Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Huh? trillion dollar deficits EVERY year in office, drone "kill list", assassinated ambassador, muslim extremists taking over EVERYWHERE, extending patriot act, DOMESTIC use of surveillance drones, etc.
wake up dude...
Can we please put this deficit nonsense to bed. Bush waged two wars using "emergency appropriations" to keep them off-budget and, at the same time, passed a huge tax cut with a nine year sunset to keep it out of the ten-year accounting cycle and gave away a few trillion more in corporate welfare to pharma with Medicare Part D. He said it would pay for itself because tax cuts stimulate investment and job growth, but it didn't; instead, it created a trillion dollar hole in the budget representing all the government spending that not even Bush would cut. Repeat: Bush cut revenue by trillions and was unable to cut spending to make up for it. So why would Obama or Romney suddenly be able to? Someone please explain that logic to me!
So Obama walks into office, moves the wars into the budget, and spends 800 billion to stave off a depression. Every year since then, he has reduced the deficit; but suddenly republicans think that Obama should magically slash all the "waste" from the budget that not even Bush was willing to touch because for some reason it's only irresponsible for democrats to run deficits. Repeat: Obama has decreased the deficit, during a recession, every year that he has been in office. The US government, with the exception of part of the Clinton administration, has run a deficit every year since about 1960. The deficit exploded under Bush, who managed to increase it by more than any time since World War II, yet it is Obama's responsibility to turn it around over night? That is called the Two Santa Claus Theory; when republicans are in office, it's spend, spend, spend, and use accounting tricks to hide how bad it is and then, when a democrat gets into office, it's suddenly all about debt and deficits and getting spending under control.
Romney/Ryan are proposing more tax cuts; they want to reduce revenue even further. Why? Because, clearly, the problem with the Bush tax cuts and the reason Bush ended eight years with negative net job growth is because he didn't cut taxes enough! But don't worry, their tax cuts will be revenue neutral because they'll close "loopholes," but not the mortgage interest deduction, which is the second or third largest loophole in the tax code (depending on how you count it). No, they're going to do it by eliminating things like PBS, which comprise around 0.0001% of the budget. Capital gains? No, that loophole should remain because we can't "double tax" investors. As if you don't get double taxed when you pay sales tax after your payroll and income taxes. You tax actions and behaviors not money; money is fungible, you literally cannot tax the same dollar twice.
Seriously, watch the VP debate, the tax plan of Paul "Mr. Numbers" Ryan, the "intellectual leader of the GOP" and Mitt "I'll say anything to get elected" Romney, is: "Trust us, the math works out, but we're not going to give you specifics." Uh-huh, just like when you ran for governor and said "trust me, I filed my taxes as a Massachusetts resident," which you totally did, retroactively, after you were caught lying. Oh, but we're not supposed to talk about Bush or your tax returns--that's all in the past... except for when Ryan invokes Ronald Reagan and JFK in the debates; no, that is being serious.
Obama isn't perfect, nor is Biden. I'm not a democrat (or a republican), but I am so sick of this completely disingenuous nonsense about the deficit. I know, I know, you'll never go broke betting on the stupidity of the American electorate, but this is just basic f-ing arithmetic.
Minority Report-style UI, as I've generally heard it called the past few years, is a joke. Would be great for games, and perhaps for giving presentations, but who would want it for actually doing work? Stupid people might for a few days, because they imagine it would look cool, until they actually -tried- it and realized what the rest of us already know, that it would suck for actually getting things done quickly. I have nothing against experimental UIs being, well, experimented with, but the mouse and keyboard UI has lasted this long because it -works-.
According to the TV, everyone talks to their phones now, you know, like in Star Trek, on the computer isn't named Computer... which is strange, because, according to Star Trek and Minority Report, gesture UIs come way before voice interaction, at which point we switch back to touch-screens... But I feel like such an idiot talking to my phone--not to mention letting everyone in earshot know what kind of nerdy nonsense I ask the Internet--that the technology is completely impractical. In fact, the only utility of voice search is when you only have one hand free, and when most Slashdotters are in that situation, they sure as hell don't want anyone to overhear their search queries.
You wake up suddenly because looters are again banging at your reinforced door, looking for food and something to kill (or both). You shoot your through the door slits to make them go away, then prepare to take off and scavenge neighboring ruins for food.
And so on, and so forth.
Unless you're fortunate enough to work at your local billionaire's fortified city-state mansion. Sure, you get paid with room and board, but who needs money when payroll taxes are 95%?
The problem with predictions of the future like this is that the truly transformational changes aren't usually obvious so they end up with incremental improvements instead. Why on earth would I still have 'a desktop' 15 years from now and what on earth would make me want to have some computing unit (CID) that I plug into various devices when that's even less useful than the closest current equivalent (a mobile phone and bluetooth/wifi). Why on earth would I despatch my car to go on a collection errand when there would be fleets of delivery vehicles constantly passing by etc. This strikes me as a particularly unimaginative and non-compelling attempt to predict the future.
I was, coincidentally, watching Tomorrow Never Dies last night, which was released in 1997; 15 years ago. In that film, the villain hacks into GPS satellites to misdirect a war ship and incite a global conflict. He controls everything using a tablet (that is about 5 cm-thick) from a control room filled with large, thin displays. Bond's newest toy is a cell phone that is also a remote control for his car. Bond movies take place in the present, but imagines technologies that are "just around the corner." So what were the transformative technologies since then? Our cell phones are bigger, are tablets are thinner, we have enough high-bandwidth penetration that we can all pirate TV shows, bankers refined the art of screwing the whole world at once, and social media is a big thing. But somehow, in the next 15 years, technology will boom, transforming every aspect of our lives. Not to mention that every prediction about robots in the last 100 years has been wildly off target; that is a tough nut to crack.
...so yah, unimaginative, non-compelling, and baseless. Also, sticking your head in an fMRI just to get into your office? Millions of hipsters will be killed in horrific accidents involving "vintage" jeans and the front door! Or do we totally figure out how to keep strong magnetic fields from exerting force on ferrous materials in 15 years? Do we outlaw metal zippers?
A more likely story; 15 years from now, we're all wondering when the recession will end and lamenting "lost generations" and the utter lack of progress in the first three decades of the 21st Century.
Solutions are best found through variation and selection, processes that are quashed and stifled by central planning; the power structure should be decentralized and localized as much as possible, and that is precisely the point of the Free Market.
The Free Market has no idea how to conduct scientific research or to do anything that requires long-term planning; markets are excellent at efficiency and optimizations for short-term gains. Look at the pharmaceutical industry, which is constantly complaining that the early stages of drug-discovery are too costly and risky and that it should be the responsibility of universities to find promising targets because they don't work under the pressure of quarterly earnings reports and shareholder value.
That is, in fact, the basic model of technology transfer; academic labs (funded by centralized federal agencies!!!) do high-risk, fundamental research. When someone runs into a "hit," venture capitalists fund their start-up. Most fail, but the few that succeed bring us amazing innovations, and are usually absorbed by a larger company to whom you credit the discovery and jump up and down screaming "Free Market! Free Market!"
Do you know how science was done before the scary Government started pooling our collective resources and directing them towards research efforts? Only rich people were allowed to do science, they were self-funded, and they generally got into it as a means to become famous. Where would a middle-class guy like Einstein have wound up without government funding?
