Would somehow like to explain how either of these two scenarios is going to cause permanent physical or psychological harm to that twelve-year-old?
While children do bounce back from a dizzying array of adversities, that hardly seems a good reason to be nonchalant about subjecting them to pornography. Or, alternatively, while some may not care that their child is exposed to porn, it is most certainly the right of other parents to be so concerned. Especially since, to use an earlier metaphor, this report says that there's porn in that there treehouse, and so maybe you don't want little Timmy to go play there...
Children doesn't need p2p to access porn. It is all over the place. Did you do a google search on "porn"; it returns 8,120,000 results, more than any p2p software can return. It is the responsibility of the parents to educate their children and restrict their childrens' use of computers.
That's not really a fair comparison. As the House report says, most web-based porn requires a credit card; while some adolescent males may search through those 8,120,000 sites for the few that are free, they are the committed ones: most will just give up and start complaining about how Congress restricts free speech, man.
The House report is more concerned with young people coming upon porn by accident. If I search for "xxx" or "porn" or "pr0n", chances are I'm actually looking for it. Some twelve year old girl looking for Britney Spears? Maybe the government should tell parents to just go out and buy her the CD so that she doesn't go online looking for the mp3.
Five comments! They stick this in obscurity, in the science section which few ever seem to read. Doesn't anyone care if Yellowstone explodes into a roiling, noxious pit of fire, even if in a long long time from now? There goes the wolf reintroduction project, and the world's climate, among other things! Course... I don't expect either of the Wyoming residents are computer geeks.
The broader/. community is worrying about Hemos. Putting him on the back page is kind of like not inviting people over to the house because Grandpa's fighting the Nazis again.
or, alternatively, we had all kind of assumed that something big would happen in the next one hundred thousand, possibly one million, years, and thus this story is really only of interest to geologists and those who pretend to be able to fake it.
It brings a tear to my eye to think that, once, the stories appropriate to "In Search Of..." were actually shown on that program, rather than in psuedo-science documentaries. Are we returning to a time when idiocy was too ashamed to assume the name of "science"? Now that I think about it, I'm not so sure that "In Search Of..." belonged to that period, either.
The use of chickens is a fair choice, it is very easy to breed chickens, and you can eat your mistakes.
Not to be unduly incredulous, but what makes you think you'd actually want to eat any animal whose genetic modifications have led to "failure"? Assuming you were successful enough to get something resembling non-mush, how many toxins might this ungodly genetic abomination have synthesized it its brief, torturous existence? Corn that's been spliced with a potato, that I'll eat. Devolved chicken?
Software is made to be reverse engineered; chickens are not.
Maybe I'm confused from reading the article, but I dont think they are trying to Tax these things cause they are flying over Califonia "Airspace". That is really quite irrelevant. The problem is these satellites are owned by people in LA
I think the proper way to deal with this is look at these sattelites like an Offshore Rig or something. If I set up a webserver that ran an online gambling site in the middle of the ocean, but I collected the earnings while living in LA, could they tax me on that? If so, tax the satellites, as they are providing service to LA citizens. If they couldnt tax me on a boat out in the ocean, then they shouldnt tax on a satellite in space.
This is one question to answer, and its answer is yes. While a number of early treaties have determined that no one owns space (the so-called Open Skies proposals, which the USSR originally rejected but then accepted), any jurisdiction may levy taxes upon anyone within its jurisdiction, whether they (only) work in it or (only) live in it; as Hughes "lives" in LA, LA can tax them for everything they own.
The real question is: How will this get resolved? Does the U.S. Congress have the authority to regulate taxes on space-commerce (as they have claimed the authority to do so regarding e-commerce, namely, saying there is no tax)? It would be great if they did, because then a single bill, which would be almost certainly passed, would stop this assessor's orgiastic phantasies. If Congress does not have such authority (over taxes which may be imposed by U.S. states, not foreign powers), then it would be up to the Supreme Court to decide. As the Constitution says nothing about this (except perhaps the occational phrase dealing with the Frontier), it would be a matter of Their Inexplicable Will, which is not nearly so easily bought off to purposes of good by Hughes as is that of the Congress.
We can see our clock ticking. Divine retribution seems to be a million years away.
Behold the start of a glorious day:
Divine Retribution is on its long way.
Through the deep void it never does stray:
Divine Retribution is on its long way.
