Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
The scenario you describe doesn't make any sense.
BCCI "tanking" doesn't give them the right to seize his house---only his default does. If BCCI tanked, some other bank would pay to assume the mortgage.
What particular form of brain damage are you suffering from that makes you think Enron's debt was assumed by the taxpayers? A lot of bondholders and debt holders would disagree.
Who owns you? Just because nobody owns you, does that mean you are free from legal restrictions? That you can do whatever you want?
Stock corporations are created by charters written by a state (Delaware is a popular one), and that means that the courts of that state are prepared to exercise jurisdiction over that company.
THIS is sanity? Your understanding of how corporations are organized and work is deficient or delusional. Perhaps this is a symptom of your sanity or lack thereof.
The stockholders do not own the company. They own the stock. The stock consists of the right to vote on issues presented to shareholders and to collect dividends. Period.
They aren't responsible for the company's liabilities, because the debts were not incurred by the stockholders, but by the corporation. No one would ever buy stock (i.e. companies could never raise capital by becoming a stock corporation) if they are on the hook to the bondholders. Things are bad enough for stockholders if the company goes bankrupt, and you want to make things even worse?
If I give you money to start a business, and *you* later fuck up, why should I be on the hook for money that a bank lent to *you* in the course of your business? You think I'd agree to be on the hook for your future mistakes? How confident would I then be that you would not make mistakes if I thereby insured you against them?
In case you haven't noticed, the only argument you've mentioned in favor of your change is righteous indignation at those "lucky" shareholders who get away with worthless stock instead of getting their pockets emptied for the mistakes of others. What dirty capitalists! They should be laboring in the fields!
Even if things *could* work your way, wouldn't you be indignant that the bondholders would get paid off no matter what?
If you lend money to a company (buy its bonds) and it goes belly-up, what else is supposed to happen? It's not like the shareholders (who are behind the bondholders in getting anything from a liquidation) make out better. Don't like your chances? Lend your money to some organization that is more dependable.
I don't understand why some apparently left-leaning people think stockholders should be on the hook for corporate expenses and liabilities. Just because your bank owns your house when you have a mortgage doesn't mean that the bank should have to pay your credit card bill for you when you can't.
I agree that he believes the effect is unlikely to exist, and I still believe he is estimating an essentially probabilistic effect.
Imagine looking through a haystack for a needle. Look for a minute, there is some relatively large probability a real needle will not be found. Look for ten years, and the probability that a real needle would not have been found is extremely low. The probabilistic aspect comes about because people searching through a haystack for a needle is a process that involves a large possibility for human error.
Probabilistic expressions are used to emphasize our imperfect knowledge of the world. We can *never* know for certain what the laws of the universe are. Therefore, we express our uncertainty in terms of probability, where the sample space is "possible sets of physical laws."
As is obvious from the quote you use, he was calculating a probability of the OBSERVATION. It is possible for an effect to exist without being large enough to be observed. It is also possible for some defect in the experiment to cause an observed effect where no new physics is involved, or obscure the effects due to new physics.
What he is probably estimating is the chance that the current theory has existed for the length of time that it has without a valid consequence of this type not to have been discovered already. That is a statement about the somewhat random thinking of physicists, not truly about the laws of nature.
You praise crackpots rather glibly. In order to support "often" you ought to be able to name more than one example of a crackpot ending up with a valid contribution to physics from his crackpottery.
To save time, I'll say right off that Newton and Einstein were never crackpots. Einstein's most vocal opponents, however, were. Also, Tesla did not make a major contribution to physics, although he may have ended up a crackpot.
I think you've over-emphasized the effect that neutrinos having non-zero mass has on the Standard Model.
As defined in a review paper, neutrino masses are zero only in the "minimal" Standard Model. There is probably still interesting physics in understanding the masses of the various particles, but it seems to me that most physicists don't think that we need to throw away the Standard Model to incorporate neutrino mass so much as "upgrade" it to a slightly more ornate version.
From my point of view as a physicist outside the high-energy field, the reason people say they would be "glad to see the Standard Model go" seems to be that the field of QFT has been pretty boring for a long while now, and they hope that concrete experimental results will start clearing out the dead wood from the forest of possible alternatives that have grown up in the last 30 years. On the other hand, none of those existing alternatives would excite me enough to start caring about high-energy physics again. That says to me that the theorists in QFT have pretty much exhausted their imagination without any earth-shaking possibilities.