Breakthroughs cannot be planned. You can put a whole lot of smart people to work, give them everything they want, and maybe you will get lucky. But any attempt to plan and direct breakthroughs will only serve to prevent them. That was one of the lessons from the soviet economy. Don't people ever listen?
I think the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program worked pretty well. Ditto for the oodles of federal dollars targeted at semiconductor technology in the mid 20th Century. Anti-retro-viral drugs were most certainly the result of large amounts of targeted funding. There are entire foundations dedicated to funding research for a specific type of cancer and survival rates have gone up dramatically as a result. I'll grant you that you cannot predict where or when a major discovery will occur, but with finite resources, research must be directed. Research funding is, in every country, highly targeted because a breakthrough will never occur in a field in which no one is working.
Don't complain. Rutherford won the Chemistry prize for basically discovering nuclear physics. He was annoyed that he would forever be labeled a chemist.
When the fields overlap the Nobel Committee can basically pick whichever one is more convenient for the year.
Nuclear physics or nuclear chemistry?. It can be hard to apply the labels of modern scientific disciplines to past research. Faraday was a chemist by today's definition, but was probably just considered a "scientist" in his day because he was really discovering some of the underpinnings of what would become modern chemistry. Linus Pauling studied under Schrodinger and Bohr and much of his work is easily classifiable as physics (but he considered himself a chemist). Much of the evolution of Chemistry into a core science completely separate from Physics was the result of people like Rutherford, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Pauling. The 2012 chemistry prize, I think, exemplifies the same evolution in biochemistry, which started as more of an outgrowth of physical organic chemistry. But, as you say, the Nobel committee has to stuff them into either Chemistry or Medicine/Physiology because Biochemistry isn't an option.
The superficial problem is that universities can't afford to subscribe to all the journals that are out there. The ultimate source of this problem is that there are too many fourth-rate universities trying to pretend that they're research universities, and too many people trying to make it in academia in proportion to the number of available permanent jobs doing research. These people have a heavy incentive to publish lots of papers. If some of those papers happen to be important and influential in their field, that's good too, but the primary commandment is just to publish a ton of articles. This is what they have to do in order to get tenure. In many cases, they're in a department at a lower-tier state school that isn't really research oriented at all. Tenured faculty in their department aren't even doing research, just teaching. But the school wants to be just like the research-oriented universities (UC, Ivy Leage, etc.), so they make research a criterion for teaching. The school can afford to do this, because they have 300 applicants for every tenure-track job. All of this creates an overwhelming incentive for huge numbers of people to do research that is probably correct but utterly unimportant, and will never be cited in another paper. These useless papers have to be published somewhere. That's why all the low-impact-factor journals exist.
The only solution I can imagine is that we could create not just a full set of high-quality free journals in all academic disciplines but also a full spectrum of medium- and low-impact free journals as well. Kind of depressing, but it seems to be what junior faculty need.
Labtiva's approach doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a way of tackling the problem. The problem they describe is that research libraries can't afford to subscribe to all the low-impact journals. Low-impact journals are crap. They're low-impact. Their papers hardly ever get cited. For that reason, the market for $0.99 downloads of their papers will be too small to matter; nobody wants to read these papers.
I teach at a community college, so I don't have access to journals. It would be great if I could get specific articles from high-quality journals for $0.99 a copy. But the publishers of those journals have no incentive to sell the articles for $0.99 rather than $30. If they did that, it would just encourage libraries to cut their subscriptions. As it is, some researchers will pay $30 for a specific article out of their grant money, and the journal will pull in a pile of money for doing almost nothing.
I agree with much of what you say, but I would like to provide a little context and put things into perspective a bit for the non-academic-scientists on Slashdot. First, tenure doesn't typically swing on the number of papers; what matters more than anything is how well-known you are, and that comes from citations and talks. You can publish one paper a year in Science for five years, give two big talks, and voila; tenure. You can also crank out 10 papers a year in the "Journal of Who Gives a Crap" and give multiple talks a year at various "World Congresses on Something" in China and be denied tenure.
Colleges and universities in the fourth tier and below know very well that they cannot expect their faculty to compete with first-tier schools; their teaching burdens are too high, they lack facilities, and their students aren't as "good" (read: ambitious). They may require some research, but usually it's on the order of one paper a year, and educational journals are encouraged. Granted, there are a lot of upstart, open-access journals that prey on nervous junior faculty that think that any publication is better than no publication.
And low-impact journals are not all crap. Some are, sure, but many are low-impact because they are specialized journals. In fact, a lot of lower-impact journals are harder to publish in than the higher-impact journals from the same publisher, because the referees are experts in some microscopic aspect of you
We (scientists) used to access publications by literally picking up a print copy of a journal and thumbing through it. We learned about researchers and where they were publishing from conferences. In the 1960's you could follow less than a dozen journals and know the entirety of the research in a field as broad as Chemistry. In the past 20 years or so the number of publications exploded; Nature has ~80 publications. Some of that is justifiable, as there are many more researchers in the world and the body of scientific knowledge is simply too large to boil down to broad journals like "The Journal of the American Chemical Society."
With the computerization of publishing, we now have instant access to metrics like our "h-index" or the number of times we've been cited. Journals now publish their "impact factors," which are self-fulfilling prophecies of how likely someone is to cite your work if it is published in that journal. Impact factors track strongly with the breadth of a journal, which means that to publish in a "top-tier" journal you must publish something that is of interest to "the broad readership of this journal." Funding is strongly linked to the aforementioned metrics, so everyone competes to publish in certain journals out of necessity and these journals can charge whatever they want, pay their editors nothing, and send take-down notices when you link to a PDF of your own work.
So, the problem has nothing to do with not being able to access enough journals; this company seems to to think that, if only we could access all of the available literature, life would be great. There are already too damn many journals to keep track of and no good way to search them (sans a few specialized fields of research that allow for things like structure-based searching). Since you still learn about papers and people from conferences, you have to speak at a conference to get anyone to read your paper unless it is in a top-tier journal--and guess how you get invited to a conference? Publishing in top-tier journals. So good research languishes in no-name journals with zero citations, dragging down the h-index of a researcher and making it harder for them to find funding. Which turns these journals into dumping grounds for research that isn't accepted in the top-tier journals; and that is, to a limited degree, just fine. When you do publish in a top-tier journal, you cite your previous work in the no-name journal which, due to the structure of "general interest" journals, often contain more scientific rigor anyway. But there is a limit; beyond a certain threshold for terribleness, journals no longer serve any purpose but to make it more difficult to sift through the mind-boggling amount of published science.
What science publishing needs now is an intelligent way to search the existing content. There is no reason good work should go unnoticed just because it isn't in a top-tier journal (and publishing in those journals is an exercise in politics as much as it is in doing good science), but it does because currently we have no way to learn about it other than by the authors promoting themselves at conferences, which is difficult if you aren't already "known." And creating more journals--free or not--contributes to this most fundamental problem of modern scientific publishing.
This "iTunes" model of access to papers sounds like something that was cooked up by grad students, who have no idea how scientific publishing actually works. And, from TFA, you still can't print or share the material, which instantly makes it useless to most professors who, due to age, routine, and the sheer volume of information they are responsible for, rely heavily on hard copies.
Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails.
Do the rails cost less than a cruise missile? I've heard the more recent versions can fire several shots before they need to be replaced; if you can fire your railgun 5 times for 10 hours of maintanence and $50000 worth of steel that easily replaces 5 cruise missiles (at a cost of $500,000 each).
The cost of the usage is not the point; it's the investment in the research, which has not panned out as a viable weapon. The whole point is to mount these on ships to save space and weight on munitions; yes, you can replace the rails, but added to the weight and volume of the bank of capacitors, and the weight of the projectiles, you now have a weapon that is heavier, takes up more room, is much slower to operate, and requires much more maintenance than what you already have. Phase II of the current railgun program is to get the firing rate up to 10 projectiles per minute in proof-of-concept (ground-based) devices... The first working prototype of a railgun pre-dates the invention of the laser; I call that a demonstrable failure, yet it continues to receive funding along with dozens of other questionable projects while NIF is on the chopping block because Congress sets the bar so much higher for civillian than military research. Instead of launching projectiles at bad guys, NASA proposed using railgun technology to launch satellites and space vehicles--did they get the funding? How's their budget looking?
My point is not that we should cut funding to military research, rather that it is ridiculous that Congress gives so much more leeway to military research and is willing to funding failing projects for far longer than any civilian projects. It is as if they measure the success of civilian research against the Apollo Program and that of military research against Star Wars. And it all boils down to political posturing and corruption (in the literal sense; they take money from defense contractors to win re-election) which are just terrible ways to make decision about research funding.
The scientists at NIF have it all wrong; if they want to save their hides they need to get someone from the military to claim they need fusion for... I don't know, fighting terrorists or whatever. Just look at the rail gun--what a spectacular failure. Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails. Or the non-lethal microwave device that doesn't work in a light rain. Hypersonic missiles? Or even the myriad "totally necessary" fighter jets with backup engines being developed, just in case. What about space-based missile defense? Maybe NIF could claim that they could retrain their lasers on ICBMs? Clearly, if the military is into something things like price and feasibility are not a problem.
In all seriousness, how the f*ck can anyone take Congress seriously when it comes to spending? Here we have $7 billion spent trying to discover limitless sources of energy, but ohhhh, they're over budget and that sounds like a big number! The Big Dig (in Boston) was federally subsidized and cost around $8 billion and it was made so poorly (due to corruption and a lack of oversight) that some poor woman was crushed when a ceiling tile fell on her car. And what about the trillion dollar tax cuts enacted in the first term of W? Or the other trillion (give or take) spent on invading Iraq for no particular reason? I don't buy this "we have to start somewhere" nonsense of budget cuts when nothing defense-related is even questioned and just letting the Bush tax cuts expire as they were supposedly originally intended is a non-starter, not to mention the insanity of the blanket 15% capital gains rate (note: you don't tax money, it's fungible, you tax the actions of people and legal entities).
If anything, Congress should be embarrassed by how little they appropriate to science and how many of its members are on the record as refusing to accept Darwinian evolution or anthropogenic global warming (which probably explains their willingness to cut funding for NIF.)
Honestly the best school/computer experience I had was in Elementary school in the early 80s. It was actually quite early in computer education history for a school to have a computer in every room and computer labs, but our little country school in northern Indiana had them (Apple IIs and Atari 400/800s) and we had a couple sessions each week were we would try different programs and just experience them. They even had us writing short programs as early as 2nd grade. All the computer classes I took after that in high school and at the college level were woefully out of date and had teachers/professors who either didn't know what they were talking about or who were teaching 20 year old technologies. So if you want to compare computer education now to something before, the bar isn't very high as far as I'm concerned.
Funny, I had the exact same experience in the mid/late 80's. In between games of Oregon Trail (I went to school in Oregon, so we had an excuse...) we would learn really basic programming on one of the two Apple ][ computers in my (rural) school. By the 8th grade, they had "upgraded" everything to Macintosh computers where we basically learned how to use a mouse; there was a big focus on getting everyone to use word processors to do homework, for which you even received some extra credit. By high school, we had once again "upgraded" to x86 machines. Except that, instead of learning programming, the utility of computers had been unambiguously determined to be word processing. Thus, we learned to touch type and how to work some basic data entry/word processing programs... in between games of Scorched Earth, of course.
I remember having a discussion with my high school computer science teacher, whose only qualification seemed to be that she knew how to switch on a computer and that any problems were certainly caused by viruses, about the Internet and why the school wasn't connected to it. The answer was a mix of "I don't know what that is" and "it is probably expensive." This was the mid 90's, mind you, when everyone and their dog (their modem-owning dog, anyway) was on Facebook---I mean, America On Line.
The evolution of my computer classes went from programming in elementary school to touch typing in high school because, you know, job skills.
Austerity has become popular because it happens to be fashionable. It's all about pretending that you're an ascetic: you get the smug feeling of self-righteousness while others - the poor and the weak - pay the price. In that sense it's every bit as mindlessly self-indulging as the worst excesses of materialism. It's also just as insane, and will result in just as much damage, if not more - because a materialist wants everything no matter the cost, while an austerist wants to deny everything to everyone else no matter the cost, and the former position is merely selfish while the latter starts crossing over into scorpion territory.
Just to avoid any confusion: I'm agreeing with you. But let me add that austerity is even more devious that you say. While deficits may not matter, debt does. Only we often call it "credit." Banks created trillions of dollars in derivatives that amount to bets that are just a fancy way of getting around limits on capital reserves. They were allowed to once again merge investment banks with commercial banks; so not only did they over-leverage, they did it with your savings account and your pension fund. And, shockingly, it created bubbles everywhere, the largest of which being the real estate bubbles that are still waiting to pop all over the world. At some point all of this debt/credit has to be destroyed because the global economy simply cannot grow fast enough to compensate. You can either take it out of the banks---give them a "haircut," claw back some of the ill-gotten profits, inflate your currency (sorry, ECB), etc.---or you can spread the pain around by screwing poor and middle class people (the non-investor class). It is the choice of each government which path to take and the US and UK are poster children for letting the banks and the investors that got rich robbing us blind call the shots.
Banks ruined the economy? Better bail them out. Things still suck? Better give them easy credit. They won't lend? Start buying up their bad assets, too. Oh, now people are starving and out of work? Well, to quote the former Vice President of the United States; "Go f*ck your self!" We need austerity to avoid disaster! Well, worse disaster, anyway...
So we get "austerity" under the threat from bankers that they will jack up sovereign bond yields if we don't. (Because apparently we all believe that banks are more powerful than sovereign nations now.) Kudos to France for figuring out that governments have to spend during recessions because no one else can or will and that austerity just further weakens a country, mortgages its future, ruins entire generations of its citizens, and makes it even easier for banks to suck more blood out before its citizens rebel. And kudos to France for asking wealthy people to kick in a bit more to help get things going again.
Artists don't like precise, or technical, and they depend on interpretation. Actually, I found the comments by the biologist part of the group more disturbing. Yes, he's a biologist, but for someone working with bacteria and heavy metals he really should know something about chemistry.
I'm not criticizing making art projects out of science. I've collaborated with opera singers and instrumentalists and am a photographer myself. Science is beautiful. My objection was to the OP calling this art science.