It does not stray, but it tarries a bit --
Divine Retribution is a long way away --
And our Lord God shall throw a great fit
On Divine Retribution's late Day.
It takes its time, there is no big rush,
On this Divine Retribution's late way.
Penitents desperate, through the church doors do push,
In hopes Retribution to sway.
Yet in some dark, foul smelling quarter,
The Fiend of Heaven doth say,
"What is the fuss? What is the matter?
Divine Retribution's a million years away!
"And if this dread threat truly doth come,
As Divine Retribution well may,
Profit! Loss! Check ye the sum!
And Divine Retribution thus weigh!
"The punishment fits, and would deter --
Let Divine Retribution have its say --
And were I immortal, true, I would prefer
To avoid Retribution's dread way.
"But a million years is a long time ahead,
And I too have something to say:
Most, in a hundred year's time, will already be dead
And for Divine Retribution can't stay.
"And fear not some Divine resurrection:
Such is not Divine Retribution's Good way,
But sleep safe in sweet Death's good protection,
And let Divine Retribution have its day.
"For what sort of Divine Unknowable
Would make this Divine Retribution's way
Such to steal from the earth, as if with a shovel,
Just to punish on Divine Retribution's dark day?
"T'would needs be a Divine most Retributive
To send such Retribution this way,
And to such blasphemy is Nature prohibitive
And would make Divine Retribution thus stray."
What this says to me is that there is something smaller than the B meson and that the "positive" version is (now) much more prevalent than the "anti" version, such that anti-B mesons get annihilated in the sub-sub-atomic version of a matter-antimatter reaction faster than the B meson.
The experiment deals with decay, not annihilation. The B meson is made up of smaller particles, viz. a bottom quark and some other anti-quark (up, down, or strange); the B- meson is made up of an anti-bottom quark and some other quark. The other quarks (u, u-, d, d-, s, s-) are more stable than the bottom quarks; therefore, the decay of B and B- mesons is most likely caused by the decay of b and b- quarks (into charm and c- quarks). Seeing that B- mesons decay more quickly than B mesons, we infer that the b- quarks decay into c- quarks more quickly than b quarks decay into c quarks. That is, in this instance (as in the case of K mesons), the antimatter particle decays more rapidly than its matter counterpart. (We can't measure the decay rates of b and b- quarks directly because quarks are only observable in color-neutral particles, so we must observe these particles in their decay to determine the decay of these quarks.)
But as the experiment deals with decay, and not annihilation, the prevelance of one (matter/antimatter) over the other does not explain the results.
btw, here's a non-MSNBC article that deals with the issue. Here's a page that discusses the decay of b quarks in Bs (bottom-strange combination) mesons.
This is unlikely, because protons apparently don't decay . I've heard other places that the estimated half-life for protons is longer than the age of the universe, and expected to be longer than the total lifespan of the universe.
These two statements say essentially the same thing; we have not observed protons decaying. Your link cites an experiment which determined that, if protons do decay, it would be about 10^33 years before it happened to a given proton; this does not mean that protons do not decay, but only that, if they do, they would take much longer to do so than is predicted by the simplest Grand Unified Theory. Thus, regardless of whether protons decay or not, that GUT is incorrect in its prediction.
if in fourteen billion years, the amount of antimatter in the universe has decayed to such a minimal level, then in fourteen billion more years, will the level of regular matter be at a similarily small level?
The nearly nonexistent level of antimatter in the modern universe is not the result of decay, but of annihilation: matter meets antimatter, and poof! The problem is that there should then be no matter in the universe, either (it would have gone poof with the antimatter). We can explain this by either saying that they are produced at unequal rates (if we begin with more matter than antimatter, we will be left with more matter after the reactions have taken place) or by saying that one decays more quickly than the other: they would be produced at equal rates (which is what we'd expect anyway), but one decays before it has an opportunity to interact with the other, producing the same result.
So, as another poster has pointed out, we are in no foreseeable danger of decaying out of existence (at the subatomic level). This result doesn't change that, but suggests why we've made it this far at all.
There's this really funny (and tragic) article in the NY Times (free registration required, yadda yadda, blah blah blah) that proves just how rectocranially-inverted these Internet advertisers are. The article talks about how much "better" ads are since advertisers started using new, larger ads.