I have a nagging feeling that we are going to have about 20 or 30 more years of high-energy physicists hoping for new physics, without getting it. Maybe the string theorists will finally connect to experimental reality, and things might get interesting again. I have a similar nagging feeling that string theorists will keep talking about the thermodynamics of black holes without having much impact on the realm of experimental physics.
True, I guess I read the original post too quickly. I don't know many people who buy 802.11a (5 GHz) equipment for home use, however, and the fact that the microwave oven interferes makes me believe that the original poster still meant 802.11b.
"HP's first product -- the resistance-capacity audio oscillator (HP 200A), an electronic instrument used to test sound equipment.
The oscillator uses an incandescent bulb as part of its wiring scheme to provide variable resistance, a breakthrough in oscillator design....The HP Model 200A is so named `because we thought the name would make us look like we'd been around for awhile,' says Dave later."
Hmm. You appear to be right. I apologize for the error. My lame excuse is that virtually every web site I could find through Google used an analogy or different units. "as much energy as the world uses in 27 years" was the basis of my 10,000 quads figure, which you are right is a daily figure of insolation instead of an annual.
The continental US figure is about 47,000 quads per year. At 30% efficiency, about 0.2% of that would provide the transportation energy supply. That is about 14000 square km of solar cells.
Someone else will have to provide useful information on cost for that area of solar energy generating capacity: I'm tired of looking for data in usable form.
Solar is my favorite energy source for splitting water.
To support a transportation system even remotely comparable to today's using hydrogen as a fuel would require a completely unrealistic amount of solar plant capacity.
In 1999, the world used 38.7 million barrels of petroleum a day for transportation. That is about 82 quads (10^15 BTU) per year in energy. That is an average of 1 million megawatts. The total world electricity consumption is about 13 x 10^12 kW hours per year, or an average of 1.5 million megawatts.
That is, you would need nearly *all* the electricity used by the world to produce the fuel energy used for transportation, assuming 100% efficient conversion.
The total solar energy hitting the earth's surface in a year is about 10,000 quads. At 30% cell efficiency, you would have to cover about 10% of the world land area with PV cells, neglecting efficiency losses due to clouds, etc., just to provide for today's transportation usage.
Hydrogen from water only helps CO2 and other fossil fuel related emissions if the energy to dissociate the water comes from nuclear reactors, and only works over the long term (more than 50 years) if those reactors are breeder reactors, or fusion reactors, which have been 50 years away for the last 50 years.
I am in favor of breeder reactors. Most of the people who think H2 fuel cells solve the pollution problem don't accept nuclear as the answer. They appear to be living in some fantasy world where wind, solar, and geothermal energy are enough to provide for both electricity and transportation needs.
Unless by "macroscopic" you mean "size of the entire universe", I don't believe that QM is known to have any problems, except for incorporating gravity. The problems with QM & gravity generally are associated with extremly microscopic (as in Planck length), that is, high energies, where the gravitational contributions to QM are comparable to the other fundamental forces.
The problem of the quantum--classical transition (a.k.a. the measurement problem) is not really a physics problem. Read Gottfried's QM text for a pretty clear description of how physicists come to grips with it. The people working on quantum computing have to deal with this all the time, and as far as I can tell, quantum decoherence for them is an engineering problem, not a physics problem. Strictly speaking, on very large length scales (like the size of the earth or larger), gravity is the most prevalent force, because matter tends to be neutral in large clumps. However, gravity is still relatively weak on those scales, so you don't need a full theory of quantum gravity to understand it---the weak gravitational fields can be treated accurately as an plain-old potential. Only in the neighborhood of a black hole, or trying to describe the entire universe being in a single quantum state, or trying to understand the first few moments of the big bang, does QM seem not to work.
When a GPS-guided "smart bomb" lands on your head because the atomic clocks on-board the GPS satellites are accurate, I think you'll agree that this accuracy can be deadly.
I can't access the original article now, but when he said "laptop," what he meant was something like "a device not exceeding a certain size, powered from an internal energy source, not exceeding a certain mass."