Well, he is a biologist, few of whom that I have met know anything about chemistry... I'm not knocking art or science or their collaboration; you are of course right that this is art and should not be labeled science.
As a scientist that has worked on a few science-art collaborations (which I think are a great way to get people interested in science) I have found it incredibly difficult to make artists understand that some words have precise, technical meanings and are not open for interpretation. Conversations quickly devolve into a Lemmon/Matthau bit.
It can be downright infuriating; you say to the artist "ok, well, what if I called your photographs watercolors?" The artist then ponders for a second, trying to find the deeper meaning in what you said, and replies, "Hmmm, I think I see what you're saying. Let's explore that idea." In this case, the artist is using the term "neo-alchemy" to describe simple redox chemistry with total disregard for the actual definition of alchemy, which is frustrating the Nerds of Slashdot and, I suspect, some scientists in Michigan.
Also, in the Netherlands we have some separate roads for bikers. I have yet to see one of those in the USA.
Visit a city like Eugene, Oregon and you will see something similar that is, in fact, motivated by the Dutch system. I haven't lived there in over a decade, but they had plans to extend their network of bike paths as to completely obviate the need for bikes and cars to share the road while within the city... there are many bike-friendly cities in the US, but just as many that seem unaware of the invention of the bicycle.
...I missed a comma in that sentence. I meant "odd reverence" as a good thing. Where I grew up, it was a 10 mile, hilly ride just to get to town, which had a population of 500. "The City" was another 20 miles. But if you rode a bike on those long, country roads, people would drive around you as if you had a force field around your bike; the second you got near The City, they would blow past you fast enough to knock you sideways and once you entered the city limits, it was all horns and middle fingers.
The law, no doubt, helps but even without such a law the car will be found to be at fault most of the time anyway. I suspect that the motivation of the Dutch government was just to save money litigating these accidents : ) Seriously, though, many US states have the same laws, but they aren't as well-known as the Dutch law because motorists in the Netherlands have to deal with an onslaught of bikes on the road the second they exit a freeway. There are exceptions to the American laws (at least in the states in which I have lived) if you are, for example, riding a bicycle on a freeway and get hit by a car. But again, the stringency varies state to state (and city to city).
I read a very sad article about a person trying to lose weight in some medium-sized US city that I can't recall by walking and eventually biking. This person could not find an unbroken chain of sidewalk long enough to actually walk for more than 10 minutes; Car-centric urban planning gone awry.
Yes, but I entered the windshield laptop-first (it was in my backpack) and my head never actually struck the car. I ended up in the passengers seat, upside-down, with my ass sticking out of the front of the car. The entire intersection came to a halt until I picked myself up and made the "I'm OK wave" at which point everyone started hoking and yelling for me to get out of the intersection.
If you fall by yourself off a bike (losing grip too fast in a curve, hitting the side of a sidewalk), you are more likely to injure your wrists or scrape your legs. There won't be much difference for the head. But if you get hit by a car, a cm of Styrofoam is not going to make much of a difference. And I say this as someone who wears a helmet mountain biking and takes it off on the bike lanes.
The US is absurd: you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorbike, but you need one on a pedal bike ?!?
Like so many laws, helmet policies vary from state to state (and city to city for bikes). There are mandatory helmet laws in many states for motorcycles. BTW I too ride without a helmet in the city and with one when mountain biking and it probably saved my life. I have crashed three times in the city; twice while taking a corner in snow/ice/rain (and injured only my arms/hands) and once through the windshield of an oncoming car (up-side-down and back-first; my head was fine). However, once while coming back down a steep trail, my front wheel lodged between a small divot and a rock, sending me face-first over the handlebars and splitting my helmet in two; I was lucky to walk away with a concussion and a wrecked bike. But I think that highlights the difference between cycling in the city as part of your daily commute and cycling for sport on rough trails. Race car drivers wear helmets, but we don't require them on freeways.
The Autobahn is also much better maintained that US highways and interstates, where the potholes, cracks, and shoddy repairs impose a Darwinian speed limit apart from the posted limit.
And in these same countries where cycling is common, cyclists aren't hit by cars at all on a large scale. How could that be? Could it be those people are actually smarter or better at driving, or does it make more sense to assume these motorists are simply used to having cyclists on the road? And if they can become used to it, why couldn't people in other countries as well?
In the Netherlands, if you see a car with a "D" on the license plate (or almost anything other than "NL"), ride defensively. The difference between Dutch drivers' awareness of cyclists and foreigners is immense, not because they are better drivers, but because they're so used to bikes (and most drivers are cyclists, too). They instinctively look to the right before making a turn, slow down to let bikes through, don't crowd, don't pass too close, and leave space for bikes when they are stopped at a light or in traffic. (Which is particularly surprising considering the total disregard cyclists seem to have for the rules.)
Contrast that to (my experience biking in) the US where motorists angrily accelerate around you, often giving you a dirty look for inconveniencing them with your stupid bike as they narrowly miss you with their side-view mirror. And where they just suddenly veer right, into a parking spot, even if there is a bike lane (which they love to double park in) without noticing the cyclist that almost face-plants on their trunk. I've lived in a few big cities in the US, and it was a common joke that you're not really a cyclist until you've been hit by a car (I went completely through a windshield). I've also lived in a few small towns, where you'd have to be crazy to bike because everything is 20 miles apart and uphill and motorists treat you with an odd reverence.
Flying is a privilege, not a right. You need to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the governing bodies, or find another way to travel. It's really that simple. Quit whining and just go through it. Trust me, nobody really wants to ogle your naked outline.
Whether or not something is technically a right or a privilege is a semantic distinction that distracts from what really matters, which is necessity. Driving a car, having a job, having a place to live, and accessing the Internet are all privileges, but are also absolutely necessary for most people to pursue happiness and generally to feel like a productive member of society. We can tell when something is necessary because of what we will put up with in order to have it. In this case, people are--so far--willing to have naked pictures of themselves taken despite any evidence of efficacy because their need to fly on commercial airliners outweighs the humiliation.
We constantly play this game with government and private companies. Raise your hand if you are happy with your cell phone provider or your Internet provider. How about public transportation infrastructure? Traffic during your daily commute? But everyone reading this is accessing the Internet, probably owns a mobile phone, most likely has a job, and probably has to deal with traffic or public transportation to get to that job.
Now consider something that really isn't necessary; a restaurant. People will send back soup for being too salty or simply stop going to a restaurant because their selection of beer is sub-par. Restaurants come and go and have to run razor-thin profit margins to stay competitive--a couple of bad reviews on Yelp can put a restaurant out of business. Yet, at the airport, the TSA is serving you a salad with a thick turd right across the top of it and you're not only eating it, you're using a knife and fork, chewing each bite thoroughly, and washing it down with less than 100 mL of liquid.
You cannot boycott a necessity, so your only recourse is to induce the government to do something about it. The US Government, however, is too broken even to be bothered to put salad dressing on the turd, let alone offer you a turd-free salad. Make every member of Congress eat that turd salad--that is a group of people that needs to fly frequently--and the body scanners will disappear without public debate, but good luck making that happen.