I wrote to the NY Times about the fact that I have to close about 10 windows everytime I'm done reading the day's news, and the reply I got said I could disable repeated instantiations of the same ad, or the ads all together, but only if I let X-10 have permission to set cookies on my browser. That hardly seems fair.
The problem with having the option to opt out is that, in order to prevent intrusions on your privacy, you have to give up your privacy.
I have to wonder: for those of us who use Google in Swedish Chef mode, were our queries listed under the 1% Swedish, the 1% Other, or the 68% English (especially since switching to the English version is listed as one of the options)?
What would normally considered good material for internal discussion, but not publication, by most academic institutions, is publicly paraded by NASA.
According to the article, DiGregorio is presenting this report to a conference on astrobiology sponsored by the International Society for Optical Engineering (part of their annual meeting in San Diego). This isn't a NASA report; it's written by someone who is predicting that a future NASA or European mission can resolve this question. Moreover, it's for a conference about what technical methods could resolve such questions.
(I should have checked out SPIE's website before this post; I think it could have cleared up some of this confusion.) I see nothing inappropriate about this sort of press.
NASA seem to be employing an interesting short term strategy. Link everything to the possibility of extraterrestrial life in order to gain publicity and funds. It's probably working. But the cost is loss of credibility. Eventually everyone is going to get fed up of hearing about yet another bit of evidence that there is life on Mars and NASA will have cried wolf once too often.
Doesn't this assume that all these little bits of evidence will turn out to have been misleading? Are you suggesting that there definitely isn't life on Mars, based upon the same evidence which leads NASA to say there might be? Are you then criticizing them for sending probes to determine the reality of the situation? I'm sure you can explain the appearance of those rocks without metabolic processes, but as there is other, unrelated evidence which suggests there might be microbes on Mars, why are these scientists wrong for wanting NASA to check it out (when NASA is already planning to send something there, anyway)?
How do they name these things? 2001 KX76 - how boring! Charon is named - why not this? Don't these astronomers have any creativity left in them? Maybe they're waiting to name it - a 'Name That Planet' contest or something. Or if someone pays enough, they'll name it after them - money got a tourist into space.
The International Astronomical Union gets to set names, and their FAQ addresses the possibility of buying them (and the question of whether Pluto is a planet or not). There is a description here of how the IAU goes about naming various things.
Rather than do the research and get a negative result - which gets you no money - they're releasing information before they do the research - which gives them a chance of cashing in.
And what would you have them do? In order to test their hypothesis, they need to experiment. In order to experiment, they need money. In order to get money, they must convince people with money that the experiment is worth doing. What would be duplicitous is if they, having raised sufficient funds, then refused to carry out the experiment or performed an unrelated one. Or would you rather they just shut up about all their hypotheses and make no attempt to progress them further?
Fund-raising is perfectly appropriate in areas where funds are needed. It only becomes inappropriate when it is misleading.
This suggests that Pluto and Charon are simply bodies within another asteriod belt and shouldn't have been classified as planets. And thus we shouldn't make the mistake of classifying this, too, as a planet, even though it is larger.
2001 KX76 is larger than Charon, according to the first figure given in the article, 788 miles across to 727, but Pluto is about 1410 miles across. (the second figure lists its diameter as 595 miles; note that the article implies that Charon's diameter is 744 miles, but our measuring techniques aren't that accurate that far out) Pluto would still be the largest thing in the Kuiper Belt we have detected thus far. And I'm sure you didn't mean to make this slip, but Charon was never classified as a planet: it is a moon.
The evidence they are citing is not nearly as thin as the remark following the story makes it out to be, let alone as the very funny second post describes it. It is not that they have found rocks that look like earth rocks, but that the earth rocks which they look like get to be that way by metabolic processes. The way I read the article, it's a bit like finding something that looks an awful lot like poop: where there is poop, there is a pooper. Of course, a lot of non-microbial-poop things can look like microbial-poop in a photograph, so they're holding off judgement until we send something to analyze it, but they are letting us know that they think they see poop in a picture and want to investigate. (Thus making this the first on-topic fecal post.)
Death on the other hand is a one time thing, which makes the whole issue more complicated - the experiment cannot be repeated, and thus the reliability not checked.
Generally, models whose reliablity cannot be checked (unfalsifiable) are of no value.
