Just in case any of the astronomers are reading...
Need money? How about using some of that fiber and building space for outsourced data centers? How about renting time on the golf ball satellite to private companies? Surely someone could find some use for it. And turn the paper shredding building into a community paper recycling center! I'm sure there are dozens of other ways you could branch out for funding...
Of course, the question that no one bothers to ask is this--how much of this radiation is reflected by the skull? Any physics grad students out there who have had to answer this question in class, and can share results with us? I know of a prof here at The University of Texas at Austin who sometimes requires reports on this in grad electro-dynamics (w/Jackson, of course). Can't give any numbers, but it turns out that most of the stuff never makes it to your brain anyway....
1) Excellent points made about the future usefulness of particle physics, and basic research in general. We're not entirely sure what it will explain, but there could be a wealth of new physics come out of neutrino research. For instance, by better understanding neutrinos, we may come to be able to better detect and understand other interactions that are going on all around us. I'm just pulling this out of my ___, but perhaps if we could reliably detect neutrinos we would be able to more quickly and easily detect beta decay--the decay of a neutron into a proton, a highly radioactive process that includes neutrino emission. Many applications to that.
2) I'm on a project called MINOS that is trying to determine neutrino rest mass by detecting neutrino oscillations--changing from one flavor to another, say electron neutrino to tau neutrino. As I understand it, the fourth neutrino may be an intermediate, neutral oscillation stage. Best place to look is in journal articles on neutrino oscillation theory. Dr. Duane Dicus at The University of Texas at Austin is one relevant author.
3) Never thought about supernova detection that way. Good point. Photons interact via the electro-magnetic force with all kinds of matter. But neutrinos do not interact with matter in the normal way. They will occasionally interact with their equivalent lepton (i.e. electron neutrino plus anti-electron yields an electron and anti-electron neutrino). So, while light must bend around planets and stars, etc., to get to us from a supernova, many neutrinos would pass right through the intervening matter, until they hit our detector that is designed specifically to stop and read them.
Hope that helps... Oh, and George Tzanakos is an excellent man and a good physicist, I'll have you know!
First of all, I'd like to particularly thank everyone in this particular thread-fork for the high level of dialogue. While I obviously can't agree with everything in this fork, I can certainly appreciate the differing perspectives it has brought to my attention.
On a more specific level, while the veractiy of individual points can be debated back and forth, I think that the warning JonKatz brings to us still stands: we must analyze and question the implications and insinuations of the laws passed--or not passed--today in the name of technology. We cannot afford to blindly sit idle. We may find the implications to be quite innocent, or we may find their controlling nature quite sinister. But if we do not explore the issue, we will never know where in the spectrum things lie...
JonKatz seems to be right when he claims that these issues are mostly passed on by the "mass media". And why so? Because, in many cases, there are simply more pressing, more dire topics on the docket. Which leaves the issue to be discussed and understood by a more specialized group. Thus the torch passes to the/. and other online communities for exploring the ramifications in (mostly) rational dialogues such as this.
I think many people fail to miss one of the main points of editorials, wherever they may read them: they are meant to quickly express an opinion and put that opinion in the public forum. They are not meant to be entire treatises, complete unto themselves.
It may be that Katz has goofed up here and made an interesting contradiction of himself. On the other hand, it may be that he is just pointing out that Napster is the most visible sign of a broader movement by the recording industry to stifle the innovation presented by MP3's and the new, competitive distribution channels of companies like mp3.com.
Personally, the more the various industries try to stop what I consider fair use of my products (such as my.mp3.com and watching DVD's in Linux), the more it makes me want to flip them the finger and go about using products like Napster. There was a time when I did not want to use Napster, because of its potential impact on the recording artists that I support. Then I realized that it is the best way for me to learn more about an artist that I'm not familiar with--and whose music I may later buy. But when the industry decides to shove their corporatism down my throat, I refuse to swallow. I just don't care very much anymore about their supposed rights.
Now we've got UCITA to worry about on top of the DMCA. I'm against pirating software, but who knows what my reaction will be if UCITA is one day passed here in Texas...
A Few Thoughts & A Defense
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
(I apologize first off if I leave anything too implicit here or do not fully draw out my conclusions. I do have to get back to work soon, you know).