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Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Huh? trillion dollar deficits EVERY year in office, drone "kill list", assassinated ambassador, muslim extremists taking over EVERYWHERE, extending patriot act, DOMESTIC use of surveillance drones, etc.
wake up dude...
Can we please put this deficit nonsense to bed. Bush waged two wars using "emergency appropriations" to keep them off-budget and, at the same time, passed a huge tax cut with a nine year sunset to keep it out of the ten-year accounting cycle and gave away a few trillion more in corporate welfare to pharma with Medicare Part D. He said it would pay for itself because tax cuts stimulate investment and job growth, but it didn't; instead, it created a trillion dollar hole in the budget representing all the government spending that not even Bush would cut. Repeat: Bush cut revenue by trillions and was unable to cut spending to make up for it. So why would Obama or Romney suddenly be able to? Someone please explain that logic to me!
So Obama walks into office, moves the wars into the budget, and spends 800 billion to stave off a depression. Every year since then, he has reduced the deficit; but suddenly republicans think that Obama should magically slash all the "waste" from the budget that not even Bush was willing to touch because for some reason it's only irresponsible for democrats to run deficits. Repeat: Obama has decreased the deficit, during a recession, every year that he has been in office. The US government, with the exception of part of the Clinton administration, has run a deficit every year since about 1960. The deficit exploded under Bush, who managed to increase it by more than any time since World War II, yet it is Obama's responsibility to turn it around over night? That is called the Two Santa Claus Theory; when republicans are in office, it's spend, spend, spend, and use accounting tricks to hide how bad it is and then, when a democrat gets into office, it's suddenly all about debt and deficits and getting spending under control.
Romney/Ryan are proposing more tax cuts; they want to reduce revenue even further. Why? Because, clearly, the problem with the Bush tax cuts and the reason Bush ended eight years with negative net job growth is because he didn't cut taxes enough! But don't worry, their tax cuts will be revenue neutral because they'll close "loopholes," but not the mortgage interest deduction, which is the second or third largest loophole in the tax code (depending on how you count it). No, they're going to do it by eliminating things like PBS, which comprise around 0.0001% of the budget. Capital gains? No, that loophole should remain because we can't "double tax" investors. As if you don't get double taxed when you pay sales tax after your payroll and income taxes. You tax actions and behaviors not money; money is fungible, you literally cannot tax the same dollar twice.
Seriously, watch the VP debate, the tax plan of Paul "Mr. Numbers" Ryan, the "intellectual leader of the GOP" and Mitt "I'll say anything to get elected" Romney, is: "Trust us, the math works out, but we're not going to give you specifics." Uh-huh, just like when you ran for governor and said "trust me, I filed my taxes as a Massachusetts resident," which you totally did, retroactively, after you were caught lying. Oh, but we're not supposed to talk about Bush or your tax returns--that's all in the past... except for when Ryan invokes Ronald Reagan and JFK in the debates; no, that is being serious.
Obama isn't perfect, nor is Biden. I'm not a democrat (or a republican), but I am so sick of this completely disingenuous nonsense about the deficit. I know, I know, you'll never go broke betting on the stupidity of the American electorate, but this is just basic f-ing arithmetic.
Minority Report-style UI, as I've generally heard it called the past few years, is a joke. Would be great for games, and perhaps for giving presentations, but who would want it for actually doing work? Stupid people might for a few days, because they imagine it would look cool, until they actually -tried- it and realized what the rest of us already know, that it would suck for actually getting things done quickly. I have nothing against experimental UIs being, well, experimented with, but the mouse and keyboard UI has lasted this long because it -works-.
According to the TV, everyone talks to their phones now, you know, like in Star Trek, on the computer isn't named Computer... which is strange, because, according to Star Trek and Minority Report, gesture UIs come way before voice interaction, at which point we switch back to touch-screens... But I feel like such an idiot talking to my phone--not to mention letting everyone in earshot know what kind of nerdy nonsense I ask the Internet--that the technology is completely impractical. In fact, the only utility of voice search is when you only have one hand free, and when most Slashdotters are in that situation, they sure as hell don't want anyone to overhear their search queries.
You wake up suddenly because looters are again banging at your reinforced door, looking for food and something to kill (or both). You shoot your through the door slits to make them go away, then prepare to take off and scavenge neighboring ruins for food.
And so on, and so forth.
Unless you're fortunate enough to work at your local billionaire's fortified city-state mansion. Sure, you get paid with room and board, but who needs money when payroll taxes are 95%?
The problem with predictions of the future like this is that the truly transformational changes aren't usually obvious so they end up with incremental improvements instead. Why on earth would I still have 'a desktop' 15 years from now and what on earth would make me want to have some computing unit (CID) that I plug into various devices when that's even less useful than the closest current equivalent (a mobile phone and bluetooth/wifi). Why on earth would I despatch my car to go on a collection errand when there would be fleets of delivery vehicles constantly passing by etc. This strikes me as a particularly unimaginative and non-compelling attempt to predict the future.
I was, coincidentally, watching Tomorrow Never Dies last night, which was released in 1997; 15 years ago. In that film, the villain hacks into GPS satellites to misdirect a war ship and incite a global conflict. He controls everything using a tablet (that is about 5 cm-thick) from a control room filled with large, thin displays. Bond's newest toy is a cell phone that is also a remote control for his car. Bond movies take place in the present, but imagines technologies that are "just around the corner." So what were the transformative technologies since then? Our cell phones are bigger, are tablets are thinner, we have enough high-bandwidth penetration that we can all pirate TV shows, bankers refined the art of screwing the whole world at once, and social media is a big thing. But somehow, in the next 15 years, technology will boom, transforming every aspect of our lives. Not to mention that every prediction about robots in the last 100 years has been wildly off target; that is a tough nut to crack.
...so yah, unimaginative, non-compelling, and baseless. Also, sticking your head in an fMRI just to get into your office? Millions of hipsters will be killed in horrific accidents involving "vintage" jeans and the front door! Or do we totally figure out how to keep strong magnetic fields from exerting force on ferrous materials in 15 years? Do we outlaw metal zippers?
A more likely story; 15 years from now, we're all wondering when the recession will end and lamenting "lost generations" and the utter lack of progress in the first three decades of the 21st Century.
Solutions are best found through variation and selection, processes that are quashed and stifled by central planning; the power structure should be decentralized and localized as much as possible, and that is precisely the point of the Free Market.
The Free Market has no idea how to conduct scientific research or to do anything that requires long-term planning; markets are excellent at efficiency and optimizations for short-term gains. Look at the pharmaceutical industry, which is constantly complaining that the early stages of drug-discovery are too costly and risky and that it should be the responsibility of universities to find promising targets because they don't work under the pressure of quarterly earnings reports and shareholder value.
That is, in fact, the basic model of technology transfer; academic labs (funded by centralized federal agencies!!!) do high-risk, fundamental research. When someone runs into a "hit," venture capitalists fund their start-up. Most fail, but the few that succeed bring us amazing innovations, and are usually absorbed by a larger company to whom you credit the discovery and jump up and down screaming "Free Market! Free Market!"
Do you know how science was done before the scary Government started pooling our collective resources and directing them towards research efforts? Only rich people were allowed to do science, they were self-funded, and they generally got into it as a means to become famous. Where would a middle-class guy like Einstein have wound up without government funding?