Yes, but I am attempting to make a distinction between what we know and how we act. Unfalsifiable theories may be useless if we wish to determine their validity, but we must still act in those cases in which we are ignorant. Now, if we have only the unfalsifiable theory, one which contradicts what we do "know" about the universe, we may be safe in ignoring it, but if the statement is about something of which we have no previous experience, e.g., death or, more generally, the future, I argue that we must have a different method of determining the best course of action.
This is what I mean by checking the reliability of the source, not experimental reliablity, for in this case there could be none, but the more intuitive reliability based on trustworthiness. Could the source know what he claims to know? If he knew, would he tell the truth about it? How can I answer either of these questions? etc.
Yes, I'd agree that that original post was off the mark, nonetheless, I prefer to stick to inferences from things I can see in order to build my model of the universe.
That's well and good, but the question raised by the poster's hopes is how we then act on our model of the universe. If we can have no knowledge of something which we can't see, but which may someday affect us, we might be justified in acting as if it did not exist. I may be shot dead by some mad sniper, but the chances of that happening are so low and so unprecedented, given the life I have led, that I go about my business without much regard to it. On the other hand, if someone tells me in advance that the sniper told him he was going to shoot me, I might take some action; what kind of action would depend on the reliability of my source. The more fantastic the account, the more scrutiny it must come under, but at the same time, it becomes harder to sleep at night.
The problem with the whole Fire Dragon argument is that you don't add new particles to a theory unless they have some explanitory value. Which in turn necessitates that they have a measurable effect. So whilst a hypothetical being cannot be disproven to exist its existence is of no concequence to science, and while people may claim that he sets garages on fire, it us up to them to provide the evidence for such.
This is true: a science which takes its bearing from positivism (in its research methods, if not in its metaphysical statements) would not be extremely interested in variables which it cannot reliably measure. The original post, however, was attempting to take the positivist statements of science as metaphysical certainty. While we may reliably make statements about what will happen to a ball if I drop it (viz., it will drop), rhinoplastiQue was trying to gather enough such evidence that s/he would not feel troubled by tales of non-natural retribution for not confessing his soul, eating pork, eating beef, drinking wine, failing to sacrifice to the Sun God, sacrificing to the Sun God in direct contravention of some other God's commandment, etc. Ani ma'amin b'emuna shlema, I believe with complete faith, that the math is much easier if we say that the moons of Jupiter go around Jupiter, and will even alter my life according to the predictions made by Kepler, rather than to those made by Ptolemy. This should in no way, however, in itself, enbolden me to ignore prohibitions against, say, non-bloodline incest.
A flat universe is flat in the absense of something that curves it, while a curved universe is curved even in such absense.
You seem to be confusing two issues: (i) the 'average' flatness of the universe, and (ii) the cosmological constant.
I was under the impression that the experiment did discuss the cosmological constant. From the BBC article:
To astronomers, flat means that the usual rules of geometry are observed - light not being bent by gravity travels in straight lines, not curves.
Unless the correspondent got this wrong, it appears that the experiment concluded that space is not curved in the absense of gravity, not that, taking all the gravity in the universe together, space still isn't curved all that much. Of course, the latter finding would support the comments on the Big Crunch more; like I said, perhaps the correspondent introduced this confusion.
Basically so that we can figure out were everything came from, where it is and where it's going in a manner that does not require an invisible man whom created everything and thus knows where everything came from, where it is and where it's going.
That's why.
While this has been the admirable goal of most modern science, the flaw with it was indicated way back in the Middle Ages (by philosophers who, I might add, came very close to atheism in their suggestions and were ultimately denounced by the clergy, in most cases). Science cannot disprove revelation by proving the eternality and non-Created nature of the universe.
There are those who say that this "invisible man" spoke to them, and that He said that the world did not always exist. Thus, the assertion of these men with whom you would have science dispute is that we cannot apply knowledge of the present to some arbitrary point in the past in order to determine its condition: the laws by which science 'predicts' past events were not in operation at the time in which these past events supposedly occurred.