We have for too long ignored the warnings of the past. They didn't come true because the technology never came about. But all of the sudden, it is coming around, and as a collective society we have forgotten that which the prophets of future doom warned us about.
America was shocked at the initial reports of cloning. Why all of the sudden doesn't this bother us? I suspect that Panamon777, the last poster at this time, has it right--we don't care about bacteria. Period. Well, perhaps we should. Someone will always manage to one-up the other guy someday, and if one person manages to create bacteria-like life, this just opens the flood gate to higher organisms. And though some think that this doesn't need to be discussed, there are in fact many people who are bothered by the idea, and thus it does need to be talked about in the public forums.
"...knock conventional religion and theology on its antiquated behinds." That is, CONVENTIONAL, WESTERN religions. There are religions out there, such as the Baha'i Faith and most of the Eastern Religions (e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism) who are either not so antiquated or not so "conventional" as to be able to deal with this.
Where, indeed, is this debate going to occur? This is a valid question, one which applies not only to the debate on life, but on many of the topics which have come up around here lately. I think we've all begun to see that the traditional media can't handle these things very well any more. Forums like this may soon be the only legitimate playground for reasonable, unfettered debate. Maybe the time of Locke and Demosthenes is coming*.
Some may take issue with JonKatz's journalistic ability. I find that his editorials do what they need. This is not investigative reporting--it is an editorial, where someone makes strong opinions known. Editorials generally assume that you get it or you don't. Some details are left implicit. Maybe they could be drawn out more--but then again maybe we don't have the time to read a whole treatise on the subject.
I applaud JonKatz for bringing to the fore some real issues and helping to shape/define/concretize a growing new ethic. Maybe some here do not believe in this ethic, but I believe that he, as much as anyones, speaks for many of us out there.
If nothing else, its certainly refreshing to read a technology-oriented editorial of this quality instead of the same old tripe that the ZDNet guys always talk about.
FARAMIR
* If some out there don't know Gattaca, they may not know Locke and Demosthenes. To forestall some question: they are assumed "net" identities in Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Read it...
I don't have any numbers on me, but we are already being bombarded by tons of neutrinos. The things are so penetrating that they can go right through the earth and keep going through you and back into space. Naturally, there will be no bird nests on the detector (or anything else). In fact, the primary detector in Minnesota will be about 2/3 mile below ground. Thankfully, there is a substantial difference between photons and neutrinos: photons interact very strongly with electrons, and neutrinos barely interact with matter at all. And xrays are, of course, a type of photon. No, its not good to have xrays shot at you, because they tend to excite electrons, which effect can then cascade into all kinds of things, including genetic mutation-->cancer.
The probability of detecting any one nuetrino is incredibly small. But the physics works out pretty well with our beam size going into 2700 tons of steel.
We can produce massive amounts of neutrinos. But it also takes massive amounts of work. I work on a project called MINOS--Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. We will be shooting a beam of neutrinos (mainly muon type) from Fermilab outside of Chicago to northern Minnesota. At each end, we will look at the flux of each type of neutrino and compare the ratio of types. If the ratio is significantly different than 1, but the overall number of neutrino ratio between detectors is around 1, then this will indicate that neutrinos do indeed have mass. Cool project, but a little beside the point.
Anyway, I've been touring the facilities the last few days, and I can tell you that the accelerator beamline is over 1 mile long, just to reach northern Minnesota. The two detectors, one on each side, will require abou 2,700 tons of steel each (no exaggeration!). So while a neutrino antenna may be able to use different (lower) energies than we are using, I can't imagine that the required equipment would be much different than this. More information can be found at U of Minnesota.
It does seem a bit lame--but look at the advertising dollars. Every Corp. out there is looking for ways to leverage their products and expertise into new revenue sources (or at least higher stock values), and the portal thing seems to have worked for many a company. Look at Real Systems, (the former) Netscape, Intuit--these software companies are/were making good money off of their huge websites. I'm not at all surprised to see Adobe doing this, and except that everything will obviously be biased towards their products, I can see it being a good resource for people looking for clipart, photos, tools, tips, tricks, books, etc.
Well, it looks as if old Slashdot really drives traffic. I've visited be.com a number of times and never had problems, but it seems to be rather dead right now...
Slashdot Mirror
Just in case any of the astronomers are reading...