Breakthroughs cannot be planned. You can put a whole lot of smart people to work, give them everything they want, and maybe you will get lucky. But any attempt to plan and direct breakthroughs will only serve to prevent them. That was one of the lessons from the soviet economy. Don't people ever listen?
I think the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program worked pretty well. Ditto for the oodles of federal dollars targeted at semiconductor technology in the mid 20th Century. Anti-retro-viral drugs were most certainly the result of large amounts of targeted funding. There are entire foundations dedicated to funding research for a specific type of cancer and survival rates have gone up dramatically as a result. I'll grant you that you cannot predict where or when a major discovery will occur, but with finite resources, research must be directed. Research funding is, in every country, highly targeted because a breakthrough will never occur in a field in which no one is working.
Don't complain. Rutherford won the Chemistry prize for basically discovering nuclear physics. He was annoyed that he would forever be labeled a chemist.
When the fields overlap the Nobel Committee can basically pick whichever one is more convenient for the year.
Nuclear physics or nuclear chemistry?. It can be hard to apply the labels of modern scientific disciplines to past research. Faraday was a chemist by today's definition, but was probably just considered a "scientist" in his day because he was really discovering some of the underpinnings of what would become modern chemistry. Linus Pauling studied under Schrodinger and Bohr and much of his work is easily classifiable as physics (but he considered himself a chemist). Much of the evolution of Chemistry into a core science completely separate from Physics was the result of people like Rutherford, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Pauling. The 2012 chemistry prize, I think, exemplifies the same evolution in biochemistry, which started as more of an outgrowth of physical organic chemistry. But, as you say, the Nobel committee has to stuff them into either Chemistry or Medicine/Physiology because Biochemistry isn't an option.
The superficial problem is that universities can't afford to subscribe to all the journals that are out there. The ultimate source of this problem is that there are too many fourth-rate universities trying to pretend that they're research universities, and too many people trying to make it in academia in proportion to the number of available permanent jobs doing research. These people have a heavy incentive to publish lots of papers. If some of those papers happen to be important and influential in their field, that's good too, but the primary commandment is just to publish a ton of articles. This is what they have to do in order to get tenure. In many cases, they're in a department at a lower-tier state school that isn't really research oriented at all. Tenured faculty in their department aren't even doing research, just teaching. But the school wants to be just like the research-oriented universities (UC, Ivy Leage, etc.), so they make research a criterion for teaching. The school can afford to do this, because they have 300 applicants for every tenure-track job. All of this creates an overwhelming incentive for huge numbers of people to do research that is probably correct but utterly unimportant, and will never be cited in another paper. These useless papers have to be published somewhere. That's why all the low-impact-factor journals exist.
The only solution I can imagine is that we could create not just a full set of high-quality free journals in all academic disciplines but also a full spectrum of medium- and low-impact free journals as well. Kind of depressing, but it seems to be what junior faculty need.
Labtiva's approach doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a way of tackling the problem. The problem they describe is that research libraries can't afford to subscribe to all the low-impact journals. Low-impact journals are crap. They're low-impact. Their papers hardly ever get cited. For that reason, the market for $0.99 downloads of their papers will be too small to matter; nobody wants to read these papers.
I teach at a community college, so I don't have access to journals. It would be great if I could get specific articles from high-quality journals for $0.99 a copy. But the publishers of those journals have no incentive to sell the articles for $0.99 rather than $30. If they did that, it would just encourage libraries to cut their subscriptions. As it is, some researchers will pay $30 for a specific article out of their grant money, and the journal will pull in a pile of money for doing almost nothing.
I agree with much of what you say, but I would like to provide a little context and put things into perspective a bit for the non-academic-scientists on Slashdot. First, tenure doesn't typically swing on the number of papers; what matters more than anything is how well-known you are, and that comes from citations and talks. You can publish one paper a year in Science for five years, give two big talks, and voila; tenure. You can also crank out 10 papers a year in the "Journal of Who Gives a Crap" and give multiple talks a year at various "World Congresses on Something" in China and be denied tenure.
Colleges and universities in the fourth tier and below know very well that they cannot expect their faculty to compete with first-tier schools; their teaching burdens are too high, they lack facilities, and their students aren't as "good" (read: ambitious). They may require some research, but usually it's on the order of one paper a year, and educational journals are encouraged. Granted, there are a lot of upstart, open-access journals that prey on nervous junior faculty that think that any publication is better than no publication.
And low-impact journals are not all crap. Some are, sure, but many are low-impact because they are specialized journals. In fact, a lot of lower-impact journals are harder to publish in than the higher-impact journals from the same publisher, because the referees are experts in some microscopic aspect of you
We (scientists) used to access publications by literally picking up a print copy of a journal and thumbing through it. We learned about researchers and where they were publishing from conferences. In the 1960's you could follow less than a dozen journals and know the entirety of the research in a field as broad as Chemistry. In the past 20 years or so the number of publications exploded; Nature has ~80 publications. Some of that is justifiable, as there are many more researchers in the world and the body of scientific knowledge is simply too large to boil down to broad journals like "The Journal of the American Chemical Society."
With the computerization of publishing, we now have instant access to metrics like our "h-index" or the number of times we've been cited. Journals now publish their "impact factors," which are self-fulfilling prophecies of how likely someone is to cite your work if it is published in that journal. Impact factors track strongly with the breadth of a journal, which means that to publish in a "top-tier" journal you must publish something that is of interest to "the broad readership of this journal." Funding is strongly linked to the aforementioned metrics, so everyone competes to publish in certain journals out of necessity and these journals can charge whatever they want, pay their editors nothing, and send take-down notices when you link to a PDF of your own work.
So, the problem has nothing to do with not being able to access enough journals; this company seems to to think that, if only we could access all of the available literature, life would be great. There are already too damn many journals to keep track of and no good way to search them (sans a few specialized fields of research that allow for things like structure-based searching). Since you still learn about papers and people from conferences, you have to speak at a conference to get anyone to read your paper unless it is in a top-tier journal--and guess how you get invited to a conference? Publishing in top-tier journals. So good research languishes in no-name journals with zero citations, dragging down the h-index of a researcher and making it harder for them to find funding. Which turns these journals into dumping grounds for research that isn't accepted in the top-tier journals; and that is, to a limited degree, just fine. When you do publish in a top-tier journal, you cite your previous work in the no-name journal which, due to the structure of "general interest" journals, often contain more scientific rigor anyway. But there is a limit; beyond a certain threshold for terribleness, journals no longer serve any purpose but to make it more difficult to sift through the mind-boggling amount of published science.
What science publishing needs now is an intelligent way to search the existing content. There is no reason good work should go unnoticed just because it isn't in a top-tier journal (and publishing in those journals is an exercise in politics as much as it is in doing good science), but it does because currently we have no way to learn about it other than by the authors promoting themselves at conferences, which is difficult if you aren't already "known." And creating more journals--free or not--contributes to this most fundamental problem of modern scientific publishing.
This "iTunes" model of access to papers sounds like something that was cooked up by grad students, who have no idea how scientific publishing actually works. And, from TFA, you still can't print or share the material, which instantly makes it useless to most professors who, due to age, routine, and the sheer volume of information they are responsible for, rely heavily on hard copies.
Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails.