The attempt to disprove this assertion through scientifically establishing the eternality of the universe must therefore beg the question (in the proper use of the phrase). Science attempts to prove that, if we apply the laws of physics to what we observe in the present, we come up with a different story from the one contained in the Scriptures of those men who claim to have spoken with this "invisible man". Yet this is only a valid arguement if these laws describe that past event which we are trying to ascertain: in order to discover what a previous state was from the current state from which it evolved, by examining the law which dictated such evolution, we must assume/assert/prove/[insert acceptable verb here] that this law held during the period of this evolution. But this is precisely the assumption/assertion/[verbal noun] which these men who claim to have spoken with the "invisible man" challenge! Somehow, a proof of this statement would be required. Yet how can one prove this statement without assuming it (aside from having actually been there and possessing a trustworthy memory)?
The above is a rather detailed way of explaining that Science, in attempting to disprove God by disproving Creation, must assume the fallacy of the very thing which it is challenging. In order to say what the universe was like seven thousand, let alone some odd billion, years ago, Science must assume that the laws (gained from observation of the present) which would allow for such 'prediction' of the past actually operated at that point in the past. The advocates of this "invisibile man" say that such is not the case; Science cannot disprove them by relying on its own bases, viz. that such is the case.
Since I've spoken of Creation vs. Eternality, I ought to add a paragraph on the Big Bang. Big Bang theories, despite describing the coming-into-being of the universe, are in essence an arguement for the eternality of the universe. Specifically, they say that the laws which governed the Beginning should, in theory, be examinable today: we are bound by our ability to reproduce the conditions of the early universe, but were we able to do so, we would observe similar results. That is, the law which describes such conditions is eternal, if the effect which it produces (viz., us) is not. I have not looked enough into theories which say the 'Big Bang' was the result of a colliding parallel universe to say that they, too, describe the universe in this manner, but I would be very surprised if this were not the case.
The above argument on behalf of theists is similar to Carl Sagan's dumned-down analogy of the fire-breathing dragon with whom we cannot interact (and thus cannot measure scientifically): who cares if such a Being exists! But as the believers in this Dragon say that He occasionally sets the garage on fire, we must take the challenge seriously. And while we may, on the basis of our own experience, choose to ignore the "Warning: Dragon Here" signs, we cannot prove, scientifically, that the Dragon is not there, no matter how far into the past we extrapolate the laws which appear to govern the present.
Slashdot Mirror
While children do bounce back from a dizzying array of adversities, that hardly seems a good reason to be nonchalant about subjecting them to pornography. Or, alternatively, while some may not care that their child is exposed to porn, it is most certainly the right of other parents to be so concerned. Especially since, to use an earlier metaphor, this report says that there's porn in that there treehouse, and so maybe you don't want little Timmy to go play there...
That's not really a fair comparison. As the House report says, most web-based porn requires a credit card; while some adolescent males may search through those 8,120,000 sites for the few that are free, they are the committed ones: most will just give up and start complaining about how Congress restricts free speech, man.
The House report is more concerned with young people coming upon porn by accident. If I search for "xxx" or "porn" or "pr0n", chances are I'm actually looking for it. Some twelve year old girl looking for Britney Spears? Maybe the government should tell parents to just go out and buy her the CD so that she doesn't go online looking for the mp3.
200 year freeze. I, for one, would prefer not to wait that long.
The broader /. community is worrying about Hemos. Putting him on the back page is kind of like not inviting people over to the house because Grandpa's fighting the Nazis again.
or, alternatively, we had all kind of assumed that something big would happen in the next one hundred thousand, possibly one million, years, and thus this story is really only of interest to geologists and those who pretend to be able to fake it.
First the robotic arm, not this. It seems that /. always reports stories sure to get me in trouble for my country domain.
It brings a tear to my eye to think that, once, the stories appropriate to "In Search Of ..." were actually shown on that program, rather than in psuedo-science documentaries. Are we returning to a time when idiocy was too ashamed to assume the name of "science"? Now that I think about it, I'm not so sure that "In Search Of ..." belonged to that period, either.
Not to be unduly incredulous, but what makes you think you'd actually want to eat any animal whose genetic modifications have led to "failure"? Assuming you were successful enough to get something resembling non-mush, how many toxins might this ungodly genetic abomination have synthesized it its brief, torturous existence? Corn that's been spliced with a potato, that I'll eat. Devolved chicken?
Software is made to be reverse engineered; chickens are not.
This is one question to answer, and its answer is yes. While a number of early treaties have determined that no one owns space (the so-called Open Skies proposals, which the USSR originally rejected but then accepted), any jurisdiction may levy taxes upon anyone within its jurisdiction, whether they (only) work in it or (only) live in it; as Hughes "lives" in LA, LA can tax them for everything they own.