Need money? How about using some of that fiber and building space for outsourced data centers? How about renting time on the golf ball satellite to private companies? Surely someone could find some use for it. And turn the paper shredding building into a community paper recycling center! I'm sure there are dozens of other ways you could branch out for funding...
Of course, the question that no one bothers to ask is this--how much of this radiation is reflected by the skull? Any physics grad students out there who have had to answer this question in class, and can share results with us? I know of a prof here at The University of Texas at Austin who sometimes requires reports on this in grad electro-dynamics (w/Jackson, of course). Can't give any numbers, but it turns out that most of the stuff never makes it to your brain anyway....
Replying to a couple of posts...
1) Excellent points made about the future usefulness of particle physics, and basic research in general. We're not entirely sure what it will explain, but there could be a wealth of new physics come out of neutrino research. For instance, by better understanding neutrinos, we may come to be able to better detect and understand other interactions that are going on all around us. I'm just pulling this out of my ___, but perhaps if we could reliably detect neutrinos we would be able to more quickly and easily detect beta decay--the decay of a neutron into a proton, a highly radioactive process that includes neutrino emission. Many applications to that.
2) I'm on a project called MINOS that is trying to determine neutrino rest mass by detecting neutrino oscillations--changing from one flavor to another, say electron neutrino to tau neutrino. As I understand it, the fourth neutrino may be an intermediate, neutral oscillation stage. Best place to look is in journal articles on neutrino oscillation theory. Dr. Duane Dicus at The University of Texas at Austin is one relevant author.
3) Never thought about supernova detection that way. Good point. Photons interact via the electro-magnetic force with all kinds of matter. But neutrinos do not interact with matter in the normal way. They will occasionally interact with their equivalent lepton (i.e. electron neutrino plus anti-electron yields an electron and anti-electron neutrino). So, while light must bend around planets and stars, etc., to get to us from a supernova, many neutrinos would pass right through the intervening matter, until they hit our detector that is designed specifically to stop and read them.
Hope that helps... Oh, and George Tzanakos is an excellent man and a good physicist, I'll have you know!
First of all, I'd like to particularly thank everyone in this particular thread-fork for the high level of dialogue. While I obviously can't agree with everything in this fork, I can certainly appreciate the differing perspectives it has brought to my attention.
On a more specific level, while the veractiy of individual points can be debated back and forth, I think that the warning JonKatz brings to us still stands: we must analyze and question the implications and insinuations of the laws passed--or not passed--today in the name of technology. We cannot afford to blindly sit idle. We may find the implications to be quite innocent, or we may find their controlling nature quite sinister. But if we do not explore the issue, we will never know where in the spectrum things lie...
JonKatz seems to be right when he claims that these issues are mostly passed on by the "mass media". And why so? Because, in many cases, there are simply more pressing, more dire topics on the docket. Which leaves the issue to be discussed and understood by a more specialized group. Thus the torch passes to the /. and other online communities for exploring the ramifications in (mostly) rational dialogues such as this.
I think many people fail to miss one of the main points of editorials, wherever they may read them: they are meant to quickly express an opinion and put that opinion in the public forum. They are not meant to be entire treatises, complete unto themselves.
It may be that Katz has goofed up here and made an interesting contradiction of himself. On the other hand, it may be that he is just pointing out that Napster is the most visible sign of a broader movement by the recording industry to stifle the innovation presented by MP3's and the new, competitive distribution channels of companies like mp3.com.
Personally, the more the various industries try to stop what I consider fair use of my products (such as my.mp3.com and watching DVD's in Linux), the more it makes me want to flip them the finger and go about using products like Napster. There was a time when I did not want to use Napster, because of its potential impact on the recording artists that I support. Then I realized that it is the best way for me to learn more about an artist that I'm not familiar with--and whose music I may later buy. But when the industry decides to shove their corporatism down my throat, I refuse to swallow. I just don't care very much anymore about their supposed rights.
Now we've got UCITA to worry about on top of the DMCA. I'm against pirating software, but who knows what my reaction will be if UCITA is one day passed here in Texas...
(I apologize first off if I leave anything too implicit here or do not fully draw out my conclusions. I do have to get back to work soon, you know).
We have for too long ignored the warnings of the past. They didn't come true because the technology never came about. But all of the sudden, it is coming around, and as a collective society we have forgotten that which the prophets of future doom warned us about.