Do the rails cost less than a cruise missile? I've heard the more recent versions can fire several shots before they need to be replaced; if you can fire your railgun 5 times for 10 hours of maintanence and $50000 worth of steel that easily replaces 5 cruise missiles (at a cost of $500,000 each).
The cost of the usage is not the point; it's the investment in the research, which has not panned out as a viable weapon. The whole point is to mount these on ships to save space and weight on munitions; yes, you can replace the rails, but added to the weight and volume of the bank of capacitors, and the weight of the projectiles, you now have a weapon that is heavier, takes up more room, is much slower to operate, and requires much more maintenance than what you already have. Phase II of the current railgun program is to get the firing rate up to 10 projectiles per minute in proof-of-concept (ground-based) devices... The first working prototype of a railgun pre-dates the invention of the laser; I call that a demonstrable failure, yet it continues to receive funding along with dozens of other questionable projects while NIF is on the chopping block because Congress sets the bar so much higher for civillian than military research. Instead of launching projectiles at bad guys, NASA proposed using railgun technology to launch satellites and space vehicles--did they get the funding? How's their budget looking?
My point is not that we should cut funding to military research, rather that it is ridiculous that Congress gives so much more leeway to military research and is willing to funding failing projects for far longer than any civilian projects. It is as if they measure the success of civilian research against the Apollo Program and that of military research against Star Wars. And it all boils down to political posturing and corruption (in the literal sense; they take money from defense contractors to win re-election) which are just terrible ways to make decision about research funding.
The scientists at NIF have it all wrong; if they want to save their hides they need to get someone from the military to claim they need fusion for... I don't know, fighting terrorists or whatever. Just look at the rail gun--what a spectacular failure. Sure, we can make heavy things go fast, but they still haven't solved basic problems like how keep plasma from electrical arcing from melting the rails. Or the non-lethal microwave device that doesn't work in a light rain. Hypersonic missiles? Or even the myriad "totally necessary" fighter jets with backup engines being developed, just in case. What about space-based missile defense? Maybe NIF could claim that they could retrain their lasers on ICBMs? Clearly, if the military is into something things like price and feasibility are not a problem.
In all seriousness, how the f*ck can anyone take Congress seriously when it comes to spending? Here we have $7 billion spent trying to discover limitless sources of energy, but ohhhh, they're over budget and that sounds like a big number! The Big Dig (in Boston) was federally subsidized and cost around $8 billion and it was made so poorly (due to corruption and a lack of oversight) that some poor woman was crushed when a ceiling tile fell on her car. And what about the trillion dollar tax cuts enacted in the first term of W? Or the other trillion (give or take) spent on invading Iraq for no particular reason? I don't buy this "we have to start somewhere" nonsense of budget cuts when nothing defense-related is even questioned and just letting the Bush tax cuts expire as they were supposedly originally intended is a non-starter, not to mention the insanity of the blanket 15% capital gains rate (note: you don't tax money, it's fungible, you tax the actions of people and legal entities).
If anything, Congress should be embarrassed by how little they appropriate to science and how many of its members are on the record as refusing to accept Darwinian evolution or anthropogenic global warming (which probably explains their willingness to cut funding for NIF.)
Honestly the best school/computer experience I had was in Elementary school in the early 80s. It was actually quite early in computer education history for a school to have a computer in every room and computer labs, but our little country school in northern Indiana had them (Apple IIs and Atari 400/800s) and we had a couple sessions each week were we would try different programs and just experience them. They even had us writing short programs as early as 2nd grade. All the computer classes I took after that in high school and at the college level were woefully out of date and had teachers/professors who either didn't know what they were talking about or who were teaching 20 year old technologies. So if you want to compare computer education now to something before, the bar isn't very high as far as I'm concerned.
Funny, I had the exact same experience in the mid/late 80's. In between games of Oregon Trail (I went to school in Oregon, so we had an excuse...) we would learn really basic programming on one of the two Apple ][ computers in my (rural) school. By the 8th grade, they had "upgraded" everything to Macintosh computers where we basically learned how to use a mouse; there was a big focus on getting everyone to use word processors to do homework, for which you even received some extra credit. By high school, we had once again "upgraded" to x86 machines. Except that, instead of learning programming, the utility of computers had been unambiguously determined to be word processing. Thus, we learned to touch type and how to work some basic data entry/word processing programs... in between games of Scorched Earth, of course.
I remember having a discussion with my high school computer science teacher, whose only qualification seemed to be that she knew how to switch on a computer and that any problems were certainly caused by viruses, about the Internet and why the school wasn't connected to it. The answer was a mix of "I don't know what that is" and "it is probably expensive." This was the mid 90's, mind you, when everyone and their dog (their modem-owning dog, anyway) was on Facebook---I mean, America On Line.
The evolution of my computer classes went from programming in elementary school to touch typing in high school because, you know, job skills.
Austerity has become popular because it happens to be fashionable. It's all about pretending that you're an ascetic: you get the smug feeling of self-righteousness while others - the poor and the weak - pay the price. In that sense it's every bit as mindlessly self-indulging as the worst excesses of materialism. It's also just as insane, and will result in just as much damage, if not more - because a materialist wants everything no matter the cost, while an austerist wants to deny everything to everyone else no matter the cost, and the former position is merely selfish while the latter starts crossing over into scorpion territory.
Just to avoid any confusion: I'm agreeing with you. But let me add that austerity is even more devious that you say. While deficits may not matter, debt does. Only we often call it "credit." Banks created trillions of dollars in derivatives that amount to bets that are just a fancy way of getting around limits on capital reserves. They were allowed to once again merge investment banks with commercial banks; so not only did they over-leverage, they did it with your savings account and your pension fund. And, shockingly, it created bubbles everywhere, the largest of which being the real estate bubbles that are still waiting to pop all over the world. At some point all of this debt/credit has to be destroyed because the global economy simply cannot grow fast enough to compensate. You can either take it out of the banks---give them a "haircut," claw back some of the ill-gotten profits, inflate your currency (sorry, ECB), etc.---or you can spread the pain around by screwing poor and middle class people (the non-investor class). It is the choice of each government which path to take and the US and UK are poster children for letting the banks and the investors that got rich robbing us blind call the shots.
Banks ruined the economy? Better bail them out. Things still suck? Better give them easy credit. They won't lend? Start buying up their bad assets, too. Oh, now people are starving and out of work? Well, to quote the former Vice President of the United States; "Go f*ck your self!" We need austerity to avoid disaster! Well, worse disaster, anyway...
So we get "austerity" under the threat from bankers that they will jack up sovereign bond yields if we don't. (Because apparently we all believe that banks are more powerful than sovereign nations now.) Kudos to France for figuring out that governments have to spend during recessions because no one else can or will and that austerity just further weakens a country, mortgages its future, ruins entire generations of its citizens, and makes it even easier for banks to suck more blood out before its citizens rebel. And kudos to France for asking wealthy people to kick in a bit more to help get things going again.
Artists don't like precise, or technical, and they depend on interpretation. Actually, I found the comments by the biologist part of the group more disturbing. Yes, he's a biologist, but for someone working with bacteria and heavy metals he really should know something about chemistry.
I'm not criticizing making art projects out of science. I've collaborated with opera singers and instrumentalists and am a photographer myself. Science is beautiful. My objection was to the OP calling this art science.