The real question is: How will this get resolved? Does the U.S. Congress have the authority to regulate taxes on space-commerce (as they have claimed the authority to do so regarding e-commerce, namely, saying there is no tax)? It would be great if they did, because then a single bill, which would be almost certainly passed, would stop this assessor's orgiastic phantasies. If Congress does not have such authority (over taxes which may be imposed by U.S. states, not foreign powers), then it would be up to the Supreme Court to decide. As the Constitution says nothing about this (except perhaps the occational phrase dealing with the Frontier), it would be a matter of Their Inexplicable Will, which is not nearly so easily bought off to purposes of good by Hughes as is that of the Congress.
Behold the start of a glorious day:
Divine Retribution is on its long way.
Through the deep void it never does stray:
Divine Retribution is on its long way.
It does not stray, but it tarries a bit --
Divine Retribution is a long way away --
And our Lord God shall throw a great fit
On Divine Retribution's late Day.
It takes its time, there is no big rush,
On this Divine Retribution's late way.
Penitents desperate, through the church doors do push,
In hopes Retribution to sway.
Yet in some dark, foul smelling quarter,
The Fiend of Heaven doth say,
"What is the fuss? What is the matter?
Divine Retribution's a million years away!
"And if this dread threat truly doth come,
As Divine Retribution well may,
Profit! Loss! Check ye the sum!
And Divine Retribution thus weigh!
"The punishment fits, and would deter --
Let Divine Retribution have its say --
And were I immortal, true, I would prefer
To avoid Retribution's dread way.
"But a million years is a long time ahead,
And I too have something to say:
Most, in a hundred year's time, will already be dead
And for Divine Retribution can't stay.
"And fear not some Divine resurrection:
Such is not Divine Retribution's Good way,
But sleep safe in sweet Death's good protection,
And let Divine Retribution have its day.
"For what sort of Divine Unknowable
Would make this Divine Retribution's way
Such to steal from the earth, as if with a shovel,
Just to punish on Divine Retribution's dark day?
"T'would needs be a Divine most Retributive
To send such Retribution this way,
And to such blasphemy is Nature prohibitive
And would make Divine Retribution thus stray."
The experiment deals with decay, not annihilation. The B meson is made up of smaller particles, viz. a bottom quark and some other anti-quark (up, down, or strange); the B- meson is made up of an anti-bottom quark and some other quark. The other quarks (u, u-, d, d-, s, s-) are more stable than the bottom quarks; therefore, the decay of B and B- mesons is most likely caused by the decay of b and b- quarks (into charm and c- quarks). Seeing that B- mesons decay more quickly than B mesons, we infer that the b- quarks decay into c- quarks more quickly than b quarks decay into c quarks. That is, in this instance (as in the case of K mesons), the antimatter particle decays more rapidly than its matter counterpart. (We can't measure the decay rates of b and b- quarks directly because quarks are only observable in color-neutral particles, so we must observe these particles in their decay to determine the decay of these quarks.)
But as the experiment deals with decay, and not annihilation, the prevelance of one (matter/antimatter) over the other does not explain the results.
btw, here's a non-MSNBC article that deals with the issue. Here's a page that discusses the decay of b quarks in Bs (bottom-strange combination) mesons.
These two statements say essentially the same thing; we have not observed protons decaying. Your link cites an experiment which determined that, if protons do decay, it would be about 10^33 years before it happened to a given proton; this does not mean that protons do not decay, but only that, if they do, they would take much longer to do so than is predicted by the simplest Grand Unified Theory. Thus, regardless of whether protons decay or not, that GUT is incorrect in its prediction.
The nearly nonexistent level of antimatter in the modern universe is not the result of decay, but of annihilation: matter meets antimatter, and poof! The problem is that there should then be no matter in the universe, either (it would have gone poof with the antimatter). We can explain this by either saying that they are produced at unequal rates (if we begin with more matter than antimatter, we will be left with more matter after the reactions have taken place) or by saying that one decays more quickly than the other: they would be produced at equal rates (which is what we'd expect anyway), but one decays before it has an opportunity to interact with the other, producing the same result.
So, as another poster has pointed out, we are in no foreseeable danger of decaying out of existence (at the subatomic level). This result doesn't change that, but suggests why we've made it this far at all.
