El Naschie's writing looks like nonsense even to non-specialists (though I guess you still need a degree in mathematics or physics). There's no way it could fool even beginners in the areas his work covers. That makes it all the more astonishing that he survived with Elsevier for so long. Apathy I guess.
25% of people claim benefit from painkillers and you think there's a scam?
It may be that there's no significant effect from painkillers and the 25% corresponds to people reporting random changes in their pain.
But it also may be that 25% respond really well to painkillers.
From this data, there's no way to tell.
For me, ibuprofen is a miracle drug for my migraines. I'm one of the lucky people for whom ibuprofen seems to act at source and lessen the underlying problem (probably some form of inflammation) rather than just masking the pain. Ibuprofen is a miracle drug.
"endorphine release" is just pop-science mumbo-jumbo that's almost as bad as alternative medicine. Yes, endorphins exist. Yes, they bind to opioid receptors. People just mumble these words as a universal explanation for countless phenomena when in actual fact very few of these phenomena have been shown definitively to be associated with endorphins, and in some cases there is good evidence that endorphins are not associated.
Same goes, I might add, for the association between sugar and hyperactivity in children.
Vitamin C generally doesn't help with colds.
> the MacBook Air ONLY has its form factor going for it
That's like saying that the only thing going for drills is that you can make holes with them.
The cool thing about Moffat is that he can straddle genre and non-genre writing. He knows how to write a (very entertaining) sitcom and yet knows science fiction. He can appeal to the geeks and the non-geeks. What's good about Russell is that he got non-geeks interested using a bunch of methods from family drama to guest stars like Kylie Minogue, but at the cost of losing the geeks to some extent. I think Moffat might be able to keep *everyone* interested.
(We're talking Doctor Who here. By geek I mean people vaguely interested in space, aliens, monsters, time travel and so on, not just hard core nerds.)
The original series had *some* contradictions and *some* discontinuities. But it was consistent enough that there were stories. Without any shred of consistency there is no possibility of dramatic tension because at any moment anything can happen. Almost all good storytelling requires some kind of internal logic, some reason why B follows A and why X chose to do Y. In Russell T Davies finales anything can happen at any moment. They are simply random sequences of events with no connection. They are pure spectacle, worse than even the trashiest movies produced by Hollywood. This is acceptable in a musical, but then the musical is the lowest form of art, something that Davies seems to aspire to writing, except that he probably can't write the music or the words.
Consider Moffat's "Blink". It was one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time. In fact, one of the best short horror/science fiction shows I've seen. It laid down some rules (you gotta keep looking) and as a result the audience knew what horrible outcome seemed inevitable and was drawn into the story. By comparison, Davies' writing is just brown sludge, the science fiction/horror equivalent of mixing all the paints of the palette until you get something indistinguishable from the color of a turd.
Even your hypothesis is overly complicated. There's a human behavior that explains every single feature of the story and is very common in humans. It's called 'lying'.
Oh dear. You must be one of those people they call "young". Everything you say about Doctor Who applies only to the last four seasons. It always used to have at least a hint of coherence and logic (not too much admittedly), we always used to worry about the Doctor running out of regenerations (this added a certain tension to the story) and you know what? The daleks never used to appear in the season finale because there was no such thing as a season finale. What you've been watching isn't Doctor Who, it's more like "Carry On Up The Doctor - the Musical". (But you'll be too young to remember the Carry On movies.)
Sadly, no matter how cruel and vicious one's invention, there will always be some sickly do-gooder who finds a way to abuse it for the good.
For some reason I'm not finding single reference to "Temherte Slaq" in a document about unicode convincing evidence that anyone uses a "sarcasm mark".