Well, he is a biologist, few of whom that I have met know anything about chemistry... I'm not knocking art or science or their collaboration; you are of course right that this is art and should not be labeled science.
As a scientist that has worked on a few science-art collaborations (which I think are a great way to get people interested in science) I have found it incredibly difficult to make artists understand that some words have precise, technical meanings and are not open for interpretation. Conversations quickly devolve into a Lemmon/Matthau bit.
It can be downright infuriating; you say to the artist "ok, well, what if I called your photographs watercolors?" The artist then ponders for a second, trying to find the deeper meaning in what you said, and replies, "Hmmm, I think I see what you're saying. Let's explore that idea." In this case, the artist is using the term "neo-alchemy" to describe simple redox chemistry with total disregard for the actual definition of alchemy, which is frustrating the Nerds of Slashdot and, I suspect, some scientists in Michigan.
Also, in the Netherlands we have some separate roads for bikers. I have yet to see one of those in the USA.
Visit a city like Eugene, Oregon and you will see something similar that is, in fact, motivated by the Dutch system. I haven't lived there in over a decade, but they had plans to extend their network of bike paths as to completely obviate the need for bikes and cars to share the road while within the city... there are many bike-friendly cities in the US, but just as many that seem unaware of the invention of the bicycle.
...I missed a comma in that sentence. I meant "odd reverence" as a good thing. Where I grew up, it was a 10 mile, hilly ride just to get to town, which had a population of 500. "The City" was another 20 miles. But if you rode a bike on those long, country roads, people would drive around you as if you had a force field around your bike; the second you got near The City, they would blow past you fast enough to knock you sideways and once you entered the city limits, it was all horns and middle fingers.
The law, no doubt, helps but even without such a law the car will be found to be at fault most of the time anyway. I suspect that the motivation of the Dutch government was just to save money litigating these accidents : ) Seriously, though, many US states have the same laws, but they aren't as well-known as the Dutch law because motorists in the Netherlands have to deal with an onslaught of bikes on the road the second they exit a freeway. There are exceptions to the American laws (at least in the states in which I have lived) if you are, for example, riding a bicycle on a freeway and get hit by a car. But again, the stringency varies state to state (and city to city).
If I owned a car, I would absolutely want a bumper sticker that says "Practice systematic acts of kindness."
I read a very sad article about a person trying to lose weight in some medium-sized US city that I can't recall by walking and eventually biking. This person could not find an unbroken chain of sidewalk long enough to actually walk for more than 10 minutes; Car-centric urban planning gone awry.
Yes, but I entered the windshield laptop-first (it was in my backpack) and my head never actually struck the car. I ended up in the passengers seat, upside-down, with my ass sticking out of the front of the car. The entire intersection came to a halt until I picked myself up and made the "I'm OK wave" at which point everyone started hoking and yelling for me to get out of the intersection.
If you fall by yourself off a bike (losing grip too fast in a curve, hitting the side of a sidewalk), you are more likely to injure your wrists or scrape your legs. There won't be much difference for the head. But if you get hit by a car, a cm of Styrofoam is not going to make much of a difference. And I say this as someone who wears a helmet mountain biking and takes it off on the bike lanes.
The US is absurd: you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorbike, but you need one on a pedal bike ?!?
Like so many laws, helmet policies vary from state to state (and city to city for bikes). There are mandatory helmet laws in many states for motorcycles. BTW I too ride without a helmet in the city and with one when mountain biking and it probably saved my life. I have crashed three times in the city; twice while taking a corner in snow/ice/rain (and injured only my arms/hands) and once through the windshield of an oncoming car (up-side-down and back-first; my head was fine). However, once while coming back down a steep trail, my front wheel lodged between a small divot and a rock, sending me face-first over the handlebars and splitting my helmet in two; I was lucky to walk away with a concussion and a wrecked bike. But I think that highlights the difference between cycling in the city as part of your daily commute and cycling for sport on rough trails. Race car drivers wear helmets, but we don't require them on freeways.
The Autobahn is also much better maintained that US highways and interstates, where the potholes, cracks, and shoddy repairs impose a Darwinian speed limit apart from the posted limit.
And in these same countries where cycling is common, cyclists aren't hit by cars at all on a large scale. How could that be? Could it be those people are actually smarter or better at driving, or does it make more sense to assume these motorists are simply used to having cyclists on the road? And if they can become used to it, why couldn't people in other countries as well?
In the Netherlands, if you see a car with a "D" on the license plate (or almost anything other than "NL"), ride defensively. The difference between Dutch drivers' awareness of cyclists and foreigners is immense, not because they are better drivers, but because they're so used to bikes (and most drivers are cyclists, too). They instinctively look to the right before making a turn, slow down to let bikes through, don't crowd, don't pass too close, and leave space for bikes when they are stopped at a light or in traffic. (Which is particularly surprising considering the total disregard cyclists seem to have for the rules.)
Contrast that to (my experience biking in) the US where motorists angrily accelerate around you, often giving you a dirty look for inconveniencing them with your stupid bike as they narrowly miss you with their side-view mirror. And where they just suddenly veer right, into a parking spot, even if there is a bike lane (which they love to double park in) without noticing the cyclist that almost face-plants on their trunk. I've lived in a few big cities in the US, and it was a common joke that you're not really a cyclist until you've been hit by a car (I went completely through a windshield). I've also lived in a few small towns, where you'd have to be crazy to bike because everything is 20 miles apart and uphill and motorists treat you with an odd reverence.
Flying is a privilege, not a right. You need to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the governing bodies, or find another way to travel. It's really that simple. Quit whining and just go through it. Trust me, nobody really wants to ogle your naked outline.
Whether or not something is technically a right or a privilege is a semantic distinction that distracts from what really matters, which is necessity. Driving a car, having a job, having a place to live, and accessing the Internet are all privileges, but are also absolutely necessary for most people to pursue happiness and generally to feel like a productive member of society. We can tell when something is necessary because of what we will put up with in order to have it. In this case, people are--so far--willing to have naked pictures of themselves taken despite any evidence of efficacy because their need to fly on commercial airliners outweighs the humiliation.
We constantly play this game with government and private companies. Raise your hand if you are happy with your cell phone provider or your Internet provider. How about public transportation infrastructure? Traffic during your daily commute? But everyone reading this is accessing the Internet, probably owns a mobile phone, most likely has a job, and probably has to deal with traffic or public transportation to get to that job.
Now consider something that really isn't necessary; a restaurant. People will send back soup for being too salty or simply stop going to a restaurant because their selection of beer is sub-par. Restaurants come and go and have to run razor-thin profit margins to stay competitive--a couple of bad reviews on Yelp can put a restaurant out of business. Yet, at the airport, the TSA is serving you a salad with a thick turd right across the top of it and you're not only eating it, you're using a knife and fork, chewing each bite thoroughly, and washing it down with less than 100 mL of liquid.
You cannot boycott a necessity, so your only recourse is to induce the government to do something about it. The US Government, however, is too broken even to be bothered to put salad dressing on the turd, let alone offer you a turd-free salad. Make every member of Congress eat that turd salad--that is a group of people that needs to fly frequently--and the body scanners will disappear without public debate, but good luck making that happen.