He then can argue from fundamental quantum theory what the limits on computation are for such a device. Unless laps get a lot bigger, people get a lot stronger, or quantum mechanics gets a lot less true;-), laptops aren't going to go beyond his limit.
Between lesson 2 and lesson 3 you've botched things. Just because the particle has a wavefunction over an infinite domain does not mean it contains an infinite amount of information.
If the particle has finite energy, then that places a limit on the curvature of the wavefunction, and therefore on the "information density" of that wavefunction.
Furthermore, the finite age of the universe sets a limit on the distinguishability of particle states from one another. Very fine separation of energy states require a long evolution period to be distinguishable. (delta-E delta-t ~ h-bar) That sets a limit on the number of currently distinguishable eigenstates of the universe.
When you so confidently dismiss mathematics as "not existing before we formulated it," you not only are being vague about "we", you are also restricting the term mathematics to mean less than most people mean when they say it.
If two mathematicians discover the same theorem independently, what that means is that the common set of axioms they are working with had some consequences that were unknown, but now are known by both mathematicians. Those consequences (that is, the theorem) obviously existed independently of either mathematician, since the other one would have discovered it alone. It therefore seems more sensible to attribute the existence of the theorem to the axioms rather than the mathematicians.
If you accept that theorems belong to axioms, then the number of theorems is potentially unlimited, and certainly greater than now "exist" or ever will exist under your restricted definition. What good is a definition like that?
Thomas Gold has said much more than you attribute to him. I agree that oil will likely still be plentiful in 30--40 years, because of discovery of new reserves and advances in oil extraction technology, and reductions in fossil fuel dependence of the economy.
However, Gold has theories of petroleum's origin and geological disposition that are very much on the fringe. The economic evidence is much stronger than Gold's geological evidence.
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The scenario you describe doesn't make any sense.
BCCI "tanking" doesn't give them the right to seize his house---only his default does. If BCCI tanked, some other bank would pay to assume the mortgage.
What particular form of brain damage are you suffering from that makes you think Enron's debt was assumed by the taxpayers? A lot of bondholders and debt holders would disagree.
Who owns you? Just because nobody owns you, does that mean you are free from legal restrictions? That you can do whatever you want?
Stock corporations are created by charters written by a state (Delaware is a popular one), and that means that the courts of that state are prepared to exercise jurisdiction over that company.
THIS is sanity? Your understanding of how corporations are organized and work is deficient or delusional. Perhaps this is a symptom of your sanity or lack thereof.
The stockholders do not own the company. They own the stock. The stock consists of the right to vote on issues presented to shareholders and to collect dividends. Period.
They aren't responsible for the company's liabilities, because the debts were not incurred by the stockholders, but by the corporation. No one would ever buy stock (i.e. companies could never raise capital by becoming a stock corporation) if they are on the hook to the bondholders. Things are bad enough for stockholders if the company goes bankrupt, and you want to make things even worse?
If I give you money to start a business, and *you* later fuck up, why should I be on the hook for money that a bank lent to *you* in the course of your business? You think I'd agree to be on the hook for your future mistakes? How confident would I then be that you would not make mistakes if I thereby insured you against them?
In case you haven't noticed, the only argument you've mentioned in favor of your change is righteous indignation at those "lucky" shareholders who get away with worthless stock instead of getting their pockets emptied for the mistakes of others. What dirty capitalists! They should be laboring in the fields!
Even if things *could* work your way, wouldn't you be indignant that the bondholders would get paid off no matter what?
You said "public" when you meant "debtholders."
If you lend money to a company (buy its bonds) and it goes belly-up, what else is supposed to happen? It's not like the shareholders (who are behind the bondholders in getting anything from a liquidation) make out better. Don't like your chances? Lend your money to some organization that is more dependable.
I don't understand why some apparently left-leaning people think stockholders should be on the hook for corporate expenses and liabilities. Just because your bank owns your house when you have a mortgage doesn't mean that the bank should have to pay your credit card bill for you when you can't.
I agree that he believes the effect is unlikely to exist, and I still believe he is estimating an essentially probabilistic effect.
Imagine looking through a haystack for a needle. Look for a minute, there is some relatively large probability a real needle will not be found. Look for ten years, and the probability that a real needle would not have been found is extremely low. The probabilistic aspect comes about because people searching through a haystack for a needle is a process that involves a large possibility for human error.