I wrote to the NY Times about the fact that I have to close about 10 windows everytime I'm done reading the day's news, and the reply I got said I could disable repeated instantiations of the same ad, or the ads all together, but only if I let X-10 have permission to set cookies on my browser. That hardly seems fair.
The problem with having the option to opt out is that, in order to prevent intrusions on your privacy, you have to give up your privacy.
I have to wonder: for those of us who use Google in Swedish Chef mode, were our queries listed under the 1% Swedish, the 1% Other, or the 68% English (especially since switching to the English version is listed as one of the options)?
According to the article, DiGregorio is presenting this report to a conference on astrobiology sponsored by the International Society for Optical Engineering (part of their annual meeting in San Diego). This isn't a NASA report; it's written by someone who is predicting that a future NASA or European mission can resolve this question. Moreover, it's for a conference about what technical methods could resolve such questions.
(I should have checked out SPIE's website before this post; I think it could have cleared up some of this confusion.) I see nothing inappropriate about this sort of press.
Doesn't this assume that all these little bits of evidence will turn out to have been misleading? Are you suggesting that there definitely isn't life on Mars, based upon the same evidence which leads NASA to say there might be? Are you then criticizing them for sending probes to determine the reality of the situation? I'm sure you can explain the appearance of those rocks without metabolic processes, but as there is other, unrelated evidence which suggests there might be microbes on Mars, why are these scientists wrong for wanting NASA to check it out (when NASA is already planning to send something there, anyway)?
The International Astronomical Union gets to set names, and their FAQ addresses the possibility of buying them (and the question of whether Pluto is a planet or not). There is a description here of how the IAU goes about naming various things.
And what would you have them do? In order to test their hypothesis, they need to experiment. In order to experiment, they need money. In order to get money, they must convince people with money that the experiment is worth doing. What would be duplicitous is if they, having raised sufficient funds, then refused to carry out the experiment or performed an unrelated one. Or would you rather they just shut up about all their hypotheses and make no attempt to progress them further?
Fund-raising is perfectly appropriate in areas where funds are needed. It only becomes inappropriate when it is misleading.
2001 KX76 is larger than Charon, according to the first figure given in the article, 788 miles across to 727, but Pluto is about 1410 miles across. (the second figure lists its diameter as 595 miles; note that the article implies that Charon's diameter is 744 miles, but our measuring techniques aren't that accurate that far out) Pluto would still be the largest thing in the Kuiper Belt we have detected thus far. And I'm sure you didn't mean to make this slip, but Charon was never classified as a planet: it is a moon.
The evidence they are citing is not nearly as thin as the remark following the story makes it out to be, let alone as the very funny second post describes it. It is not that they have found rocks that look like earth rocks, but that the earth rocks which they look like get to be that way by metabolic processes. The way I read the article, it's a bit like finding something that looks an awful lot like poop: where there is poop, there is a pooper. Of course, a lot of non-microbial-poop things can look like microbial-poop in a photograph, so they're holding off judgement until we send something to analyze it, but they are letting us know that they think they see poop in a picture and want to investigate. (Thus making this the first on-topic fecal post.)
Yes, but I am attempting to make a distinction between what we know and how we act. Unfalsifiable theories may be useless if we wish to determine their validity, but we must still act in those cases in which we are ignorant. Now, if we have only the unfalsifiable theory, one which contradicts what we do "know" about the universe, we may be safe in ignoring it, but if the statement is about something of which we have no previous experience, e.g., death or, more generally, the future, I argue that we must have a different method of determining the best course of action.
This is what I mean by checking the reliability of the source, not experimental reliablity, for in this case there could be none, but the more intuitive reliability based on trustworthiness. Could the source know what he claims to know? If he knew, would he tell the truth about it? How can I answer either of these questions? etc.
That's well and good, but the question raised by the poster's hopes is how we then act on our model of the universe. If we can have no knowledge of something which we can't see, but which may someday affect us, we might be justified in acting as if it did not exist. I may be shot dead by some mad sniper, but the chances of that happening are so low and so unprecedented, given the life I have led, that I go about my business without much regard to it. On the other hand, if someone tells me in advance that the sniper told him he was going to shoot me, I might take some action; what kind of action would depend on the reliability of my source. The more fantastic the account, the more scrutiny it must come under, but at the same time, it becomes harder to sleep at night.