America was shocked at the initial reports of cloning. Why all of the sudden doesn't this bother us? I suspect that Panamon777, the last poster at this time, has it right--we don't care about bacteria. Period. Well, perhaps we should. Someone will always manage to one-up the other guy someday, and if one person manages to create bacteria-like life, this just opens the flood gate to higher organisms. And though some think that this doesn't need to be discussed, there are in fact many people who are bothered by the idea, and thus it does need to be talked about in the public forums.
"...knock conventional religion and theology on its antiquated behinds." That is, CONVENTIONAL, WESTERN religions. There are religions out there, such as the Baha'i Faith and most of the Eastern Religions (e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism) who are either not so antiquated or not so "conventional" as to be able to deal with this.
Where, indeed, is this debate going to occur? This is a valid question, one which applies not only to the debate on life, but on many of the topics which have come up around here lately. I think we've all begun to see that the traditional media can't handle these things very well any more. Forums like this may soon be the only legitimate playground for reasonable, unfettered debate. Maybe the time of Locke and Demosthenes is coming*.
Some may take issue with JonKatz's journalistic ability. I find that his editorials do what they need. This is not investigative reporting--it is an editorial, where someone makes strong opinions known. Editorials generally assume that you get it or you don't. Some details are left implicit. Maybe they could be drawn out more--but then again maybe we don't have the time to read a whole treatise on the subject.
I applaud JonKatz for bringing to the fore some real issues and helping to shape/define/concretize a growing new ethic. Maybe some here do not believe in this ethic, but I believe that he, as much as anyones, speaks for many of us out there.
If nothing else, its certainly refreshing to read a technology-oriented editorial of this quality instead of the same old tripe that the ZDNet guys always talk about.
* If some out there don't know Gattaca, they may not know Locke and Demosthenes. To forestall some question: they are assumed "net" identities in Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Read it..."good" works equally well as "evil", but bad does not, and you can't leave out the word <evil,good>.
"good" works equally well as "evil", but bad does not, and you can't leave out the word .
...day after day, love turns gray, like the skin on a dying man...
I don't have any numbers on me, but we are already being bombarded by tons of neutrinos. The things are so penetrating that they can go right through the earth and keep going through you and back into space. Naturally, there will be no bird nests on the detector (or anything else). In fact, the primary detector in Minnesota will be about 2/3 mile below ground. Thankfully, there is a substantial difference between photons and neutrinos: photons interact very strongly with electrons, and neutrinos barely interact with matter at all. And xrays are, of course, a type of photon. No, its not good to have xrays shot at you, because they tend to excite electrons, which effect can then cascade into all kinds of things, including genetic mutation-->cancer.
The probability of detecting any one nuetrino is incredibly small. But the physics works out pretty well with our beam size going into 2700 tons of steel.
We can produce massive amounts of neutrinos. But it also takes massive amounts of work. I work on a project called MINOS--Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. We will be shooting a beam of neutrinos (mainly muon type) from Fermilab outside of Chicago to northern Minnesota. At each end, we will look at the flux of each type of neutrino and compare the ratio of types. If the ratio is significantly different than 1, but the overall number of neutrino ratio between detectors is around 1, then this will indicate that neutrinos do indeed have mass. Cool project, but a little beside the point.
Anyway, I've been touring the facilities the last few days, and I can tell you that the accelerator beamline is over 1 mile long, just to reach northern Minnesota. The two detectors, one on each side, will require abou 2,700 tons of steel each (no exaggeration!). So while a neutrino antenna may be able to use different (lower) energies than we are using, I can't imagine that the required equipment would be much different than this. More information can be found at U of Minnesota.
It does seem a bit lame--but look at the advertising dollars. Every Corp. out there is looking for ways to leverage their products and expertise into new revenue sources (or at least higher stock values), and the portal thing seems to have worked for many a company. Look at Real Systems, (the former) Netscape, Intuit--these software companies are/were making good money off of their huge websites. I'm not at all surprised to see Adobe doing this, and except that everything will obviously be biased towards their products, I can see it being a good resource for people looking for clipart, photos, tools, tips, tricks, books, etc.
Well, it looks as if old Slashdot really drives traffic. I've visited be.com a number of times and never had problems, but it seems to be rather dead right now...