Probabilistic expressions are used to emphasize our imperfect knowledge of the world. We can *never* know for certain what the laws of the universe are. Therefore, we express our uncertainty in terms of probability, where the sample space is "possible sets of physical laws."
As is obvious from the quote you use, he was calculating a probability of the OBSERVATION. It is possible for an effect to exist without being large enough to be observed. It is also possible for some defect in the experiment to cause an observed effect where no new physics is involved, or obscure the effects due to new physics.
What he is probably estimating is the chance that the current theory has existed for the length of time that it has without a valid consequence of this type not to have been discovered already. That is a statement about the somewhat random thinking of physicists, not truly about the laws of nature.
You praise crackpots rather glibly. In order to support "often" you ought to be able to name more than one example of a crackpot ending up with a valid contribution to physics from his crackpottery.
To save time, I'll say right off that Newton and Einstein were never crackpots. Einstein's most vocal opponents, however, were. Also, Tesla did not make a major contribution to physics, although he may have ended up a crackpot.
I think you've over-emphasized the effect that neutrinos having non-zero mass has on the Standard Model.
As defined in a review paper, neutrino masses are zero only in the "minimal" Standard Model. There is probably still interesting physics in understanding the masses of the various particles, but it seems to me that most physicists don't think that we need to throw away the Standard Model to incorporate neutrino mass so much as "upgrade" it to a slightly more ornate version.
From my point of view as a physicist outside the high-energy field, the reason people say they would be "glad to see the Standard Model go" seems to be that the field of QFT has been pretty boring for a long while now, and they hope that concrete experimental results will start clearing out the dead wood from the forest of possible alternatives that have grown up in the last 30 years. On the other hand, none of those existing alternatives would excite me enough to start caring about high-energy physics again. That says to me that the theorists in QFT have pretty much exhausted their imagination without any earth-shaking possibilities.
I have a nagging feeling that we are going to have about 20 or 30 more years of high-energy physicists hoping for new physics, without getting it. Maybe the string theorists will finally connect to experimental reality, and things might get interesting again. I have a similar nagging feeling that string theorists will keep talking about the thermodynamics of black holes without having much impact on the realm of experimental physics.
True, I guess I read the original post too quickly. I don't know many people who buy 802.11a (5 GHz) equipment for home use, however, and the fact that the microwave oven interferes makes me believe that the original poster still meant 802.11b.
That's because WWII is both the last popular war with enough footage to fill a cable channel. The Gulf War had good footage, just not enough.
Of course, HP's garage invention consisted of
"HP's first product -- the resistance-capacity audio oscillator (HP 200A), an electronic instrument used to test sound equipment.
The oscillator uses an incandescent bulb as part of its wiring scheme to provide variable resistance, a breakthrough in oscillator design....The HP Model 200A is so named `because we thought the name would make us look like we'd been around for awhile,' says Dave later."
from HP's history page.
Somehow, I don't think the NY Times ran a story about this, or that many people thought this was extraordinarily "cool."
Do you have a 2.4GHz cordless phone? Why??
In my experience, the 900 MHz band is good enough for cordless, and this 2.4GHz trend is just silly "my number is bigger" marketing.
Hmm. You appear to be right. I apologize for the error. My lame excuse is that virtually every web site I could find through Google used an analogy or different units. "as much energy as the world uses in 27 years" was the basis of my 10,000 quads figure, which you are right is a daily figure of insolation instead of an annual.
The continental US figure is about 47,000 quads per year. At 30% efficiency, about 0.2% of that would provide the transportation energy supply. That is about 14000 square km of solar cells.
Someone else will have to provide useful information on cost for that area of solar energy generating capacity: I'm tired of looking for data in usable form.
Solar is my favorite energy source for splitting water.
To support a transportation system even remotely comparable to today's using hydrogen as a fuel would require a completely unrealistic amount of solar plant capacity.
In 1999, the world used 38.7 million barrels of petroleum a day for transportation. That is about 82 quads (10^15 BTU) per year in energy. That is an average of 1 million megawatts. The total world electricity consumption is about 13 x 10^12 kW hours per year, or an average of 1.5 million megawatts.