This is true: a science which takes its bearing from positivism (in its research methods, if not in its metaphysical statements) would not be extremely interested in variables which it cannot reliably measure. The original post, however, was attempting to take the positivist statements of science as metaphysical certainty. While we may reliably make statements about what will happen to a ball if I drop it (viz., it will drop), rhinoplastiQue was trying to gather enough such evidence that s/he would not feel troubled by tales of non-natural retribution for not confessing his soul, eating pork, eating beef, drinking wine, failing to sacrifice to the Sun God, sacrificing to the Sun God in direct contravention of some other God's commandment, etc. Ani ma'amin b'emuna shlema, I believe with complete faith, that the math is much easier if we say that the moons of Jupiter go around Jupiter, and will even alter my life according to the predictions made by Kepler, rather than to those made by Ptolemy. This should in no way, however, in itself, enbolden me to ignore prohibitions against, say, non-bloodline incest.
I was under the impression that the experiment did discuss the cosmological constant. From the BBC article:
Unless the correspondent got this wrong, it appears that the experiment concluded that space is not curved in the absense of gravity, not that, taking all the gravity in the universe together, space still isn't curved all that much. Of course, the latter finding would support the comments on the Big Crunch more; like I said, perhaps the correspondent introduced this confusion.
While this has been the admirable goal of most modern science, the flaw with it was indicated way back in the Middle Ages (by philosophers who, I might add, came very close to atheism in their suggestions and were ultimately denounced by the clergy, in most cases). Science cannot disprove revelation by proving the eternality and non-Created nature of the universe.
There are those who say that this "invisible man" spoke to them, and that He said that the world did not always exist. Thus, the assertion of these men with whom you would have science dispute is that we cannot apply knowledge of the present to some arbitrary point in the past in order to determine its condition: the laws by which science 'predicts' past events were not in operation at the time in which these past events supposedly occurred.
The attempt to disprove this assertion through scientifically establishing the eternality of the universe must therefore beg the question (in the proper use of the phrase). Science attempts to prove that, if we apply the laws of physics to what we observe in the present, we come up with a different story from the one contained in the Scriptures of those men who claim to have spoken with this "invisible man". Yet this is only a valid arguement if these laws describe that past event which we are trying to ascertain: in order to discover what a previous state was from the current state from which it evolved, by examining the law which dictated such evolution, we must assume/assert/prove/[insert acceptable verb here] that this law held during the period of this evolution. But this is precisely the assumption/assertion/[verbal noun] which these men who claim to have spoken with the "invisible man" challenge! Somehow, a proof of this statement would be required. Yet how can one prove this statement without assuming it (aside from having actually been there and possessing a trustworthy memory)?
The above is a rather detailed way of explaining that Science, in attempting to disprove God by disproving Creation, must assume the fallacy of the very thing which it is challenging. In order to say what the universe was like seven thousand, let alone some odd billion, years ago, Science must assume that the laws (gained from observation of the present) which would allow for such 'prediction' of the past actually operated at that point in the past. The advocates of this "invisibile man" say that such is not the case; Science cannot disprove them by relying on its own bases, viz. that such is the case.
Since I've spoken of Creation vs. Eternality, I ought to add a paragraph on the Big Bang. Big Bang theories, despite describing the coming-into-being of the universe, are in essence an arguement for the eternality of the universe. Specifically, they say that the laws which governed the Beginning should, in theory, be examinable today: we are bound by our ability to reproduce the conditions of the early universe, but were we able to do so, we would observe similar results. That is, the law which describes such conditions is eternal, if the effect which it produces (viz., us) is not. I have not looked enough into theories which say the 'Big Bang' was the result of a colliding parallel universe to say that they, too, describe the universe in this manner, but I would be very surprised if this were not the case.
The above argument on behalf of theists is similar to Carl Sagan's dumned-down analogy of the fire-breathing dragon with whom we cannot interact (and thus cannot measure scientifically): who cares if such a Being exists! But as the believers in this Dragon say that He occasionally sets the garage on fire, we must take the challenge seriously. And while we may, on the basis of our own experience, choose to ignore the "Warning: Dragon Here" signs, we cannot prove, scientifically, that the Dragon is not there, no matter how far into the past we extrapolate the laws which appear to govern the present.