That is, you would need nearly *all* the electricity used by the world to produce the fuel energy used for transportation, assuming 100% efficient conversion.
The total solar energy hitting the earth's surface in a year is about 10,000 quads. At 30% cell efficiency, you would have to cover about 10% of the world land area with PV cells, neglecting efficiency losses due to clouds, etc., just to provide for today's transportation usage.
Pennsylvania roads in better condition?
Where the hell do you usually drive? Afghanistan?
Hydrogen from water only helps CO2 and other fossil fuel related emissions if the energy to dissociate the water comes from nuclear reactors, and only works over the long term (more than 50 years) if those reactors are breeder reactors, or fusion reactors, which have been 50 years away for the last 50 years.
I am in favor of breeder reactors. Most of the people who think H2 fuel cells solve the pollution problem don't accept nuclear as the answer. They appear to be living in some fantasy world where wind, solar, and geothermal energy are enough to provide for both electricity and transportation needs.
100% clean production cycle (no fossil fuels required to make it)
As long as you ignore the fossil fuels used to grow, process, and transport the plant products providing the vegetable oil and methanol, that is...
Unless by "macroscopic" you mean "size of the entire universe", I don't believe that QM is known to have any problems, except for incorporating gravity. The problems with QM & gravity generally are associated with extremly microscopic (as in Planck length), that is, high energies, where the gravitational contributions to QM are comparable to the other fundamental forces.
The problem of the quantum--classical transition (a.k.a. the measurement problem) is not really a physics problem. Read Gottfried's QM text for a pretty clear description of how physicists come to grips with it. The people working on quantum computing have to deal with this all the time, and as far as I can tell, quantum decoherence for them is an engineering problem, not a physics problem.
Strictly speaking, on very large length scales (like the size of the earth or larger), gravity is the most prevalent force, because matter tends to be neutral in large clumps. However, gravity is still relatively weak on those scales, so you don't need a full theory of quantum gravity to understand it---the weak gravitational fields can be treated accurately as an plain-old potential. Only in the neighborhood of a black hole, or trying to describe the entire universe being in a single quantum state, or trying to understand the first few moments of the big bang, does QM seem not to work.
When a GPS-guided "smart bomb" lands on your head because the atomic clocks on-board the GPS satellites are accurate, I think you'll agree that this accuracy can be deadly.
I can't access the original article now, but when he said "laptop," what he meant was something like "a device not exceeding a certain size, powered from an internal energy source, not exceeding a certain mass."
;-), laptops aren't going to go beyond his limit.
He then can argue from fundamental quantum theory what the limits on computation are for such a device. Unless laps get a lot bigger, people get a lot stronger, or quantum mechanics gets a lot less true
Between lesson 2 and lesson 3 you've botched things. Just because the particle has a wavefunction over an infinite domain does not mean it contains an infinite amount of information.
If the particle has finite energy, then that places a limit on the curvature of the wavefunction, and therefore on the "information density" of that wavefunction.
Furthermore, the finite age of the universe sets a limit on the distinguishability of particle states from one another. Very fine separation of energy states require a long evolution period to be distinguishable. (delta-E delta-t ~ h-bar) That sets a limit on the number of currently distinguishable eigenstates of the universe.
When you so confidently dismiss mathematics as "not existing before we formulated it," you not only are being vague about "we", you are also restricting the term mathematics to mean less than most people mean when they say it.
If two mathematicians discover the same theorem independently, what that means is that the common set of axioms they are working with had some consequences that were unknown, but now are known by both mathematicians. Those consequences (that is, the theorem) obviously existed independently of either mathematician, since the other one would have discovered it alone. It therefore seems more sensible to attribute the existence of the theorem to the axioms rather than the mathematicians.
If you accept that theorems belong to axioms, then the number of theorems is potentially unlimited, and certainly greater than now "exist" or ever will exist under your restricted definition. What good is a definition like that?
Are you serious? Do you have a reference?
Thomas Gold has said much more than you attribute to him. I agree that oil will likely still be plentiful in 30--40 years, because of discovery of new reserves and advances in oil extraction technology, and reductions in fossil fuel dependence of the economy.
However, Gold has theories of petroleum's origin and geological disposition that are very much on the fringe. The economic evidence is much stronger than Gold's geological evidence.
Actually, Quark tastes like cheese.